The Man-Kzin Wars 01 by Larry Niven

feeble ... .
    It nonetheless illuminated the planet aft. Quarta's hue was pale rose, overlaid with silvery streaks that were ice clouds: crystals of carbon dioxide, ammonia, in the upper levels methane. No twists, no vortices, no sign of any jovian storminess marred the serenity. Though the disc was visibly flattened, it rotated slowly, taking more than 40 hours. Tidal forces through eons had worn down even the spin of this huge mass. They had likewise dispersed whatever rings it once had, and surely drawn away moons. The core possessed a magnetic field, slight, noticeable only because it extended so far into space that it snatched radio waves out of incoming cosmic radiation- remnant magnetism, locked into iron as that core froze. For gravitational energy release had long since reached its end point; and long, long before then, K-40 and whatever other few radionuclei were once on hand had guttered away beyond measurement. The ice sheath went upward in tranquil allotropic layers to a virtually featureless surface and an enormous, quietly circulating atmosphere of starlike composition. Quarta had reached Nirvana.
    It fell ever farther behind. Fido closed in on Rover .
    The ship swelled until she might have been a planet herself Instructions swept back and forth, electronic, occasionally verbal. A boat bay opened its canopy. Yoshii maneuvered through and docked. The canopy closed, shutting off heaven. Air hissed back in from the recovery tanks. A bulb flashed green. Yoshii unharnessed, operated the lock, crawled forth, and walked under the steady weight granted him by the ship's polarizer, into her starboard reception room .
    Laurinda waited.
    Yoshii stopped. She was alone. White hair tumbled past delicate features to brush the dress, new to him, that hugged her slenderness. She reached out. Her eyes glowed. “ W -welcome back, Juan," she whispered .
    “ W hy, uh, thanks, thank you. You're the ... committee? ”
    She smiled, dropped her glance, became briefly the color of the world he had rounded. “ K am met Carita. As for you, Dorcas-Mate Saxtorph suggested-" He took her hands. They felt reed-thin and silksoft. “ H ow nice of her. And the rest. I've data discs for you. ”
    “ T hey'll keep. We have more work than we can handle. Observations of Quinta were, have been incredibly fruitful." Ardor pulsed in her voice. The outermost planet was a safe subject. “ W e think we can guess its nature, but of course there's no end of details we don't understand, and we could be entirely wrong- ”
    “ G ood for you, " he said, delighted by her delight. “ I missed out on that, of course." Transmissions to him, including hers, had dealt with the Quartan system exclusively; any bit of information about it might perhaps save his life. “ T ell me. ”
    “ O h, it's violent, multi-colored, with spots like Jupiter's – one bigger than the Red-and-the surface is liquid water. It's Arctic-like; we imagine continent-sized ice floes clashing together."
    “ B ut warmer than Quarta! Why? ”
    “ W e suppose a large satellite crashed, a fraction of a million years ago. Debris formed the rings. The main mass released enough heat to melt the upper part of the planetary shell, and, and we'll need years, science will, to learn what else has happened. ”
    He stood for an instant in awe, less of the event than of the time-scale. That moon must have been close to start with, but still it had taken the casual orbital erosion of ... almost a universe's lifespan so far-how many passages through nebulae, galaxies, the near-ultimate vacuum of intergalactic space?-to bring it down. What is man, that thou art mindful of him-? What is man, that he should waste the little span which is his?
    “ T hat's wonderful", he said, "but-we Impulsively, he embraced her. Astoundingly, she responded .
    Between laughter and tears she said in his ear, “ C ome, let's go, Kam's spread a feast for the two of us in my cabin."
    Set beside that, the cosmos was