Record of Yoshio Kawashita.
Building our house. A sun hangs at the upper center of our dome. The powdery hills carry grass and bushes and trees again—real this time. Rain falls at unpredictable intervals. The air is cool, vivid, changeable. Anna designs the rooms, which will be made in the Japanese style of my day. I study all that is known about nonhuman beings. We have purchased a huge library of select source material for my work. Here, I can feel the weight of my past lives, and the eyes of those who watched me, every instant, who watched all I did, and recorded it perhaps, and studied me as I now try to study them. Anna maintains they were not Gods—not even kami—but I wait for my own conclusions.
The dome is broad enough to have its own kind of weather, a playfulness which contradicts the environment machines. We may, if we wish, have a few animals—birds, insects. They wait to be cloned or grown from eggs. A luxury of terrestrial life waits in one box, more than we could ever need, but most human colonies have such a box, Anna says. It's the germ plasm of Earth, insured against loss by its presence on thousands of worlds. Perhaps we'll find such a box from another world, left behind by beings long dead. This world? No. I think not! (Laughter.) That would be too much to hope for. But elsewhere.
I take walks outside the dome at least once a week, surveying the plains but mostly looking and trying to feel for the missing things. At one time there must have been buildings, streets, perhaps vehicles—and Perfidisians. Sometimes Anna goes with me. We have a small cart which we use for longer trips, and a larger one which hasn't been used yet. In time we will cover a fair portion of the planet, place instruments at various points, and study its long-term behavior. Anna thinks we'll find very little of interest. She's probably right. But it serves as a distraction while I work on other problems.
Reading histories of many races and beings now, starting with my own kind. Aighor literature—most of the works that have been translated—Crocerian saga-histories. With electronic amplification, I can read a book of a hundred thousand words in twenty minutes, from a tapas. Still not fast enough. My head swims with dissociated facts. Lifetimes to process them all! So I am more selective now. I go back to source documents, earliest records, experience tapas when possible.
Of great interest at the moment is the period of first contacts, when two species acknowledged awareness of each other and began to set up relationships. For humans most such contacts occurred between 2035 and 2145. The politics and cultural changes of this period are fascinating.
Each day my love for Anna grows. She is still strong, independent, but we touch whenever we can. She enjoys being stroked, like a cat. She feels some embarrassment about this, but it comes so naturally the embarrassment is an afterthought. Sometimes she will try to avoid contact, but we always come together again to touch, compare our thoughts, reenergize. All of my past life is like a shadow compared to this. Memento mori—it cannot go on! Not forever. What will we feel when one or the other is gone? Unimaginable.
A week ago we took the small cart out on one of the (to her) monotonous journeys. She grew bored early. After suggesting we turn around before dark, which we didn't, she became silent. In the dark, the cart's roof-mounted lights shining across featureless concrete, we felt more alone than we had between the stars. Here was isolation at its most extreme—just ourselves, ten thousand kilometers of planet under our feet, and a few machines. She said she was afraid we'd lose our souls here but couldn't explain why. The hair on my neck raised and the dark was filled with ghosts. She began to cry. Humans have long since learned that some residue of living things persists after death, as a record of organized particles moving in personal spaces. Why not with the Perfidisians? By the time we reached the dome, we were both terrified. It took us several hours to calm down. She was angry with me for two days after.
But the Perfidisians were too thorough to leave ghosts behind. So what do I look for, when I go from point to barren point on the plains?
For that one overlooked item. No living being is perfect. Perhaps some individual Perfidisian forgot one tiny artifact. the equivalent of a nut or bolt, too minor to be detected by the Centrum and USC instruments. Anything. And while I look, I work, try to recall . . . What is that key I know exists, but which can't be remembered?
Anna is patient. She may last me out.
The Peloros has been gone for a month. It will take another four months to complete its missions and return to check up on us.