Robert Silverberg - Starborne

The horror that Planet B has turned out to be, after the great expectations that they had all allowed themselves to foster for it, has indeed taken a terrible toll, and not just on the two men who experienced that horror at close range.

It is suddenly occurring to those on the Wotan — many of them, at any rate — that after having left the predictability and comfort of Earth behind for the sake of undertaking a great exploit, they are faced now with the possibility of touring the galaxy forever without finding a world that can become a tolerable home for them. And the wildness of the thing they have volunteered to do, the utter fantastic gamble that it is, has begun to oppress their souls. They are afraid now, many of them, that they have simply thrown away their lives.

The year-captain struggles to transcend this bleak mood in himself, so that he will be better able to purge it from the others. But the sights and sounds of Planet B haunt him day and night, and they engulf him in a dire morass of melancholy. An entire world so hopelessly dismal: it is enough to make one deny the existence of the Creator, assuming one believed in Him in the first place. What divine purpose could have been served by the creation of a planet of endless rain, of titanic vines that constrict and strangle every hectare of the place, colossal brainless worms that feed on the vines, diabolic parasitic bugs that feed on the worms? No doubt it is the best of all possible worlds for the vines and the worms and the jewel-eyed bugs. But such objectivity is beyond him just now. He feels as though he has made a little excursion into some hitherto unrecorded subsidiary circle of Dante’s own Hell.

He yearns to speak with the Abbot about Planet B, if only he could. He hungers for the few quick acerbic sentences that would demolish all the darkness that clings to him now.

But the Abbot is beyond his reach. And so, very gradually, over a period of days, the year-captain manages to pull himself up out of the slough of despond without the aid of the Abbot’s direct intervention. There is no other course that he can allow himself to take.

Some of the others, primarily Hesper and Paco and Julia and Huw and even Sieglinde, have been able to retain their optimistic outlook toward the expedition despite the sobering outcome of the Planet B event. “The remarkable thing isn’t that the first two landings failed,” Julia says. “The remarkable thing is that we found two worlds that were worth checking out within the first couple of years of the voyage.”

“Hear, hear,” Huw bellows, as Huw likes to do. Huw knows that much depends now on his show of hearty high spirits and indomitable will, and he makes sure that he is never seen to be anything but his usual stalwart self, even after all that he has observed and felt on Planet A and the very different but equally oppressive Planet B. There is a price for this. He is willing to pay it.

But there are some aboard who have become deeply bemired in funk. These are the ones who had chosen, for whatever reason, to put a great many emotional chips down on the success of the Planet B mission, and were devastated by the spectacular failure of their wagers. Elizabeth is part of this group, and Imogen, and Sylvia, and several of the men: Roy, Elliot, Chang, Jean-Claude. Among these, who now spend most of their time at Go in the gaming lounge, there has begun to be some talk of giving up the voyage entirely, of swinging around and heading back to Earth.

“Don’t be idiots,” Paco says. “I can’t even imagine creeping back there.”

“You can’t imagine it,” says Elliot. “But I can.”

Elliot’s specialty is urban planning; it is Elliot who will design the future extraterrestrial settlements that the Wotan people hope to found. Since the Planet B fiasco he has convinced himself that he will never get a chance to practice his profession among these alien worlds, that the enterprise on which they all are bound is quixotic and foolish. Marcus’s death has affected Elliot deeply; so has the loss of contact with Earth.

Paco says to him, “If you want to go back, Elliot, why don’t you go? Maybe Huw will let you have one of the drone probes, and you can ride back to Earth in that. You and whoever else wants to go home. It’ll take you about three hundred years, give or take five or six, but if you’re as homesick as all that you won’t mind waiting a—”

“Stop it, Paco,” Elizabeth says.

Paco turns to her. “You’d like to go with him, wouldn’t you? Well, that’s fine with me. I’ll even calculate the course for you, if you like.” The Paco-Heinz-Elizabeth triad has just about collapsed in recent weeks; Heinz has been sleeping in a random, intermittent way with Jean-Claude and sometimes with Leila; and Paco, though he still spends some of his nights with Elizabeth and the occasional one with Heinz, has drifted off into a collateral entanglement with Giovanna. “Here,” Paco says, grabbing Elizabeth roughly and shoving her against Elliot. “She’s all yours. My blessings.”

Elliot is so annoyed that he pushes her back. Heinz gathers Elizabeth up as she rebounds from Elliot and tucks her against the side of his chest. To Paco he says quietly, “Can you try to calm down a little?”

“I hate all this talk of giving up and going back to Earth. It’s completely insane.”

“Is it, now?” Roy asks, looking up from the game of Go he is playing with Noelle. He is another who has let it be known that he may have already had a sufficiency of nospace travel.

“Of course it is. We’re here to do a job, and we’re going to do it. Julia’s right — one or two bad planets, that doesn’t mean a thing. We’ve only begun to search. Besides, do you think anyone could ever talk the captain into turning back? Has that man ever turned back from anything in his life?”

“He doesn’t necessarily have to go on being captain forever,” Elliot says, a little sullenly. “The job was supposed to be for one year. We gave him three. We could replace him.”

“With someone who wants to bring the voyage to an end?” Paco asks. “Somebody willing to turn back, you mean?”

“Absolutely.”

Huw says, from the corner where he is playing a languorous game of Go with Chang, “He would never step down in favor of anyone who would take that position. He may not have wanted to keep the job this long, but he’ll keep it forever rather than hand it over to someone who—”

“I’m not talking of asking him voluntarily to step down,” says Elliot. “I’m talking of replacing him.”

“Mutiny?” Huw asks. “Is that the word you’re looking for?”

“A new captain,” says Elliot doggedly. “That’s what I’m looking for. And a new direction for the voyage.”

“You’re talking mutiny,” Huw says, lost in wonderment. “You’re talking a coup d’état aboard the ship, overthrowing the captain by force, abandoning the Articles of the Voyage completely—”

“He’s talking idiocy,” Paco says. “He’s talking like a lunatic. He ought to be sedated. Where’s Leon?” Leon is playing Go with Sylvia. He looks up, scowling. “Leon, we’ve got a crazy man here for you to take care of! Give him an injection of something, will you?”

“Please,” Noelle says, very softly.

She has been silent up until now, concentrating entirely on her game, bending over her Go board as though it were the entire universe. As it so often does, the very softness of her tone succeeds in drawing the attention of everyone in the room, and they all look in her direction.

“Please,” she says again. “We mustn’t fight like this. The voyage is going to continue. You know it will, Elliot. It has to. So why even talk about these things?”