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thought the views from orbit had prepared them, the pageant of detail unfolding as the lander descended toward the surface awed Kyal and left even Yorim speechless. Despite all the images they had seen, to fully grasp the extent of Earth's oceans, you had to actually see one down there, through an atmosphere as clear as crystal, stretching all the way to the rim of a quarter of a planet and beyond. As the landscapes of colored daubery rose, expanded, and resolved into plains, valleys, rifts, and snow-topped mountains of stupefying dimensions, the age of the planet became visible too. They could sense the aeons of history written into every fold, river channel, and crumbling ridgeline taking shape among the bastions of ancient rock.

    "It makes home look a bit like a factory slag dump," Yorim offered finally.

    Rhombus, by now a small if cluttered and somewhat inelegant town, had grown from one of the earliest surface bases. The most geographically widespread Terran language, de facto standard for business and most other international dealings, and hence the one that Venusian linguists were concentrating on, had been that known as English. It took its name from the dominant of a diverse collection of squabbling tribes who inhabited a group of islands off the northwest of the main planetary land mass, where it had emerged as an impossibly irrational amalgam of various ancestral languages brought by successive waves of foreign invaders, all of whom added to and further complicated the makeup of the final population. Untangling the history was still a bewilderment to Venusian scholars, but it appeared that the English had inherited their various contributors' proclivities for conquest as well as their languages, for they went on to establish an empire of their own which for a short time girdled the entire world. Either the language itself somehow instilled a tendency toward aggression—or perhaps was an expression of it—or there was some peculiar genetic connection between the two. One of the principal regions colonized by the English—after invasion by a number of rival groups and virtual extermination of the natives—was the northern part of the double-continent Americas across the ocean to west. Having adopted the language, the Americans then became the major world power and proceeded in turn to begin attacking and invading everybody else.

    Rhombus was situated in what had been known as Iran, part of an area called the Middle East, which the first Venusian explorers had selected for a base on account of its central position in the main Afro-Euro-Asian land mass. The initial consideration was proximity to a wide range of geology and climates. However, this was followed by rapid expansion to accommodate just about every line of research when the region was recognized as having been where many of the major Terran cultures and racial divisions met. Perhaps not coincidentally, it had also been the focus of the Central Asian War, which had been one of last great conflicts to be fought before the Terrans died out.

    The town derived its name from the shape of the main building of the original base of fifteen years previously, still discernible among the sprawl of launch and transportation installations that formed the outskirts on the east side. That was also where most of the scientific complexes were concentrated, having grown from the first field cabins and laboratory shacks. Subsequent development became more orderly as it spread westward and now constituted the central district, with residential precincts, services, amenities, and supporting industries that had quickly come into existence to ease the burden on the supply ships from Venus. On the western periphery was an animal and plant breeding station, where attempts were being made to re-domesticate what were thought to be the descendants of former artificial Terran strains that had reverted to wild.

    A white, dust-covered bus brought Kyal, Yorim, and a batch of other