lemuria beach was the worst place in the world, and Elizabeth Harkness was happy to be there. She trudged along the shingle shore, her head down and her left shoulder hunched against the knife-edge wind off the sea. Hooded parka, quilted trousers, fur-lined gloves and boots weren’t quite enough, especially when she had to push her hood back or take her gloves off. Big smooth pebbles ground against each other, and dried wrack crackled under her soles. Seabats screamed as they wheeled overhead. Behind all the sounds, the white noise of the white water filled her ears. The abandoned whaling station where she and Gregor Cairns had parked the skiff was a couple of kilometers behind her, its rusted boilers tiny at this distance, like some wrecked laboratory apparatus. Gregor had chosen to spend the morning hacking fossils from the foot of the cliffs, the same hundred-meter-high rockface that rose to her right. Elizabeth was intent on finding more recent signs of life. Although the season was what passed for spring in these latitudes, there wasn’t much: Seabat roosts whitened the cliffs, and the occasional wind-dried corpse of a failed fledgling would be caught on the windward side of a boulder; on the lee side of boulders, lichens spread out their wrinkled mats of grey and orange; on the lichens, tiny red arthropods scurried like the dots before a bloodshot eye; and here and there a drift of soil sustained a small tough flowering plant, white as the sea’s froth.
The sea itself, choppy in the wind off the ice-capped polar ocean a thousand kilometers southward, was a more hospitable abode of life than anything the island could offer. Every seaward glance couldn’t but take in, somewhere between the horizon and the shore, the plume of hot breath from a spouting whale. Seabats of several species, from the tiny watershears skimming the wavetops to the three-meter-spanning alcatrazi gliding high above, patrolled and plunged to pillage the inexhaustible shoals that thronged the waters below. Every so often, about five hundred meters out from the shore, the black bullet heads of seals or sea-lions or some such seagoing mammal would pop up, peer around in a disconcertingly human manner, then disappear again in a humping curve of back.
Elizabeth worked her way steadily along, scraping rocks, making notes, taking samples and placing them in airtight plastic cases or small, stoppered jars. Even the minute insect or arachnid specimens found their way there, via an arrangement of L-shaped glass tube and long rubber suction tube and rubber bung with holes through it for both, which, in all its centuries of scientific use, had never been given a more scientific name than “put-er.” The biota of Mingulay, like that of all the other Earthlike planets of the Second Sphere, shared a common terrestrial ancestry but had, over megayears, diverged in unique and interesting ways. Not that the ancient arthropod or other invertebrate lineages showed much sign of it—she could identify most of the ones she picked up, right down to the species level, from memory of the standard manuals reprinted from originals published millennia ago on Earth. Mingulay’s own geology and biology had been left for several centuries in something of a mess. The planet’s earliest human settlers had barely sorted out a few recognizably successive epochs—Pelagic, Noachic, Nevisian, Corpachian, Strontian—and one or two bold philosophers had just begun to postulate a theory of evolution when the last starship from Earth had arrived with the disheartening news that while the scientists were in principle right, the planet they were standing on had indeed undergone a succession of creations and catastrophes and was in all likelihood the bodged work of gods.
After forgetting time for a while, Elizabeth glanced at her watch and at the sun, decided it was time to rest and to turn back, and selected a large boulder to shelter behind. The pebbles were dry this far up the beach. She swung her pack off and sat down and pulled out a thermos flask of coffee. Just as she was unscrewing the cup, she noticed some whitened thing sticking partly out of the ground, a few meters up the beach where the pebbles ran out into thin sand below the cliffs.
Curiosity got the better of her tiredness. She wedged the flask among the stones and stood up, a little stiffly—forty years of life, twenty of them spent in varied gravities, were beginning to tell on her knee joints—and stalked over, tugging off a glove, fumbling in her jacket pocket for the sturdy clasp knife she used for her rough fieldwork’s probing and digging. She hunkered down on the sand and peered at the half-covered thing: a fossil in formation, sinking into sand that would one day be sandstone. At first she thought it was the washed-up exoskeleton of a brittle-star or a long-legged crab: There was a handsbreadth roundish central bit with jointed appendages coming off it. She could see three evenly spaced cup-shaped depressions, each with a tiny central hole, in the exposed part of the main bit, and below these concavities other holes, and below these holes a triangular articulation of delicate, roughly rectangular plates, and along the inner edge of each plate a row of something whiter than the rest of it.
