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Corpachian, Strontian—and one or two bold philosophers had just begun to postulate a theory of evolution when the last starship from Earth had arrived with the disheartening news that while the scientists were in principle right, the planet they were standing on had indeed undergone a succession of creations and catastrophes and was in all likelihood the bodged work of gods.
    After forgetting time for a while, Elizabeth glanced at her watch and at the sun, decided it was time to rest and to turn back, and selected a large boulder to shelter behind. The pebbles were dry this far up the beach. She swung her pack off and sat down and pulled out a thermos flask of coffee. Just as she was unscrewing the cup, she noticed some whitened thing sticking partly out of the ground, a few meters up the beach where the pebbles ran out into thin sand below the cliffs.
    Curiosity got the better of her tiredness. She wedged the flask among the stones and stood up, a little stiffly—forty years of life, twenty of them spent in varied gravities, were beginning to tell on her knee joints—and stalked over, tugging off a glove, fumbling in her jacket pocket for the sturdy clasp knife she used for her rough fieldwork’s probing and digging. She hunkered down on the sand and peered at the half-covered thing: a fossil in formation, sinking into sand that would one day be sandstone. At first she thought it was the washed-up exoskeleton of a brittle-star or a long-legged crab: There was a handsbreadth roundish central bit with jointed appendages coming off it. She could see three evenly spaced cup-shaped depressions, each with a tiny central hole, in the exposed part of the main bit, and below these concavities other holes, and below these holes a triangular articulation of delicate, roughly rectangular plates, and along the inner edge of each plate a row of something whiter than the rest of it.
    Teeth. Jaws. Eye sockets. The cascade of successive recognitions sent a shock of adrenaline through her body. She walked back to take a trowel from her pack, returned and began to dig around it, very carefully. When it was all uncovered, she stood up and took a long look at it. It had eight appendages in all, each about forty centimeters long, with ball-and-socket joints proximally, medially, and distally. On the distal joints were what looked like miniature versions of the whole skeleton—buds, or eight-fingered hands. The central part was at the top something like a skull, curving inward beneath the jaws; the lower part, joined to the upper by a stubby central rod, and to which the appendages were attached on each side in rows of four, was something like a pelvis. The three sockets she’d initially seen had five others like them further around the circumference, all evenly spaced, and the triple-jaw arrangement was repeated, sans teeth, on the opposite side.
    Already it was so unlike any invertebrate she’d ever seen that it was making her shake. It was making her almost sick, actually: It was much too like the remains of hideously conjoined quadruplet infant monkeys to be easy on the eye. What clinched it for her was the presence of shriveled but recognizable tendons on the outside of the joints, still holding them together, and in the parts which had been covered, the clinging fragments of leathery, fuzzy skin. Unless she was misinterpreting it completely, what she was looking at was an internal skeleton, not the external skeleton of an invertebrate, not even one unknown to science. It looked like a vertebrate—hell, if that fuzz was hair, like a mammal —that had evolved from some invertebrate without losing its radial symmetry. Either she’d stumbled upon some bizarre malformation, or a new phylum, or an organism that had no terrestrial ancestors at all. She could imagine its possible ancestors. She did not have to imagine, because she’d already seen pictures of its probable descendants. Or, if this was a juvenile, its adults.
    Still staring down at it,