We really hadn’t expected this. It hadn’t been people we’d come to see but the life of Eden itself, the only life known to exist outside of Earth, with its strange geothermal ecosystem that had grown and multiplied and warmed a planet without the help of a sun. As far as human life was concerned, we’d hoped for no more than a few bones, and maybe a clue or two as to what had happened to Tommy Schneider and Angela Young after their decision to stay here by themselves, while their three companions attempted to return to the Defiant. For the genetic experts had all agreed that you simply couldn’t get a viable human population from just one man and one woman.

Recessive genes. Inbreeding. Even twenty men and twenty women, they’d said, would probably not suffice. But it seemed they’d been wrong.

‘We’d better turn off the lights,’ I said. ‘They’re obviously finding them blindingly bright.’

Deep touched his screen. For a few seconds, while our eyes adjusted, the world outside became completely dark and all we could see was the glow from our screens, with their numbers and diagrams, that illusion of order and mastery. But then from the darkness emerged the world that we’d glimpsed in those uploaded images the Defiant brought back, and heard described by Eden’s five discoverers in those haunting diaries. It wasn’t much brighter than moonlight is on Earth, but from all round us a dim light – pink, white, blue and yellow – shone from the strange blooms, some spherical, some elongated and tubular, that dangled from those smooth and fungus-like trees.

Small flying creatures were darting round those lights, as moths and bats might do round streetlights on Earth, and some of these creatures seemed to be shining faintly too. Round the bases of the trees, another kind of vegetation twinkled like the strings of lights we hung up back home to mark the Winter Festival, although very much more faintly. I vaguely remembered that, in the meticulous reports that Michael Tennison uploaded before he died, these lifeforms were called starflowers. He speculated that they were parasites, feeding on the roots of the geothermal organisms he referred to as trees. Mehmet Haribey, who died with him, had discovered they were rich in vitamin D.