Traveler in the Dark

24

Titov stared down at the sealed box as he scooped the last of the soil over the pit. Rebecca sat on her knees across from him, her gaze on the valley below them rather than the grave. It was so green. The plain was dark with it, as if it were in deep shadow, even in the red-gold glare of the ancient sun. Titov rolled a chunk of white stone between his hands. Rebecca glanced over at him. "That's pretty," she said.

He nodded. "Found it during the initial survey. She would have been excited about it. If she'd just—" he broke off and looked down where Rebecca had been staring. "They shouldn't have passed her. She should have stayed on the Keseburg. Belham was younger, he should have been on this crew. Dorothy could have gone to the moon. She would have been happy. Peaceful. Wandering around sterile stone formations." He sighed and knelt down next to her. "And Stratton. If he just would have— she was clean."

"He was doing what he thought was right," said Rebecca. "We all knew what exposure meant. What if she hadn't been? What if she'd had some long incubating thing?"

"I know. It just seems so cruel. All of it." He sighed. "I'm glad we at least have something to show for it. Never seen a green that vibrant on the agri deck, have you?"

Rebecca shook her head.

"Maybe they'll build a school just on the crest of the ridge. Call it Hackford Academy. Peter told me he wanted to be a mountaineer." Titov laughed suddenly. "I had to look it up. Didn't know what a mountaineer was. He said Dorothy was the one that told him about mountains. 'Rocks bigger than the ship, Dad!' he told me. 'And trees, as tall as a deck.' He made it sound like mythology, even to me." He tried to wipe his face and smudged his cheek with a dirty glove. He blinked the rest of his tears away instead. "Now he'll get to see them, touch them. They all will. Dorothy might not see it, but she helped it happen."

He placed the stone at one end of the soft soil.

"Andrei," said Rebecca gently, "the gravity here— lots of Peter's genmates have been showing Spindling. Even with new health regimens. Leroux told me it may be a mutation on the genetic level now."

"We'll introduce them slowly. The engineers can outfit them with exterior structures, Celia and I have thought about it. We always told Peter that he could do whatever he set his mind to, that Spindling was just a temporary setback—"

"It's not just the Spindling. Dorothy got lucky. She died because of a weakness in her heart instead of a deadly alien disease. We may not all be as lucky. And that green down there, you know what that is?" She pointed at the vibrant jade expanse below them. "It's millions of uncatalogued plants. Maybe toxic, maybe home to dangerous animals or bugs. We aren't ready yet. Not us, not Peter's gen, maybe not ever. The Keseburg is safe—"

"The Keseburg is killing us!" shouted Titov. "It's what caused the Spindling in the first place. Generation by generation it's picking us off. You know what the original complement was? Almost fifty thousand people. Celia showed me the last census. You know how many we have now? Thirty thousand and falling every day. A few more generations and we won't even have enough people left to man the ship or even sustain a population if we found some other lucky planet. We're at a turning point, Emery. If we don't get those people onto a planet soon, we're going to die out completely."

"Do you really want Peter to be a guinea pig? You want to risk him as one of the first to try to survive out here?"

Titov shook his head. "You don't understand yet. I want the best for him—"

"Then don't tell him about this place. Don't tell anyone."

"Why are you so adamant that this is the wrong thing for us?"

"Because I don't want to watch my father or my sister or my friends die in the hope that maybe this will work. Yeah, the Keseburg is old. Yeah, we aren't all in a hurry to produce the next gen and more of them are Spindlers every time. But what happens in several more generations isn't my concern. Whether we limp along in space until the ship falls apart or get wiped out by a microbe here, what's the difference? I just care about the people who are alive now. We aren't moving into a shiny new city with all the modern conveniences you know. You ready to go back to subsistence farming? Do you even know how? I don't. We don't even know the seasonal patterns yet. Or whether our species of plants will thrive here. Or our animals survive the native life. We've only explored a tiny fraction of the planet. A few miles radius— anything could be out there, regardless of what Issk'ath says. But none of us will see it if we settle here. We aren't going to be explorers. Not once we're here. Are you ready to watch Celia break her back to eke out enough food? Peter won't be a mountaineer. Or a chemist. He'll be a farmer. We're all going to be farmers. Peter won't have a choice. And he won't be a good one. Sorry, Andrei, but it's true. Even with help he'll always be weaker and take longer than someone who isn't Spindling. And if it's like Leroux expects, his kids will all be Spindling too." She was silent for a moment. "They don't belong here. We don't belong here," she said after a moment. "Dorothy's death was a warning."

She stood up and brushed the loose soil from her suit's knees. She wandered back down the hill toward the ship without waiting for Titov to respond.