“Bring them back,” Shan said, and Gveter said on the suit intercom, “Please return to the lander, Betton and Tai.” Betton at once started up the ladder, then turned to look for his mother. A dim blotch that might be her helmet showed in the brown gloom, almost beyond the suffusion of light from the lander.
“Please come in, Betton. Please return, Tai.”
The whitish suit flickered up the ladder, while Betton’s voice in the intercom pleaded, “Tai—Tai, come back—Gveter, should I go after her?”
“No. Tai, please return at once to lander.”
The boy’s crew-integrity held; he came up into the lander and watched from the outer hatch, as Gveter watched from the port. The vid had lost her. The pallid blotch sank into the formless murk.
Gveter perceived that the instruments recorded that the lander had sunk 3.2 meters since contact with planet surface and was continuing to sink at an increasing rate.
“What is the surface, Betton?”
“Like muddy ground—Where is she?”
“Please return at once, Tai!”
“Please return to Shoby, Lander One and all crew,” said the ship intercom; it was Tai’s voice, “This is Tai,” it said. “Please return at once to ship, lander and all crew.”
“Stay in suit, in decon, please, Betton,” Gveter said. “I’m sealing the hatch.”
“But—All right,” said the boy’s voice.
Gveter took the lander up, decontaminating it and Betton’s suit on the way. He perceived that Betton and Shan came with him through the hatch series into the Shoby and along the halls to the bridge, and that Karth, Sweet Today, Shan, and Tai were on the bridge.
Betton ran to his mother and stopped; he did not put out his hands to her. His face was immobile, as if made of wax or wood.
“Were you frightened?” she asked. “What happened down there?” And she looked to Gveter for an explanation.
Gveter perceived nothing. Unduring a nonperiod of no long, he perceived nothing was had happening happened that had not happened. Lost, he groped, lost, he found the word, the word that saved—“You—” he said, his tongue thick, dumb—“You called us.”
It seemed that she denied, but it did not matter. What mattered? Shan was talking. Shan could tell. “Nobody called, Gveter,” he said. “You and Betton went out, I was Support; when I realized I couldn’t get the lander stable, that there’s something funny about that surface, I called you back into the lander, and we came up.”
All Gveter could say was, “Insubstantial…”
“But Tai came—” Betton began, and stopped. Gveter perceived that the boy moved away from his mother’s denying touch. What mattered?
“Nobody went down,” Sweet Today said. After a silence and before it, she said, “There is no down to go to.”
Gveter tried to find another word, but there was none. He perceived outside the main port a brownish, murky convexity, through which, as he looked intently, he saw small stars shining.
He found a word then, the wrong word. “Lost,” he said, and speaking perceived how the ship’s lights dimmed slowly into a brownish murk, faded, darkened, were gone, while all the soft hum and busyness of the ship’s systems died away into the real silence that was always there. But there was nothing there. Nothing had happened. We are at Ve Port! he tried with all his will to say; but there was no saying.
The suns bum through my flesh, Lidi said.
I am the suns, said Sweet Today. Not I, all is.
Don’t breathe! cried Oreth.
It is death, Shan said. What I feared, is: nothing.
Nothing, they said.
Unbreathing, the ghosts flitted, shifted, in the ghost shell of a cold, dark hull floating near a world of brown fog, an unreal planet. They spoke, but there were no voices. There is no sound in vacuum, nor in nontime.
In her cabined solitude, Lidi felt the gravity lighten to the half-G of the ship’s core-mass; she saw them, the nearer and the farther suns, bum through the dark gauze of the walls and hulls and the bedding and her body. The brightest, the sun of this system, floated directly under her navel. She did not know its name.
I am the darkness between the suns, one said.
I am nothing, one said.
I am you, one said.
You—one said—You—
And breathed, and reached out, and spoke: “Listen!” Crying out to the other, to the others, “Listen!”
“We have always known this. This is where we have always been, will always be, at the hearth, at the center. There is nothing to be afraid of, after all.”
“I can’t breathe,” one said.
“I am not breathing,” one said.
“There is nothing to breathe,” one said.
“You are, you are breathing, please breathe!” said another.
“We’re here, at the hearth,” said another.
Oreth had laid the fire, Karth lit it. As it caught they both said softly, in Karhidish, “Praise also the light, and creation unfinished.”
The fire caught with spark-spits, crackles, sudden flares. It did not go out. It burned. The others grouped round.
They were nowhere, but they were nowhere together; the ship was dead, but they were in the ship. A dead ship cools off fairly quickly, but not immediately. Close the doors, come in by the fire; keep the cold night out, before we go to bed.
Karth went with Rig to persuade Lidi from her starry vault. The navigator would not get up. “It’s my fault,” she said.
“Don’t egoize,” Karth said mildly. “How could it be?”
“I don’t know. I want to stay here,” Lidi muttered. Then Karth begged her: “Oh, Lidi, not alone!”
“How else?” the old woman asked, coldly.
But she was ashamed of herself, then, and ashamed of her guilt trip, and growled, “Oh, all right.” She heaved herself up and wrapped a blanket around her body and followed Karth and Rig. The child carried a little biolume; it glowed in the black corridors, just as the plants of the aerobic tanks lived on, metabolizing, making an air to breathe, for a while. The light moved before her like a star among the stars through darkness to the room full of books, where the fire burned in the stone hearth. “Hello, children,” Lidi said. “What are we doing here?”
“Telling stories,” Sweet Today replied.
Shan had a little voice-recorder notebook in his hand.
“Does it work?” Lidi inquired.
“Seems to. We thought we’d tell…what happened,” Shan said, squinting the narrow black eyes in his narrow black face at the firelight. “Each of us. What we—what it seemed like, seems like, to us. So that…”
“As a record, yes. In case…How funny that it works, though, your notebook. When nothing else does.”
“It’s voice-activated,” Shan said absently. “So. Go on, Gveter.”
Gveter finished telling his version of the expedition to the planet’s surface. “We didn’t even bring back samples,” he ended, “I never thought of them.”
“Shan went with you, not me,” Tai said.