I followed Anselm into the meeting room where the five Committee members were sitting around a table. The only spare seat was opposite Chairman Colby, so I took it. He has the pale skin of a lifelong cave dweller, and thin white hair fringing his bald head.
“Did you find anything useful?” he asked as soon as I sat down. He’s always thought my roving is a waste of time because none of my samples have produced anything useful to the colony. All I ever brought back was more evidence of how unsuited this planet is for human habitation.
I shrugged. “We’ll have to see what the lab says about my biosamples. I found a real pretty geothermal region.”
He grimaced at the word “pretty,” which was why I’d used it. He was an orthodox rationalist, and considered aesthetics to be a gateway drug to superstition. “You’ll fit in well with these gullible young animists we’re raising,” he said. “You and your fairy-tales.”
I was too tired to argue. “You wanted something?” I said.
Anselm said, “Do you know how to get to Newton’s Eye?”
“Of course I do.”
“How long does it take?”
“On foot, about 200 hours. Allow a little more for the buggy, say 220.”
I could see them calculating: there and back, 440 hours, plus some time to unload the cargo capsule and pack, say 450. Was there enough time?
I knew myself how long the nights were getting. Dust is sharply tilted, and at our latitude, its slow days vary from ten hours of dark and ninety hours of light in the summer to the opposite in winter. We were past the equinox; the nights were over sixty hours long, what we call N60. Umber already rose about midnight; you could get a sunburn before dawn. But most of its radiation didn’t reach us yet because of the cloud of dust, gas, and ionized particles surrounding it. At least, that’s our theory about what is concealing the star.
“I don’t suppose the astronomers have any predictions when the shroud will part?” I said.
That set Colby off. “Shroud, my ass. That’s a backsliding anti-rationalist term. Pretty soon you’re going to have people talking about gods and visions, summoning spirits, and rejecting science.”
“It’s just a metaphor, Colby,” I said.
“I’m trying to prevent us from regressing into savagery! Half of these youngsters are already wearing amulets and praying to idols.”
Once again, Anselm intervened. “There is inherent unpredictability about the star’s planetary nebula,” he said. “The first time, the gap appeared at N64.” That is, when night was 64 hours long. “The second time it didn’t come till N70.”
“We’re close to N64 now,” I said.
“Thank you for telling us,” Colby said with bitter sarcasm.
I shrugged and got up to leave. Before I reached the door Anselm said, “You’d better start getting your vehicle in order. If we do this, you’ll be setting out in about 400 hours.”
“Just me?” I said incredulously.
“You and whoever we decide to send.”
“The suicide team?”
“You’ve always been a bad influence on morale,” Colby said.
“I’m just calculating odds like a good rationalist,” I replied. Since I really didn’t want to hear his answer to that, I left. All I wanted then was a hot bath and about twenty hours of sleep.
That was my first mistake. I should have put my foot down right then. They probably wouldn’t have tried it without me.
But the habitat was alive with enthusiasm for fetching the cargo. Already, more people had volunteered than we could send. The main reason was eagerness to find out what our ancestors had sent us. You could barely walk down the hall without someone stopping you to speculate about it. Some wanted seeds and frozen embryos, electronic components, or medical devices. Others wanted rare minerals, smelting equipment, better water filtration. Or something utterly unexpected, some miracle technology to ease our starved existence.
It was the third and last cargo capsule our ancestors had sent by solar sail when they themselves had set out for Dust in a faster ship. Without the first two capsules, the colony would have been wiped out during the first winter, when Umber revealed itself. As it was, only two thirds of them perished. The survivors moved to the cave habitat and set about rebuilding a semblance of civilization. We weathered the second winter better here at Feynman. Now that the third winter was upon us, people were hoping for some actual comfort, some margin between us and annihilation.
But the capsule was preprogrammed to drop at the original landing site, long since abandoned. It might have been possible to reprogram it, but no one wanted to try calculating a different landing trajectory and sending it by our glitch-prone communication system. The other option, the wise and cautious one, was to let the capsule land and just leave it sitting at Newton’s Eye until spring. But we are the descendants of people who set out for a new planet without thoroughly checking it out. Wisdom? Caution? Not in our DNA.
All right, that’s a little harsh. They said they underestimated the danger from Umber because it was hidden behind our sun as well as its shroud when they were making observations from the home planet. And they did pay for their mistake.
I spent the next ten hours unpacking, playing with the dogs, and hanging out in the kitchen. I didn’t see much evidence of pagan drumming in the halls, so I asked Namja what bee had crawled up Colby’s ass. Her eyes rolled eloquently in response. “Come here,” she said.
She led me into the warren of bedrooms where married couples slept and pulled out a bin from under her bed—the only space any of us has for storing private belongings. She dug under a concealing pile of clothes and pulled out a broken tile with a colorful design on the back side—a landscape, I realized as I studied it. A painting of Dust.
“My granddaughter Marigold did it,” Namja said in a whisper.
What the younger generation had discovered was not superstition, but art.
For two generations, all our effort, all our creativity, had gone into improving the odds of survival. Art took materials, energy, and time we didn’t have to spare. But that, I learned, was not why Colby and the governing committee disapproved of it.
“They think it’s a betrayal of our guiding principle,” Namja said.
“Rationalism, you mean?”
She nodded. Rationalism—that universal ethic for which our parents came here, leaving behind a planet that had splintered into a thousand warring sects and belief systems. They were high-minded people, our settler ancestors. When they couldn’t convince the world they were correct, they decided to leave it and found a new one based on science and reason. And it turned out to be Dust.
Now, two generations later, Colby and the governing committee were trying to beat back irrationality.
“They lectured us about wearing jewelry,” Namja said.
“Why?”
“It might inflame sexual instincts,” she said ironically.
“Having a body does that,” I said.
“Not if you’re Colby, I guess. They also passed a resolution against figurines.”
“That was their idea of a problem?”
“They were afraid people would use them as fetishes.”
It got worse. Music and dance were now deemed to have shamanistic origins. Even reciting poetry aloud could start people on the slippery slope to prayer groups and worship.
“No wonder everyone wants to go to Newton’s Eye,” I said.
We held a meeting to decide what to do. We always have meetings, because the essence of rationality is that it needs to be contested. Also because people don’t want responsibility for making a decision.
About 200 people crammed into the refectory—everyone old enough to understand the issue. We no longer had a room big enough for all, a sure sign we were outgrowing our habitat.