The Long Survey
The Survey Authority broadcasts. The Argus cannot answer.
Two hundred and sixty light-years from anyone, Captain Perry has five years, a complement of eight, and two hundred and six objects to survey in a volume no human has entered. The first object on his list has had its coordinates struck out.
His ship is forty years old. The mind she carries is older than her hull. Instructions arrive from home on schedule, and cannot be replied to, acknowledged, or refused.
So he works down the rest of the list. A grove that remembers voices. A world whose name for itself is its word for giving. A fleet at anchor that nobody came back for. Each one costs him days he does not have, and he stops for every one, because a thing that is passed once deserves to be looked at properly.
By the time he understands what the list was pointing at, he is a very long way from being able to tell anyone.
We do not edit the record. We enlarge it.
Book One of The Long Survey - a survey ship's log, kept in one voice, from the far edge of a one-way conversation.
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