IGMS Issue 22 by IGMS

we'd found Eden before all of us got bored and tired of each other, and started splitting up."
    "No matter," Carlos said. "We'll have to make the most of what we've got. Rordy, you were always a bit of a sleuth. We need somebody to solve the puzzle of how these people came to Eden. Whoever made the transplant might have a way of effectively resisting the Swarmers. Some form of technology we haven't discovered on our own. Weapons, even."
    "Sounds like a plan," I said.
    "Meanwhile," Wanda said, "we need to know the locations of any clement worlds you might have run across. Places where we can put more humans. Not like the one where I found you, that will take too long to fully terraform. I mean planets that are capable and ready of supporting humans
now
."
    I thought about it for a moment, then Linked the information to the group. I'd only ever found two planets which were acceptable: circling yellow dwarfs at the right distance, with the right gravity, and with photosynthetic life advanced enough to have put the atmospheric oxygen content close to acceptable for humans.
    The information had already been Linked to Stephen and Pham, who diverted from their work on the detector network and began pulsing out of the system, destined for eventual transluminal hops towards the planets in question. They'd do a survey and report back. If all seemed well, we'd have to figure out how to successfully collect a viable pod of humans for transplant.
    We shook hands and split up to begin our various tasks.

    The system of Eden -- circling the yellow dwarf sun we'd named Edenstar -- proved remarkably pedestrian. Twelve major planetary bodies, most of them small and rocky, three of them big and gaseous, as well as two thin asteroid belts, and the previously mentioned -- and entirely predictable -- Kuiper and Oort cometary regions. I spent weeks pulsing across the system, doing detailed examinations of the moons of the big Jovian worlds, poking through the corrosive clouds of two of the smaller terrestrials, and generally growing both bored and discouraged. If the Transplanters -- as we'd come to call them -- had left any record or sign of their existence, it didn't show. No staging posts, no warning or sensory networks. Not even industrial trash.
    Wanda caught up with me as I surveyed Eden from a distance of 100,000 kilometers, our mile-long ships locked in co-orbit. Her data core Linked with mine and she said, "Penny for your thoughts?"
    "God is the only answer," I said across the Link.
    "God?"
    "Yes, because I can't find a damned thing which would tell us anything otherwise. These people, these Edenites, might have been formed from Adam's rib, for all the good my research has done."
    I Linked over my latest findings, and after a few minutes, Wanda Linked back.
    "Maybe it is God," she said.
    "Getting religion in your old age?" I teased.
    "No. But like Sherlock Holmes said, when you have excluded the impossible, whatever remains, however improbable, must be the truth."
    "Doesn't help us a bit," I said.
    "No, but have you spent any time on the surface of Eden itself?"
    "I thought anthropological studies had been assigned to Kaman and Jorge?"
    "Not the Edenites themselves, dummy, their
ruins
. Old villages and camps, long abandoned. They go back thousands of years. There are glyphs and markings in the caves."
    "Think it's worth a shot?" I said.
    She linked me a smiley face.

    I spent a few days Link-talking with Kaman and Jorge, who'd manufactured Edenite bodies for themselves and were going
incognito
on two separate land masses. They pointed me to some of the oldest ruins; sites which had been deemed interesting but not of pressing value. I built my own Edenite body and dropped it onto the surface near one of the planet's poles. Tundra territory. Cold, with not much natural flora and even less fauna. The ruins were a collection of mounded stones in the foothills of a substantial, ice-capped mountain range.
    As always, my mechanical self was