"Because the people at Bidgrass turn sick and want to slug you if you mention eating it. That's reason enough for me."
Well, that was data too, Cole thought, heading back to his stateroom.
Two days later Daley piloted the cargo tender down in a three-lap braking spiral around New Cornwall. Cole sat beside him in the cramped control room, eyes fixed on the view panel. Once he had the bright and barren moon Cairdween at upper left, above a vastly curving sweep of sun-glinting ocean, and he caught his breath in wonder.
"I know the feeling, Doc," Daley said softly. "Like being a giant and jumping from world to world."
Clouds obscured much of the sprawling, multi-lobed single continent. The sharpening of outline and hint of regularity Cole remembered noting on Tristan and his own planet of Belconti, the mark of man, was absent here. Yet New Cornwall, as a human settlement, was two hundred years older than Belconti.
The forests stretched across the south and west, broken by uplands and rain shadows, as the old books said. He saw between cloud patches the glint of lakes and the crumpled leaf drainage pattern of the great northeastern plain but, oddly, the plain was darker in color than the pinkish-yellow forest. He mentioned it to Daley.
"It's flowers and vines and moss makes it that color," the little man said, busy with controls. "Whole world in that forest top—snakes, birds, jumping things big as horses. Doc, them trees are big."
"Of course! I read about the epiphytal biota. And low gravity always conduces to gigantism."
"There's Lundy," Daley grunted, pointing.