Planetfall

by David Barber

Part 1 appears in this issue.

conclusion

They called this grizzled old woman Captain.

She took Arp to one side, touching his arm. “Amy says you are an Engineer. And young. And handsome.”

She lifted her face towards him in the dim light, and he saw she was blind.

“Not that young,” Arp protested.

Her fingers found the telescope. “Do you know what this is?”

Arp peered at the blurred specks that she said was their long foretold Destination, almost close enough now to touch. The Instructions prophesied wet, green worlds, and it had finally come to pass. But the Bridge must have electric again. They must turn the Ship and begin slowing. The Instructions were clear on this.

“I thought...”

“What?”

“That it was for generations to come. That it wasn’t for us.”

The Captain found his hand and patted it, like a blessing.

Arp was almost afraid to ask. “And how long—”

“You will live to see planetfall.”

Arp rolled the word around his mouth. He had seen the engraved metal Instruction sheets about Planetfall in Engineering, though he couldn’t read them himself, but now he had glimpsed worlds green and wet, he understood the thing he’d always wanted.

If the Chief Engineer saw for himself, insisted the Captain, then surely they could cooperate. Even generations after the Mutiny, there was fear and mistrust. Hadn’t Navigator Chen offered a truce and been spaced? Arp must go back with a message.

Jek had not waited, but the girl, Amy, would guide him back to familiar decks. As she lit a lamp, he saw her lip was horribly split, from under the nose down into her mouth.

* * *

“What you want the Chief for?”

“Something I come across on the dark decks,” said Arp, reluctantly. “He’ll want to hear.”

“Chief’s a busy man.”

Kay waited him out. They’d never liked each other. Kay had risen in the Engineers and was now in charge of the Drive, a job Arp shrugged at. The Drive was a vast, sealed unit, and even adjusting the dials back to the positions shown on the Instructions was a ceremony performed only rarely.

“They have electric.”

Kay’s smirk faded.

“Stop messing with him,” said Chief Engineer Parker from the door. “What’s all this about?”

Once started, Arp couldn’t stop. He described the blind Captain and her damaged kin, the telescope and the wet green worlds. How they needed electric for turnaround. He struggled to explain the way the Captain had said “planetfall,” and how this was what Arp had looked for all his life. He did not say this last part.

“Don’t sound like a threat,” decided Kay. “Sounds like they’re barely hanging on.”

“And I can take you to the Captain,” said Arp finally.

Parker pursed his lips. “They show you some dot in a telescope and claim it’s Eden. And it pops up now, after all this time, just when they’re getting desperate.”

“But it’s planetfall,” said Arp. It was all so obvious. “Folks need to hear.”

Parker dismissed Kay with murmured orders, then studied this odd young man.

“I’ve read the instructions for Turnaround. Every Chief Engineer does. Says we have to turn off the Drive.” He let that sink in. “But what if we couldn’t light it again? And they warn that everything floats. The farm decks. The fish pools. Everything.”

Kay came back in with men and, before Arp understood, he was bundled to the floor, struggling and yelling until someone dazed him with a blow. Kay stood over him, rubbing his knuckles, his big lumpy face red with effort.

Parker shook his head. “We don’t want to go worrying folk.”

“Let’s do the airlock test again, Chief, only this time—”

“Leave the thinking to me. Arp here knows where the Captain is.”

* * *

Chief Parker kept coming back to it like a sore tooth. He couldn’t stand the thought of someone still sitting in the Captain’s chair. They could wait for the inevitable collapse of these survivors, though who knew when that might be. And worse, how would he ever know? So he visited Arp in the lock-up and said he’d thought better. If Arp would guide them, he’d give this blind woman a fair listen.

A line of Engineers followed Arp, holding their lamps high, haunted by their own grotesque shadows, until they reached the hall of stars. Parker wouldn’t hear of snuffing their lights to look. It never occurred to Arp that the Chief Engineer was afraid.

Each man carried a metal rod, like scavenger gangs. Arp watched them whipping them through the air and laughing. It was the loud, excited behaviour of men before a fight. They didn’t guard him because who would go into the dark without a lamp?

He looked from one animated face to another, then slipped away.

They came looking, but he howled a terrible warning from the dark, and they fled. Later, he heard them again: distant cries of shock and pain as if something had gone wrong. Trailing his fingers along walls, he retraced his steps and sat looking up at the stars.

“I thought you might be here,” said the Captain a long time afterwards.

* * *

On the way back, one Engineer had seen a thing looming in the dark, or thought he did, and panic engulfed them all, ending with bodies tumbling down a staircase. When the last of the injured were finally carried back, some said Parker trembled as he shouted for the dark decks to be sealed off.

Certain that folk would act if they just knew about planetfall, Arp searched for a way Aft. He hammered on the Great Doors in frustration, metal on metal, without reply.

The booming echoed round the Aft decks like some furious thing eager to get in. People stayed off the corridors and, when the Chief limped out of Engineering days later, it was to promise the Doors would stay shut.

* * *

The people of the Bridge, mainly descendants of Officers, had an unshakable faith in their Destination; if this one proved false, then the true one would emerge from the Hall of Stars.

A generation from now, a different Chief Engineer might raise the Doors again and they must be ready. If this Turnaround was missed, they would resume their bare, cold lives and wait. They began engraving metal sheets with new Instructions.

With no choice, Arp settled into their sparse routines and began to see how they might have come to think like this.

It took years for the speck of their destination to grow brighter. Longer than a lifetime for the Captain, who in her blindness had promised planetfall.

