Upstairs—as if the station and safety and families and friends were still all as attainable as a ride in a lift.
But family and friends weren’t in their reach—wouldn’t be soon, nor might ever be, for all they could know. That was the gamble they had all taken, coming down here and subjecting themselves to unregulated weather and air so thin that just walking across the compound was strenuous exercise.
They’d acclimate to thinner air with no trouble, the medics claimed, they’d adjust—although a botanist who’d previously had mostly to do with algaes in convenient tanks and taxonomy in recorded text wasn’t sure that he was adequate to be a discoverer or a pioneer.
Still, for all of the discomforts there were compensations. Every specimen in the lab was a new species, the chemistry and the genetics was all to discover.
And for those of them who’d grown used to the day sky, and all that glowing, dust-diffracted blue space overhead, for those of them who had convinced their stomachs that they weren’t going to fall off the planet when they looked outward to the horizon—thank God for the hills around them, that gave the illusion of a positive, not a negative curvature—they could take deliberate chances with their stomachs, walk with their eyes on an opaque sky and watch the colors change behind the hills as the world turned its face to deep space.
Every evening and every morning brought new variations of weather and different shadows on the hills.
Weather and hills… words they’d learned in Earth Science, from photos that had never hinted at the transparencies of a worldly sky, or the coolth of a storm wind and the rushing sound it made in the grasses. He still found it unnerving that windows dared be so thin that thunder rattled them. He’d never realized that a cloud passing over the sun would cool the air so quickly. He’d never have guessed that storms had a smell. He’d never imagined the complexity of sound traveling across a landscape, or the smells, both pleasant and unpleasant—smells that might be more acute once his nose quit bleeding and his lungs quit aching.
He still found it hard to make the mental conversion from being on the station looking at tape of a planet he couldn’t touch, and being on the ground looking at a point of light he might never reach again.
It had been a hard good-bye, Upstairs. Parents, grandparents, friends… what could one say? He’d hugged them for what he knew might be the last time, in the lounge where the cameras weren’t allowed—and he’d been fine right down to the moment he’d seen his father’s expression, at which point his doubts had made a sudden lump in his throat and stayed there for the duration of the capsule ride, even after they had felt the parachute deploy.
“See you,” he’d said to them when he was leaving. “Five years. In five years, you’ll ride down.”
That was the plan—set up the base, and start taking selected colonists down—force the building of the reusable lander, once they’d found something the Guild wanted badly enough; and priority on that safer transport would go to family and friends of the team members on the initial phase of the on-world mission. That was a privilege he won for them by being here and taking the risk… not quite among the first down, but still on the list, dropped in early enough to be counted a pioneer.
God, he’d been scared when he’d walked out of that room and into the suiting area, with the ten other team members. If there’d been a way to turn around, run back, beg to wait for another year of capsule-drops, to prove to him that that chute was going to open.
If that was being a hero, he didn’t want to do it twice, and God, the freefall descent… and the landing…
The first astronauts had done planetfall in such capsules, by parachute. The history files said so. All old Earth’s tech was in the data banks. They’d known that that first capsule would work, the same way they knew the recoverable lander was going to work—when the Guild turned loose enough resources to see it built.
But come what might, they were down. The Guild might have refused to fly them down, but the Guild hadn’t had the right to stop the launch of what they’d built—and what they’d built, by its unpowered nature, hadn’t needed Guild pilots; what they’d built had come all of spare parts and plans from history files the Guild in its wisdom had called irrelevant to where they were.
The Guild could have applied force to stop them, hauled the capsules back after launch—of course, the Guild could still do that, and the division was potentially that bitter.
But so had the station its own force to use, if the Guild wanted to play by those rules—and the Guild evidently didn’t. The Guild hadn’t reached consensus, maybe, or hadn’t expected the first cargo lander to make it, or had a crisis of, God help them, conscience—no station-dweller knew what passed in Guild councils, but the almighty Guild hadn’t made a move yet. And the Guild couldn’t starve them out once they were down here without bringing about a confrontation with the station that they’d already and repeatedly declined. The food and equipment drops, so far, kept coming.
Food and equipment drops that might not be absolutely critical by this time next year. And then let the Guild order what they liked. If they could eat what grew here—they could live here. The first close look Phoenixhad had at the planet, had seen cities and dams and the clear evidence of agriculture and mining and every other attribute of a reasonably advanced civilization… natives, with rights, to be sure. But not rights that outweighed their own rights.
The sun sank in reds and yellows and golds. A planet shone above the hills. That was Mirage, second from the sun they called just… the sun, having no better name for it, the way they called the third planet the world, or sometimes… Down, in the way the Guild-born didn’t use the word.
Stupid way to name the planet, Ian thought; he personally wished the first generation had come up with some definite name they could use for the world… Earth, some of them had wanted to call it, arguing that was what anyone called their home planet, and this was, in all senses that mattered, home. The Guild had immediately rejected that reasoning.
And others, notably the hydroponics biologist, Renaud Lenoir, had argued passionately and eloquently that, no, it wasn’t Earth. It mustn’t be. It wasn’t the Sun. And it wasn’t the star they’d been targeting—when whatever had happened in hyperspace, had happened, and Taylor had saved the ship.
Taylor might be the Guild’s saint—Taylor and McDonough and the miner-pilots that, God save them, every one alive owed their lives to—but Lenoir, who’d argued so convincingly not to confound the names of Earth with this place, was due a sainthood, too, no matter that what would soon become the Guild had voted with him for reasons totally opposed to what Lenoir believed in; and that the construction workers and the station technicians, whose sons and daughters would carry out Lenoir’s vision and go down to the surface, had mostly voted against him in that meeting.
Not Earth, Lenoir had argued, and not their target star. The planet had undergone its own evolution, all the way to high intelligence, and by that process made up its own biological rules, through its own initially successful experiment at life, and its own unique demands of environment on those ancestral organisms.
The biochemistry, the taxonomies and the relationships of species down to microbes and up to Earth’s major ecosystems—whole branches of human science sat in Phoenix’library: the systematic knowledge of the one life-affected, human-impacted biosphere humans had thoroughly understood, thousands of years of accumulated understanding about Earth’s natural systems and their evolution and interrelationships.