Starlight 81 is quite specific in its description of Viridia Tertius, laying out in painstaking detail the planet’s orbit, its mass, its sparkling silicate jungles and oceans of glass, the placid herds of armored beetlehemoths grazing on fields of ripe needlemoss, the intricate web cities hung by its reclusive but gracious population of many-limbed nightclimbers. The accuracy of this passage, however, has yet to be confirmed, due to the apparent absence of the planet itself: where the Intoans described the third world of the Viridia system, modern astronomers have only found a planet-sized gravity well containing no discernible mass, officially listed in the Parliamentary database as Spatial Anomaly X1X.

A number of scholars have maintained, not without reason, that no such planet has ever existed, and that the Starlight passage is an impeccable forgery. Unexplained by this thesis, however, are further complications: the regular if unintelligible transmissions received from the anomaly whenever its orbit approaches that of Viridia Prime; the occasional appearance in transradioscopic surveys of a flickering, translucent moon; the repeated disappearance of vessels traveling in and around Tertius’s predicted location, including but not limited to the twin battleships Meat Baby and Thumbscrew, the flagship Uncle Hacksaw, the science probe Limit of Wisdom, and the search and rescue vessels Mercy’s Heart and Mercy’s Heart III.

There exist as many explanations for Viridia Tertius as there are discussions of Viridia Tertius: Tertius has fallen out of phase with local spacetime; Tertius is the product of telepathic mass hysteria; Tertius is a hoax perpetuated by a dark cabal of superdimensional engineers; Tertius was populated by a civilization which managed to tap its own existence as an energy source but then foolishly squandered these reserves; Tertius is not a planet but the idea of a planet attempting to become reality; Tertius does not exist, but is the future-cast shadow of something that did exist, or the past-cast shadow of something that will exist again.

Of the various broadcasts periodically received from the space that was/is/would have been/will be Viridia Tertius, the clearest is a single repeated word in old Intoan: “Welcome, welcome, welcome.”

—Recorder 3000-21