Impressions
Wyth Valley
When the wind and shuddering stopped, Piers opened his eyes. It was almost miraculous to find himself still sitting on the ground at the farthest edge of the clearing. The river still rushed by a few yards away, and New Lake still dazzled in the foreground, but the just-now addition to the scenery dominated the valley. All around him, other people were reawakening, emerging from either their psi efforts or their astonishment.
A horse whinnied. He was getting used to that sound.
On his left, Davyn Ralen sat cross-legged and still. The younger man’s eyes were still closed, and Piers wasn’t about to hurry him. A few weeks ago, Davyn had known himself to be an orphan and the stable master at an inn, and his life had been proceeding quietly. Now he knew he was the lost heir to one of the Great Houses of Merra, had an ability he’d never heard of that seemed supernatural to him, and had a role in the shifting political calculus of the aristocracy. Oh, absolutely that would be a lot for a twenty-one-year-old to absorb—even a mature, intelligent, sober-minded one. As soon as Davyn looked up and saw Redemption, the reality of yet another revision would confront him.
Piers looked around and assured himself that all of his fledging Empaths had come through all right. Dazed, that was all, and still going through the process of re-engaging their physical senses. They needed time.
The Starborn were a bit more agog, having just witnessed the fulfillment of their prophecy. They hadn’t actually known the ship was what they were waiting for, hadn’t known that the “redemption” in their legends was a proper noun. For centuries they’d lived their nomadic lives expecting something more messianic than technological. Now the revelation would be hard to refute—the ship’s name was spelled out on the hull in foot-high letters.
Beyond the lake, the Wyth Valley’s largest clearing no longer presented a pastoral landscape. Redemption hulked there, improbably large and inarguably alien. Piers had known for a fact that the ark ship was enormous, because he’d seen it through the back viewport of his tiny shuttle when he dropped away to begin his scouting mission. That was his only prior look at it from the outside. It had been a stunning sight, though his fellow passenger in the shuttle had pretended to be less awed than Piers felt.
“It’s only half the size of the largest ship ever built,” Arthur had said, with his characteristic dismissal of imprecise observations. As usual, that had set Piers’s teeth on edge and he’d had to remind himself, almost like a mantra, that Arthur’s scientific focus was a deliberate counterbalance to his own Empathy-driven perspective. For the rest of the shuttle’s descent, he kept his reactions to himself.
Grief tinged with guilt stung when he thought of it now, because if Arthur hadn’t drowned six weeks ago, he’d be here to see this. Piers would have privately enjoyed the moment of petty vindication, because his late scout partner would have had to admit that Redemption was impressive.
It was over a mile away, but dwarfed everything around it. The nearest trees that were still standing reached only two thirds of the ship’s height. Its starboard side lay along the shoreline of the lake, inviting comparison with the largest natural feature around. An angular module jutted out over the water, wrecked trees packed under it, and Piers realized it must be the starboard lounge. He’d spent countless hours in that room, staring out the large viewport first at the distant stars and more recently at the planet. Inside, some of his fellow travelers were surely staring out now, getting their first view of the home they’d come so far to find.
“It’s huge!”
Piers grinned up at Atto, who’d come up between him and Davyn. The teenager’s eyes were even brighter than usual, and he rocked from side to side as if building momentum. He steadied himself to help Piers up, and kept a hand under Piers’s elbow until they were both sure he could stand on his own.
“You never said how big it was,” Atto said.
“I honestly didn’t know.”
Atto cocked his head, which did a fine job of expressing his good-natured skepticism. Piers laughed and Pushed a little of his own amazement to his young friend. Whether or not Atto recognized the psi trick of sharing a feeling internally, he knew Piers’s reaction was genuine. That dynamic brushed against a conversation that needed to happen. Atto was psi, though he hadn’t known it and still didn’t believe it, despite Piers’s certainty and recent events. And despite having just been part of the group whose psi energy Piers had borrowed to help guide the ship to a safe landing. It wasn’t the kind of psi Piers was used to, but it was there and real all the same. He’d joked about it, but it was true: he could be busy for months teaching all these unprepared Empaths how to manage their ability. After things settled down.
One by one, the other Empaths got to their feet and gathered around him. The last effects of their trance-like psi immersion wisped away as they saw Atto’s grin and caught Piers’s excitement.
“That’s Redemption,” Piers said, with a wave of his hand that was supposed to turn the statement of the obvious into an introduction. “My home.”