Arp had his own prentice to the green now, who he scolded for not paying attention. Arp still felt like the boy who wanted better, but now he was plagued by a dread he would end his days like this after all.

He tried to explain all this to his wife, but Amy shook her head. “That was another man and another life,” she soothed. “You are a good husband, and our daughter is beautiful.”

The airlock nightmare returned, the one with Kay’s big smirking face looming over him as he struggled helplessly in the tangled blanket of the dream. But this time, Kay was trying to keep him away from the orange suits hanging by the lock.

* * *

Jek found Arp pushing an empty EVA suit under water, watching for the tell-tale bubbles of a leak.

Even after all this time, he did not like this man from the Aft decks. Arp never seemed satisfied and, though Jek could not explain, he felt Arp was dangerous.

Only one suit need be airtight, Arp was saying, though there was nothing he could do about the dead batteries. It turned out they knew their jobs, those old Engineers. Suits still worked without electric, waste air hissing out a valve in the helmet as long as there was pressure in the airtank.

Arp planned to by-pass the Great Doors sealing off Aft by entering through an airlock on a lower deck. Jek could not believe Arp was going Outside.

* * *

They wiped the dusty glass in the airlock door to watch Arp, clad in the big orange suit, clamber backwards out of sight, as if swallowed by a dark mouth.

Amy couldn’t wait any longer because the child grew hungry and cold. Arp had promised her the Doors would be raised and he would return to them through the dark decks.

Jek had helped Arp scavenge enough copper cable to lower himself down the outside of the hull, but without really believing it was possible. Now he wondered if he would ever see Arp again.

He pictured Arp preaching to the folk of the Aft decks like a lost prophet and them rising up to demand the Chief restore electric to the Bridge. But in his heart he knew it would never happen; in his heart he believed the Ship would plunge into the dark forever.

* * *

Children were playing, taking turns jumping off piles of stuff in the unused corridor near the airlock, when the airlock door squealed open and an orange creature fell out. After a stunned moment, they screamed and fled.

A wary crowd assembled to defend their homes. Some carried knives, others metal rods. The creature unfastened its fogged helmet and let it roll away.

“Is that you, Arp?” asked someone, puzzled.

Arp took a deep breath of familiar air. “I’ve got good news.”

He told them about the green wet worlds and planetfall. He told them how electric must be restored to the Bridge for Turnaround and how, if the Doors were raised and the dark decks lit, anyone could go and see through the telescope for themselves.

He was not good with words, but these people were starved of meaning and he fed them. They took him from deck to deck to repeat his story. Those too far away to hear properly saw his orange suit and hoped something important was happening in their lives.

“There are those of us here who will see planetfall,” he announced. “Imagine that. And your children will grow up on wet, green worlds.”

“What will it be like?” they wanted to know.

About this he was certain. “Everything will be better than here.”

Eventually Engineers shouldered through the crowd.

* * *

Kay had put on weight and his face was suffused with blood. Chief Parker sent him off to see what the hubbub was about. Arp was surprised how old they both looked. It hadn’t occurred to him that the years he endured had passed here as well.

“Good trick with the airlock,” Parker acknowledged.

“Now everybody knows,” said Arp simply.

“So the blind woman’s dead and you’re Captain, that it?”

“Not me.” Arp shook his head. “You’ll take us to planetfall.”

Parker laughed. Was Arp giving out jobs now?

“Light the dark decks, and you can go and see for yourself.”

The Chief Engineer studied him silently until Kay came back. All that commotion was folk demanding to see Arp.

“We can still keep a lid on it,” Kay added. Even if the Doors got raised, only Engineers knew how to restore electric.

Parker was thoughtful. He would deal with the crowd. “And what shall I do with him?”

“Take him back to the airlock.”

Kay turned his triumphant gaze on Arp.

* * *

Arp’s hands were tied and Kay kept shoving him forward.

“We can say you came to deliver a message. We can say you went back the way you got in. We can say anything we like. Folk are stirred up now, but it won’t last.”

Turning a corner, they bumped into a crowd by the lock, busy cutting up the material of the ancient suits. Many had already fixed an orange patch to their clothing.

“Arp!” they cried.

Kay struggled but there were too many of them.

Once untied, Arp pointed at Kay. “He was going to space me. He doesn’t want planetfall!”

They could hear Kay inside the lock, kicking at the door. He was pressing his face against the small round glass, bawling something.

“He wanted to stop us,” Arp said, which was true, and he hit the button to open the outer door.

When they got back to Engineering, Parker was surrounded by an angry crowd. His Engineer escort had slipped away.

He lifted a hand from the gun on his hip. “There he is.”

They stood face to face for the second time that day. If Parker was relieved, he didn’t show it.

“Tell them you’ll wear the orange,” Arp murmured. “Promise them planetfall.”

“You’re crazy,” said Parker, misunderstanding to the last. “Why risk everything?”

“You call this everything?” Arp raised his arms to silence the crowd. “I’m no Captain,” he called. “So listen to Chief Parker. He has something to say.”

*
* *

A genealogy is handwritten in the flyleaf of For Whom The Bell Tolls. A list of births, deaths and marriages of the Kern family, similar to that of the Wrights, found in Teach Yourself Guitar. (see Ref 1)

Two historical events are also recorded on the endpaper of FWTBT. The trial and spacing of Navigator Chen, believed to be contemporary with the Mutiny, and “The Enlightening of the Dark Decks by Captain Parker, Hero of Planetfall.” This article deals with the latter.