The Memphis moved back out into daylight. Over the continents and several chains of islands.

Hutch trained the telescopes on the ground and Bill put the results on-screen. Mostly, it was mountain and forest. Jungle near the equator. Broad plains in the north of both continents. Herds of animals on the flatlands, and lone beasts near the rivers.

“There,” said Alyx.

Structures! It was hard to make out the details. They seemed to coexist with prairies and forests, half-hidden by the landscape, rather than rising over it.

“Full mag, Bill,” Hutch said.

A harbor city appeared on-screen, unlike anything she had seen before. It appeared fragile, a place of light and crystal, a cluster of chess pieces, brilliant in the sunlight. Hutch noticed that no roads connected them. And no ships drifted in the harbor.

There were no aircraft, no sign of ground transportation. This society, whatever it was, did not seem to have access to power. And with that realization, she understood they had done nothing more than arrive at another relay point.

LIKE THE STRUCTURES that rose from them, the forests had a delicate appearance. No counterpart of the great northern oak was going to be found here, or of Nok’s ikalas, or of the iron-hard kormors of Algol III. Rather, these seemed to be the kind of woodlands Japanese artists might have designed, subtle, precise, fragile, suggestive of a spiritual dimension.

Here was a maple green palace straddling a ridge of hills, and there a pair of emery-colored buildings shaped like turtle shells. The imagers picked out a cliff dwelling, a group of balconies and windows carved in the living rock, looking out of the face of a precipice. And a series of gleaming glass mushrooms, lining both banks of a river.

They were curious structures. There seemed to be no means of ingress to the cliff city unless you’d brought your climbing gear. And no bridges crossed the river, connecting the buildings on either side.

They saw a tower rising out of the symmetry of vines and branches.

They weren’t sure at first. It might have been merely an odd grouping of trees or limbs, a natural cage of sorts, but it would have been a very large cage. They studied it. Bill extracted it from its surroundings, tried to strip the forest away. But it was anchored in the vegetation and you could not remove it any more than you could remove a cave from the side of a mountain. Bill turned it about, displayed it from every angle.

Here was a roof, and there a set of supports. It almost seemed to be constructed of branches and vines, wild in themselves, yet part of an overall design.

As Hutch watched, a large bird appeared in an alcove, spread enormous wings, and launched itself like a great swan into the sky.

“Bill,” she said.

The AI knew what she wanted. He magnified the image.

The swan wore clothing! A loose-fitting tunic was draped across near-human shoulders. It had limbs that might have been arms and legs. And it had a face. Its skin was light, and golden hair, or feathers, tumbled down its back. The wings were patterned in white and gold, and as they watched the creature soared to another level of another structure, alighted gracefully, and stepped out of view.

Alyx was first to make the obvious observation. “It looked like an angel,” she said.

A pair of the creatures appeared, and rose from the trees. They swirled gracefully around each other in an aerial dance with a vaguely sexual flavor.

“We’ve come to Paradise,” said Herman.

They were all gawking at the images and somebody said how by God it was the most beautiful place he’d ever seen and who would have believed it.

“How soon can we be ready to go down?” George asked.

Hutch hadn’t expected that such a moment would arrive, and she was caught off guard. She hadn’t considered what might happen if they actually found a set of aliens. It all seemed so preposterous.

“George,” she said, “let’s go up on the bridge for a minute.”

He frowned, and she knew he wanted no cautious advice, but he followed along. The others turned to watch, and Herman said, “Don’t be hard on him, Hutch. He means well.”

They all laughed.

“It’s not a good idea,” she said when they were alone.

“Why not?”

“We don’t know anything about these creatures. You don’t want to go barging in down there.”

“Hutch.” His voice suggested she needed to calm down. “This is why we came. Eleven people died to put us here. And you want me to, what, wave and go home?”

“George,” she said, “for all you know they could be headhunters.”

“Hutch,” he said soothingly, “they’re angels.”

“We don’t know what they are. That’s my point.”

“And we never will know until we go down and say hello.”

“George—”

“Look, Hutch, I hate to put it this way, but you’re one of the more negative people I know. Have a little faith in us.”

“You could get killed,” she said.

“We’re willing to take our chances.” They hadn’t made the bridge. They had in fact come to a stop outside the holotank. But they were alone so it didn’t matter. “Hutch, listen. We’re all doing something we’ve dreamed about for a lifetime. If we sit around up here and look at the pictures, and call somebody else in, it’s going to be like—.”

“—You backed off at the critical moment.”

“That’s right. That’s exactly right.” He pressed his fingers against his temples, massaged them, but never took his eyes from her. “I’m glad you understand.”

“I hope you understand that anyone who goes down there is putting his life on the line.”

He nodded. “Do you know what we’ve been doing all our lives? Making money. And that’s about it. Alyx, she’s been running glorified strip shows. Nick does funerals. Pete, of course, did Universe. Herman’s not that well-off, but it’s what his life is about. Every day he goes to a job he doesn’t like very much. Just to pay the bills. Ask him what he’s most afraid of. You know what he’ll tell you? You know what he told me once?”

Hutch waited.

“That he’d get to the end of his life and discover he hadn’t been anywhere.” His eyes bored into her. “Tor’s the exception. He was born into money. You know why he was at Outpost? Because he wants his work to be something more than wall hangings for rich people.”

Hutch thought she knew why Tor was out on that remote moon, and she didn’t believe it had much to do with wall hangings. But she let it go. “George,” she said, “you’re taking a terrible chance if you go down there. Don’t do it.”

“Captain,” he said, “I own the Memphis. I can order what I want. But I don’t want to do that. I’d like it very much if you tried to understand what this means to us. To all of us. Even if we were to lose somebody.” He shrugged. “Talk to anybody back there, and you’ll hear that this is why we came. And it’s all we really care about.”

She took a long moment, looked down the empty passageway. “The others feel the same way?”

“Yes.”

“Even Pete?”

“Especially Pete.”

She nodded. “What do you want from me?”

“Your permission.”

“You said it yourself. You don’t need it.”

“I want it anyhow.”

She took a long deep breath. “Damn you, George,” she said, “I won’t give it. The landing is too dangerous. Leave it to the professionals.”

He looked at her, disappointed. “I assume you’ll remain here.”

“No,” she said. “You need somebody riding shotgun.”

“Okay,” he said.

“I wish we had a shotgun.”

THERE WAS NO legitimate way she could stop them. If she refused to pilot the lander, they could have Bill take them down. She could direct Bill to refuse instructions from them, but George was the owner, and she really could not legally do that. Hell, maybe they were right. Maybe she was being overprotective. They were, after all, adults. If they wanted to be front and center when history was made, who was she to stand in the way?