Starborne

He has put the “angel” thing aside, therefore, for three good and proper reasons, one that is simply sensible, one that is tenderhearted, and one that is out-and-out selfish.

But the year-captain knows that the Abbot, if only he could be consulted in these matters, would focus on the third of those reasons, and would ask him whether it was likely that the other two would have had much force in his mind if the third one had not been driving him; and there would be no good answer to that. There never were any good answers to the Abbot’s questions. He never condemned; he left that job to you yourself; but he could never be fooled, either.

Alone in his cabin now, the year-captain closes his eyes and the formidable figure of the Abbot rises vividly in his mind: a small, compactly constructed man, a fleshless man, bone and muscle only, ageless, indefatigable. He was probably about a hundred years old, but no one would have been greatly astonished had it been demonstrated that he was twice that age, or three times it, or that he had come into the world in the latter days of the Pleistocene. He seemed indestructible. An unforgettable face: broad forehead, dense mat of curling dark hair, piercing violet eyes, firmly jutting nose, practically lipless mouth. No one knew his name. He was simply the Abbot. Had he founded the monastery? No one knew that, either. The residents of the monastery did not indulge in historical research. They were there; so was he; he was the Abbot. Beyond that, very little mattered.

The year-captain revered him. In the hour before dawn, when he would arise and go down to the icy shore for the first of the day’s rituals of discipline, he would always find the Abbot already there, kneeling by the water’s edge, holding his hands beneath the surface. Not to mortify the flesh, not to incur the sin of pride by demonstrating how much self-inflicted damage he could tolerate, but simply to focus his concentration, to clarify the operations of his mind. All of the Lofoten exercises were like that. One performed them for their own sake, and not to convince others or even oneself of one’s great holiness. Holiness was beside the point here; the monastery, in this entirely secular age, was entirely secular in its orientation.

The year-captain relives, for the moment, those Lofoten days. The jagged chain of bleak rocky islands, rising like the spines of some submerged dinosaur’s enormous back from the sea off Norway’s fjord-sundered northwest coast. A stark landscape here. The dark, stormy Vestfjord that separated them from the mainland. The white-covered alpine peaks towering steeply in the background, a wall of wrinkled granite. The sparse grassy patches; the sodden cranberry moors; the broad ominous breast of the Atlantic curving off toward the west. Once these had been fishing islands, but the swarms of silvery cod were long extinct, and so were the fishing villages that had harvested the abundant catch. Mostly the islands were empty now, except for the one where the monastery sat, a neat row of stone buildings a short way inland from the sea.

The Gulf Stream flows here; the climate is harsh but not as extreme as the Arctic location might suggest. After Ganymede and Io and Callisto and Titan, these Lofoten islands might seem almost like paradise. There are no cranberry bogs on Ganymede. There are no grassy patches. One would derive no spiritual benefit from thrusting one’s bare hands into the waters of one of Titan’s hydrocarbon lakes, only a quick death. It was after his final excursion to the moons of Saturn that he had entered the monastery, leaving Huw to reap the glory of their exploit all alone. Returning from Saturn, he had felt a need to — was it to flee the society of his fellow humans? No, not flee, exactly, but certainly to withdraw from it, to go to some quiet place where he could reflect on the things he had seen and learned, the prevalence of living things in places like Titan and Io, the stubbor

The Abbot had known it even before he had. “I have come to request permission to leave,” he had said, and the Abbot, smiling a smile as cool and remote as the light of the farthest galaxies, had said, “Yes, it is the time when you must carry us to the stars, is that not so?”

Huw says, “We’ll go down and take a look at it, won’t we?” And then, when the year-captain remains silent: “Won’t we?”

The Wotan has made the shunt out of nospace successfully once again, and Julia has executed the appropriate braking maneuvers, and now the starship hangs in orbit a couple of million kilometers above the surface of the second world of this nameless K-type sun’s solar system. For three days they have been studying the characteristics of that world via the ship’s instruments. Huw and the year-captain are looking at it now, a furry gray-white sphere centered perfectly in the view-plate. A planet-shaped blanket of thick cloud, with a planet hiding behind it.

What kind of planet, though?

“We have to go down and give it the old once-over, don’t you think?” Huw asks. There is something of a touch of desperation in his voice. The year-captain has been at his most opaque today, his i

Once again Hesper’s long-range calculations have been miraculously confirmed by direct instrument scan. It has turned out to be the case that Planet B is somewhat larger in diameter than Earth but has very similar gravitation, and that its atmospheric composition is 22 percent oxygen and 70.5 percent nitrogen and 4.5 percent water vapor, which is a lot, along with a hefty, though not unmanageable, 1.75 percent CO2and assorted minor quantities of methane and various inert gases. That suggests a steamy tropical climate, and indeed the instrument scan has revealed that the mean temperature of this Planet B varies scarcely a degree from pole to pole: it is uniformly hot, a sweaty 45 degrees Celsius everywhere. A jungle world. Plenty of vegetation, photosynthesizing that lofty to

No visual evidence of cities or towns. No electromagnetic output anywhere along the spectrum from gammas up to the longest radio waves and beyond. Nobody home, apparently.

No oceans, no lakes, no rivers, either. A solid landmass from pole to pole. That’s odd, in view of the startlingly high proportion of water vapor in the atmosphere. All that H2O must condense and precipitate out occasionally, right? There should, in fact, be almost constant rainfall on such a world. Where does that enormous quantity of rain go? Does it all evaporate right back into the cloud layer? Doesn’t it collect anywhere on the surface in the form of large bodies of water?

The sonar probe shows something even odder. The planet is a big ball of rock, extremely skimpy on heavy metals, maybe on metals of any sort. Most of it is just basalt. But the sonar indicates that this world is swaddled in a huge layer of something relatively soft that covers the entire surface, theentire surface, not a break in it anywhere. Vegetable matter, evidently. A planetary jungle. Well, that’s congruent with the climatic and atmospheric figures. But this worldwide layer of vegetable stuff seems to be two or three hundred kilometers thick. That’s quite a thickness. The tallest mountain on Earth is only about nine kilometers high. The idea that this planet is covered by a wrapping of jungle that has roots going down twenty times as deep as Mount Everest is tall is pretty hard to accept.