Ondo was in the conversation, too. “I'll take the Dragon on a sweep trajectory around the system and seed it with nanosensors of my own. They may be able to pick up something more useful.”
Hessia couldn't stop herself from laughing audibly, but she didn't say anything.
An hour later, Selene, Hessia and Eb walked in a line through Ansider's pre-dawn glow, following a dusty track that meandered through well-maintained fields. Two of the planet's moons were in the sky, casting a white glow across the landscape, although Selene also projected a light from her left eye so they could see where they were walking. She also activated her inner Ondo, not wanting him to miss out on anything. The gravity of Ansider was a notch lower than Maes Far's, lower than the level they ran the Refuge at, and it had taken her a few moments to adopt the right flowing stride.
Without access to the Refuge, they'd made do with clothes from Hessia's stock on the Falling Fire. Selene had added artificial flesh to the left-hand half of her body in order to blend in. She could apply the exterior in a little over an hour now. The arrangement of her facial organs and limbs was well within the normal range for the planet, so she'd adopted no other disguise.
Hessia had been more of a problem: she was much taller than any individual they'd been able to identify, and no one on Ansider had olfactory slits in lines up the sides of their neck. In the end, she'd adopted a cowl that concealed her features. She'd be able to tell if anyone was suspicious and react accordingly.
Eb was hooded, too. His height was also unusual, but worse was his skin: from certain angles it looked clearly metallic, shimmering when the light caught it. Then there were his eyes: he was used to gazing into the endless depths of metaspace, and it showed. No one looking into his face would consider him normal.
She glanced aside at him as they walked. His gaze was darting about in open fascination – and, she thought, with a wariness that bordered on fear. He'd had the whole galaxy to rove for countless epochs of time, but he'd also been confined to the core of a relatively small starship. He had to be feeling disorientated. Even the simple concepts of up and down would be disorientating. She'd checked with him three or four times, making sure he wasn't experiencing any side-effects of being separated from the Dragon. For a reply, Eb had simply nodded his head, saying nothing as if he were concentrating hard on some problem.
Repeatedly, they passed shrines set beside the road, little more than a few standing stones in a natural bowl in the rock or in a clearing among the trees. They were generally overgrown, the rocks covered in lichen, although one had been recently decorated with flowers. Selene picked out the weathered traces of carvings on a couple of them. The triple eye motif was just discernible. She asked Hessia if she knew anything about them.
“This planet has intermittent upsurges in spiritual sentiment about an omnipotent god and his avatar who intervenes in our lives and makes the bad things go away. My guess is these shrines date from one of those periods.”
They came upon another such shrine, three columns of stone over which a trickle of water from a brook sprinkled. Eb stopped in front of it, apparently transfixed by the sight.
He hadn't spoken once since they'd stepped onto the planet, but now he did. His voice was little more than a whisper. “This world, it feels familiar to me.”
“You've been here before?” Selene asked. “That must have been aeons ago. It will have changed enormously.”
“I … I cannot tell if the memories are mine, or someone else's.”
“Who's else could they be?”
He shook his head inside his cowl. “I suppose they must be mine.”
Selene addressed Hessia directly, brain-to-brain so Eb couldn't overhear. “What emotional state are you getting off him?”
“His mind is basically in turmoil. There's delight, alarm, confusion. And questions, lots of questions. There's a growing sense of resolve, too. Like a purpose he knows he has to fulfil.”
“What purpose?”
“I can't tell.”
Had she made a mistake in encouraging Eb to come to the surface? “Is this too much for him? Is it going to sink him?”
“He is fundamentally strong, I think. After a period of adjustment, he'll come through. Best leave him to process.”
The walk to the stone structure would take them a couple of hours. They'd put the lander down in an isolated ravine, out of sight of any settlement. They'd also descended at night, to limit the chances of natives of the planet spotting them. At least they'd been able to make a gradual approach; for once, Selene hadn't been plagued with trauma-flashbacks to previous lander-rides.
The planet's sun was climbing the sky in the west now, its warped, flattened disc burning blood-red, lighting up the haze of the early morning mists, casting long shadows and gilding every surface with its fire. Selene paused to take the scene in, breathing deeply, relishing the scents of earth and dust and greenery in her nose. Eb, too, stopped, and after a moment did the same. It was like he was learning from her how to react. She smiled at him, in appreciation of the beauty around them, and after a pensive moment he nodded back.
They encountered a few lone travellers on the road, but no one gave them any trouble or even stopped to engage with them at any length. Hessia's monitoring of the system meant that she'd built up a good catalogue of linguistic patterns and idioms, and both she and Selene had uploaded the relevant translations into their brain flecks. Eb had assured them that he had done the same.
Ondo had been especially fascinated by the grammar of the world's tongues. “I've never seen anything like this;