The communication chime tickled his inner ear through his implant. For the last two months, that sound had meant the ship was in range but hundreds of miles above him, and that had counted as nearby. It had been reassuring; now it felt celebratory. He turned away from the others as he answered, and heard the captain—his father—telling him that everyone was all right, everything had worked as they’d hoped, and they needed some time before they tried to open the hatch.
He and his father had talked more often in the past twelve hours than they had since they were still living together in the family quarters, and there was an easiness in their interactions that Piers wasn’t sure they’d ever had. His parents’ shattered marriage had tainted all the familial relationships, except for the one between Piers and his older sister, and the fact that all four of them were powerful Empaths had made things worse. As he’d grown up, he’d gradually learned that blame was fungible and there was enough to go around, but forgiveness hadn’t quite smoothed over the damage. Lately, though, new perspective was at work. When Piers clicked out of the connection now and stopped the flow of signals to and from his communication implant, he was left with a warm appreciation for his father.
He relayed the situation to the group around him, and in case any of them didn’t already know what he felt, he Pushed gratitude to them all.
“There aren’t words to thank you for what you’ve done,” he said. “I know you didn’t know what I was getting you into. I didn’t either.”
They also hadn’t fully comprehended how essential their participation was. The plan concocted by the New Foundation Project before any of the ships left Earth depended on careful sequencing. The three foundation ships would go first, using psi-powered timedrives to reach terraformed planets where they could establish colonies. Twenty-five years after that, those pioneers would be ready to serve as the ground crew for the ark ships, like Redemption, that had followed in their metaphorical wake. Their assistance would include psi energy as well as ordinary technical support; Redemption’s landing needed Empaths on the planet who would balance the psi force of the ship’s crew.
But Redemption had overshot the timemark by nine hundred and fifty years, and the original passengers had found themselves eighty-two travel-years away from their destination. Worse, the sum of the errors of time and place meant that a thousand years had passed on the planet since the first ship had landed. In that millennium, it seemed all knowledge of the plan had been lost—the original colony was gone, and the technology and memory of Earth had faded to nothing.
No one on the planet seemed to have active psi ability, either, which was baffling and decidedly problematic. After a few traumas, Piers discovered that the aristocrats were descended from the original bridge officers of Valiant Star, who had all been psi, and he’d enlisted them to help today.
“We owe you everything.” His voice cracked, but he kept going. “Your willingness to let me pull you into it and use your energy like that, when none of us knew what would happen, has to count as one of today’s real miracles.”
Lord Tarken of House Dannpelier, a hale man in his late fifties who was one of the Empaths, grinned and snapped his fingers with a flourish.
Atto looked at Piers, read the confusion Piers thought he was hiding, and said, “That means ‘I’ve forgotten it already.’”
Tarken said, “It means we’re glad we could help and let’s get on with it. We’ve got things to do!”
The ship was pressed so deeply into the soil that it seemed rooted in the planet. The landing had been relatively controlled, but there had been skidding and plowing and settling, and the displaced ground was piled against the curved front of the ship. It almost covered the bottom edge of the closed ramp that led to the forward cargo bay, which would soon be the passengers’ exit.
Marveling at the scale of it, Piers stood beside the ship’s battered hull and craned his neck as he looked up. The rectangular outline of the closed ramp rose almost twenty feet above him. Above the cargo hold was the lower deck, where the scout room occupied the bow. The bridge was stacked above that, on the upper deck. Both had viewports, but Piers was standing too close to the ship for anyone in those rooms to be able to see him. Not that it mattered; face-to-face was only moments away.
Uncertainty about this door had been a long-standing source of anxiety for the officers and engineers. They’d known for years that it was designed to be opened from the outside, also with psi assistance, and they had never found a failsafe. If Piers hadn’t found the Empaths, they expected to have to cut their way out or exit through the airlocks and find some way to lower people to the ground.
Now Piers found text on the hull at his eye-level, text that had never been visible on external maintenance inspections or other EVA events: instructions for the planetary Empaths, chemically revealed by contact with the atmosphere. Like invisible ink, he thought, and suppressed a laugh. He initiated a conversation with his father through his implant, explained what they needed to do, and then walked back to where Davyn and the others stood in awe.
“We need to Connect with them again,” Piers said. “That’s how we open the door.”
It seemed obvious now—the shipbuilders had counted on the same psi-powered collaboration that they’d planned for the landing. Piers had been the conduit for that, because his psi ability had been their most plausible option. When the ship began its trip through the atmosphere, he had Opened his psyche to all the psi energy around him. He’d pulled that in, tried to merge it with his own, and then Reached for psi contact with someone on the ship.
