The brownish light of P2 flooded in through the windows, both virtual and real, and then the world itself hove into view, a swirling sphere of yellow-white clouds, of isolated blue-green oceans and vast, amber-colored continents.
P2's plant life, such as it was, relied on something darker than chlorophyll, something chestnut-brown which drew its energy mainly from infrared light. Conrad would miss Earth's greenery in the open spaces, but the multicelled algoids were not without their own special charm. All across the planet, in dense patches between the deserts, the probes had shown chest-high forests of the stuff, waving in the breeze like translucent blades of wheat.
And Conrad, realizing he was about to see this sight with his own two eyes, felt his heart leap. To hell with Xmary. If she thought she could do better than him . . . Well, she wasn't stupid. Maybe she could. But he was here, and she was not, and this really was an important moment in both their lives.
“Living large is the best revenge,” Bascal murmured behind him, as if eavesdropping on his thoughts.
Conrad looked over his shoulder and said, “Sire, that is possibly the most intelligent thing you've said all day.”
The way that Conrad got horribly killed was sort of funny in retrospect.
They had set the ferries down beside a shallow but steep-banked stream, almost a waterfall really, cutting down along the equally steep bank of the seashore. The ferries were at the crest of it, on flat ground, but the sand dropped away sharply to the east, along a contour that was neither “beach” nor “cliff,” but something in-between which the site survey had named a “subcritical intertidal embankment” or “depositional foreshore bluff.” Such features were, apparently, typical of the shorelines where they weren't vertical cliffs of granite bedrock.
The planet's two oceans were completely isolated from each other, and this was the larger of the two. Overall it was slightly wider than Earth's Pacific Ocean, though it covered a much smaller fraction of the planet's oversized surface, so Bascal had insisted it was properly a sea, and had named it the Sea of Destiny.
The men were all outside milling around on the sand, beneath a sun that looked remarkably like Earth's own—no larger or smaller or dimmer, and only very slightly redder. And the filter masks were working just fine; Bascal had even engineered the surface properties so they didn't fog up on the inside. But there was room for improvement, because breathing in the masks was kind of like sucking chowder through a straw. You could do it, no problem, but the comfort factor wasn't quite there. The air that did get through felt thick but somehow unsatisfying. Not enough oxygen.
Anyway, Bascal was beside himself with glee—literally—and the two of him were pointing and gesturing wildly. “The city's Main Street will run right here, east-west, from the shore to the first ridgeline of the mountains, and perhaps beyond. Forty meters wide, and lined with domes on either side.”
The other nodded. “Yeah, great! Put the palace right here on the beach, like proper Tongans. Matatahi Falehau, the Beach Palace. But tall, yes? Looming over the city, as a proper palace should.”
“Really? I thought perhaps over there, so the ridgeline doesn't hide the sunset. Not tall, but hugging the rocks like it's been there a million years. So perhaps the city should be farther south, over there a ways.”
“Hmm. Interesting. Lemme think about that a minute. Our own planet, Your Most Regal Majesty! You know how excited I am.”
“Indeed I do!”
The two Conrads had diverged by this time, no longer quite identical, and while one of them hovered by the Bascals, absorbing their plans and injecting the occasional comment, the other one was down below at the waterline, hunched over, studying the river stones lining the mouth of the stream. They were mainly granite, as near as he could figure, but they had a funny sort of sheen that was new to him. Chlorination weathering, maybe. If these stones came from the mountains above—and they must have—then some of the bedrock up there, properly quarried and polished, would make for interesting facades. The really raw thing was the way the different layers of it striped the ridge's face in such wildly different colors. Not just browns and yellows and reds, but actually some greens and even blues as well. Or so his eyes had told him up there, through the yellow haze of fifteen kilometers of atmosphere.
Looking down again, he noticed movement in the stream's clear water, between the stones.
“Oh,” he said. “Oh, my. Will you look at this.”
No one was paying attention to him at that moment, and he was too rapt to notice or care. He leaned closer, watching the wriggling forms. The “animals” of Planet Two were, he'd been told, extremely primitive. Denizens of the water—never the air or land—they possessed only five cell types, loosely grouped into three layers: skin, gut, and muscle. There was no nervous system, no immune system, and no real digestive system other than a simple holding chamber—the gut. Nutrients and wastes simply sloshed through the spaces between the cells, and the creatures' metabolisms—stunted by chlorine and starved by low oxygen levels—supported movement which was very sluggish indeed by Earth standards. Most were tiny—pinhead-sized or smaller—and drifted along with the ocean currents, feeding on bacterial mats and occasionally on each other, though never on the chlorine-spewing algoids, large or small.
One creature, though—the lidicara—was different. Conrad couldn't help but know this, because it was nearly all the biologists could talk about. How fascinating! How surprising and raw! Most days it was hard to get their minds on anything else. But seeing it now, seeing a hundred of them swirling around his boots like animate snowflakes, he understood what all the fuss was about. Here was a thing that moved with purpose, with ambition. An actual alien creature! The other animals were radial forms—tiny urchin/starfish with little to distinguish them—but the pale lidicara jetted around fast enough to need some streamlining, some architectural finesse. The thing even had a cluster of sensory cells or something at its front end. “Cephalization!” the biologists screamed when the subject came up. “The thing is growing a head!” Slowly, of course—the fossils of seventy million years ago looked much like the creatures here at his feet—but even to Conrad it sounded like an important development.
The lidicara's shape was like nothing ever seen on Earth, and at a glance, on his hands and knees with his masked face hovering right above the water, Conrad could see how it had come about. The creature had started out as just another seven-armed starfish, but somewhere along the way its “front” arms had shortened and thinned, becoming feeding appendages or something, while the other limbs had slid toward the back, fitting together into a kind of teardrop shape, with one elongated limb at the back serving as a kind of tail.
Right there and then, Conrad discovered an interest in biology which he had never once suspected. Wow. There were only a few hundred cells in these animals, right? As opposed to the trillions in his own body? And he found himself wondering what happened inside, down in the DNA, to permit—to create?—such changes as these. And it occurred to him, with a prickle of excitement, that he—that this particular Conrad Mursk—could abandon all other responsibility and simply pursue this question, reintegrating with the “real” Conrad, the navy's Conrad, at some future date.