Ark

98

The shuttle’s exit ramp was simple, a section of the hull that would fold down to the ground, lined with a corrugated surface for traction.

Helen, Jeb and Wilson stood by the closed door. They wore thick-lined bright green overcoats, and gloves and hats, and face masks connected to filter bottles. A few of the older children were with them, all in coats and masks, while the rest waited in the main cabin. Jeb, awkward and panting, was carrying little Sapphire Murphy Baker in his arms. The girl’s face was almost entirely hidden by her mask. They were all hanging on to rails, supporting their unaccustomed weight. Jeb and Wilson had at least grown up in Earth gravity; Helen had only known the hull’s fractional gravity and that not for thirty years since the Split, and the one and a quarter G felt crushingly heavy. But she stood, determined.

“So,” Wilson said, his voice muffled by his mask. “Everybody set?”

“Do it,” Helen murmured.

Wilson pulled a lever. With a hiss of hydraulics the hatch gracefully yawned down to the ground. Cold, sharp air washed into the shuttle, and a pale pink light drowned out the glow of the artificial lamps.

Wilson glanced around. “Nobody dead yet? Ready for the EVA?”

Helen snorted. “An EVA which is never going to end, Wilson.”

“I guess not.” He led the way out of the hatch.

They all walked cautiously down the ramp-cautiously as they encountered the new world, and cautiously because Helen wasn’t sure she even remembered how to walk. Jeb carried little Sapphire, who looked around wide-eyed.

They were looking straight toward the sun, which hung huge in a pink-brown sky. It was maybe forty times as wide as the sun’s disc as seen from Earth, but you could look directly at its pale glow without blinking. The hills at the edge of the lake rose up, coated with streaks of black, their shadowed faces thick with frost. Shapes like stocky trees, squat and dark, pushed up from the hills’ flanks.

Helen felt a deep, gut-wrenching fear to be walking out of the shelter of the shuttle like this, to enter openness, infinity, to be for the first time in her whole life not contained within a hull. This was not like the HeadSpace sims, she thought; in the end they had been no real preparation. And yet she kept walking, one foot in front of the other, down the ramp after Wilson. She was evolved for this, she told herself. The kids were young; they would adapt.

They paused before they got to the base of the ramp.

“I think I see open water over there,” Jeb said, pointing. “See, in the valley between those hills? Like a river, feeding the lake.”

“I can’t see,” Helen said. She had trouble focusing on the middle distance. But then she’d only ever had to look at things within the hull, or at infinity, nothing in between. Maybe her eyes would adjust.

“We can always move closer to the subsolar point if we want,” Wilson said. “The shuttle is designed to break down to build habitats, sleds. We might try to get to the ocean. It’s not far, fifty klicks.”

Helen, new to planets, didn’t want to sound foolish. “You think those tall things are trees?”

“If they are, their leaves are jet black,” Jeb said. “And so’s that grassy stuff at their feet.”

“Well, that makes sense,” Helen said. “The M-sun’s light isn’t like Earth’s. It peaks in the infrared. Photosynthesis here needs to be efficient, absorbing as much of the spectrum as it can consume. Hence it looks black.”

Jeb the farmer’s son asked, “So you think we really can grow crops here? It’s all so strange.”

“Hell, yes,” said Wilson, and he waved a gloved hand. “In the long term there are all sorts of advantages to a world like this. That sun’s never going to move from where it is in the sky.”

“It’s always morning here,” Helen murmured.

“Always morning. We can set up mirrors to concentrate the light. Later, when we get back off planet, we can throw up strings of orbital mirrors to focus the light on our farms, even start lighting up the far side and melt that damn ice cap.”

Helen smiled behind her mask. “One step at a time, Wilson.”

“I think I smell sulfur,” Jeb said.

“Volcano air,” Wilson said.

Helen took another step, toward the base of the ramp. It had cut a shallow groove in the ice, which was gritty and littered with small rocks and a thin ash, maybe from some volcanic event.

On impulse Jeb kneeled down, cautiously, and set little Sapphire down on the ramp. Sapphire, the youngest of the crew, too young to know she had not yet learned to walk, tried to stand up, and fell flat on her backside. But she just rolled over and got up on her hands and knees and began to crawl, a bit unsteadily, but purposefully.

And she crawled right off the edge of the ramp and onto the ice of Earth III. She squealed at the cold, and then poked her gloved finger into the groove the ramp had made. Helen felt regret, a deep, visceral stab, that her own children couldn’t come running down this ramp and join her.

“Look up,” Wilson said.

Helen straightened up. There, crossing the tall red sky, was a star, ruby-bright, tracking steadily toward the M-sun. It was Halivah, the only moon of Earth III. And as Helen watched, straining her eyes, the sky puckered, and the Ark was gone.