It had worked. For the whole rest of his life, Piers knew, he’d struggle to describe what had happened and what it felt like. He had been specifically aware of certain people on the ship—his father, his sister, a few others—and Linking with them simultaneously was the purest joy he’d ever felt. The desire to close the gap between them seemed to have drawn the ship to its destination.
Unsealing the door wasn’t nearly as all-consuming as the psi experience of the landing had been, and through the minutes of psi effort Piers’s anticipation boiled. His Empathy and imagination were more distracting than the suspense as he thought about what the people inside were feeling and experiencing. There was a lot of creaking and squealing as the seals released and the age-fused hinges accepted their duty, and then, begrudgingly, the ramp unfurled. Piers waved everyone back without breaking the Connection.
There should have been fanfare and wild applause, but when the end of the ramp settled near where Piers stood, it was surprisingly undramatic. This moment, so long delayed, came down to a soft thud of the ten-foot-wide ramp on grass. Piers let the psi Connection end, tried to ignore the pang from abruptly isolating himself from all but Davyn. He kept that Connection in place, because Davyn needed whatever stability he could offer.
At the top of the ramp, standing with her left hand on a cane, was Kath. She gazed out at the sky and then the trees, her eyes wide and her lips slightly parted, before finally seeing him standing a few steps forward from the others and waiting for her.
They’d been friends, then lovers, then friends again, and she should have been on this mission with him. She’d been injured badly in an unexplained explosion the night before their intended departure, and there’d been no question of her scouting. She hadn’t been able to walk. Piers had been reluctant to go without her, but there hadn’t been a choice, and he’d missed her at every turn. He was beyond glad to see her there, poised to take her first steps on the planet.
When she saw him, her smile deepened and she let the cane fall. With new confidence, he let his psi screens drop, leaving himself Open to the host of emotions around him. Around the edges of his awareness, a shadowy presence, now familiar but wholly unwelcome, pressed into his psyche. He pushed it aside and focused on Kath, wanting to see if she were as thoroughly happy as she seemed.
Then Kath was in his arms and laughing and crying and talking all at once. He kissed her cheek and held her and all he could do was laugh along with her and let the moment play out. When he noticed the others on the ship watching and waiting, he took Kath’s hand and helped her with the vertical step down from the ramp. They wanted her to be the first. When she finally stepped onto the ground, she gave him a quick hug and then moved away to stand in total independence.
Now there were cheers—from people at the top of the ramp and from people here who reacted to the significance of that first step, even without knowing Kath’s circumstances. Piers saw his father striding down with a small group right behind him. That led to another embrace, when he’d expected nothing more than a man-to-man handshake.
“Welcome to Valiana,” Piers said. He’d thought about what to say in this moment, something a bit more profound, but no one really needed a clever greeting. This planet had been the object of their hopes and their ancestors’ plans, and the simple fact of their arrival at last was all the drama they needed.
“Piers,” his father said, setting him back and holding him by both shoulders. “I am so proud of you.”
Other friends were upon him before he could catch his breath from those unanticipated words, and the next few minutes were a tumult of reunions and reassurances. Most of the bridge officers were part of this first group, and it was good to see all of them—Piers had grown up with the officers as extended family. There were others, some of whom Piers wouldn’t have predicted. Knowing his father, Piers was quite sure none of them had been casually included. It might be entertaining to try to guess the captain’s reason for each person’s presence, but he didn’t need to make a game of it. Being back among familiar faces was wonderful regardless.
Piers’s sister came down the ramp with her husband, the head of the scout program, Jon Franklin. Seeing Allie absolutely made this feel like a homecoming. He’d expected to see his mother, too, though it was true she avoided situations where she’d have to interact with his father. Piers snuffed out the flicker of hurt, which would serve no purpose at all. Not all of his friends were in the first small group, and wasn’t that natural enough? There were three thousand people on the ship, and it would be hours or days before all of them had a chance to set foot on the ground.
Each person who came down the ramp had a moment of hesitation at the midpoint; Piers understood perfectly. That was when the realization caught up with them, like a cautionary hand on their shoulders just before they stepped wholly into the new world. He also understood the way their eyes blazed at the same time they squared their shoulders—excitement and determination carried them forward.
It wasn’t until the overall breathless pace of those interactions eased that Piers felt he could begin bridging his two worlds. Atto, Davyn, and the others were holding back, politely letting the scene play out, and he gestured to bring them closer.
“Time for introductions,” he said.
Atto jumped right in, of course. He grinned and shook hands with Captain Haldon first, without even a blink of hesitation.
