Renas Vitas

Renas Vitas is the science chief aboard the ark ship Gilgamesh. She surveys a planet covered in fungus and argues that the crew must attack rather than risk trusting an offer of peace from Kern’s World.

Appearance

Vitas is a neat, trim woman who wears a shipsuit. Her feelings are buried deep enough that her face remains a cipher. When Holsten Mason meets her again before the return to Kern’s system, he wonders whether she is human, then takes her hand and feels its warmth.

Background

Commander Vrie Guyen appoints her head of the scientific team when the Gilgamesh reaches the system of the distress beacon. She reports that the green planet is slightly smaller than Earth, at close to Earth’s distance from its star, and has oxygen, carbon, water and minerals. She will not commit to it: the world is too much like Earth to be believed, and she wants the instruments overhauled first. When Holsten argues that the planet must be a finished terraforming project, she says there is no evidence the ancients practised terraforming.

Story

The sentry satellite

She guesses that the satellite would need to track and deal with objects hitting it from deep space, so perhaps lasers for asteroids. Asked whether its weapons endanger the Gilgamesh, she answers “Probably, yes”, then says the energy it has just spent may limit what it can do next. She speculates that the Old Empire built machines that could think and speak as if human, or more than human. When a voice comes from the satellite she insists the speaker is still a computer, a more sophisticated approximation of one.

The grey planet

She and Karst take a shuttle and drones down to the planet of the next system, and she presents the survey herself, precise and fastidious. She reports gravity at about eighty per cent of Earth’s, a day of about four hundred hours, and oxygen at about five per cent. One fungus covers the whole world, pole to pole and at every altitude, and she suggests it may be a single organism. Nothing can be burned back with that little oxygen, and both of her drones stopped working, so she recommends no further investigation.

Guyen’s upload

Guyen enlists her to help with the upload facility. She tells Lain and Karst that the Key Crew debated the project and that she was in favour of experiment and trial, and she says that preserving human minds electronically would be advantageous. When Lain tells her to disconnect the equipment she asks instead whether Lain has some sort of plan, because she wanted the upload to go ahead and to see what would happen. After Lain fires she shows real shock and, at the same time, a kind of prurient interest. Then she agrees that the affair has gone far enough.

The war for the green planet

On the return she is the only department chief left beside Holsten, and she runs the waking of Key Crew. She explains that the ship cannot travel again and that the crew must fight the Old Empire for the only world left to them. She calls the plan Guyen’s, and says the human race owes him a great deal. She asks everyone whether they can use a gun, and speaks to the engineer Alpash, born aboard the ship, as though he were a pet or a machine.

Her case for war rests on an Old Empire tradition: two prisoners each choose to spare or accuse the other without conferring. The cost of being betrayed is too high, so the rational choice is to strike first. She will not say the word spiders, and says the creatures could only be sentient in the way a computer is. To clear them she asks for a workshop and the ship’s old files on Earth, and proposes a toxin that attacks the outer skeleton or the breathing of arthropods without harming humans.

Death

During the boarding she shuts off the air and divides the ship into sealed sections to hold back the spiders’ weapon. Her assistants in the lab collapse, and she is left in a sealed test chamber with her toxin unfinished. She reports them cutting through the doors, the walls and the ducts, then that they have reached the lab. She screams for Lain to send help, says “I’m sorry”, and the spiders break into the chamber.

Unanswered questions

• What Vitas was sorry for in her last words.
• Whether her toxin would have worked.