Behind me, boots crunched on cinders. I turned to see that Amal had joined me. He didn’t greet me, just stood taking in the scene.
At last he said, “It’s uplifting, isn’t it?”
Startled, I said, “What is?”
“That they came all this way for the sake of reason.”
Came all this way to a desolation of rock and erosion stretching to the vanishing point—no, uplifting was not a word I would use. But I didn’t say so.
He went back to the tent to fetch the others, and soon I was surrounded by youthful energy that made me despise my own sclerotic disaffection. They all wanted to go explore the ruins, so I waved them on and returned to the tent to fix my breakfast.
After eating, I went to join them. I found Seabird and Davern bathing in one of the hot pools, shaded by an awning constructed from their coldsuits. “You’re sure of the chemicals in that water, are you?” I asked.
“Oh stop worrying,” Davern said. “You’re just a walking death’s-head, Mick. You see danger everywhere.”
Ahead, the other three were clustered under the shadow of the soaring ship ribs. When I came up, I saw they had found a stone monument, and were standing silently before it, the hoods of their coldsuits thrown back. Sally sat at Edie’s feet.
“It’s a memorial to everyone who died in the first year,” Edie told me in a hushed voice.
“But that’s not the important part,” Anatoly said intently. He pointed to a line of the inscription, a quotation from Theodore Cam, the legendary leader of the exiles. It said:
Gaze into the unknowable from a bridge of evidence.
“You see?” Anatoly said. “He knew there was something unknowable. Reason doesn’t reach all the way. There are other truths. We were right, there is more to the universe than just the established facts.”
I thought back to Feynman Habitat, and how the pursuit of knowledge had contracted into something rigid and dogmatic. No wonder my generation had failed to inspire. I looked up at the skeleton of the spacecraft making its grand, useless gesture to the sky. How could mere reason compete with that?
After satisfying my curiosity, I trudged back to the tent. From a distance I heard a whining sound, and when I drew close I realized it was coming from Bucky. Puzzled, I rummaged through his load to search for the source. When I realized what it was, my heart pulsed in panic. Instantly, I put up the hood on my coldsuit and ran to warn the others.
“Put on your coldsuits and get back to the tent!” I shouted at Seabird and Davern. “Our X-ray detector went off. The shroud has parted.”
Umber was invisible in the bright daylight of the western sky, but a pulse of X-rays could only mean one thing.
When I had rounded them all up and gotten them back to the shielded safety of the tent, we held a council.
“We’ve got to turn around and go back, this instant,” I said.
There was a long silence. I turned to Amal. “You promised.”
“I promised we’d turn back if Umbernight came on our way out,” he said. “We’re not on the way out any longer. We’re here, and it’s only ten hours before the capsule arrives. We’d be giving up in sight of success.”
“Ten hours for the capsule to come, another ten to get it unpacked and reloaded on Bucky,” I pointed out. “If we’re lucky.”
“But Umber sets soon,” Edie pointed out. “We’ll be safe till it rises again.”
I had worked it all out. “By that time, we’ll barely be back to the Winding Wall. We have to go up that path this time, bathed in X-rays.”
“Our coldsuits will shield us,” Anatoly said. “It will be hard, but we can do it.”
The trip up to now had been too easy; it had given them inflated confidence.
Anatoly looked around at the others, his face fierce and romantic with a shadow of black beard accentuating his jawline. “I’ve realized now, what we’re doing really matters. We’re not just fetching baggage. We’re a link to the settlers. We have to live up to their standards, to their… heroism.” He said the last word as if it were unfamiliar—as indeed it was, in the crabbed pragmatism of Feynman Habitat.
I could see a contagion of inspiration spreading through them. Only I was immune.
“They died,” I said. “Two thirds of them. Didn’t you read that monument?”
“They didn’t know what we do,” Amal argued. “They weren’t expecting Umbernight.”
Anatoly saw I was going to object, and spoke first. “Maybe some of us will die, too. Maybe that is the risk we need to take. They were willing, and so am I.”
He was noble, committed, and utterly serious.
“No one wants you to die!” I couldn’t keep the frustration from my voice. “Your dying would be totally useless. It would only harm the rest of us. You need to live. Sorry to break it to you.”
They were all caught up in the kind of crazy courage that brought the settlers here. They all felt the same devotion to a cause, and they hadn’t yet learned that the universe doesn’t give a rip.
“Listen,” I said, “you’ve got to ask yourself, what’s a win here? Dying is not a win. Living is a win, even if it means living with failure.”
As soon as I said the last word, I could see it was the wrong one.
“Let’s vote,” said Amal. “Davern, what about you? You haven’t said anything.”
Davern looked around at the others, and I could see he was sizing up who to side with. “I’m with Anatoly,” he said. “He understands us.”
Amal nodded as if this made sense. “How about you, Seabird?”
She looked up at Anatoly with what I first thought was admiration—then I realized it was infatuation. “I’ll follow Anatoly,” she said with feeling.
The followers in our group had chosen Anatoly as their leader.
“I vote with Anatoly, too,” said Amal. “I think we’ve come this far, it would be crazy to give up now. Edie?”
“I respect Mick’s advice,” she said thoughtfully. “But our friends back home are counting on us, and in a way the settlers are counting on us, too. All those people died so we could be here, and to give up would be like letting them down.”
I pulled up the hood of my coldsuit and headed out of the tent. Outside, the day was bright and poisonous. The coldsuit shielded me from the X-rays, but not from the feeling of impending disaster. I looked across to the skeletal shipwreck and wondered: what are we doing here on Dust? The settlers chose this, but none of us asked to be born here, exiled from the rest of humanity, like the scum on the sand left by the highest wave. We aren’t noble pioneers. We’re only different from the bacteria because we are able to ask what the hell this is all about. Not answer, just ask.
Someone came out of the tent behind me, and I looked to see who it was this time. Edie. She came to my side. “Mick, we are so thankful that you’re with us,” she said. “We do listen to you. We just agreed to go to a twelve-hour work shift on the way back, to speed things up. We’ll get back.”
I truly wished she weren’t here. She was the kind of person who ought to be protected, so she could continue to bring cheer to the world. She was too valuable to be thrown away.
“It’s not about me,” I said. “I’ve got less life to lose than the rest of you.”
“No one’s going to lose their lives,” she said. “I promise.”
Why can’t I quit asking what more I could have done? I’m tired of that question. I still don’t know what else there was to do.
Ten hours later, there was no sign of the supply ship. Everyone was restless. We had slept and risen again, and now we scanned the skies every few minutes, hoping to see something.
Edie looked up from fashioning little dog goggles and said, “Do you suppose it’s landed somewhere else?” Once she had voiced the idea, it became our greatest worry. What if our assumption about the landing spot was wrong? We told ourselves it was just that the calculations had been off, or the ship was making an extra orbit. Now that we had made the commitment to stay, no one wanted to give up; but how long were we prepared to wait?