The girl said something in a language other than Portuguese. Valya recognized it: German. “About what?”

Camilla’s eyes were bright, but vacant…much like those of eighty percent of the teenagers Valya had seen in the past generation, all linked to Slates and earbuds and even experimental direct-neural taps.

She was distracted and unable to respond.

By whom? she wondered. Or what?

“Let’s go back to the others,” she said.

Without a word, Camilla got to her feet and began walking, and never looked back or sideways.

Valya wanted to run.

ARRIVAL DAY: MAKALI

“Makali girl, when did you eat last?”

Vikram Nayar’s voice jarred Makali like a slap. She was sitting against the wall of the Temple—or, as she persisted in thinking of it, part of an alien structure on an alien world!—writing in her notebook. Nayar was squatting, tailorlike, a few meters away. There was no one else around. The deadened air of the Keanu habitat made it seem as if she and Nayar were the only humans within kilometers.

“I don’t know,” she said. In the weeks she had worked with the Brahma mission director, she had grown to appreciate his fatherly side. She would have appreciated it slightly more if she’d believed his attentions to her were entirely fatherly. “Since the shooting.”

Nayar grunted at the reminder. Although famously ill-tempered—Makali had not yet enjoyed the full force of the man’s wrath, but she had seen it descend on any number of young and not-so-young men in the control center—he claimed to be bothered by violence. He claimed Gandhi as his model. Well, as Makali’s father used to say, “We all need our ideals, no matter how short of them we fall.”

“There isn’t much food left.”

She slid her Moleskine back into her purse and stood up. “Then why tell me to eat?”

“You need your strength. We all do.”

“Humans can function on far less food than they know. I believe Gandhi proved that.”

She knew she was provoking Nayar—knew also that a man his age might take that as flirtation, which meant that she ought rightly to share the blame for his attentions.

But she couldn’t help it. Fighting back—all the while knowing that Nayar wasn’t likely to explode at her as he would with a male subordinate—gave Makali a sense of power, which was a rare and precious thing for an Austro-Indian woman in India.

And all Nayar could do was grunt.

“How long have you been sitting there?”

“A minute, no more.” His face told her he was underestimating, that he had likely sat there for some time. “What are you writing so furiously?”

“Observations, of course.” She had no need to lie about it. “I’m an exoterrestrial specialist in an exoterrestrial environment. Every breath is an observation.”

“Or, rather, an interaction—and possible contamination.” He smiled. He was reverting to fatherly, possibly even professorial mode.

“I’ve been forced to accept the contamination,” she said. And she wasn’t lying about that, either. For years exoterrestrial specialists had fretted about the possible damage alien cultures could inflict on each other, from cultural and religious right down to the biological. Astronauts who had accomplished the first few lunar landings fifty years back had been forced to endure two weeks of isolation upon returning to Earth, just in case they might be carrying virulent, deadly lunar organisms.

From the airless, sun-blasted, billion-years-dead Moon.

By those standards, the collision of humans with Keanu was so appallingly rich and uncontrolled that Makali was unable to study the matter. It was like obsessing about a potential scratch on your finger only to have your head chopped off. Air, water, the touch of Keanu soil—she had been exposed to all of it.

And now, as Nayar was reminding her, she needed to consume some of what grew here.

“I must confess, I was always bemused by the way you took notes.” Makali preferred pens and pencils and expensive, pocket-sized Moleskine notebooks to even the most capable Slates and tablets. It wasn’t a political decision, though she was proud of the green values of her method, but a practical one.

She had found that she remembered thoughts and observations if they were tactile…if she physically wrote words or drew images. Even the act of typing was insufficient to allow her to capture her discoveries—data flowed into her eyes and brain, and, apparently, right out of her fingers.

Of course, she owned so many Moleskines that she could not put a number on it. (“Sorry, Cedric!”)

But thanks to her notebook and pencil, she was able to continue making her observations, about the weather, the light—and what was wrong with the light? Shouldn’t there be a night and a day?—the smells, the soil, the dimensions of the habitat, the architecture…

The Temple structure fascinated her, of course. Aside from the fact that Keanu itself was a structure, the oddly proportioned ziggurat was the first artifact she had ever been able to study. And she had been busy sketching the walls, speculating on what kind of material they were made of, when Nayar found her.

She was amazed to find that, in addition to studying this alien structure, she was also interacting with it…treating it as just another building to walk around. Makali wasn’t alone in this; there were dozens of humans lingering around the base of the Temple, some sitting, others collapsed in sleep, a few arguing, one elderly Indian man staring into a far distance only he could see—

And several people devouring fruits and other vaguely edible-looking objects.

Nayar approached a young man who seemed to have taken charge of the distribution. “Xavier,” he said. “Makali here hasn’t eaten.”

Xavier turned toward her…and favored her with a look she had not seen in many days and had never expected to see in this world: Makali was ethnic Hindu, but that was where her links to the subcontinent ended. She had been raised in Australia, had surfed and done martial arts, and was about as far from the bindi-wearing stereotype as a woman could get. She was wearing a loose shirt and khakis, but they still showed off a figure one of her girlfriends had described as “lean but oh so womanly.”

Here, on an alien world, after two days of insane travel in an alien bubble craft, Xavier reacted to Makali as a pretty young woman. She didn’t realize that she needed that affirmation, and perhaps she truly didn’t back on Earth, where she had tended to be too appreciative at times.

But she rather liked it now.

Not that it helped her get fed. “Sorry, that’s all there is.” Makali tried to place the young man’s accent; growing up in Australia, but having lived in the United States, England, and India, she had grown sensitive to the many voices of English. This was definitely Cajun—“that” was actually “dat”—but with some other flavoring.

Nayar took her part. “Nothing! How could you let that happen? Aren’t you keeping track? Are you certain everyone has eaten? Have you taken roll?”

One of Nayar’s Indian engineers would have shrunk visibly from this assault, but the American teenager just looked more sullen and dug in.

“It’s all right,” she said to Nayar, reassuring him by putting a hand on his arm, a trick that never failed. “We got the food from those trees there,” she said to Xavier.

He pointed down-habitat, toward the wall the Temple entrance faced. “I’ll just pick something for myself.”

“I can’t allow that,” Nayar said. “It could be incredibly dangerous.”

“I rather doubt that,” she said. “We’ve seen no signs of physical danger at all. This habitat was clearly designed for humans.”

“Please don’t put your theory to a field test.”

“You’re not going to wrestle me to the ground, are you?”

Even the mild suggestion of physical contact made Nayar uncomfortable. He merely shrugged, then gestured as if to say, What’s a fatherlike figure to do? and stepped aside.