And finally, the single pairs, the most unexpectedly unsettling of the lot. Bipedalism is not a common trait on Planet Earth, and typically we associate it either with ourselves – and thus an unfounded indicator of intelligence – or birds, which are physically so unlike us in every other way that we often forget we both walk in roughly the same manner. But though birds are without arms, they still have four limbs. When you look at the skeletal wings of a bird, you can see the shoulders, the wrist, the phalanges. You understand that the template is the same as ours. Not so with the trio of bipedal creatures we found at the first Mirabilis landing site. They had legs, which attached to a stump of a torso, which in turn attached (without any approximation of a neck) to something akin to a head, except it had no orifices beyond a sucking tube. A thick fringe of hairy feelers was its only guide to the plants it absent-mindedly drained, bumbling clumsily from one feeding spot to the next in a manner that felt like a pointed insult toward everyone who had ever assumed ‘two legs’ means ‘smart’.

We had known there was life on Mirabilis. The atmospheric data gathered by OCA were indicative of virtually nothing else. We had not known said life would be anything like this. This was a jackpot, an offering so absurdly rich it almost seemed as if the planet was pulling a prank. Have you ever seen one of those dinosaur paintings from the 1800s, in which the artist crammed every known Jurassic species onto a single teeming riverbank? That was what lay before us, only the artist’s palette was robbed of green and blue, and every assumption of vertebrate evolution had been thrown out the window.

‘Camera!’ we each commanded, nearly in unison. Elena looked ravenous. Jack kept muttering ‘wow’ again and again, punctuated with reflexive swearing. Chikondi wept silently. But I can’t say what I felt in that moment, any more than I can properly call Spirasurculus a grass. As an astronaut, you know conceptually that you’re going to another world, that you’re going to see alien life. You know this, and yet there is nothing that can prepare you for it. It’s going to the zoo and seeing an animal you’ve never heard of. It’s seeing footage of a deep sea jelly whose body shape makes you feel as though you’re going mad. It’s the uncanny valley, pumped full of breath and blood. That first moment on Mirabilis rendered me a child – not joyous, like we’d been on Aecor with our glowing swimmers, but overwhelmed. A toddler surrounded by the knees and noise of adults, tasked with learning the entire world from scratch.

That said, the joy was quick to follow.

‘I’ve got the news downloaded, whenever you’re ready.’

If Chikondi registered what I’d said, he didn’t show it. His camera traps had been chugging along for a few hours, but he couldn’t wait. He was in the data lab, going frame by frame through his helmet recordings from landing – playing a little, pausing the video, drawing what he saw, repeat. It was a tedious way to review material. He didn’t care in the slightest. He was drawing in a frenzy, scribbling limbs and notes so furiously that his normally tidy handwriting was nearly illegible.

‘Hey. Chikondi,’ I said.

He looked up at last, surprised. He hadn’t even heard me walk up.

‘Want to watch the news?’

‘Oh. Um.’ Chikondi blinked, thrown off track. He thought for a moment, then pointed at the video monitor. ‘Can I—’

I nodded easily. ‘Yeah, sure. No rush. Do your thing.’

He threw himself back into it, drawing with gusto.

I went looking for the others. Elena was in the control room, tinkering with a digital thermometer. The entire table was filled with meteorological gear, lined up in neat rows.

‘Something wrong with it?’ I asked, ready to fetch a toolbox.

She didn’t look up, but she heard me. ‘No, no,’ she said. ‘Just making sure everything works for tomorrow.’

‘I already ran diagnostics on everything,’ I said.

‘I know,’ she said. ‘Just double-checking.’ She continued sorting.

I knew her well enough to not take this as an insult, but it needled me a bit all the same. ‘Do you want to watch the news?’

Elena needed no time to consider this. She shook her head. ‘I’ll watch it later,’ she said. She looked up at me and gave me a short smile – the sort of smile that says you’re not annoying me, and I appreciate you, but leave me alone so I can work. So I did.

It wasn’t hard to find Jack. I could hear him huffing and puffing across the corridor as he hit the exercise equipment hard.

‘Hey,’ he exhaled. His cheeks were flushing fire, and rivers ran down his temples. ‘This sucks in double-G.’ He grinned as he said the words. The challenge delighted him.

‘Looks it,’ I said. I watched him heave himself back and forth on the rowing machine, beads of sweat flinging from his freshly shorn scalp. ‘You do know we’ve got plenty of fieldwork ahead.’

‘Yeah.’ One rep.

‘And walking.’

‘Yeah.’ Another rep.

I paused, waiting for him to acknowledge that a normal work day would give him all the exercise he needed. He did not. I shrugged. ‘I’ve got the news downloaded.’

‘Okay,’ he said. Two reps. Three reps. Four.

‘Do you want to watch?’

Five. Six. Seven. Eight. He stopped, panting hard, and reached for his water bottle. ‘Nah,’ he said.

‘Just . . . not at all?’

‘Not right now, anyway,’ he said.

‘Why?’

He took a gulp of water and mopped his brow with his shirt. ‘I saw things today I’ve never imagined. Could never have imagined. Things were good, on Aecor, but this—’ There was an awed look in his eyes, a boy standing in a dream. ‘I mean, God.’ He laughed, words falling short.

‘I know,’ I said, and I did, I truly did. ‘But the news—’

‘Doesn’t matter,’ he said simply.

I frowned. ‘Yes, it does.’

‘Why?’ he asked. ‘It’s over a decade out of date. It doesn’t affect us, and there’s nothing we can do to change any of it. We know what our mission is. We know how to do our jobs. Why should we distract ourselves from that? Especially when the distraction sucks.’

‘But we— they—’ I disagreed with him, but I felt like I was standing on shaky ground. ‘The news is what’s happening to the people who sent us here. We should care about that.’

‘Of course we care. We wouldn’t be doing this job if we didn’t care. But our work is how we contribute. Listen, every time we watch the news, the air in here gets heavy for a few days. Or longer. It eats at us. Why are we letting something millions of kilometres away and fourteen years behind fuck up our ability to focus on the thing we were actually sent here to do?’ He finished his water. ‘If there’s something important, we’ll get a mission update. But the news – I mean, how does it help me to know that some fuckwit I’ve never heard of is leading a coup, or whatever? It doesn’t. So, that’s how we show we care – by doing a good job. We can catch up on world history anytime we want to. Because it is history by now. We don’t need to know every shred of political bullshit that’ll happen over the next decades in order to fit in once we get back. Nobody on Earth stays that up-and-up. Why do we have to?’