"I never use the newsray during duty hours," he said patiently. "I prefer not to be interrupted." Ky-Tann was a metals stress analyst at the Roa-Pitin Spaceworks.
Devia missed or ignored the implied criticism. "I'm sure you would have wanted to hear this. Your friend Deez just returned from that exploration of his. He came back a hero, too."
"Deez?" Ky-Tann said; shouted in fact. "Deez back? Devia, are you sure you heard it right?"
"Of course I did. And Deez himself called, not more than five minutes ago. He said the Administrators had him and his crew quarantined for the moment, but he plans to break loose tonight. If he can manage it, he'll be here before the second sunset. Isn't it wonderful?"
"It's wonderful, all right. Only where was he? What did he do that made him such a hero?"
"I couldn't gather too much from the newsray, except that he found a world somewhere that has the Archeological Commission excited as children—"
"You mean an inhabited world?" Ky-Tann said skeptically.
"Once inhabited, anyway. Please don't ask me to explain it, Ky, ask newsray or Deez himself, you know how stupid I am about such things."
He chuckled, and said something loving in their private code, and switched off. His curiosity about Deez' discovery rivaled his excitement about seeing his friend again; in a hundred years of exploration, the space vessels of Illyri had merely confirmed the ancient belief that Life was a rare and precious gift. They had found slugs and lichen and moss on rocky, almost-airless worlds; they had seen wild plant growth in steaming alien jungles; the sea creatures of the Planet Vosa, despite their infinite variety, proved utterly lacking in intelligence. Once, on an unnamed world in the Acheos galaxy, the great space pioneer Val-Rion unearthed the artifacts of a dead civilization and stunned the people of Illyri by his announcement. He claimed to have found written language, works of art, implements and weapons. Val-Rion was a brave man and a mighty adventurer, but a poor scholar. In the time it took Illyri's double suns to rise and set, the Archeological Commission completed a study of his findings and declared it a not-too-clever hoax, perpetrated by students of the University of Space Sciences. To the end of his days, even after some of the students came forward to admit their deception, Val-Rion persisted in his belief that the finding was authentic, and squandered his fortune in an attempt to interpret the mysterious language. He failed, of course; the "language" was nonsense. Some of the students had been sensitive enough to regret their hoax; one of them, Deez-Cor, named his ship after the late explorer.