Passage I

PROSE FICTION: This passage is adapted from the science fiction novel Another Heaven, Another Earth by H. M. Hoover (@1981 by H. M. Hoover).

Always in those first few minutes when the shuttle left the parent ship and accelerated to clear the gravitational pull of the larger mass, Lee was sure she had made a terrible mistake. She didn't belong here; none of them did—fragile creatures set in rows in a canister shot through black space. She belonged to Earth. To be here was madness, an insane presumption, and there was no way to escape.

All she was, all she had accomplished, meant nothing in this time of desperate sanity. The fifty-oddmen and women in the cabin with her were all accomplished, all experts in their fields, and all incidental.

As the shuttle turned, the cameras gave them a view of the Kekule, the parent ship receding in the distance. Three miles long, half a mile deep and wide, the starship was a tribute to the art of welding. It floated in deep space like a chunk of bizarre litter. The word "starship" evoked a far more poetic image than the real thing, Lee thought as she watched.

Around her, people talked and laughed. She didn't join in, nor did they try to talk to her. Past experience had taught them she was best left alone in shuttles—unless they wanted to be snapped at. In the confinement of starships individual quirks became well-known.

The planet Xilan appeared on the screen, as green as Earth was blue. From this distance it suggested an agate ball, variegated with white, shining and untouched. It had been discovered five hundred Earth years before; there were records of several landings there, but little more than basic data survived in the corporate archives. At the time of its discovery Xilan had been considered too far from Earth to make colonization profitable, too far to plunder for mineral wealth. Technology was changing that.

Hours passed. Polar ice caps and land masses came into focus. The white became clouds and then the gleam of snow-capped mountains. A wide tapering of beige suggested that desert covered the center of one continent. Rivers veined into view. Several volcanoes plumed into the upper atmosphere.

For Leland Hamlin, biologist, all this had just one joyous message—a wide variety of life forms existed on this world, animals never seen before, each one unique and fascinating, The archives reported only lower life forms here, but to her that proved nothing. Five hundred years earlier, tests of sentience had been crude, full of Earthly chauvinism, unreliable.

Born in a ring-world colony in L₅, she had grown up without ever seeing any animals but humans—and she missed animals. Her father said she was a product of a more primitive era. The data banks of her first learning center had been almost exclusively devoted to zoology. At fourteen, she had qualified for a scholarship at an Earthside university.

She had gone to her home planet expecting to find the wealth of species detailed in her studies. She found instead that humans had permitted only those creatures which served them to survive. The rest were extinct and had been for generations past. The child in her never quite forgave her ancestors for that crime.

The ancient zoologist Beebe had written, " . . .when the last individual of a race of living things breathes no more, another heaven and another earth must pass before such a one can come again. " And so, finding Earth desolate, she searched.

It was not a quest one could go on alone, although she would have liked to. But she had learned the practical must enter into the realization of any dream, so when an employment recruiter from one of Earth's largest corporations offered her a job as a biochemist on a deep space exploration venture, she accepted.

Fifteen space years had passed since then, and five more expeditions. Study during travel time had earned her two more doctorates. Two of her trip logs had been so well written, so alive with her enthusiasm, that they sold throughout Earth's federation as popular adventure books. She had gained also in that time a devout respect for life. It was so rare a phenomenon. Entire galaxies existed without a trace of it. Billions of years passed on planets while nothing ever changed but rock.

On Xilan's night side, in the lowest and last orbit, she saw a dull red glow of surface fire and something glinting in its light—lightning-struck vegetation, or molten lava? The shuttle was too close to the surface and moving too fast for its cameras to see clearly. She glanced at nearby colleagues; none seemed to have noticed anything remarkable. The belltone signaled that they were landing.