“Do you see it?” Marlene’s only sign she’d heard me come up behind her was the breathless question.

I looked at the bright green alien landscape. “See what?” She finally looked back with a faint expression of disgust. Which made me feel defensive, of course. “This isn’t going to be like those cloud formations on Venus, is it?”

“I just don’t understand how you can be so blind.” She spread her arms out wide, nearly hitting me in the process. Lucky I duck fast. “Here we are on a new planet, a million years away from home,” (I rolled my eyes at the exaggeration), “and you’ve spent the last month with your nose buried in,” she took a deep breath so she could give the last two words the derision she really felt, “instrument readings.”

“But it’s a fascinating study in parallel evolution,” I began, but she made a dismissing hand gesture and turned back to contemplate the greenery. “It shouldn’t be possible. Every new species we have found have been plant or plant analog. There aren’t even any insect analogs, for Earth’s sake.”

“But that’s the point.” She pointed at the moss-analog covered landscape in front of us. “Do you see what’s under there? What could make those shapes? It’s not a tree.”

I stared, still not certain that she wasn’t trying to prove some artistic point. For the brilliant mind that she was, Marlene did have her quirks. I shuddered at the memory of the poetry reading that she had organized six months into the voyage.

“Oh, by the Moon and all her sisters.” She circled behind me and stood on tip toe to point. “See that curve right there? It’s like a spine—of a giant. And if you look over there,” she used her hand to trace a sinuous curve, “that’s the skull. We need to get under the moss. I think we might have set up camp in the remains of the animal life.”

I looked, and could almost see it.

“The thing of it is,” she continued and her tone was almost unnaturally calm, “You know how fast the moss grows here. It’s been hoping we don’t notice that we’re next.”

"Moss"