Resurgence

He was in space. More than that, he was in orbit. Below him, filling the sky, floated a substantial planet, all grays and muted greens. And this was more than just any old orbit, it was a low orbit. His suited body was racing forward, fast enough that he could see the planetary surface skimming past. His instant mental calculation told him that his orbital period was no more than an hour and a half. The Builder transport vortex had dumped him close to grazing altitude, not far above the limit of the atmosphere. He knew that there must be an atmosphere, because the ground below was hazy in places. Even now he was passing over a clouded region.

E.C. looked in the opposite direction, above his head. Another great world hung there, almost as big in apparent size as the one that he orbited but much farther away. He could see banded patterns of green, white, and orange around its middle. The superb eyes of his embodiment detected a slight broadening at the planet’s middle. The other world was in rapid rotation, and from its appearance it was almost certainly a gas-giant.

One hemisphere of that great world was in shadow. E.C. looked to his left, seeking the source of illumination for both that planet and the one he was close to. There it was, a shrunken but fiercely brilliant disk of greenish-yellow. His external sensors and internal geometric algorithms combined to tell him a few things almost instantly. That sun was too distant, with its tiny disk, to provide life-giving warmth to any planet. Yet the one around which he moved was clearly a living world, with the telltale evidence of green photosynthesis. The banded planet, farther off, was not merely warm. It was hot. He detected emitted radiation in the thermal infrared, consistent with a temperature close to eight hundred degrees. Therefore, although the sun formed the primary source of light for the whole system, the heat that warmed the world below came from the gas-giant’s thermal radiation.

And did the world below possess more than vegetation? Might intelligence reside there?

Tally recalled Sue Harbeson Ando’s last words to him as he completed his most recent embodiment. “You ruined two perfectly good and valuable bodies by rushing into things. Be patient, E. Crimson Tally. Learn to take things slow and easy.”

Slow would be difficult. His orbit took him zipping across the surface of the planet at better than eight kilometers a second. But he could be patient, evaluating everything before he made his next move.

First, he would inspect his general environment in more detail. This system was well worthy of study. It was unlike any that he had ever seen or heard described. From the look of the general geometry, the gas-giant and its satellite world—the one around which he was orbiting—moved roughly in a plane about the parent star. Assuming that was the case, days and nights on the nearby planet would be of roughly equal length. There would be one oddity. Close to noon at the middle of the hemisphere facing the gas-giant, the light of the star would be cut off for a while, occulted by the body of the gas-giant. E.C. was approaching that position now. He stared down. The terrain here was hidden by a dense cloud layer, but it was the part that received continuous maximum heat from the gas-giant. Beneath the cloud you might expect to find a hot, damp world where plant and animal life luxuriated.

His own orbit had a short period. Already he was past the place where the gas-giant stood at zenith, and was rushing on. The day-night terminator lay far ahead, but the land beneath him was changing. The hazy green of vegetation took on a darker hue, interspersed with patches of white. Those grew in number and extent as he moved on, showing brilliantly in the reflected sunlight.

After a moment or two, Tally comprehended what he was seeing. The light from the distant sun provided ample illumination for vision, and it allowed photosynthesis to continue—provided that the temperature on the surface was high enough. But the star was so far away that it offered only a meager supply of heat. Without the warming influence of the hot gas-giant, the world below would be frozen, hundreds of degrees below zero. It was not so cold as that, but lifegiving warmth was provided only to the hemisphere that permanently faced the gas-giant. The other side faced always away from the source of heat, so any warmth had to be delivered to it by convective air currents between the two hemispheres.

Tally glanced behind him and confirmed his theories. The warm giant planet was sinking toward the horizon, while the surface beneath him was becoming a near-continuous ice sheet.