Teeth. Jaws. Eye sockets. The cascade of successive recognitions sent a shock of adrenaline through her body. She walked back to take a trowel from her pack, returned and began to dig around it, very carefully. When it was all uncovered, she stood up and took a long look at it. It had eight appendages in all, each about forty centimeters long, with ball-and-socket joints proximally, medially, and distally. On the distal joints were what looked like miniature versions of the whole skeleton—buds, or eight-fingered hands. The central part was at the top something like a skull, curving inward beneath the jaws; the lower part, joined to the upper by a stubby central rod, and to which the appendages were attached on each side in rows of four, was something like a pelvis. The three sockets she’d initially seen had five others like them further around the circumference, all evenly spaced, and the triple-jaw arrangement was repeated, sans teeth, on the opposite side.
Already it was so unlike any invertebrate she’d ever seen that it was making her shake. It was making her almost sick, actually: It was much too like the remains of hideously conjoined quadruplet infant monkeys to be easy on the eye. What clinched it for her was the presence of shriveled but recognizable tendons on the outside of the joints, still holding them together, and in the parts which had been covered, the clinging fragments of leathery, fuzzy skin. Unless she was misinterpreting it completely, what she was looking at was an internal skeleton, not the external skeleton of an invertebrate, not even one unknown to science. It looked like a vertebrate—hell, if that fuzz was hair, like a mammal—that had evolved from some invertebrate without losing its radial symmetry. Either she’d stumbled upon some bizarre malformation, or a new phylum, or an organism that had no terrestrial ancestors at all. She could imagine its possible ancestors. She did not have to imagine, because she’d already seen pictures of its probable descendants. Or, if this was a juvenile, its adults.
Still staring down at it, Elizabeth reached inside her jacket for her radio to call Gregor. Just as she was about to thumb the dial, she heard behind her the sound of heavy footsteps crunching up the beach. Startled, but not scared—someone might have landed silently from a boat or skiff while she was preoccupied—she turned around, and came face-to-face with her second unknown species of the morning.
At first, as before, Elizabeth’s perception tried to make sense of what she saw in terms of what she knew. The figure stood about two and a half meters tall, and about twenty meters away from her. It could have been a fat gigant in a black wetsuit. But the staring eyes and opening mouth and snorting nostrils were set in the same shining hair-covered skin as the rest of it. The rest of him. He had long hands and feet, and his neck sloped smoothly to his shoulders, but otherwise his proportions and features were human. She realized that he could be one of the marine mammals she’d noticed earlier.
He said something, in a deep, barking voice, but evidently speech. He spread his broad hands wide, palms forward, and then walked towards her, staring with apparent curiosity all the while, and repeating his utterances. Elizabeth backed away. He stepped over the boulder she’d thought to shelter behind, and paused to look down at her gear, with a long sniffling snort. Then he strode forward again, to stop before the small excavation she’d made. The cliff face was pressing into her back. She could feel the revolver in her thigh pocket knocking her leg as her knees quivered.
He squatted down and poked a long finger at the strange bones, stirring them gently. Then he stood up and looked straight at her. He pointed at the bones, then pointed to the sky, then looked up and slowly brought his arm around and down until it was pointing at an angle to the ground. He dropped his arm to his side, raised it and pointed at her, waved his arm about, and made a loud grunt.
The only sound she could make in response was what came from her teeth chattering. He cocked his head, turning a small ear to her, then faced her directly. He rocked his head from side to side, shrugged, turned and walked back down the beach and, without breaking step, into the water until he was waist-deep, and stooped forward and was suddenly gone with barely a splash.
