Penumbra

11

Bennett and Ten Lee loaded the transporter with provisions and scientific equipment, Mackendrick supervising. He seemed to have gained strength since landfall, after the rigours of suspension. He was moving more easily, restored to his old ebullient self, as if looking forward to the exploration of Penumbra.

Bennett packed the containers of food on the flat-bed. Ten Lee fastened the inflatable dome with polycarbon ties and Mackendrick checked that the water canisters were full. At last they stood beside the cab of the vehicle, preparatory to driving from the Cobra’s hold. Bennett let out a breath; the gravity of Penumbra was slightly higher than on Earth, and the effort of loading the transporter had tired him. He felt the tug of the planet’s gravity pull on his entrails, making his limbs heavy and sluggish.

“We’ll need these as a precaution,” Mackendrick said, handing out facial masks. “The air’s breathable, but we won’t know about any possible dangerous microorganisms until the tests come in.”

Bennett took his mask and slipped it over his nose and mouth, feeling it seal itself to his skin like something alive. Mackendrick and Ten Lee did likewise.

Mackendrick opened a container on the side of the truck and passed a short, bulky rifle to Bennett. “Pulsers, for our protection.” His voice was muffled by the mask.

Ten Lee regarded Mackendrick, declining to take the rifle he held towards her. “Why do we need weapons?”

Mackendrick sighed. “We don’t know what’s out there, Ten. It’s merely a precaution.”

She shook her head, her eyes watching Mackendrick above her mask. “I could not bring myself to kill.”

Bennett said, “They’re pulsers, Ten. You can turn down the charge to stun. Look.” He adjusted the slide on his own weapon.

Her eyes pulled into a dubious frown, Ten Lee took the rifle from Mackendrick and pushed the slide down to its lowest setting.

“We’ll take it in turns to drive,” Mackendrick said. “Anybody for first shift?”

Bennett volunteered and climbed into the driving seat. Mackendrick sat beside him, plugging a com-board into the console on the dash. On a command from Mackendrick, the hatch of the cargo hold slowly lowered, forming a ramp.

A plain of purple grass stretched away from the ship, bejewelled with the result of the storm: diadems of captured rain-water scintillated in the half-light of Tenebrae, the gas giant, turning the grass into a shimmering, sequinned haze.

Bennett fired the engine and edged the vehicle forward, down the ramp and across the purple plain. The atmosphere of Penumbra invaded the cab, increasing the temperature with its cloying, sticky humidity.

The mountains on either side came into view, and Bennett made out the monstrous bulk of Tenebrae. It had risen since his first glimpse of it at landfall, and he had to tip his head back to stare through the clear roof of the transporter at the great bulging underbelly of the giant. There was something almost impossible about its vastness, like an optical illusion the brain knows to be a fact and yet cannot visually accommodate.

Mackendrick tapped the com-board with a gnarled finger. “This is our present position, this the location of the possible settlement, and the red line is our intended route.” The com-board showed a computer-simulated aerial view of the mountains and the central plain, and the flashing points denoted the transporter and the settlement. All Bennett had to do was keep the first flashing light on the red line. “It’s merely a case of following the lie of the valley plain,” Mackendrick said.

Their destination was just under three hundred kilometres distant. The com-board told them that at their present speed of thirty kilometres an hour, they would reach the settlement in approximately ten hours.

“But that doesn’t take into account stops we might make,” Mackendrick added. “I want to get out from time to time, see if there’s any evidence of habitation. Also, it’ll be getting dark in five hours. We’ll stop and pitch camp, prepare a meal and grab a night’s sleep.”

Shortly after landfall, Bennett had studied the original probe’s astronomical report on the characteristics of Penumbra. The planet was unique. It turned on its. axis in just sixteen hours, creating two fairly regular periods of night and day. The main source of light was that provided by Tenebrae, both the steady glow of its superheated gas and a more fitful illumination created by the electrical storms which raged in its upper atmosphere. The system was part of a stellar binary; the light of the major sun never reached Penumbra, hidden as it was behind the bulk of Tenebrae. A distant sun provided Penumbra with a secondary source of light, so that even during the night, when the planet turned away from Tenebrae, the minor sun would ensure that Penumbra was not in total darkness.

From time to time, as the belly of the gas giant overhead coruscated with storms, light pulsed across the surface of land around the transporter. The purple plain brightened perceptibly, and the shadows of rocks and plants fell in darker relief.

