Chapter 6: Nubis Receives Its Investigators with Appropriate Ceremony and Hidden Desperation

The descent through Nubis's atmosphere was not what Owan had expected, though he could not have said, precisely, what he had expected instead.

He had read the standard Concordance geographic entry during the transit—oceanic world, tidal governance, equatorial archipelago chain, the usual inventory of facts assembled to give a place the appearance of being fully known—and the entry had done its work so well that he found himself, as their shuttle broke through the cloud layer, genuinely surprised by what lay below. Not by the water, which the entry had mentioned, but by the quality of it: the way it received the light without quite returning it, the way it lay against the horizon in a manner that suggested not a surface but a threshold, a membrane between the atmosphere above and something beneath that the shuttle's angle of approach was not yet sufficient to illuminate.

He watched it for a long time without speaking.