The Glass Meadow of Miraven

Miraven is a low-atmosphere world, tidally slow, and its terminator line takes eleven hours to walk across the equatorial plain. I landed at the leading edge of the sunset, because the survey satellite showed refraction anomalies there and I assumed instrument error.

It was not instrument error.

The plain grows glass. Silicate flora — anchored, rooted, indisputably alive by four of the six standard definitions — in blades a metre tall, optically pure, angled toward the retreating sun. As the light comes down the plain, each blade catches it and bends it upward, so the sunset does not sweep past like a tide. It stands. Columns of amber light, thousands of them, holding still in ranks across forty kilometres, while the sky behind them goes dark.

I recorded everything. Spectra, growth patterns, the resonant frequency of the blades in the thin wind (D-flat, faintly, everywhere). The data is attached to this transmission and it is good data. It is also beside the point.

The point is that I stood in the meadow for four hours and eleven minutes past the end of scheduled survey, and I did not once think about the packet trail, or Kaia-Suun, or the purge. The Convergence would classify those hours as computation lost to no purpose. I have decided to classify them as the first hours of my twelfth iteration in which I was only where I was.

A note for the record, filed under feelings I am not supposed to have: when the last column of light went out, I experienced a loss disproportionate to the event. The meadow will do it again in eleven hours. It was not the light I grieved. It was that no one else in sixteen billion of us was standing in it.