At one point Ten Lee pointed at something. “Look…”

Bennett slowed the transporter. Five metres ahead, a raft of vegetation was undergoing a transformation. As they watched, a patch of deeper purple grass sprouted a thousand bright yellow flowers, tiny blooms that winked open and stretched towards the electric illumination of the distant lightning. All over the plain, in fact, a constellation of tiny flowers was blossoming.

Seconds later Bennett made out what at first he assumed was some kind of dark mist, hovering over the land. Then he realised that the mist was shifting, lifting from the land and moving on, then descending. It was a mist, he decided—a great pall of iridescent sapphire insects feasting on the flowers.

For perhaps three minutes the flowers remained open, a vast bright carpet, and then disappeared as quickly as they had arrived as the pulse of light from Tenebrae abated. Just as rapidly, the cloud of insects disappeared, as if absorbed into the land.

One hour later the storm arrived.

A driving wind hit the transporter head on, and low cloud swirled and swelled around them, driving a battering front of raindrops the size of golf balls. Muffled thunder sounded a distant, stratospheric cannonade. Seconds later the surrounding clouds pulsed with opalescent lightning. Bennett slowed the transporter and proceeded with caution.

Mackendrick doubted that it was a result of the lightning storm on Tenebrae they had just witnessed. “Too soon for that,” he said. “But I’ve no doubt that they’re linked. What we’re seeing now is probably the result of an electrical storm on the giant a day or so ago.”

The transporter rocked like a cradle in the wind.

Despite himself, Bennett experienced a surge of elation. He laughed, earning odd looks from Mackendrick and Ten Lee. “It takes me back,” he said. “You know, the storms when you were young, the sense of comfort from knowing you were safe.”

Ten Lee shook her head. “On Bhao Khet the storms frightened me,” she replied. “The typhoons killed thousands of people. I had an aunt who claimed they were avenging spirits. Of course that was nonsense, but I didn’t realise that at the time.”

As abruptly as the storm began, it ceased. First the wind flagged, and then the rain stopped its noisy pounding on the roof of the transporter. The cloud lifted in minutes, revealing a land washed clean and sparkling in Tenebrae’s milky light. A sea of rainwater coruscated across the plain, and another raft of tiny flowers, red as well as yellow this time, snapped open and drank in the light and the moisture. As before, a swarm of insects appeared to take advantage of the evanescent blooming.

Bennett was the first to witness the fauna of Penumbra. At first he thought that the movement to his left, on the periphery of his vision, was no more than a trick of the light, the shadow of a windblown stand of grass. The shadow continued its motion across the plain, though, and Bennett turned his head to see a long-legged animal, frail and skittish as a deer, halt in its sprint and regard them with intense suspicion. He slowed the transporter and pointed. The creature had a jet-black pelt as sleek as an otter and a thin wedge of a head. It was the improbable angularity of its head, and its massive bulging eyes, that marked it out as alien.

He realised, with amazement, that it was the first non-Terran animal he had ever seen in the flesh.

“And there are others,” Ten Lee said. “Hundreds of them.”

Beyond the first animal, Bennett saw others, a great stilled herd watching the progress of the transporter with minute attention. Seconds later they had seen enough; as if at some signal, they turned as one and flowed off down the valley away from the vehicle. Bennett estimated they were moving at close to fifty kilometres an hour. In seconds they were lost to sight.

As the day progressed, Tenebrae moved from its oppressive position directly overhead and slipped towards the mountains to the east. It lowered itself slowly over the horizon, its progress visible behind the silhouetted mountain range, and the light dimmed. The sky to the west became a wash of indigo; a scatter of faint stars, the constellations unfamiliar, appeared above the plain. High in the sky the faint yellow beacon of the minor sun materialised, the night star that ensured Penumbra would never know total darkness.

On Bennett’s reckoning they had covered some hundred and fifty kilometres—they were almost halfway to their destination.

Mackendrick suggested that they halt for the night. “Don’t know about you two, but I’m hungry. Let’s move into the lee of the hills over there and call it a day.”

Bennett turned the transporter and tracked across the plain, approaching the gentle rise of the foothills. Trees came into sight, a forest of dark shapes covering the hillside in the light of the stars and the distant minor sun. He braked the vehicle and stared out. In the sudden silence, the rearing trees seemed an eerie presence. They were branchless for much of their height, and near the top sprouted long, dangling fronds. Some of these fronds had connected themselves to neighbouring trees. Small dark shapes scurried from tree to tree, and occasional calls, piping ululations like the urgent shrilling of a piccolo, pierced the silence of the night.

Mackendrick touched the screen, and the computer graphic of their course was replaced by lines of text. “The air’s safe, according to the analysis,” he said. “We can take these damned masks off now.”