Elizabeth’s thumb at last engaged the knurl of the dial, her fingers found the switch. Finding the right channel was easy; there was no other traffic here.
“Gregor—”
“Are you all right?”
Deep breath. “Yeah, I’m fine. But I think you’d better come over here quickly. I’ve . . . found something interesting.”
“Okay. Be right over. Signing off.”
Hands shaking, Elizabeth opened the flask and poured herself some coffee, as if to return to her interrupted action, and therefore to her previous equilibrium. She kept looking out to sea—where the round black heads bobbed up as before—and over to her left, to the whaling station. She’d taken only a few sips and slurps of coffee when she saw the skiff rise from behind the tumbledown wooden buildings and the ochre boilers to skim along the beach towards her, its course so steady that it seemed to enlarge rather than approach. The lens-shaped, fifteen-meter-wide craft halted a few meters away and hovered. Its three landing legs telescoped out, their bases grinding into the pebbles as the field was powered down and its weight came back. The hatch on the underside opened, the stair ladder extended, and Gregor descended. He ran over to her and caught her in his arms.
“I’m all right,” she insisted.
“You look like you’ve had a shock.”
“Um,” she said, pushing him away gently. “One at a time.” She showed him the thing she’d dug up. Gregor glanced at her, whistled, drew a long breath in through his teeth, and squatted down and poked at the bones with his forefinger, just as the other primate had done. He stayed looking for a minute, then stood up.
“You know,” he said, “we’re going to have to find a better name for these than ‘the monkey-spider things.’ ”
She laughed, some tension going out of her as her identification was validated.
“I thought it might be a relative,” she said. “As close to them as a monkey or maybe a lemur is to us.”
“That or a juvenile,” Gregor said. “We’ll have to look again at the records.”
Elizabeth nodded. “And look again at the island.”
“Oh, gods, yes.” Gregor frowned. “This isn’t what shook you up.”
“No,” agreed Elizabeth. “What shook me up was that I met a—”
She hesitated, knowing that as discoverer she had the privilege of naming, and that the name would matter, the popular name perhaps more than the scientific.
“A selkie,” she decided.
“What?”
She pointed seaward. “Those, out there. They’re not seals. They’re aquatic hominids. Probably closer to us than the gigants or the pithkies. Same genus as us, I’ll bet.” She found herself giggling. “Just like Alister Hardy speculated long ago—you know, the aquatic ape hypothesis? We could call them homo hardiensis: Hardy Man.”
She told him about her encounter.
“You know what’s weird about that?” she concluded. “It was like he recognized it.”
“It’s not so much weird as inevitable,” Gregor said. He looked down at the bones, then out to sea. “Even if that thing wasn’t here, we’d still be thinking aliens as soon as we saw the selkies. Because they sure as hell haven’t been here long. The last whalers were here ten years ago.”
“Are you sure they couldn’t have been unnoticed earlier? The Southern Ocean’s big enough.”
“Yeah, but its islands aren’t. And if they’re any kind of viable population, they must use islands to breed, if nothing else. I suppose it’s just possible that sailors and whalers misidentified them all this time, but I doubt it. Nah, they must be recent arrivals. And that raises the question of who brought them here. I seriously doubt it was the saurs.”
Elizabeth knocked on the underside of the skiff. “Assuming they didn’t come here themselves.”
“There is that,” Gregor conceded. He was gazing intently out at the bobbing dots. “You know, not to get too excited or anything, I think we may soon be able to ask them.”
Elizabeth realized that they were now only about two hundred meters out. She counted twelve of them.
“Should we get into the skiff?” she asked.
“Just keep our pistols easy to reach.” Gregor clicked open the flap on his thigh pocket, and Elizabeth did likewise. They waited silently.
After a couple of minutes the selkies were standing waist-deep in the water and wading ashore. They were all adults, seven males and five females. The females had large breasts, and long hair on their heads. As they stepped out of the water, they were wringing out their hair and twisting it to hang forward over one shoulder. The water seemed to slide off their bodies; they didn’t look wet for more than a moment. They paused at the strand and spread their empty hands.