“I’m Atto Reed. I’m glad you landed safely.”
Then he worked his way through the entire group, greeting each person with the same frank enthusiasm.
Piers was touched. What Atto wanted, more than anything, was to run up the ramp and slake his curiosity about the ship. He’d been chattering about it for days. Instead, his contagious good humor and energetic handshakes were getting the newcomers through what could have been an overwhelming and uncomfortable moment. He even said welcome home once or twice.
Davyn’s introductions were more reserved, but Piers thought the young Lord Caladen managed well. When he was introduced to Captain Haldon, he held his own, and represented the Great Houses of Merra as if he’d been doing it all his life. The other lords seemed more at ease, but no one came close to his dignity. And that was what made him a match for the captain. Piers saw his father register Davyn’s gravitas with surprise and approval.
“We have so much to catch up on,” Piers said. He draped his arm around Kath’s shoulders, but it was a general statement. Two months, that was all it had been, but crammed with events and experiences on both sides. “But I think we need to be practical first.”
Today had been exhausting by any measure, possibly more so even than Piers’s first day on the planet, and it was heaven to stop moving. He’d been on his feet since the ship landed almost six hours ago, and the constant pressure of emotions—his and everyone else’s—had been a burden. Yet he’d managed the Empathic overload all day without getting his usual headache and nausea, and that was a welcome change. Physical symptoms had been the unwelcome consequence of prolonged psi activity for years, and their absence now was absolutely a pleasure. He didn’t know why it was different now, but without the threat of pain, he was able to reclaim a core part of his life.
His back ached from standing all day, however, and it seemed conceivable that his feet would never recover.
He lowered himself onto a crate that someone had dragged out from cargo, grateful for that forethought. A half-circle of them had been set not far from the ramp, but only one other was occupied. Kath was perched there, stabilizing it by bracing with her cane since the ground wasn’t level. Her tatty workbag from the ship lay at her feet. It was amazing how unremarkable it all felt, but surely that was just fatigue dulling his reactions. He couldn’t imagine any other explanation for sliding into nonchalance so soon.
The setting sun touched Kath’s dark hair with reddish highlights he’d never noticed. A small thing, but Piers added it to his mental list of familiar things that looked different on the planet. There were too many to keep track of, and he knew he’d forgotten observations from only a few hours ago. The key impressions were set and indelible, though: Redemption was here, enormous, and out of place.
That last one had hit him squarely in the center of his self-awareness. Last night, the night before the landing, he’d been congratulating himself on how well he’d adjusted to being on the planet. He’d felt like he was part of this world. When his former life appeared and surrounded him again, he felt false in both contexts, belonging nowhere. He wondered how long it would take for that to resolve.
“You look tired,” Kath commented.
“Understatement. What a day.”
“That’s an understatement, too. I can’t get my head around the magnitude of all this.”
Piers didn’t reply, and the simpatico silence brought back all the conversations they’d had on the ship. So often, they slipped into pensive quiet together while looking out at the planet and futilely trying to imagine what lay ahead. All the speculation and dreaming had led up to the two of them sitting on empty cargo crates with long grass tickling their ankles and the bright metal parts of the ship gleaming in the last rays of the sun against a dusky sky.
“I’ve missed you,” he said. He reinforced the words with a Push of the emotions he couldn’t quite name. He didn’t know if there were a word for the relief of homecoming, or the feeling that someone’s presence resolved a suspended harmony.
Lightly, Kath said, “Where do we even start?”
“Not at the beginning. There’s too much. Stars, Kath. It feels like a lifetime.”
“Oh, listen to you. ‘Stars.’”
That pulled him up. When had he adopted that? “I knew it would happen. It’s what they say. And wait till you see the stars, Kath. In fact…yes, look. That’s the evening star.”
The bright jewel seemed pinned to a wisp of rosy cloud. Kath took a sharp breath.
“I see why you kept getting poetic,” she said. With her face upturned, Piers couldn’t see her eyes, but he suspected there might be tears. Her emotions seemed to be drifting to him, without effort from either of them.
More stars would shine through, second by second, and Piers knew exactly how overwhelming that was going to be for Kath and for any others who were still outside. He’d considered trying to prepare people for it, but hadn’t. There was magic in the discovery of the night sky—not twinkling-fairy magic but soul-shaking, perspective-changing, terrible-beauty magic. His first view of the stars from down here had reset his understanding of his place in the grand sweep of the universe. He didn’t want to diminish that moment for anyone else, and the shock was part of it.