Bennett peeled off his mask and massaged his face. He glanced at Mackendrick, who nodded that he should open the door and climb out. As he did so, swinging down into the humid twilight, it occurred to him that he was setting foot on the most distant planet ever explored by humankind.

The grass was springy underfoot, the warmth cloying. The animals in the tree-tops high above called out with shrill urgency.

They expanded the dome, set up a perimeter alarm to alert them to unwelcome nocturnal visitors, and carried inflatable mattresses and food trays inside. The dome was transparent, and they ate their meals—Ten Lee preferring her own vegetarian fare—in the half-light of the distant second sun. Later, Bennett and Ten Lee sat cross-legged on the floor while Mackendrick stretched out on his mattress, hands lodged beneath his head. They chatted among themselves, Ten Lee contributing only occasionally.

“So now that we’re here, Josh,” Mackendrick was saying, “how do you feel about things?”

He thought it best not to give the smart-ass answer that life was pretty much as it had always been. Mackendrick was trying to gauge the morale of his team.

He shrugged. “I… I suppose I expected it to be more… I don’t know—alien. I’ve never been out of Sol system before now. It’s spectacular, I suppose. But perhaps not as threatening as I thought it might be.”

He realised he was saying the first things that came into his head. He could not tell Mackendrick and Ten Lee how he was really feeling.

When he had looked ahead at the start of the voyage, he had envisaged a strange new world with himself, his thoughts and emotions subtracted from the equation. He had imagined a wondrous, totally alien world, but the reality of being here was that he was slightly disappointed—because he was himself and had not been changed by the experience. He still carried his old worries and disappointments: his guilt over his father and what Julia had said to him at their final meeting.

Hell, he thought, we can go halfway across the galaxy and never really get anywhere.

He shrugged. “I’m looking forward to reaching the settlement,” he said, which was true, even though he knew that once he was there he would inevitably feel some sense of dismay, no matter what they discovered. He recalled telling Ella’s ghost that reality was never as bad as you expected it to be; but, at the same time, it was also true that no experience was ever as good as you hoped it might be.

Mackendrick turned and propped himself on one elbow. “What do you think we’ll find?”

“Well, we keep calling it a settlement. It certainly looked like one from the shots we’ve seen. Of course it’d be great to discover evidence of sentient life…” Even as he said the words, he hardly believed they would. “I really don’t know what to think until we reach our destination. I don’t want to hope for too much in case we find nothing at all.”

Mackendrick nodded. “Ten Lee? Any thoughts?”

“I cannot guess what we might find. Speculation is useless.” She paused, blinking down at her plate of half-eaten food. “I am pleased to be here. It is right, destined. My Rimpoche said go outwards. I am about as far out as it is possible to be in this galaxy, and for the first time I have the feeling that I am in the right place.” She turned a serious gaze on Mackendrick. “I feel that Penumbra has at its heart a great secret.”

Mackendrick raised his eyebrows and lay down again, staring up at the ceiling of the dome.

Bennett watched the strange woman as she prepared her mattress and settled herself upon it in the lotus position. She closed her eyes and made circles with her thumbs and index fingers, then seemed to slow her breathing. There were times when he felt in awe of Ten Lee Theneka, her composure and certainty of thought. He sometimes wondered if she regarded everyone around her as shallow, mere puppets of conditioning, jerking to the meretricious dance of life’s music.

He prepared for sleep, unrolling his mattress and lying down on his back. Mackendrick sat up, tipping a dozen small white pills into his shaking palm and swallowing them with a draught of water. There was something about watching someone taking their medication that filled Bennett with a sense of trespass. He recollected once or twice accidentally coming across Ella as she administered her own injections; he had always quickly retreated, as if the healing might in some way prove less efficacious if he was around to witness the ritual.

Surprisingly, he slept well that night. He awoke feeling refreshed and invigorated seven hours later. The milky light of Tenebrae filled the dome, along with the odour of freshly brewing coffee.

Mackendrick was kneeling before the microwave. “Breakfast’ll be ready in ten minutes.”

Bennett sat up and stretched, peering around. “Where’s Ten?”

Mackendrick pointed through the wall of the dome. Ten Lee was a childishly small figure standing on a hillside fifty metres away, silhouetted against the light of the rising gas giant.

He felt a sudden pang of alarm at the sight of her. He looked around and saw her rifle lying beside her mattress.

“Is she safe out there alone?”