Elizabeth, then Gregor, mirrored the gesture.
The selkies advanced up the beach to about ten meters away, then stood in a semicircle and looked at the two intruders. Elizabeth recognized the one she’d seen earlier. Their height was intimidating. On an impulse, Elizabeth sat down on her heels. The selkies did the same, taking care to keep their hands open, palms upward.
“Body language looks reassuring,” muttered Gregor.
“Uh-huh. I just wonder if a smile means the same.”
“Try it without baring our teeth.”
Elizabeth stretched her lips and crinkled her eyes. The selkies responded with broad grins. Their teeth were not much larger than human teeth, in proportion to their body size. They just looked larger, white in their black, hairy faces. So Elizabeth told herself.
“Hallo,” said Gregor, raising his right hand slowly. The selkies responded with a brief, barking phrase and raised their hands also, but hesitantly, as though the gesture was unfamiliar. Everyone relaxed a little. Three or four of them had, as though absently, begun grooming each other and themselves, scratching and snatching and popping things caught between thumb and forefinger into their mouths. It was disconcertingly apelike. But their expressions remained intent, curious, patient.
The one she’d already met stood up. He looked at Elizabeth and opened his eyes wider—no, he was raising his eyebrows. Elizabeth nodded. He walked forward and past them and laid his hand on the rim of the skiff. Then he patted it and made a happy-sounding chuckle, a deep, liquid note, bassy and warm. Elizabeth wondered if he recognized, in the rough pitting of its metal, and in its general appearance of being a copy made from too many generations of copies, that it was a skiff built by humans and not by saurs. The selkie strolled around it, ducking under to examine the hatch, then went over and looked again at the bones, and called back to his fellows. After standing there scratching his head, he turned and strolled back to the group. They began a quiet and orderly sounding conversation, pointing now at Gregor and Elizabeth, now at the skiff. When everyone had spoken—Elizabeth was watching and listening carefully, and she noticed—he came forward again and squatted on the shingle a couple of meters in front of them. Elizabeth could smell the fish on his breath. He leaned an elbow on his knee and held his chin in one hand for a moment, then rubbed a finger along his lips, then nodded as though to himself. He looked about among the stones at his feet, selected one, and picked up another at random. He held the first stone in the palm of one hand and brought the other down sharply on it, splitting it. He held out the two pieces. They contained a fossil of a coiled shell, an ammonite. He raised his eyebrows and grunted on a rising note.
“Yes,” said Elizabeth, nodding.
The selkie tapped the fossil with a blunt, ridged fingernail. Then he pointed over to the bones; at the skiff; at the sky; then away at an angle as he had done earlier; pointed at himself, and finally waved his finger back over his shoulder at the others. He settled back, buttocks on heels, elbows on knees, waved a hand to include Gregor and Elizabeth, and repeated the interrogative grunt.
“Translation,” Elizabeth said, turning to Gregor. “ ‘The spidery things carried us in skiffs long ago. Where do you come from?’ Agreed?”
“Yup,” said Gregor. “But maybe there’s more to it than that. What’s with that pointing at the ground?”
Elizabeth shrugged. “I don’t know. Maybe there’s more of the things buried over there?”
“Hey, that’s a thought. We can check it later. What do we tell him? And how?”
“Same way as he told us.”
Elizabeth stood up and walked over to the bones. Gregor watched her with a slightly worried look. She beckoned to the selkie, who came over but stayed a few meters distant. She pointed down at the alien skeleton, then at herself, then moved her head from side to side. The selkie tipped his head back a couple of times. She hoped this was a nod.
Elizabeth reached for the trowel, still lying there undisturbed, and sketched in the sand a spidery shape. Indicating it, and the bones, elicited another backward jerk of the head. She smoothed over the disturbed sand and drew a semicircle joined to a V to make a crude outline of a saur’s head. Four curved strokes outlined the almond-shaped eyes, a slash the slit mouth. She pointed to the saur face, then to the skiff.
