Landers await us there, sleek shadows ghostly gray. Our lines move toward the chrome-silver gate in the translucent white bulkhead. There is no experience like it, except for coming awake and meeting in the flesh.
Long, lazy times of instruction and play and exploration shot through with intense training, keeping our muscles fit. She is a master of Ship's biology-myself, training, and culture. Making up, we realized we were incapable of being angry with each other for long. We played and learned together in the Dreamtime and resolved our earliest disputes. She is nearby, and I find myself strangely embarrassed to meet in person for the first time, because I have known her for all the sleepy ages. Soon we will choose new names: land names, sea names, air names, poetically spun from the old. We make awful, funny faces, like clowns, to smooth and relax the muscles of our joy. We form teams, holding hands in waving, weightless lines in the blister, calling to each other using our Dreamtime names and smiling until our cheeks sting. I don't remember the name we've chosen, it's on the tip of my tongue-not that it matters. They have analyzed and returned with the facts. Planters and seedships have descended before we came awake. Kinetic, no longer pent up or potential… The long centuries are over. We are eager to meet children as yet unconceived-eager to hurry them along so they can share this beauty with proud parents. We-dozens of us, so many gathering in the observation blister, finally bathing in real light! There is sweet joy in voices from real lungs and tongues and lips-and such language! Ship language and Dreamtime-speak all musically mixed. We will explore that other promise once we are established here. There are two moons, one close in, the second much farther out and large enough for icy mountains under a thin atmosphere.
A long limb of dawn in the east-how lovely! Our world turns wisely widdershins-the best of luck. All the springs of my youth flow toward this new Earth. Like a hovering angel, I look down upon the dazzling surface and yearn. Rolling beneath, she slips aside her creamy white veil to reveal the sensuous richness of blue water, brown and tan prairies, yellow desert, a wrinkled youth of gray mountains hemmed by forest so green it is almost black-and the brilliant emerald sward of spring pastures. Our chosen is perfect-more than we could have hoped for.
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