Their guide went stumping off toward the hostel, shouting something unintelligible.
“As the zossit flies, we’d have arrived two days ago,” muttered Chur Durwen.
“As the zossit flies on this planet, we wouldn’t. It has no zossits. It has no large flying creatures at all, only tiny ones.” Mitigan picked up his pack and settled it on one shoulder.
From inside the hostelry came the clangor of a gong, a disruptive sound, quickly smothered, like a cough at a concert.
“Food,” Mitigan said, turning toward the gray building.
From the forest behind them came a voice, an interrogative note, a questing, almost human cry.
Their driver appeared beside the door.
“Come in,” he called. “Now.”
“Such a hurry,” Chur Durwen muttered to himself. “The usual nonsense. Hurry up and wait.”
Mitigan had not moved. He stood staring into the trees. “I heard something … wings. Didn’t I just say there were no large birds?”
“Now!” insisted the guide peremptorily.
The man from Asenagi turned and trudged after his colleague, hearing behind him the flutter of wings coming purposefully through the trees.
Perdur Alas was a celestial anomaly, a planet on which life had stuck at the level of fish, bird, and shrub without any obvious cause for the lack of further diversification. Currently the planet held a limited variety of sea and land plants, enormous schools of a few varieties of fish, and sizable flocks of even fewer scaled bird forms that seemed to have evolved directly from air-breathing flying fish without intermediate land-dwelling stages. Biologically speaking, Perdur Alas was extremely simple. So far as homo-norming went, simplicity made the job easier, which explained the small size of the preliminary team recently evacuated from the planet.
When the pseudo-team of ex-shadows arrived, they were set down beside a new encampment, raw as a wound, just beginning to scab over with ferny and brushy growths. A thousand or so paces to the west a pallid sea swooshed gently onto a rocky shelf at the base of the cliffs. A little north of west the cliffs sagged onto a scanty crescent of graveled beach, the only beach a day’s journey in either direction. Farther north, ranks of east-west ridges cut the sky, the nearest jagged, the more distant sparsely freckled with prototrees. Bracken-like and furzelike growths covered everything not covered by blue or purple mosses, making a moorland that stretched unbroken to the eastern and southern horizons.
When the preliminary work was done, the birds and plants would be gone. The planet would have trees suitable for lumber and grasses suitable for pasture. It would have grains, edible root, leaf, and fruit crops, plus at least one draft and one dairy animal and perhaps—if the colonists were not Firsters—one or two animals from the category “small-furry-dociles” or pets. There was no need for insects or birds in Class-C homo-norm. All plants were designed to be wind-pollinated, and Perdur Alas was windy enough.
The arriving team knew this without needing to consider the implications, though bio-assay tech Snark surprised herself shortly after landing by thinking that a million things could be added to Perdur Alas before it had the same complexity as most untouched Class-A planets. Her next thought was one of recognition. This planet, in all its simplicity, was entirely familiar to her.
“Quarters this way,” announced team leader Kane, hoisting an equipment case onto his shoulder and stumping off toward the team housing at one side of the encampment.
The pseudo-team, though differing from the original team in physical appearance, was identical as to numbers, sex, and functions. Now most of them straggled after Kane without comment. Each of them had a role to play. Kane’s was to keep everyone else working. Snark’s was to compare current organisms with those included in Class-C category, using an automatic inventory device, to determine which species should be adapted or eliminated and what others should be introduced to make the world suitable for man. A few members of the team had been conditioned as tank-farm workers, assigned to grow and process food. Others were assigned as housekeeping staff, while others yet would provide maintenance duties and staff communications.
Each of them would occupy the same work space and sleep space as his or her counterpart on the former team. Each of them knew the routine for each day’s labors. They knew what the departed team had known about the work already done. In addition, they knew, and had had it proved to them on the way out, that they could not injure one another. As in Shadowland, if one formed any intention toward violence, one found oneself curled into the fetal position, thumb in mouth, just as formerly. They knew who they were. They also remembered what they had been, though that matter did not seem relevant and was often forgotten for quite lengthy periods. Each of them had almost invisible scars behind which implanted devices made records of everything seen, heard, smelled, tasted, felt. The devices did not intrude upon thought. Their thoughts, though rare, were their own.