Without waiting for a reply he grabbed his rifle, found his boots and hurried from the dome. He was surprised at the quality of the air, how fresh it was despite the warmth, and scented with a perfume suggesting pine, but sharper. He jogged across the purple grass and climbed the hill to where Ten stood. The view was spectacular from the summit: the dwindling plain shimmered with haze in the light of Tenebrae, its girth straddling the entirety of the horizon.

“Ten!”

She turned and glanced at his pulser.

Bennett shrugged. “I don’t think you should be out here without this.”

He held up the rifle, but she ignored the gesture, took a deep breath and swept her gaze around the view, suggesting without words that he was being needlessly apprehensive.

He smiled. “Beautiful morning.”

She ignored the observation and said, “Have you thought about the SIH disc, Joshua?”

The question surprised him. He had wanted to let it ride, maybe assess how he felt about things later, at the end of the mission.

“I… no. That is, I know what I should do.”

She turned to him and stared. “Then do it.”

She opened her palm before him, and upon it was the small silver disc from the hologram module.

He regarded it for what seemed like minutes.

“Joshua, you must let go. Accept what happened. In letting go we free ourselves, open ourselves and admit that new experience is possible.”

“You don’t know what it is like to lose—”

She blinked at him. “Joshua, when I was eighteen I lost the man I loved. He was killed in the War of Independence. I know what it is like—”

“Is that why you… why you turned to religion? To get over the loss?”

“Of course not. I always believed in the Path. My belief helped me, when he died.”

“Have you had anyone since?”

“Not a lover,” she said. “A few casual encounters…” She smiled at him. “I am passing even beyond that, now. I need nothing, only the peace that meditation brings. Here, I feel as though I need only to meditate to be close to the essence.”

Bennett regarded her. She was still proffering the disc on the palm of her small hand. He thought of Ella, and then Julia, and then the other women he thought he had loved over the years.

“I wish I could do without people, Ten. They seem only to bring me pain.”

She shook her head. “Perhaps you seek too much in others, Joshua. Perhaps you seek that which they are not, instead of that which they are. Accept them for themselves, not that which you wish them to be.” She stared at him. “Now take the disc and throw it as far as you can.”

He realised that, if he hesitated any longer, he would disobey her command—and he knew that then he would hate himself.

On impulse he snatched the disc and drew back his arm. He launched the disc high, watched it go spinning through the air and catch the light once or twice, then fall on a long, slow arc into the valley bottom.

He thought of Ella, and felt a quick stab of guilt he knew to be irrational.

Briefly, in a gesture valuable because of its rarity, Ten Lee reached out and touched his hand. Then she left him and walked back down the hillside to the dome.

After a breakfast of coffee and fruit bread, taken outside the dome on the purple grass, they packed up and boarded the transporter on the final leg of the journey. Ten Lee drove and Bennett sat beside the open window next to Mackendrick.

They made good time as Tenebrae moved from west to east. It seemed less to rise than to roll with vast majesty across the valley. When Bennett tipped his head and stared through the roof of the vehicle, the giant filled his field of vision, blotting out the starfield and provoking a stifled sense of claustrophobia. Great flashes of lightning pulsed within the gaseous bands, sending floods of opal illumination across the plain before them.

They sighted more wildlife as the short day progressed. Ten Lee was the first to spot the flying creatures. She leaned forward, clasping the wheel in both hands, and peered through the windshield. “Look,” she said. “There. Straight ahead.”

At first they appeared as a flock of jet specks in the air at the far end of the plain. Seconds later they were overhead and silhouetted against the belly of the gas giant, creatures with sickle wings and great scythe-like beaks, not unlike pteranodons from the Cretaceous period. So vast was the flock that they took fully minutes to pass overhead.

“We can safely say it’s looking a viable habitat for fauna at the top end of the food chain,” Mackendrick commented. “I wonder what’s at the very top?”

His words set Bennett to seriously contemplating the possibility that a sentient alien lifeform might inhabit Penumbra. Certainly the aerial video of the so-called settlement seemed to indicate that some form of intelligence had been at work on the planet. The thought that, if this intelligence still existed, then sooner or later they would come across it… Bennett laughed to himself. It was one of those concepts—like the apprehension of infinity—just too vast to grasp.

Only three planets had been discovered to harbour sentient life from the hundreds so far explored on humankind’s expansion along the spiral arm. Bennett had seen the usual documentaries about the alien races, and read a couple of books and a few articles documenting the story of the first contact and subsequent relations.

One race was humanoid, the Phalaan of Arcturus V, who were at a stage of evolution comparable to that of Neolithic man. After the discovery of these Stone Age people, and initial mutually incomprehensible contact, it was considered best for the future development of the Phalaan if they were spared relations with their more technologically sophisticated neighbours. The planet had been designated out of bounds for all but authorised scientific investigation teams.

