Incandescence

«So now I'm a low-fi copy of myself?»

«Oh, don't get precious on me,» Parantham retorted. «We were counting isotopes atom-by-atom in that rock. Hardly the kind of thing your personality depends on. I suspect they maintained the standard we're used to in travel, but you know that falls far short of sending a few tonnes of matter at atomic resolution.»

«Fair enough.» In fact, as far as Rakesh knew nobody in the Amalgam had ever attempted such a thing. «So how did they send us?» he wondered. «How long did it take?» He checked the console. The map told them that they'd traveled the two hundred and seventy-nine light years from their previous location in three hundred and twelve years. The excess time over line-of-sight distance didn't really prove anything one way or the other, though: those decades might have been spent adding a new node to the Aloof's network, or they might have been nothing but the necessary delay caused by a slightly zigzagged path between pre-existing nodes. «Did we ride mundane gamma rays, or the secret highway?» How could they tell the difference?

Parantham didn't reply, and Rakesh let the question drop. The destination was more important than the journey, and the cabin was flooding with light as their chosen star swung into view.

The window darkened to compensate, but a broad patch of bright sunlight still swept across the floor, bringing a palpable warmth as it touched Rakesh's skin, lighting up motes of dust as it crossed the cabin. He had almost forgotten that until now they'd had no sun to call their own; the starlight here had seemed more than enough for any purpose. Just as he was getting used to the change, a far greater surprise followed. A stark, slate-gray world appeared beneath them, sharply etched vistas of plains and canyons passing by, before the sliver of vivid dayside topography was replaced by a softer starlit version.

«I take back every insult,» Rakesh proclaimed. The lack of planets on the Aloof's star map might have been perverse, but they hadn't played dumb with their guests this time. He had been expecting that he and Parantham would be dumped in a remote circumstellar orbit and left to scour the region themselves for specks of light. Instead, the Aloof had placed them just a few hundred kilometers above a rocky, terrestrial-sized world. Even if the system was packed with other planets, this was clearly a good place to start.

Parantham said, «We'll need telescopes, spectrometers, radar.» Rakesh was already summoning up the interface with the workshop, and sending it suitable designs culled from the library.

While the workshop labored, they stood by the window and waited impatiently for each new glimpse of the world below. Twice a minute, the sunlit landscape raced by; Rakesh would gladly have given up the convenience of centrifugal gravity for a steadier view, but he'd already programmed the workshop with designs for instruments anchored to the center of the spinning habitat, so with a little patience he could have both. At least their orbit around the planet was taking them further into the dayside, so the crescent beneath them was steadily growing.

«What should we call this place?» Rakesh asked. The planet had never been detected from the disk, and though its sun had been catalogued a million years before it had never been allocated anything more than a number.

«We haven't even named our ship yet,» Parantham replied.

«Lahl's Promise?» The name slid off his tongue without a moment's thought, but on reflection Rakesh decided that it had a suitably admonitory ring to it. It would remind him that he'd vowed to treat the search for his cousins as seriously as Lahl had treated the need to find a child of DNA to take up the quest in the first place.

«That's fine by me,» Parantham said. «But let's hold off on the planet until we know something about it.»

The planet looked arid to Rakesh, though at least it wasn't visibly cratered, and the haze on the horizon made it clear that it possessed some kind of atmosphere. Back in the disk, the DNA panspermia was full of worlds like this, mostly populated with nothing but microbes who'd been hiding meekly in the soil for a few billion years. Lahl's Promise? Rakesh felt a twinge of guilt. Noteworthy as it would be to confirm that the panspermia really had stretched a tendril down into this perilous neighborhood, microbes were microbes, and he couldn't pretend that he wasn't far more excited simply to have found an excuse for the Aloof to release him from their usual strictures. According to legend, Leila and Jasim had been given a grand tour of the natural wonders of the bulge, but even if that was true, in three hundred millennia only a handful of travelers taking the short cut had claimed to have been woken en route at all, and no one had ever been handed a ship and allowed to go sightseeing.