The Prefect raised an eyebrow, pursed his leathery lips. “I gather you are behind in your summations.”
A flat fact. “I am, yes. I have been taking a careful review of some expedition records.”
“You are a Trainee, not a Librarian. Nor, if you continue this way, much hope of becoming one. Best to shape your skills to the essentials.”
“I think I can better fathom records if I see the planetary explorations in direct sensing.”
His face soured more, lips turned down, his frown a ladder of creases. Legendarily, he favored the scowl over the smile. She had to change the dynamic here.
She stood. “My, you have a window.” She had never seen one in a Lunar office.
“I like to have some perspective.”
Outside was the sweep of the plaza, pearly in the Earthshine. “A view, yes, I can see—”
“I like some separation from the rest of all this. Also the glass is a constant temptation.” “To … what?”
“Throw something through it. Usually a student. Sometimes a Trainee, such as you.”
“Ah, I—”
“Fly-in recordings will not reward mere poking around. They have been studied in great detail and can yield nothing more. Especially this red dwarf you just sensed.”
“I am not just reviewing—”
“No, you are taking up pod time with full-sense flyby data.” “It was odd, how it suddenly cut off—”
“Many expeditions simply died, yes—accident, equipment failure. Those were the early days, full of verve, over a century ago. Ignore them. I want to see more of your time spent in the hard work. Take up third level Messages and work with the Artilects to advance our understanding. Remember, these are not linear languages at Level Three.”
“I, I will try.”
“And do not use the pods to simply joyride on old explorations.” He turned toward the view and she realized her appointment was over. At least she didn’t have to exit through the window.
Quick!—a world in a few passing hours. Then to sum it up in the brittle frame of linear sentences, the frail girders of mere flat words:
A ruddy world with lesser grav. One huge sprawl of a continent, plus lesser land mass in the other hemisphere, of humped and dirty rockrimmed mountains. Skies the color of crisp sand. Spiky mountains cut into curiously precise pie slices by iodine rivers that flowed to the continental center, making a vast somber bay of jade waters.
Go closer, lower: giant caterpillars stretched in trees as tall as mountains. The low grav here made for monsters.
Forested slopes in close-up were mushroom trees of violent orange. Huge blue birds with wings like parachutes, bills shaped like Death’s sickle, feathers like flapping palm fronds. A plain of plants evoking erect oak leaves. Smaller growths resembling inside-out umbrellas.
Rain turning to snowflakes at high noon on the equator. Rain like drops of blood in the rocky highlands. Mists glowing like white fire in the valleys. Chasms radiating in mountain ranges like fractures in frosted windowpanes. Winding rivers in the fevered tropics, shapely as women’s torsos or slim violins. Icecaps featuring swollen growths like blue berets. Storms that solidified like hurled hammerheads across tropical isles. Clouds drifting like pregnant purple cows. Wind-blasted rockwork in curious curved forms, like frozen music. Lurching beasts all angles and ribs, grazing across mustard grasslands.
The sailcraft played out its fat helium balloons, which went roving roving roving until they ran out of lift. These captured close-up the many odd beasts, eyed landscapes for buildings, assayed the sweep of land for betraying rectangles—signs of intelligence, or else of obsessive animals who knew Euclid in their souls.
Grazers aplenty swept by under the balloon’s down-looking eyes, plus carnivores, big and furred and fanged. The craft saw big floater insects, too, with steering wings and armor plates and strange inexplicable leggy bits like antennae. These creatures eyed the balloon uneasily, braying roars into the acoustic balloon ears. Some angular beasts gazed upward warily, as if the balloon were a new foe in their air. They bristled, blared and thrust up narrow snouts that ended in the blunt truth of mouths like a pair of pliers. Some, in a narrow canyon lined with goat-like shambling monoliths, shot lances at the balloon eye, which fell far short. Still, perhaps a compliment of sorts.
And again: roads. Towns tucked under ample tree canopies. No electromagnetic emissions beyond the faint and local. Cities under regular humps of hills. Ships dotted the inland sea, white and slender. Yet this advanced society had only a weak signature in the radio, microwaves, and in the other bands, no signals at all.
Then the pod went silent, done. Another failed expedition.
She lingered a while in the quiet. Biting her lip, she wondered if silence was not the true state of the universe, now that the ancestral acoustics of the big bang had faded into scratch-marks in the microwave sky. Silence: far more noble than humanity’s squeaks.
This world had been a treat, really. She took planetary records at random, not really knowing what she was seeking. Most worlds in the habitable zone were of a sameness. Solemn planets sleeping in the silence of ice and stone. Seaworlds awash in dark purple waters betraying no life, only its eventual prospect. Baked plains of ancient lava, unblessed by seas or even ponds, a likely match for a collision with a wandering waterworld, should orbital dynamics ever bring one from further out: a Newtonian miracle awaiting. Black volcanic corkscrews spiraling up to the atmospheric roof of planets still in process, getting baked to oblivion. Vast planets of crawling slime. Oceans lapping against barren shores. Plankton mats the size of continents.
To find a mature, thriving biosphere was a blessing. She savored them in the sensory auditorium of her snug pod.
She began to favor the dwarf suns and their narrow habitable zones. Such stars lived long, as old as the galaxy’s ten billion years, yet scarcely a fraction along their stable lifespans. So, too,
