The port of the Richard P Feynman opened with a sigh, and the cool air of WhatAPlace wafted into Stoner’s head. She walked down the ship’s ramp and onto a belt of earth that had been scorched to a deep, black crispness by the Feynman’s landing jets, and then further out to where the grass grew undisturbed.
Flowers curled around her boots. The sunlight, the breeze made her uniform feel stiff and formal.
Behind a bush there was a child: dirty, bald, naked, and with a swollen belly …
“Oh, drink in that sun.”
Stoner, startled, turned. Dryden and Wald, her two crew-members, had followed her out of the ship, and now Dryden, the life scientist, short and plump, was turning her round face up to the sun. “Isn’t that great, after months of canned air?”
Stoner turned back to the bush. The child had gone; Stoner blinked, seeking to retrieve the afterimage.
Wald, the expedition’s physical sciences specialist, pulled his thatch of red hair away from his forehead. “You can feel the peacefulness seep into you. WhatAPlace … they named it well.”
Stoner turned around slowly, appraising the area. The ship sat like a metal egg in a landscape shaped like an upturned hand; the “palm” was furred by clumps of bushes (no trees, she noticed), while rock formations a little further away, gleaming white in the pale sunlight, encircled the ship like curled fingers. Stoner was surrounded by a jumble of shapes and colours; there was a feeling of newness, of freshness, as if the land had only recently been assembled.