The selkie stared at her. He made what she’d taken as the interrogative sound, but this time with a sort of strain in his voice—the human equivalent would have been “Huh?!” He squatted beside her and held out a hand for the trowel. She gave it to him; he grasped it confidently as though holding a paintbrush and rapidly added a rendering of a saur’s spindly body beneath the head. Beside it, he drew with equal speed and economy an ellipse with three legs, then put down the trowel and looked at her.
“Yes,” she said firmly, nodding backwards.
The selkie’s mouth and eyes widened. He stood slowly, as though weary, and walked back to the others. They conferred in a huddle. Some of them made downward slapping gestures that puzzled Elizabeth for a moment, until she realized that in water it would have been deliberate splashing at the surface, perhaps as a warning. Then they all jumped to their feet and fled into the sea; but the bold one was the last, and he looked back over his shoulder as he ran.
After marking the spot and photographing it they finished the excavation, laid the small skeleton carefully in a plastic tray, and into another tray they shoveled the sand in which it had been buried and which contained myriad tiny rods that might be small bones or internal parts or otherwise related to it; or perhaps just the spines of sea urchins; in any case, part of the puzzle. They lifted the two trays into the skiff, along with clinking racks of tubes containing the other specimens Elizabeth had collected. By comparison with the apparently alien skeleton, these specimens seemed trivial, but in the long run nothing was trivial in science. Not wishing to hang around where the selkies had been, as much to avoid further alarming them as out of uncertainty about how dangerous the alarmed selkies might be, they took the skiff back to the whaling station and parked it well up the beach. Over a hasty midday ration, they discussed what to do next.
“The first thing we have to do,” said Gregor, “is take another look inland.”
Elizabeth waved a half-chewed chewy bar at the cliffs. “We’ve already looked. There’s nothing but sea-bats and insects.”
“We weren’t looking for that. What we need to know is whether it’s just some waif or part of a breeding population.”
“Okay,” said Elizabeth. “I’ll fly. You look.”
The skiff was human-adapted, but its control panel still assumed four-fingered hands: that configuration was buried so deep in the manufacturing-control program that it was impossible to change without a radical redesign of the craft. Elizabeth sat on the padded seat in front of a section of the circular shelf under the encircling viewscreen, a section that contained a few dials and gauges and a pair of shallow, hand-shaped but four-fingered depressions. She rested her fingers in the hollows, her thumbs to the sides, and consciously relaxed for a moment. Control was intuitive, something you had to ease yourself into, dependent on chords of varying pressures rather than any one-to-one correspondence. She let her fingers do the flying, and the craft lifted.
The view tilted from side to side as her initial tremors of hesitation transmitted themselves to the drive, then steadied as the machine rose above the top of the cliff. Higher, and the jumbled landscape of Lemuria Beach opened before them. The island was about a hundred kilometers east to west, and fifty north to south. Behind the tilted sedimentary strata of the southern cliffs were ragged strips of rock alternating with long bands of rough grass, which, after a few kilometers, gave way to a more recent mixture of volcanic rock and tuff, basalt flows, sulphurous geysers, and bogs of lime-green algae, interrupted by snow-covered remnant plateaus and outcrops of the sedimentary rock and lumpy intrusions of even older metamorphic and basal layers.
“Let’s follow the clifftop grasslands first,” said Gregor.
Elizabeth leaned down on her left hand, spinning the skiff to that side. She pressed her fingertips down and the skiff moved forward, rocked back the heels of both hands and it rose. They settled on a cruising altitude of thirty meters. Gregor paced around the circular space between the viewscreen and the central engine fairing, gazing out with binoculars. Every so often he’d spot something and Elizabeth would bring the craft down, tip it on edge or even right over, so that they could look at the ground just inches above their heads. But the bones always turned out to be of seabats, and the momentary excitement of finding in a grassy bank a huge warren of burrows was dimmed somewhat by the discovery, which at any other time would have made their day, that they were the work of a peculiar flightless bird which they provisionally dubbed the “mole penguin.”
