Such fools we mortals be….

She stopped for a glass of wine and some snack centipedes, delaying the inevitable. A passing friend gazed into her eyes and asked, “Hey, what’s bitin’ your bum today?”

Rachel opened her mouth, closed it, and the whole idea she had been seeking came together in that second.

Ask the Messages Repositories for their data on nearer life-bearing planets. Go after what their probes found.

“Shut up,” she explained. And went to see the Prefect.

A week later, she had a find to show Prefect Masoul. A week of little sleep, but she felt a zip in her stride now as she entered his office.

Her hydrogen wall fame had gotten her around Prefect Stiles’s stern censure. Prefect Masoul had worked some diplomat-bureaucrat magic and granted her more time. Back-corridor politics had its advantages.

She’d found older files that gave surprisingly detailed surveys of planets. These ancient repositories were embedded in transmits of Messages from dead societies. These came from robotic radiators, a fashion in interstellar signaling that appeared common among repeating beacons, making their transmissions resemble archaeological layers of Messages.

Rachel said firmly to Masoul and several others present, “Here’s what turned up from an old Message. It’s basically a reference work. I got it from an autobeacon of a civilization gone silent otherwise. They’re just passing on what their robo-explorers discovered, millennia ago.” A hand wave.

She let the visuals do the job. “Turned out, this star is a G nine, lots like ours.” Golden in hue, luminosity half of Sol’s. The world was smaller, surface gravity 0.63 g, with a thinner and drier atmosphere. Air perfectly breathable by humans, with more argon and less nitrogen. Bodies of water, modest seas. The globe was very lovely as it turned against star-crowded night—blue, tawny, rusty-brown, white-clouded. Two little moons skipped in escort.

“I got the biological spectra, too. Its life is chemically similar to Earth. Pictures taken at low altitude and on the ground showed woods, lakes, wide plains rolling toward mountains.”

“Terratype, the Astros term it,” the Prefect said.

Rachel stepped through the alien Message’s images. “The pictures did reveal small towns spread over the two major continents—clusters of buildings, at least, lacking defensive walls or regular streets—hard by big digs that may be mines. I used Artilects trained in this, from our own flyby history.”

“In our great Laser Era?”

“Yes indeed!”

Many had forgotten that surge, over two centuries ago. In her opinion, it came from the explosion of human longevity, when people started living well beyond a hundred years. So many had expectations of seeing the results of long-term laser-driven probes, which began firing off diaphanous screens the size of cities. Fast craft to cruise by stars. Confident that they would live to see the returning photos, the wealthy countries spent the gigabucks necessary to do it.

She spoke carefully, voice even and steady as she advanced her own pod-driven views of the many ancient visions she had seen and felt and ruminated upon for days now. “They could identify a variety of cultures, from rural through our modern. Yet invariably, aside from those petty communities, settlements consisted of a few houses standing alone. None closer than ten kilometers apart.”