The Kreyn of Betelgeuse XVII were an ancient race of starfarers who discovered humankind when one of their ships landed on the colony world of Bethany. They were crab-like beings, and about as far in advance of humanity as humanity was in relation to the Phalaan. It was they, the Kreyn, who decided that for the good of humankind contact between the races should be kept to a minimum.

The dominant lifeforms on Sirius were great sea-living cetaceans, and the jury was still undecided as to whether these aliens were sentient or not.

Humankind had yet to discover a race with whom they were on an equal footing, beings with whom they might come to some understanding in the many realms of endeavour: cultural, scientific, philosophical. The chances were that such a race was unlikely to be found on Penumbra. The planet was not developed globally as was the Earth; there was no evidence of cities or roads or other signs of civilisation, as such. But, Bennett told himself, perhaps Penumbrians lived underground, and had no need of cities in the Terran sense. It would be rash to discount any possibility so early in their explorations. Still, the thought of encountering intelligent extraterrestrial life, at any stage of their evolution, seemed improbable to Bennett.

They halted at midday to take a meal break, and it was shortly after they had finished their food trays—when Ten Lee slipped from the cab to stretch her legs—that she made the discovery.

She was gone perhaps thirty seconds when Bennett heard a shout. “Joshua! Mack! Here!”

Something about her tone, an uncharacteristic urgency, alerted Bennett. He jumped from the cab and looked about for her. She was twenty metres from the transporter, kneeling and reaching out to touch something in the short grass.

She looked up as he approached at a run, an expression of surprise and delight on her face. “I’ve found something, Joshua, Mack. Look.”

Bennett knelt beside her, joined by Mackendrick, and stared at the square, grey stone object in the grass. It was perhaps twenty centimetres high and a metre square, a slab of stone as dark as iron. It was not the uniformity of the object that was surprising, however, but the fact that inscribed into the surface of the stone was a series of neatly chiselled hieroglyphs.

Mackendrick stood and hurried back to the transporter while Bennett ran a hand over the stone’s surface. The inscription was worn, and filled in places with lichen. A series of small circles, in various stages of completion, contained a number of dots, stars, squares and smaller circles. Each character was perhaps the size of a coin. Bennett counted a hundred such on the horizontal plane.

Mackendrick returned, burdened with equipment. He unstrapped an analyser from his neck and placed it on the stone plinth, kneeling to get a closer look.

Ten Lee was moving away, drawn like a somnambulist to something she had spotted a few metres away. Bennett watched her as she knelt, reached out and pushed aside the obscuring purple grass.

She looked up. “Over here, Josh. Another one.”

He ran across to her. This stone seemed identical to the first in dimensions, but instead bore a series of square hieroglyphs. The markings within these characters, so far as he could make out, were identical to those on the first stone: dots, stars, squares, small circles. He looked more closely at the stone, and noticed that it was not perfectly square. The top and bottom edges, as seen from above, sloped minimally towards the left. He returned to the first stone. The edges of this one, too, were angled in the same direction as the second.

“A form of ironstone,” Mackendrick told him. “Initial analysis measured the degree of wear of the various hieroglyphs—those in the middle and those at the southernmost edge, in the teeth of the prevailing winds. The read-out suggests they’ve been worn over a period of ten thousand years, so the stones in their chiselled state are that old at least.”

“Measurements?”

Mackendrick nodded and read off the dimensions.

“Could you do the same with the second?” Bennett asked.

They made their way to where Ten Lee was kneeling, and placed the analyser on the face of the stone.

Mackendrick read out the results. “This one is smaller, but only slightly. It’s as if it’s cut out of the same length of receding block…”

Bennett was already on his feet and striding to an irregularity he’d spotted in the grass five metres away. There was another stone. He looked up, across the plain, and made out a series of similar slabs marching away across the grassland. He guessed, then, that each one would be smaller than the last, diminishing like the head of a giant arrow, as if pointing…

Only then did it occur to him to look up, all the way, to where the foothills began some two or three kilometres away.

What he saw there made him laugh out loud. They were like short-sighted ants wondering at the footprints of an elephant, when all along the elephant itself was just metres away.

“Ten Lee!” he called. “Mack!”

They hurried to his side, looking down at the grass for another stone block.

“No,” he said. “Not down. Up. Take a look at that.”

He pointed. In the distant valley, the great stone columns of a vast and ancient ruin brooded in the light of the gas giant overhead.