Simply put, men and women could live on asteroids, but they needed to know that there was as blue world nearby—to see it in their sky. It’s a flaw in our character, no doubt, but we cannot go out and live in space all alone.
We have to have waterworlds, if the universe is ever to be ours.
This system’s waterworld we named Quest, after the beast so long sought by King Pelenor, our ship’s namesake. It shone blue and brown, under a clean whiteswaddling of clouds. For hours we circled above it, and simply cried.
Alice awakened ten corpsicles—prominent scientists who, the Worldcomps had promised, would not fall apart on the reawakening of hope.
We watched them take their turn at the viewport, joytears streaming down their faces, and we joined them to weep freely once again.
6
Pelenor was hardly up to the task of exploring this system by herself. We spent a year recovering and modifying several of the ancient ships we found drifting over our planet, so that teams could spread out, investigating every farcorner of this system.
By our second anniversary, a hundred biologists were quickscampering over the surface of Quest. They genescanned the local flora and fauna excitedly, and already were modifying Earthplants to fit into the ecosystem without causing imbalance. Soon they would start on animals from our genetanks.
Engineers exploring the smallbodies excitedly declared that they could get the lifemachines left behind by the prior race to work. There was room for a billion colonists out there, straight from the start.
But the archaeologists were the ones whose report we awaited most anxiously. Between my ferrying runs, they were the ones I helped. I joined them in the dusty ruins of Oldcity, at the edge of Longvalley, putting together piles of artifacts to be catalogued and slowly analyzed.