The transcript said Marak and his party had gotten under way a little late in the day, for them. Marak, when he was out in the land, believed that a day began at whatever time the terminator swung near enough to be a hint on the horizon—that kind of late.Which meant Marak had been up and moving for, oh, about five or six planetary hours by now, without saying much at all. None of it was unusual, especially not in Marak’s scale.

Auguste’s transcript ended with the note: Small discussion relative to landmarks (ref 288) and plant growth, which Marak declares to be common graze and false pearl plant, no samples taken.

Note: the release of insect life (see my note: ref 122) has not shown up here, but it must exist nearby, since windblown seed from the graze plant has reached this point (ref 1587)…

God. Typical Auguste, whose style crowded more words onto a thought than he personally liked, but Auguste did have a clear vision of the ecology, was dead-on accurate on his references, and usually had intelligent suggestions and comments to inject.

Windblown, Auguste reminded them, in answer to his own naive suggestion of his last watch. Windblown, which he just hadn’t thought of. Things on the station didn’t ordinarily pick up and travel—at least on the macroscopic level. But a field of graze plant was not going to reproduce if insects didn’t find it, and it couldn’t be here if insects hadn’t had something to do with it—or—of course—the wind. The wind and the insects. A textbook case of life constantly paving the way for itself. Procyon felt his face flush, reading Auguste’s untargeted comment on his suggestion yesterday, that he thought the unsupported graze plant must be an earlier seeding, when it turned out—trust Auguste to have his references, and a mind like an encyclopedia—that no one had visited this area in ages.

Thus proving Auguste’s theory. And proving the newest member of the observation team wasn’t clever enough to make observations—yet.

Survival on Marak’s World was such a complex, interwoven thing, so many things to think of, so foreign to his way of thinking. A plant died without bugs, and the bugs needed the plants to get food out of the elements. The one needed the other to reproduce, and the other needed the one to live at all. The wind carried the seeds andthe bugs, and if bugs and seeds got in the wrong order, the bugs were certainly worse off, not being able to live at all. Penalty of being higher up the food chain.

He absorbed the data. Beyond the data, he tried to imagine what it was liketo stand on the planet surface, like Marak, feeling an earthly wind on his face, experiencing a rush of air that wasn’t a fan-driven draft from an open vent, but rather the product of heatingand cooling and the rotation of a planet. He tried to adjust his lifelong thinking—admittedly only twenty years’ worth—in terms of things that moved on the wind as well as by gravity and a thousand other interrelated causes that a station-dweller might not think of. He wondered what it was to watch the stars go out because the world was turning toward the sun, and he imagined what it felt like to see that first suspicion of dawn come over the edge of a convex horizon.

He loved the thought. He swore he’d volunteer to go down without thinking twice, if they ever had to replace Ian or Luz, as, who knew? couldhappen—if Ian or Luz fell off a cliff. He was sure he could adapt to living forever. He’d like to live forever, no matter the documented downside of that gift and the questions about sanity that consoled those of them that lived and died in normal span, up here on the station. He was sure he could adapt to immortality quite nicely. He’d ride the open land for years, just getting acquainted with the world. Of course Marak would teach him. He’d find the new seedings they’d let loose on a ravaged planet. He’d see lightning from underneath, and listen to thunder with his own ears, and watch the spread of species by means space-based humans just didn’t ordinarily think about, and he’d spend the first hundred years just riding around watching things, before he even got down to taking notes.

Daydreams, those were. No station-dweller was immortal, and no one went down to the planet. No one ever went down, that was the very point, the reason Concord was here in the first place, staving off war and ondatcraziness. The world below, Marak’s World, was a permanent sealed laboratory, and three governments’ armed forces saw that it stayed sealed, no matter what happened elsewhere, no matter what governments did, no matter what cataclysms came and went. Concord swung around Marak’s World, and, like Marak’s World, Concord, too, changed very, very little from what remotest ancestors had known.

Planets? There were worlds in Outsider Space you could land on and live on if you wanted to stay on them forever, but Procyon had no interest in those: they were just as isolate as Marak’s World, but the stations above them were, from all he knew, strange, secretive, and focused on a trade in oddments. The people down onthose carefully guarded worlds might have been human once, but the one culture struggled with agriculture that wouldn’t cooperate, mines that collapsed, and native life that wasn’t amenable to their presence, while another was nomadic and barely surviving the violent winters, not to mention the ones where humans hadn’t survived at all. No, no interest in being assigned to any of those stations, not in this Concord-born researcher.

This world—Marak’s World, that had been the focus of inter-species controversy, this technology-ravaged world—was the most human of all the colonized planets. It was self-ruling, managing its own environment through all the changes, and its changes were progressive, building up, not just churning away at the edge of catastrophe. Granted, one human lifetime wouldn’t see it: but Marak’s World was improving constantly from the days of the Hammerfall—was hauling itself up out of the years of destruction and making itself more than viable, while ondatand humans watched. It was a pace of change that, so certain authorities believed, had encouraged ondatto become friendlier. The ondat-human relationship did change, however slowly, and the ondatcommunicated, these days, on the third station to bear the name Concord.

A long, long watch. Teams did archaeology over at Mission One station, and brought strange things to the museum, oddments that few people could even figure out, and some of them were stranger still, leavings of the ondat,that today’s ondatscarcely recognized. Stations had been orbiting Marak’s World, yes, that long, since the Hammerfall, and the world below them had many, many centuries yet to go before anyone remotely contemplated unraveling the quarantine or changing the treaties that depended on it.

But change did happen. And for a watcher who’d only just begun on his job, there was hope that before he left it, he might see a few more klicks of grassland grow, and a settlement or two spring up.

Meanwhile he had constant pictures from the camera sites around the world: the ceiling-high half ring of monitors that surrounded him gave him a constantly shifting view, a few from inside the refuge, another out on the volcanic islands, where smoke generally obscured the view. One observation station sat highabove the seacoast, where waves broke against jagged rock, and yet another up on the high plateau, where sand still flowed off the edges. He could shift any one of these cameras to the transparent view in his contact lenses, making one of them his momentary, if dizzying reality. He did it, when storms swept in. He loved the lightning, particularly, and the rain.

0955h. He was about to become recording angel, that particular presence in the heavens that watched over Marak, recorded his information—and advised him in case the wisest man on earth ever needed advice from orbit.