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were meant for this kind of work, it could run the whole comparison by itself while we slept even without the AI, but it was just meant to follow beacons to orbits and landings and take sights only when it knew pretty well what it was looking for. And when we were looking for a nearby star, well, we were looking at the few very bright stars in the sky. Planets might be pretty dim stars, especially depending on what angle we’re viewing them at.”
    “Can you program the omnis to do the comparison?” Whips asked.
    Caroline hesitated, then nodded. “I have a comparison program from my studies, actually. It can be transferred. But . . .”
    “But . . . ?” Laura Kimei prompted.
    “But . . . well, without any benchmarks it’s going to be really hard to know what we’re looking at. Oh, you can tell the characteristic banding on a gas giant pretty easy, but how do you know if you’re seeing one that’s closer in or farther away? We don’t even know which direction we are going yet.”
    “Never mind that,” Laura said firmly. “First let’s find planets. By the time we find some, I’m sure Sakura will have gotten enough data to tell us how fast we’re moving with respect to our star and we can really start nailing things down then, right?”
    “Yes, Mom,” Caroline said after another hesitation.
    They all acquired the running comparator program a few moments later. “I’ve picked out some bright stars as landmarks,” Sakura said. “ LS-5 will use those to keep our orientation the same, so each of us has our own camera to focus on and the view won’t shift.”
    Maybe a silly question, Whips sent to Sakura, but what if you’ve picked a planet as one of your landmarks?
    Oh, come on , Whips, don’t you think I thought of that? The transmitted voice came with a grin-symbol, so he knew she wasn’t really annoyed. I put full magnification on each one to make sure it didn’t change size and got a partial spectrum off each using Melody’s program; they’re emitters, not reflecting the local sun, so yeah, they’re all stars.
    Good. He hesitated, then, You know the odds are . . . not good?
    Yeah , she sent back after a few moments. One out of ten chance there’s a decent candidate, and then there’s the question of the biosphere. She looked at her father, who had subtle frown lines on his normally cheerful face.
    He knows—better than anyone else—what those odds are.
    They’re great odds . . . if you’re not worried that your life’s being bet on them, Sakura sent back.
    That much was true, he had to concede. Out of all of the extrasolar planets found to harbor significant life, one-half had a biosphere that was, astonishingly, compatible with Earthly (and Europan) lifeforms. Why this was true was a source of spirited, not to say flamingly acrimonious, debate between biologists and allied professions. Some held that it was simply a matter of chemistry. There were only so many easily assembled building blocks of self-replicating chemistry, and the ones that Earth and Europa were based on were some of the most easily synthesized, and so it was just likely that similar lifeforms would evolve. Others had championed the old idea of Arrhenius’ “panspermia,” that life had evolved somewhere else a long time ago and been spread through the universe by light pressure or similar phenomena. But so far no one had found an unambiguous example of such spaceborne spores.
    No matter the actual source, it was true that half the lifebearing planets found had compatible biospheres—although “compatible” did not in any way guarantee it was safe, or even easily digestible. The other half . . . were not compatible and generally lethal. And vice versa, of course—an animal of those biospheres eating me would likely die in agony .
    So . . . one chance in twenty, then. We beat odds like that all the time in those card games.
    Sure, agreed Sakura, darkly. But if we lose this game we won’t be starting another.
    Little