Captain Haldon appeared at the top of the ramp again, miniaturized by the opening to the cargo hold. Even in a casual moment like this, he was composed and commanding, Piers thought, which was both his conditioning and his personality. Surely he wasn’t unmoved by the lustrous spring evening.
An impulse came, so novel and unexpected that Piers acted on it before he thought about it. He Reached to his father.
And saw his father’s chin lift like he thought he heard something. Then he sent a cautious return of Piers’s psi touch, as if he doubted it, and then a quickening, deepening answer. Stopping short of Connection was wise, but this brief Empathic touch gave Piers a feeling that wasn’t too far removed from that first view of the stars. Since they’d spent years avoiding the emotional plane between them, this half-step was a reconciliation and an admission that would never have been possible in words.
Smiling, the captain proceeded down the ramp.
“Piers, Kath,” he said, with only the slightest extra glance at Piers. “Good to find you together.”
It sounded, perhaps, like he meant something more than the fact that they were sitting side by side. Piers wondered if his father had picked up an emotion that Piers himself wasn’t aware of. It could happen—he wouldn’t be the only Empath to spend so much effort containing his emotions that he hid some from himself.
“What’s the word from the other scouts?” Piers asked. He hadn’t had a chance to talk to Jon about it, and had been so swept up in the day that he’d hardly seen any of the officers.
The look on his father’s face made him regret asking, but he kept quiet. If there were bad news, rushing wouldn’t improve it. Better to give the captain time to choose the words. And if it were horrific news, a half-second to brace himself was worth having.
“The satellite isn’t working,” Captain Haldon said. “We’re not sure why, and there’s no way to troubleshoot.”
Damn. That meant there was no way to know how their journeys to the ship were progressing, no way to encourage them, no way to guide them. Without the satellite, which had been an Engineering Project of capital letter proportions after they realized what they would face when they landed, the curvature of the planet nixed their communications once the ship was no longer in orbit. They’d pieced it together from remnants and crossed their fingers, but their luck hadn’t held.
Seeing the sick look on Kath’s face and the stoic determination on the captain’s, Piers shifted his reaction. Instead of joining the wailing chorus in mourning this reality, he said, “Rotten luck. But all of us had to be able to get along without being in constant contact with the ship, and they know what they need to do.”
Both of them understood. He was qualified to offer that reassurance in a very personal sense. There had been times when he’d been cut off from the ship’s communications during his adventure, and it had been uncomfortable and unsettling for both sides. The scouts had been sent as autonomous agents, though, and they were prepared to manage independently. Worrying, as Atto’s grandmother said, would have no effect on how well they could take care of themselves.
The captain gave him a thoughtful look, then changed the subject. “I’ll be calling everyone back to the ship in a moment. They need to eat and we need to pace ourselves, and not overwhelm the people who are trying to help us.”
“I’m not sure that’s going to work,” Piers said. Some people from the ship were still outside, drinking it in. Sensible as the officers’ plan was, maintaining ship discipline tonight of all nights seemed unlikely.
“Most will come, I think. Some will want a break from the intensity, some will come from habit, and some may simply want more comfortable sleep. And they all realize we have a lot to do on the ship to stabilize operations, and we can’t integrate overnight.”
The captain rested a hand on Piers’s shoulder and looked at him with sympathy. “Having said that, I suspect you won’t be coming back to the dorms.”
It hadn’t even been a thought. Piers had learned to sleep on the ground, surrounded by natural noises and wrapped in the fragrance of the soil and the spring air. Reclaiming his bunk and settling in for the night in a room with three guys who had yet to experience solitary slumber had no appeal whatsoever.
Kath laughed. “Well, sir, I think we know how he feels about it. Your face, Piers. Priceless.”
He deflected. “What about you? I can get you set up in the camp if you want to try it.”
The captain granted her the option, and she didn’t hesitate. Then he raised his wrist and tapped his commlink. Kath had hers clipped to her collar, and it buzzed as the broadcast signal came through.
That now seemed strange, another inversion of the familiar. For twenty-eight years, commlinks had been part of Piers’s life. He’d worn one every day from childhood until two months ago, but now he was witnessing the technology with an outsider’s curiosity. At the signal, the ship people who were still out here all tapped their devices, opening the channel to hear the captain’s words. Piers wished he were with Davyn or the others to witness their reaction and explain if he could.
Minutes later, people were climbing the ramp and disappearing into Cargo One. The captain greeted them all, which looked like courtesy but was also a tally. Soon Piers and Kath were the only ones still outside, though Piers imagined some people must have chosen to stay out overnight, out of sight, defying orders.
