Expendable - James Alan Gardner [29]
Sentients: No illuminated cities visible on night side; no industrial pollutants in atmosphere; no unnatural EM transmissions; no visible roads or constructions; no visible dams or canals
Initial Response
A summary of the initial probe data replaced the starscape on the main monitor. “It’s rather like Earth, isn’t it?” Prope observed. “Isn’t that, uhhh, surprising?”
“There are two ways to look at it,” Yarrun answered. “Given the vastness of the universe, it is highly probable that a close twin of Earth would exist somewhere; therefore, the mere existence of such a planet should not take us aback. On the other hand, the odds of such a twin turning up only a few thousand parsecs from the original planet…that is frankly unbelievable.”
“Which means?” Chee asked.
“What else?” Yarrun shrugged. “There’s something fishy going on.”
“I just hope the continents don’t look familiar,” I muttered.
Conjectures
A.Prope: Perhaps we’re really looking at Old Earth. Through some unknown phenomenon, we aren’t where we think we are in space; or at least we’re seeing into a completely different part of space.
Yarrun: The stars aren’t in the right places for the Sol system. And the other planets are all wrong.
Me: Besides, Earth would show plenty of signs of sentient habitation. Cities, highways, all those nuclear waste dumps…
B. Harque: Maybe the computer is malfunctioning.
Chee: [After banging three times on the console with his fist.] Has anything changed?
C. Prope: Perhaps this is just an illusion, and some unknown agency is tampering with our very minds.
Me: So what do we do about it?
Chee: [Closing eyes and holding fingers to temples.] I disbelieve, I disbelieve, I disbelieve. [Opening eyes again and looking at Harque] Shit.
The Globe
“I think we have enough to construct a map of the day side,” Yarrun said. He tapped a few keys and a globe appeared on the screen in front of us: north pole at the top of the view, south pole at the bottom. (By convention, all planets are assumed to rotate west to east; once you determine west and east, north and south fall out automatically.)
On the left of the display, two land masses were emerging from shadow at the terminator. One lay roughly in the northern hemisphere, one in the south. The positions of the continents reminded me of North and South America on Old Earth, but the coastlines were very different. For that, I was grateful.
The daylit part of the north continent formed a breast-shaped bulge jutting eastward into a crystal blue ocean. That sparkling blueness on the view screen was deceptive—the computer used color to represent water depth, not tranquility. On land, various colors represented types of terrain, splitting continents into patchworks of yellow desert, gray mountains, green forests. Every few seconds, a region of the map shimmered for a moment, as the colors were updated on the basis of more specific data. The effect always made planets look more cheerful than they actually were.
A narrow spine of mountains cupped the lower coast of the northern bulge, extending east into the water to form a tail of rocky islands and rounding northwest into the darkness of the night side. Inside that cup of mountains, the rest of the bulge appeared to be a grassy basin, broken by three linked lakes that emptied into a river flowing northeast.
The south continent had a concave coastline, gouged by a large bay slightly south of center. North of the bay, the land supported a tropical forest; south was a strip of hilly woodland along the ocean, but thinning to desert farther in. The lowest part of the coast offered jagged fjords, zigzagging down to the whiteness of polar snow.
“Designating those continents the western hemisphere,” Yarrun announced formally.
The eastern hemisphere had two continents too. Most of the northern continent had disappeared into the night side. The remainder was an egg-shaped protrusion