An Excerpt from Planets and Peoples of the Dark Arm: My Journey across the Spur of Leda, from Erostera to Lebenda and Back Again, and What I Discovered along the Way; by Professor Rouxaan Okkum of the University of Vyecourf, Published in the Seventeen-Hundred-and-Third Year of Our Lady, May Her Wisdom Guide us Always.
Chapter 84: A Wondrous Discovery.
When we arrived in the Jurati System, a system called Salt by the Jurati natives, I was given permission to study the sensor trays. The system was home to a handful of planets, and perhaps a dozen planellas, as well as the usual assortment of hasteroids and comets, all of which orbited a single goldwork star. The Captain pointed to a rather unassuming planella in the inner system. “This is Jurati,” he said.
He next pointed at an even more unassuming planella nearby. “This is Mangali.”
I was taken aback. “Mangali? Home of the Mangalians?”
“Yes.”
“You don’t come from Jurati?”
“Everyone comes from Jurati. We come from Mangali.”
If I had been wiser, I would have questioned why this Mangalian junk captain was revealing to a foreigner, even a Fontish foreigner such as myself, all his people’s most closely held secrets. I would later discover the motive behind such loose talk and action, much to my detriment and dismay. But at that moment I was still ignorant, gazing as I was in rapt wonder at the sensor trays.
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On closer inspection, I could see that the interstices between the worlds were absolutely filled with the types of ruins that make Leda so famous and so mysterious, and which had originally brought me to the region on my quest. Spinning-wheels, tunnels-in-nothing, parasols. All the strange and ancient structures we learn about as children and a dozen more I could not name. But perhaps the strangest of all was the presence of an okracone, which are common around Fontain and the surrounding systems, but are virtually nonexistent elsewhere.
An enormous structure near the goldwork star was obviously a pacifier, but it was the largest and most bulbous pacifier I had ever set eyes upon. And the moon of Jurati! Such a moon I have rarely seen orbiting such a small planella! It was a planella unto itself!
“What is that moon called?” I asked the Captain.
“It is called the Moon,” he said. “All the other moons are named after that one. All the other moons in the Galaxy.”
At that moment, I believed him. I had been to a hundred worlds in Leda, all claiming to be the mythical but certainly real Starting Line, but this world before me, this little Jurati, quietly spinning in its garden of unutterably ancient wonders, this little planella was the genuine article. This was it. I had found it. I had found the Cradle. I had discovered the Starting Line of the Great Race, the prize which men and women had been searching for for generations! I was dizzy. I would be famous. I had found it.