“All the proteins, the amino acids—everything humans need to survive—are out there in that alien biosphere. If they weren’t, none of us would still be alive. But there’s something about the way they’re put together that the human digestive system can’t handle. Except that most of the children can survive—survive well, in fact—once the plants have been broken down in the owoc guts.”
He rubbed his face again. “But I don’t know why. After all this time, all I know is that meat is poisonous and we can only eat vegetation if the owoc process it.” A dry, humorless laugh. “And we knew that within two months.”
The first two months had been a nightmare, horror piled upon horror.
The confused awakening. Her muddled mind, still sluggish from the long years in coldsleep, had not been able to register much beyond the desperate urgency with which members of the crew had hustled her into one of the landing boats. All she had been able to grasp, as they strapped her into a seat, was that something had gone terribly wrong on the Magellan—ironically, at the very end of its immense voyage. An engineering malfunction of some sort, human error—she never knew. And never would. The only thought which had been clear was that Captain Knudsen had ordered all the children placed into the landing boats, along with a few adults. The adults, Indira realized later, had been ruthlessly selected by Knudsen. Those who had skills which the Captain thought would be most useful for survival (and why me, an historian? Indira often wondered; until the years brought the answer). The children could thus be saved—or, at least, given the best possible chance—while Captain Knudsen made the desperate attempt to land the Magellan itself.
Half-conscious as she was, the shock had registered.
“That’s impossible!” she protested.
The face of the crew member strapping her down had been grim.
“It’s a long shot,” he admitted. “But Knudsen’s a great pilot. If anyone can do it, he can.”
The Magellan had never been designed to land directly on the planet. It was supposed to stay in permanent orbit, while the colonists were shuttled down on the two landing boats. Before he died, the pilot of her landing boat had told her of the Magellan’s end.
“I swear to God,” he hissed, “he almost did it!” He paused, coughed blood. Indira stared helplessly. She had not been hurt, beyond bruises, but she was pinned in the wreckage, her hands fluttering helplessly. There was nothing she could do—and, in any event, the pilot’s body was a hopelessly shattered mass of bloody tissue.
“I watched it on the screen,” he whispered. “He got through the jetstream—he almost made it! But then—” More coughing blood. “I don’t know what happened. It blew up. There was nothing left—just a huge red cloud spread over the ocean.”
Finally, in a whisper: “Like—like those old pictures of the Challenger.” And he died.
Both of the landing boats had crashed. Although they had been designed for planetfall, they were carrying far too much weight—every cubic centimeter, it seemed, had been packed with wailing children. The first boat had landed in the center of a valley atop a huge low mountain, and in fairly good shape. No fatalities, at least. But in his over-riding concern to bring the second boat down near to the first one, its pilot had struck the mountainside, tearing the boat in half.
Indira had suffered little, physically. But the time she had spent—endless hours, it had seemed, although it had only been a few minutes—before she was pried loose were a nightmare.
What had happened to her children?
She had found Juan first. She would not even have known who the mangled little body was, if she hadn’t recognized the shirt he was wearing.
But before the tears had barely started to flow, worse horror came. From somewhere outside the broken shell of the landing boat, she heard a piercing shriek.
Ursula!
She raced out of the ship, tripping and falling over pieces of wreckage. Outside, she cast her head wildly about, oblivious to her surroundings, trying to locate her daughter.
Again, the shriek.
“That way!” cried a man, whom she vaguely recognized as Doctor Koresz, pointing down the slope. He raced off, Indira on his heels. They plunged into some kind of trees (trees? at the time she didn’t care), floundering through the thick growth, desperately trying to pinpoint Ursula’s location.