…how much better could Explorers do?

Each of us at the conference table had a vidscreen with access to all the files on Muta. My first action — and probably the first action of everyone else present — was to send my personal data agent tunneling through the files in search of "hot spots": juicy information it knew I would care about.

My agent was almost as old as me — software that had grown by my side, learning my likes and dislikes, developing algorithms to winnow fields of data down to the most meaningful grains of fact. The program had changed a great deal over the years… especially when I entered the Academy and was forced to pay attention to information I’d never cared about before. The software and I had both endured a radical reeducation; but we’d got through together, and now my agent could zip through the files with a skilled Explorer’s eye.

Ultimately, of course, I’d have to read everything in detail myself — nobody who understands computers trusts them completely. But I could rely on my software servant to provide me with a good first overview, and to highlight key words or phrases I’d found important in the past. Considering how little time we had before reaching Muta, such shortcuts were valuable.

So, an overview report, courtesy of my agent. The Unity had approached Muta with maximum caution. A single survey team had landed and stayed in one place for several months, carefully monitored by an orbiting luna-ship. Then another team put down on the other side of the planet, in a completely different type of ecosystem. Three more teams set up camp a month later, again in different terrains. All were watched closely for five full years, always with at least one luna-ship ready to evacuate everyone at the first sign of trouble. Finally, another four teams were assigned to "points of interest" from earlier observations, with another full year of monitoring. Only then did the last luna-ship depart, leaving the Mutan teams to continue gathering information. If all went well, the Unity had planned to start full colonization in another ten years.

Not bad, I thought. More patience and caution than the Technocracy would have shown. Of course, the Unity knew something had scared off or killed the Greenstriders. Moving in too many people too quickly was an unacceptable risk. The longer they held off on full settlement, the more chance the survey teams would find whatever threat lurked on Muta.

But so far, the teams had turned up nothing… or at least nothing my data agent noticed. The agent’s report had a few lines at the bottom summarizing geological, hydrological, meteorological, and other findings, but they simply confirmed what I’d already been told — Muta was a first-rate planet for colonization. It was highly Earth-like, but too young to have evolved intelligent life. More precisely, it had reached its mid-Triassic period, with abundant land vertebrates and lots of ferns. Flowering plants weren’t due to arrive for another fifty million years; but the Greenstriders had thrown everything off schedule by bringing in their favorite crops, a supply of pollinating insects, and various other lifeforms they liked to have around. (Pets. Farm animals. Ornamental shrubs. The Greenstriders always surrounded themselves with the comforts of home, and to hell with the indigenous ecology.)

I clicked my vidscreen’s controls and proceeded to the next section of the agent’s report: key words and phrases. The top word on the list was naturally "death" — always an Explorer’s number one concern. But the word only appeared in innocuous contexts ("Average death rates of microorganisms…" "Protomammals dissected after death…") so I scanned down the other entries for anything noteworthy. Some of the words were simple (danger, threat, risk), while others were technical terms I’d never heard of till I reached third-year planetology. None of the references rang any warning bells… until I reached a phrase that always caught an Explorer’s attention: Capsicillium croceum.

It was a species of tree noted chiefly for fruit shaped like small yellow chili peppers. Definitely not native to Muta — it was too biologically sophisticated compared to Muta’s fernlike flora, and besides, Capsicillium croceum had been recorded on more than ninety other planets. In fact, there’d been plenty of these "minichili" trees on my homeworld, Anicca…

I found myself remembering a morning when I was twelve: the first clear day after months of monsoon rains, and everyone wanted out into the sunshine. Even my mother deigned to leave the house; by that time, I did most of the shopping so Mother didn’t have to be seen by others with her bare thanaka-free face, but she could still bear a little public scrutiny under congenial circumstances. I wanted to go to the market where we might see pretty things… including a certain boy who’d watched most keenly when I danced at a recent street masque. But Mother wanted to visit a temple — and after her usual maddening hour of vacillation, she chose the Ghost Fountain Pagoda on the edge of town. (She thought it would be less crowded than places in the city center. I told her every temple would be crowded in such lovely weather, probably more crowded than the market, and couldn’t we go shopping instead? But with the sky so clear and the temperature perfect, I was in too good a mood to start a major fight. Besides, I could prowl the market later by myself, once my mother got her fill of fresh air.)

Like most temples on Anicca, the Ghost Fountain Pagoda was ecumenical — open to Buddhists of every denomination, and anyone else who might drop by. We therefore shared the walkways with saffron-robed Theravada monks and nuns, their heads shaved and their begging bowls full of donations from sun-happy passersby… with hawkers selling favorite Mahayana icons — prints and holos and statuettes of the saintly Bodhisattvas who symbolize various virtues… with Vajrayana mystics engaged in their perennial rituals, spinning prayer wheels, banging drums, chalking impromptu mandalas on the pavement… and with those of my own school, Tarayana, "the starry vehicle," not monastic, populist, or mystic, but more oriented toward psychology. We Tarayana adherents were respectful but dubious about showy religious practices, and therefore kept a restrained distance from the temple’s more exuberant devotees. My mother (convinced as always that she was somehow exceptional, a jewel apart from the common crowd) disdained the "superstitious breast-beating and mumbo jumbo" of the older sects in favor of the "pure scientific spirituality" of our own. Sometimes I secretly felt the same, wondering what the no-nonsense Buddha would have thought of PARINIRVANA BRAND INCENSE-STICKS™ or the man and woman practicing Neo-Tantric sex in the middle of an open sunny glade; but I refused to admit I agreed with my mother on anything. I put money into every begging bowl we passed and bought a bag of pricey red sand to sprinkle ostentatiously on patches of gravel I pretended were especially holy.

The pagoda lay in the middle of the Arboretum of Heroes: a park with concentric rings of trees and statues. The statues (bronze, stone, plastic, ceramic) depicted noble figures from myth or history — great warriors, enlightened sages, and tragic martyrs. Many individuals had been all three; there’s nothing dearer to my people’s hearts than an admired soldier who refuses to break some minor Buddhist precept and, therefore, dies horribly. The more pain and mutilation, the better. In Eastern legends, death is always part of the story. Even if a hero dies peacefully at a ripe old age, you have to include that death as part of the hero’s tale. Many Western champions just vanish into the sunset or "live happily ever after," as if death passes them by… but in the stories I heard growing up, the time and manner of a hero’s death were never glossed over. Often, they were the whole point.