“I’m amazed the whalers didn’t hunt them to extinction,” said Elizabeth.
“Probably taste disgusting.”
She looked at him sidelong. “And your point would be?”
They laughed and took themselves aloft.
The volcanic badlands were, not to their surprise, an even less thriving habitat for land animals. They chipped some interesting mats of yellow, stinking extremophile bacteria and netted a few specimens of a small spider that skittered across the algae-clogged pools, but that was it. They returned to the whaling station as the short day ended. The wind had dropped, and the sea was calm, smooth on the surface of its ceaseless swells. Elizabeth and Gregor stowed their less fragile specimens, marked and tagged for later collection, in the whaling station. In the long twilight they built a fire from the whitened timbers of a ruined boat and cooked over it their first hot meal of the day. They lingered, huddling closer together against the cold, as the embers faded with the light and the stars came down to the horizon. The southern hemisphere constellations were so unfamiliar they didn’t have names. Repairing this omission and identifying the two stars, among the many visible, that they’d visited themselves, was keeping them idly occupied when they heard heavy footsteps crunching up the beach.
“Behind the fire,” Gregor said quietly.
They scrambled to their feet and backed off, one to each side, and peered toward the shoreline. The footsteps became quieter as they moved from the shingle to the sand, then stopped. Elizabeth could dimly make out a selkie silhouetted against the starlit sea. He spread his hands wide and stepped forward into the dim circle of light from the fire. One arm was raised, shielding his eyes from the glow as he peered over his thick forearm at them. It was the bold one they’d met before.
He began to speak, his deep voice loud above the surf but quiet in itself. There was something in it of frustration, perhaps sorrow, but nothing of anger or fear. He spoke for about two minutes, then trailed off and ended with a gurgling laugh. Then he hunkered down, spread his hands, and looked at them across the fire, his eyes having apparently adapted to the light. Elizabeth stepped over beside Gregor, put a hand on his shoulder, and he joined her in squatting down. She faced the selkie, spread her hands, and leaned forward earnestly.
“What you are saying,” she said, her voice speaking to the selkie but her words for Gregor’s benefit, “is that you are speaking, and therefore you are a rational being, and that you want us to recognize you as such, and that you find our lack of a common language as frustrating as we do. Well, I understand and agree with that. In fact, I think that for all your nakedness and living in the wild, you are not a savage, a hunter-gatherer, although that may be how you live now. I think you’re basically as civilized as we are, and as aware of the nature of the universe. You can draw, you’ve seen a skiff before, you’ve met aliens. Am I right?”
Gregor nodded. The selkie responded with another minute or so of speech, looking down a little, as though in abstraction. When he’d finished, he looked up, and his teeth flashed in the embers’ glow. He reached for a stick from the fire, motioned to them and began to draw in the sand. They joined him and watched as he slashed in the sand the glyphs of skiff and spidery alien—ten lines, little more. He pointed at himself, waved a hand out to sea, and then raised a hand, palm forward: Wait. He rose and tramped into the dark, beckoning them after him. When they were all out of the circle of light, a few tens of meters along the beach, he held out an arm stiff with a pointing finger. It started at the angle to the ground he’d pointed at before, then swung smoothly up and around, until it was aimed at a bright red star about halfway up the sky to the east. They joined him in sighting along their arms at the star. Just to make sure they were looking at the right one, he poked a finger in the sand and dotted out the pattern of the stars around it, completing the picture with the one he’d pointed at, jabbing his finger in deep, then pointing again. He pointed at his chest again, then at the sea, then at the star again. Elizabeth and Gregor nodded vigorously. The selkie’s lips peeled back from his teeth in a grin that would have been frightening had they just encountered him.
He laid a hand first on Gregor’s shoulder, then on Elizabeth’s—it was like being a child again, looking up at him—and said something, then walked away into the waves.
“You know what I just figured out?” Gregor said, as the selkie’s back vanished.
“What?”
“The way he was pointing downward earlier, and at the start just there? He was pointing to where the star was in the morning, when it was below the horizon.”
