too blunt — and when he imagined a mating ritual in which these creatures leapt into the air to butt their heads together, he could not see how it could help but scramble their brains, since their skulls were so light.
'Probably for a display of health,' said Sel.
'The antlers?'
'Horns,' said Sel.
'I think they're shed and then regrown,' said Po. 'Don't these animals look like skin-shedders?'
'No.'
'I'll look for a shed skin somewhere.'
'You'll have a long look,' said Sel.
'Why, because they eat the skins?'
'Because they don't shed.'
'How can you be sure?'
'I'm not sure,' said Sel. 'But this is not a formic import, it's a native species, and we haven't seen any skin shedding from natives.'
So went the conversation as they traveled — but they did cover the ground. They took pictures, yes. And now and then, when it was something really new, they stopped and took samples. But always they walked. Sel might be old and need to lean on his walking stick now and then, but he could still keep up a steady pace. Po was likely to move ahead of him more often than not, but it was Po who groaned when Sel said it was time to move on after a brief rest.
'I don't know why you have that stick,' said Po.
'To lean on when I rest.'
'But you have to carry it the whole time you're walking.'
'It's not that heavy.' 'It looks heavy.'
'It's from the balsa tree — well, the one I call 'balsa, since the wood is so light.'
Po tried it. Only about a pound, though it was thick and gnarled and widened out at the top like a pitcher. 'I'd still get tired of carrying it.'
'Only because you put more weight in your backpack than I did.'
Po didn't bother arguing the point.
'The first human voyagers to Earth's moon and the other planets had an easy time of it,' said Po, as they crested a high ridge. 'Nothing but empty space between them and their destination. No temptation to stop and explore.'
'Like the first sea voyagers. Going from land to land, ignoring the sea because they had no tools that would let them explore to any depth.'
'We're the conquistadores,' said Po. 'Only we killed them all before we ever set foot on land.'
'Is that a difference or a similarity?' asked Sel. 'Smallpox and other diseases raced ahead of the conquistadores.'
'If only we could have talked to them,' said Po. 'I read about the conquistadores — we Mayans have good reason to try to understand them. Columbus wrote that the natives he found 'had no language, merely because they didn't understand any of the languages his interpreters knew.'
'But the formics had no language at all.'
'Or so we think.'
'No communication devices in their ships. Nothing to transmit voice or images. Because there was no need of them. Exchange of memory. Direct transfer of the senses. Whatever their mechanism was, it was better than language, but worse, because they had no way to talk to us.'
'So who were the mutes?' asked Po. 'Us, or them?'
'Both of us mutes,' said Sel, 'and all of us deaf.'
'What I wouldn't give to have just one of them alive.'
'But there couldn't be just one,' said Sel. 'They hived. They needed hundreds, perhaps thousands to reach the critical mass to achieve intelligence.'
'Or not,' said Po. 'It could also be that only the queen was sentient. Why else would they all have died when the queens died?'
'Unless the queen was the nexus, the center of a neural network, so they all collapsed when she did. But until then, all of them individuals.'
'As I said, I wish we had one alive,' said Po, 'so we could know something instead of guessing from a few desiccated corpses.'
Sel silently rejoiced that yet another generation of this colony had produced at least one who thought like a scientist. 'We have more of them preserved than any of the other colonies. Here, there are so few scavengers that can eat them, the corpses lasted long enough for us to get to the planet's surface and freeze some of them. We actually got to study structure.'
'But no queens.'
'The sorrow of my life,' said Sel.
'Really? That's your greatest regret?'
Sel fell silent.
'Sorry,' said Po.
'It's all right. I was just considering your question. My greatest regret. What a question. How can I regret leaving everything behind on Earth, when I left it in order to help save it? And coming here allowed me to do things that other scientists could only dream of. I have been able to name more than five thousand species already and come up with a rudimentary classification system for an entire native biota. More than on any of the other formic worlds.'
'Why?'
'Because the formics stripped those worlds and then established only a limited subset of their own flora and fauna. This is the only world where most of the species evolved here. The only place that's messy. The formics brought fewer than a thousand species to their colonies. And their home world, which might have had vastly more diversity, is gone.'
'So you don't regret coming here?'
'Of course I do,' said Sel. 'And I'm also glad to be here. I regret being an old wreck of a man. I'm glad I'm not dead. It seems to me that all my regrets are balanced by something I'm glad of. On average, then, I have no regrets at all. But I'm also not a bit happy. Perfect balance. On average, I don't feel anything at all. I think I don't exist.'
'Father says that if you get absurd results, you're not a scientist, you're a philosopher.'
'But my results are not absurd.'
'You do exist. I can see you and hear you.'
'Genetically speaking, Po, I do not exist. I am off the web of life.'
'So you choose to measure by the only standard that allows your life to be meaningless?'
Sel laughed. 'You are your mother's son.'
'Not father's?'
'Both, of course. But it's your mother who won't put up with any bullshit.'
'Speaking of which, I can hardly wait to see a bull.'
Now that the ship was rapidly decelerating as they approached Shakespeare, the crew were far busier than usual. The first order of business would be docking with the transport ship that had brought the war fleet here to this world forty years before. Without supplies for a return journey, the ship was left as a huge satellite in geosynchronous orbit directly over the colony site. Solar power was enough to keep its computers and communications running for these past decades.
The original crew, colonists now, had used their fighters as landing vehicles; their supplies and equipment for the first years of the colony had been designed to fit in or on the fighters. And all of them were equipped with ansibles. But the fighters were land-once vehicles, and had no ability to leave the surface of the planet.
Admiral Morgan's crew would service and refit the transport. They had brought new communications and weather satellites with them, which they would place in geosync at intervals all the way around the planet. Then
