Nilis seemed to have anticipated their difficulty. Rather than explain, he encouraged them to use the corvette wall’s magnification facility, to explore the view and figure it out for themselves. Slowly the strange truth of what they were seeing opened up in Pirius’s mind.
He was looking down at a planet, a hemisphere dominated by a single great ocean — an ocean of water, open to the sky. It was kept liquid not by technology, but by thermodynamic equilibrium; its curved surface not shaped by human design, but following a simple gravitational equipotential. Even the wispy clouds he saw were water vapor. Although humanity had by now mapped the Galaxy, this was still, remarkably enough, the largest open-water ocean encountered anywhere.
This was Earth.
Those crawling forms were ships, scudding like insects over the ocean’s surface. But some of the larger forms looked oddly familiar. They turned out to be Spline, which had themselves evolved on a watery world, and now gamboled ponderously in the deep-ocean waves of the Pacific. After millennia of war, the seas of Earth had become a nursery for living starships. But the Spline schools weren’t the strangest thing Pirius saw.
He focused on an island, one of the irregular masses of rock that protruded into the air from the ocean’s patient hide. He peered down at buildings, docks, landing strips. He could even see people moving between the buildings. One little girl, skipping down a path to a beach, glanced up at the sky, as if she could see him staring down at her. Her face was a tiny button. And she was quite naked; the child wore no mask, no skinsuit, no protection of any kind — naked and in the open.
It was too much. Pirius and Torec fled to the enclosed security of their cabin, where they clung to each other, trembling. But they could feel the corvette shudder subtly as it dipped into the air of Earth.
After their landing at a spaceport, a small bubbletop flitter took them in a short suborbital hop to their final destination, Nilis’s home.
As the flitter shot briefly back out of the atmosphere Pirius saw that the primary spaceport had been at the heart of one of the larger land-masses. Now the flitter took them over a strip of ocean to a large offshore island. On this island Pirius spotted crumpled hills and rocky outcrops, obviously natural formations, no use to anybody. In the lowlands, though, and near the coasts and along the river valleys, the land was covered by wide green rectangles and cut through by arrow-straight canals.
But this cultivated land was marred by clusters of silver-gray, irregular, bubbling masses, like blisters. You could see these were not the work of humans, for they lacked both the symmetry of deliberate human design and the more organic patterns of unplanned settlements. But these alien scars were the cities of mankind, Pirius learned; they were called Conurbations.
Conurbations were officially referred to only by numbers. Thus the corvette had landed at the fringe of Conurbation 2807, while the flitter would bring them to Conurbation 3474, a sprawling city surrounding a broad, languid river. These numbers had been assigned by the long-vanquished Qax — pronounced Kh-axe, the alien occupiers of Earth in the years before Hama Druz. The huddling domes of the Conurbations, bubbles of blown rock, were essentially Qax designs; they had been preserved as a kind of permanent memorial of that dreadful time. But Nilis, with a wink, told them that the locals referred to their cities by much older, pre-Occupation names, though not a trace of those older settlements had survived the time of the Qax. Thus they had first landed at Berr-linn, and Nilis’s base was in a city called Lunn-dinn.
They landed by the bank of the river, close to one of the great domes of Lunn-dinn. As they prepared to leave the flitter, Pirius glimpsed the river itself, sparkling in the low sun. Even that was a stunning sight: open water, billions of tonnes of it just sliding by, in miraculous equilibrium with an atmosphere that was itself open to space.
It was a short walk through a covered passage from the pad to Nilis’s apartment, which was just inside the skin of the dome. Nilis briskly walked through dusty rooms. Maintenance bots clustered in Nilis’s wake demanding instructions, and self-proclaiming “urgent” Virtuals fluttered around him, evanescent and noisy. There was a musty smell, a faint staleness. It had evidently been some time since he had been home.
Nilis showed the ensigns to the room he had assigned them. Thankfully, it was without windows to the outside. Torec simply pulled off her uniform, threw it to the floor and climbed into the single wide bed.
Pirius followed her, a little more slowly. In this strange new place fear and curiosity warred in him, making him restless. But he held Torec until her trembling had stopped and she slept.
He woke after two hours. Torec was sleeping soundly; for now she had escaped from the strangeness.
Pirius watched her for a while. The curving skin of her shoulder was smooth, flawless, and her small face, turned away from him, was blank, as if she were a child, unformed. He felt a surging warmth toward her, an urge to hold her, so they could protect each other in this bewilderingly strange place.
If you’d asked him before they left Arches, he thought, he’d surely have said Torec was no more than a squeeze to him, and vice versa. Now she seemed a lot more. Was his feeling for her because they were alone here, the only bit of familiarity for each other so far from home? Had he felt this way about her, underneath, even before they had left Arches? Or maybe the crisis they had been through on the ship had drawn them together, as if they’d been through combat.
It was complicated. He wasn’t used to digging into his own emotions so deeply; in a Barracks Ball you didn’t get a lot of quiet time to think.
There was plenty to distract him here, of course. He slid carefully out of bed.
He explored the room. He found doors to a lavatory, and a shower room — not a clean-cloth store, but a place where running water came pouring out of a slot in the roof at his commands. Pirius tried it. Though it was hot and clear, the water left him feeling vaguely unclean; perhaps it came from the safety of a recycling tank, but it could have come from the river, or the ocean. He didn’t imagine he would ever enjoy this strange experience.
He dried off and dressed in a fresh uniform.
He stepped to the door and hesitated. He hadn’t come all the way to Earth itself to hide. He tapped the door; it slid open silently, and he left the room.
The apartment was astoundingly big, and astoundingly empty; Pirius thought you could have lodged five hundred ensigns in a space this size, but it was all devoted to one fat Commissary. As he wandered, small maintenance bots scuttled silently after him, scuffing at the carpet, removing all traces of his presence as he passed. The apartment was just under the outer skin of the dome, and large picture windows had been cut into the outer wall. The rooms were flooded with light that poured unfiltered from the parent star. Pirius, trying to acclimatize, shied away from the light.
Some of the rooms had functions that seemed obvious. One contained a long conference table, for instance, flanked by rows of chairs. Pirius touched the surface of the table. It was pale brown and textured with a kind of grain, a material he had never seen before. Other rooms seemed designed for leisure; typically, they had chairs and low tables set up before the windows.