Someday a robotic follow-up probe might fall again toward the red star she had just seen, to become the Schliemann of that alien Troy. There was a powerful laser satellite orbiting Earth farther out, nailing small sailcraft with beams, into systems around stars.

More would happen; there were so many stars to reach toward and see, and more candidates by the day. Now she could swim by other strange, distant worlds and feel them, fed by slabs of data—and still sense the great dark unknowns. Which was her job now. And she suspected why.

3.

Quick!—a world in a few passing hours. From a century-old mission that orbited a living world. Then to sum it up in the brittle frame of linear sentences, the frail girders of mere flat words:

A ruddy world with lesser grav. One huge sprawl of a continent, plus a lesser land mass in the other hemisphere, of humped and dirty rock-rimmed mountains. Skies the color of crisp sand. Spiky mountains cut into curiously precise pie slices by iodine rivers that flowed to the continental center, making a vast, somber bay of jade waters.

Go closer, lower, into orbit: giant blue caterpillars stretched in trees as tall as mountains. The low grav here made for monsters.

Forested slopes in closeup were towering mushroom trees of violent orange. Huge blue birds with wings like parachutes, bills shaped like Death’s sickle, feathers like flapping palm fronds. A plain of plants evoking erect oak leaves. Smaller growths resembling inside-out umbrellas. Rain turning to snowflakes at high noon on the equator. Rain like drops of blood in the rocky highlands. Mists glowing like white fire in the valleys. Chasms radiating in mountain ranges, resembling fractures in frosted windowpanes. Winding rivers in the fevered tropics, shapely as women’s torsos or slim violins. Ice caps featuring swollen growths like blue berets. Storms that solidified like hurled hammerheads across tropical isles. Clouds drifting, lazy pregnant purple cows. Wind-blasted rockwork in curious curved forms, like frozen music. Lurching beasts all angles and ribs, grazing across mustard grasslands.

The sailcraft played out its fat helium balloons, which went roving roving roving until they ran out of lift. These captured closeup the many odd beasts, eyed landscapes for buildings, assayed the sweep of land for betraying rectangles—signs of intelligence, or else of obsessive animals who knew Euclid in their souls.

Grazers aplenty swept by under the balloon’s down-looking eyes, plus carnivores, big and furred and fanged. The craft saw big floater insects, too, with steering wings and glistening armor plates and strange inexplicable leggy bits like antennae. These creatures eyed the balloon uneasily, braying roars into the acoustic balloon ears. Some angular beasts gazed upward warily, as if the balloon were a new foe in their air. They bristled, blared, and thrust up narrow snouts that ended in the blunt truth of mouths like a pair of pliers. Some, in a narrow canyon lined with goatlike shambling monoliths, shot lances at the balloon eye, which fell far short. Still, perhaps a compliment of sorts.