“What do you think?” she asked softly. “This will be your only glimpse of it before we land. It’s like looking at a blank canvas, isn’t it? All that potential, all that space!”

Park had shaken her head. “No,” she said. “It’s not like a canvas. It’s like—”

Keller had looked at her. “It’s like what?”

Then Park had smiled to herself; even she could tell it looked secretive. “It’s like looking into the face of God,” she said.

As they descended, the light wavered, as if to answer her: the pale and colorless suns watching as the ship floated down on the alien wind.

2.

The next day started on a different schedule than the one Park was used to. The term would have been “bright and early” on Earth, but there was no “bright” on a ship with no windows and the same kind of artificial lighting every moment of every day—and “early” was relative, too. But her body knew the difference; she was jittery and on edge from the moment her inlays blinked her awake.

She stayed that way all morning, off-kilter, feeling as if something was wrong. But there was work to do: now that they had landed and the expeditions were officially underway, patient sessions with the crew—which had previously only been sporadic and intermittent—were now daily and mandatory. Keller and Park would be in charge of mitigating any stress the expedition members felt as they explored the new planet.

Except Keller never turned up for their first session of the day—which raised klaxons in Park’s already-anxious mind. She dispatched Jimex to find out if her mentor had somehow overslept—or, she thought with a mental shudder, been poisoned, or fallen ill like Reimi—but he returned and said he couldn’t find her anywhere. That was even more concerning. It was a big ship, but Jimex was thorough, and Keller couldn’t have gone out with the expedition team: she was forbidden to, just as Park was.

But she couldn’t spare any more thoughts on it. Wan Xu was already in their office, downing clarity meds like breath mints. He was their exobiologist and biodome designer, a brilliant but narcissistic man; any interruptions in his perceived routines could catapult him into an outburst, trigger his neuroses. Park had to go through her first patient session with him alone, wondering all the while where the hell Keller could be.

For a while they slogged through the requisite questionnaires and checklists and evaluative worksheets together; Park read off the standard surveys that ISF had bundled together for her, feeling a little chagrined—like a student struggling to perform under the watchful eye of a teacher. Wan Xu, folding his arms, listlessly answered that everything was fine, average, five out of ten—meaning perfectly regular. But when Park asked him how the morning’s expedition had gone, he blanched a little and looked away.