And again: roads. Towns tucked under ample tree canopies. No electromagnetic emissions beyond the faint and local. Cities lurking under regular humps of hills. Ships dotted the inland sea, white and slender. Yet this advanced society had only a weak signature in radio and microwaves, and, in the other bands, no signals at all.

Then the pod went silent, done. Another failed expedition.

Rachel lingered awhile in the quiet. Biting her lip, she wondered if silence was not the true state of the universe, now that the ancestral acoustics of the Big Bang had faded into scratch-marks in the microwave sky. Silence: far more noble than humanity’s squeaks.

This vibrant world had been a treat, really. A glimpse at the alien. A way to condition her mind to dealing with… real, present aliens. Practice, of a sort.

She took planetary records at random, not really knowing what she was seeking. Most worlds in their star’s habitable zone were of a sameness. Solemn planets sleeping in the silence of ice and stone. Seaworlds awash in dark purple waters betraying no life, only its eventual prospect. Baked plains of ancient lava, unblessed by seas or even ponds—a likely match for a collision with a wandering waterworld, should orbital dynamics ever bring one from farther out: a Newtonian miracle awaiting. Black volcanic corkscrews spiraling up to the atmospheric roof of planets still in process, getting baked to oblivion. Vast planets of crawling slime. Oceans lapping against barren shores. Plankton mats the size of continents. Living, but dull. To find a mature, thriving biosphere was a blessing. She savored them in the sensory auditorium of her snug pod.

She began to favor the dwarf suns and their narrow habitable zones. Such stars lived long, as old as the galaxy’s ten billion years, which was yet scarcely a fraction along their stable life-spans. So, too, their worlds had had millions of millennia to work their slow, gravid marvels. The Ythri might have come from a smaller world around such a star. They could fly, implying lesser gravity. Had they come here because a human probe had enticed them?

She studied these worlds whenever she could manage the time, outside her own work and research on the looming Ythri arrival. These labors, she felt, were perhaps foolish. But such labor was also a proud thing to do, as a fleck of dust condemned to know it is a fleck of dust.

She needed bed time, and Kane was there, ready, when she needed it. He noticed that her long hours in her pod had made her “moody” and, his solemn gaze implied, needy. “What’s it like, now…?” he murmured in her ear, which was still moist from his delicious, funny licking.

“When you finish,” she said slowly, “you walk off and a little part of yourself stays there. It’s gone and done and you did it, and you feel a little bit of emptiness after it’s over. But… I thought the experience had left me, but it hadn’t.”