Down was inside me, a point halfway between navel and groin. The Chinese call that point the dantien, the center of the soul. I fell toward my center like rain.

The center of my soul. The center of my soul. If I conceived a child, this was where it would grow. When I died, this was where I would run.

Down was everywhere around me. I flew outward. I exploded into my body. My skin snapped taut like a sail catching a gust of wind. I felt blood surging through my brain. The world burned red outside my closed eyelids.

Down was the vector of my descent. My eyes flickered open.

I rolled with the impact of my landing. Grass lashed wet streaks across my faceplate. In that moment, I remembered how grass smelled on summer afternoons, when I was young and would live forever.

But I didn't smell the grass; I smelled only my own sweat. My tightsuit and I were a closed system.

Breathing the odors of my body, I stood up.

Down was the pull of gravity beneath my feet. Melaquin.

Melaquin Without Stories

Overhead, a cloudless blue sky surrounded a yellow sun. Around me, a grassy field danced with wildflowers. Black-eyed Susans. Daisies. He loves me, he loves me not.

A few paces to my left, Yarrun scrambled to his feet. Green grass stains were streaked across the white of his suit. He shrugged off his backpack and began to rummage through it.

I powered my throat transceiver to maximum strength. "Jacaranda, do you read?"

"Loud and clear, Explorer," Harque answered, with just the faintest tone of insolence.

"Christ, I love that ride!" Chee's voice said over the com-set.

I looked around. A few meters away, Chee lay spreadeagled face-down in the grass. He made no effort to get up, but his feet kicked enthusiastically like a gleeful child. Good — no damage to his spinal cord. "Jacaranda," I said over the radio, "the Drop was successful. Proceed to record."

"Roger. Recording."

Idly, I wondered if Harque was lying; but I had stopped caring. I would do my job, I would make my reports, and I would be professional to the very end.

Formally, I announced, "Explorer First Class Festina Ramos, TSS Jacaranda, reporting initial survey of Melaquin, AOR. 72061721, Inter-date 2452/9/23. Other party members: Explorer Second Class Yarrun Derigha and Admiral Chee. Any comments for the record, Admiral?"

"The High Council of Admirals can kiss my—"

"Thank you, Admiral. On a more immediate note, Melaquin appears to be an extremely Earthlike planet with local weather and flora similar to the temperate zone of New Earth… the Lake District of Novatario, I'd say. Thick grass growing calf- to knee-height. Wildflowers highly reminiscent of daisies and black-eyed Susans. About a hundred meters away, this meadow falls off into a ravine with deciduous trees on its side. And in the opposite direction, we have bluffs descending to a sizable freshwater lake.

"There is a good deal of insect activity apparent here: I can see several on the wildflowers around me. They are highly reminiscent of terrestrial bees." In fact, they were exactly like terrestrial bees, big fuzzy bumblebees in yellow and black… the kind we all ran from as children, even though adults told us not to make sudden moves. "I can also see three butterflies not too far away. Two are a greenish-white, wingspan about three centimeters; the other is highly reminiscent of a Monarch butterfly."

It was a Monarch butterfly. Orange and black, landing on a milkweed plant whose pods spilled creamy floating seeds.

"In short," I said aloud, "one's immediate impression of local flora and fauna is that they are visual duplicates of Earth species. Do you concur, Admiral Chee?"

"The High Council commits unnatural acts with poodles."

"Duly noted, Admiral. Thank you."

The Bumbler

"Bumbler operational," Yarrun said with exaggerated diction. (He was always self-conscious about having his voice recorded. A typical exploration report from the two of us consisted of a steady stream of blather from me, with infrequent one- or two-word interjections from Yarrun.)

The Bumbler — officially our "Portable Wide Spectrum Amplification and Analysis Datascope" but only called that by quartermasters — was a hand-held scanning device about the size and shape of a flat-topped coffee pot. It served two functions:

A. Its screen could be tuned to display any range of the electromagnetic spectrum in a visible form… handy if you wanted to check the neighborhood for the IR glow of warm-blooded fauna, or take an X-ray shot of some animal specimen's skeleton.

B. The machine was constantly analyzing incoming data for hints suggesting the approach of hostile lifeforms. The Bumbler broadcast an alarm if it detected anything moving toward us. It had saved my life at least twice, and I was grateful; I was not, however, overwhelmed with the Bumbler's acumen. It was a kindly little machine that meant well in its bumbling way, but it was not as bright as one might hope — it took so long to do a risk analysis that the alarm sometimes went off after the first attack.

Surveying

"Infrared scanning," Yarrun said, turning a careful circle with the Bumbler in front of him. "Cat-sized creature," he said, suddenly pointing off to my right; but almost immediately, he lowered his hand and muttered, "Went down a hole."

"Another rabbit?" Chee asked. He was sitting up now, working at the release catches of his helmet.

Yarrun didn't answer. He completed his sweep, then reported, "Negative warm-bloods now."

"Then we'll begin standard sampling," I told him. I reached into my own backpack. On top of everything else lay my stunner, and I slid it into my hip holster. In entertainment bubbles, donning a weapon is always a portentous affair; but that's because in entertainment bubbles, weapons have a more tangible chance of stopping whatever is trying to kill you. In my case, I was only moving the stunner out of my backpack because it lay in the way of the plastic bags we used to hold samples.

Yarrun traditionally took plant samples while I dug up packets of soil. I wasn't particularly interested in dirt, but I had sat through four soil analysis electives at the Academy because geology was one of Jelca's majors.

My own major was zoology. It meant that whenever we shot an animal, Yarrun made me decide what to do with the carcass.

"Ahhhh!" Chee sighed, inhaling deeply as he removed his helmet. The sight of him, naked to the planet's microbes, filled me with envy and anger… like the time when I was a teenager, and watched girls with normal faces go skinny-dipping as if it were the height of erotic sophistication. I knew it wasn't, and I knew it was.

"It smells wonderful out here!" Chee cried in delight.

"Could you please describe the smell, sir?"

"It smells real. Grass. Air that hasn't been through anyone else's lungs. Glorious."

"And you feel well?"

"Better than I have in months." He arched his back in a happy stretch. "Forget the damned samples, Ramos. Let's go for a walk."

"Begging the admiral's pardon," I replied, "but we are conducting a survey mission here."

"You're conducting an execution, Ramos. The survey is nothing but horseshit."

"Any information we gather may assist other parties who land here," I insisted. "No Explorer is an island."

"Don't give me that John Donne crap," Chee grumbled. "Do you know what he said about Shakespeare?" Turning his back on me, the admiral headed in the direction of the lake, taking ostentatiously deep breaths.

"Admiral," I called out, "please don't wander off. You don't understand how risky—"

"I understand fine! I'm just going to look at the water."