She stared at him. “Could you do that?”
Gregor had been a navigator for twenty years. He had a more direct and practical knowledge of the sky than most astronomers. He thought about it for a moment and shook his head.
“Which means,” said Elizabeth, “that I may have been wrong about the selkies. They’re not as smart as we are. They’re smarter.”
A storm blew up later that night. Gregor and Elizabeth had already stowed some of their kit in the whaling station’s gloomy rooms, but they decided to spend the night in the skiff. With its field on it was less moveable than a rock. Its encircling view-screen picked up enough light from outside to give them a clear view, even with the interior lights on. They sat exhausted, gazing outward. It was like watching black-and-white television—white the surf, black the waves—but interesting.
“Wonder how the selkies are doing,” Elizabeth said.
“They can ride it out,” said Gregor. “Like seals.”
“But they’re not like seals. They’re not that aquatic. I can imagine them huddled on a beach somewhere. Poor things.”
“They look tough.” He grinned. “ ‘Hardy Man,’ all right.”
Elizabeth saw Gregor’s gaze drift back to the plastic tray in which they’d placed the anomalous octopod’s bones. Of all the specimens they’d collected, this was the one they could least afford to lose. They had not cared to examine it further with the crude instruments—scalpels, tweezers, pliers, hammers—that were on hand. They hardly dared to think about it. Not thinking about it was making them dizzy.
“This is big,” he said. “This is evidence, the first solid evidence we’ve had of the aliens for a start, and it looks like evidence that they’ve settled the selkies here. Or that they’re still doing it.”
Elizabeth smiled wryly. “The long-awaited invasion?”
“Something like that.” Gregor sighed. “Whatever. We have to report back.” He reached sideways and clasped her right hand, intertwining their fingers. “The journey’s over.”
“Yeah,” she said. “It’s the next journey I’m worried about.” It had been a good journey, almost a holiday. It could even have been the beginning of a retirement, or the resumption of their true careers after a long interruption. They’d always promised themselves that someday they would pay their home planet, Mingulay, the attention of a Beagle voyage. Marine biology had been, for both of them, their first love. When they’d both been twenty years younger, eighty-odd years ago, Gregor had found in the structures of the cephalopod brain the key to his family’s generations-long Great Work—to reverse-engineer the control program of the lightspeed drive, hitherto monopolized by the kraken navigators who plied the fixed trading routes of the Second Sphere. Implementing the program on the ancient onboard computers of the Bright Star, the ship in which Gregor’s ancestors had been hurled across the galaxy to humanity’s second home, had taken Gregor and Elizabeth across the four light-years to Croatan and, a month or two later, the four light-years back. The lightspeed jumps were subjectively instantaneous. While they’d been away, people had grown up or aged or died. That first experience of skipping forward in time had been a jolt. As the Cairns clan’s starship fleet had expanded and new planetary systems were laboriously added to the navigation programs, their journeys’ reach had extended, and that first jolt had been followed by many more. Already, the oldest members of Elizabeth’s family, who’d had decades yet to live when her starfaring had started, were long dead. Her parents were barely recognizable centenarians. Her children—at least they had kept pace, because they’d traveled with her. Elizabeth was already beginning to feel that disconnection with common humanity, and that identification with her traveling-companions, that was so patent in the long-established merchant families who for millennia had traveled in the krakens’ ships, slipping through centuries in months.
—And she thought for a moment of Lydia de Tenebre, still young in the momentary eternity of her century-long journey to Nova Terra, and she blinked that thought away—
It had seemed their task was done. It was no longer necessary for Gregor, the First Navigator, to go on each newly charted course; or for Elizabeth, the Senior Science Officer, to accompany him. They had been able to get away, to leave the pioneering to others, and to return to exploring their own underpopulated and diverse world. And even, for once, to leave the children at home. Weeks, then months, of wandering the planet’s oceans and islands in the skiff had not tired them, nor ceased to bring them new discoveries each day. This day’s discoveries would end all that.