So now that they had mined the solar system, built the station, built an economy that could, with difficulty, build the lander to reach the planetary surface, the Pilots’ Guild wanted them to leave—asked them, after nearly a hundred fifty years of orbiting the world, to shut down the station and transfer everything to the airless, waterless planetary base the Guild would gladly give them on Maudette, fourth from the sun… far from interference in a world the Guild adamantly maintained should stay sacrosanct, untouched by human influence, uncontaminated by human presence.
Meaning that the Guild wanted them all to live under the Guild’s thumb—because that was also the price of Maudette.
The sun touched only the top of the buildings now. The western face of the hill was all in shadow, and Ian leaned his back against lab 4 and watched the colors flare, gazing past the red clay scar of the safe-tracks toward the hills of sighing grass.
Grasses was definitely what they were, the department had ruled so officially, and they could officially, scientifically, use that word as of two weeks ago—confirming the theories and the guesses of a century and a half of orbital survey. They were exact in their criteria, the ones of them that believed such things were important—the ones of them who had spent their careers memorizing the names for things they saw only in pictures and teaching them to generation after generation—a hundred fifty years of studying taxonomies and ecosystems of an ancestral world they’d never known—
No damned use, the Guild said, of course. The Guild’s sons and daughters didn’t enter Earth Studies, oh, no. The Guild’s sons and daughters had been learning physics and ship maintenance and starflight in all those long years before Phoenix had flown again—and was that practical, to launch a starship when they were struggling for basic necessities?
But, Fools, the Guild brats called the station kids fools and worse…
For what? Fools for endangering a planet the Guild didn’t give an honest damn about? Fools for wanting the world they could see offered abundantly everything they had so precariously, most of what they mined reserved for the Guild’s list of priorities?
Fools for challenging Guild authority—when you couldn’t be Guild if you weren’t born a descendant of Phoenix crew? Wasn’t that the real reason the Guild-born called them fools? Because no station-builder brat could ever cross that line and train as Guild, and the Guild had every good reason for keeping it that way.
Of course the name-calling had stung with particular force, the way the Guild kids had meant it to. Never mind that if the older generations caught the Guild brats at it, they put them on rations for a week… it didn’t break a Guild brat’s pride, and it didn’t admit a station kid to what he wasn’t born to reach, or make the science of their lost Earth and lost destination either relevant or important to the Guild.
So now the Guild said, Leave this world? Go colonize barren Maudette, while they searched the stars for other planetary systems free of claimants—oh, and, by the way, mine and build stations at those stars to refuel the Guild’s ships, and live there and die there and do it all over again, all the lost lives and the sweat and the danger—be the worker-drones while Guild ships voyaged to places that would need more worker-drones to build, endlessly across space, all the while the Guild maintained its priorities and its perks that took most of every resource they had.
Better here, in a cold wind and under a fading sky. Their sky, in which Mirage was setting now and Maudette had yet to rise, that curious interface between the day-glow and the true night.
They could die here. Things might still go wrong. A microbe could wipe them out faster than they could figure what hit them. They could do terrible damage to the world and every living creature on it.
The fears still came back, in the middle of the dark, or in the whispering silence of an alien hillside. The homesickness did, when he thought of something he wanted to say to his family, or his lifelong friends—then, like remembering a recent death, recalled that the phone link was not all that easy from here, and that there was no absolute guarantee that the reusable lander they had bet their futures on would ever be built.