The Question You Don't Ask

Her brief was four pages long and it used the word catalogue thirty-one times and the word origin zero times. Imran counted. She counted because the absence was so deliberate it was loud. The survey authority wanted a species inventory, a biochemistry report, a commercial viability assessment. It did not want her to ask why a planet looked designed, and she understood the reason without anyone telling her, which was that if Eshara was designed then somebody had designed it, and somebody who can compose a biosphere is not somebody you want to find by accident with a six-person survey team and a commercial mandate. So the brief simply declined to wonder. Imran sat in her hab that night with the brief on her lap and made a decision she knew would cost her. She would do the catalogue. She would do it perfectly. And in the margins, in her own notebook, the one nobody had requisitioned, she would keep the other survey, the forbidden one, the one that asked who.