Related:

• Planet's atmosphere, though a gasping death to humans and most animals, is paradise for Earth plants.
  The high nitrate content of the soil and the rich yellow sunlight bring an abundant harvest wherever adjustments can be made for the unusual soil conditions....
• Having now established a secure perimeter, we have made ourselves relatively safe from enemy incursions.
  But against the seemingly random attacks by Planet's native life only our array of warning sensors can help us, for the Mind Worms infiltrate through every crevice and chew through anything softer than plasmasteel....
• You see in this dome the intermingling of native and earth plants.
  Outside, they are competitors, struggling over the trace elements required for life....
• The fungus has been Planet's dominant lifeform since about the time of the Lower Paleozoic on Earth.
  But when, once every hundred million years or so, the neural net at last achieves the critical mass necessary to become sentient, the final metamorphosis kills off most of the other life on the planet....
• The prevalence of anoxic environments rich in organic material
  combined with the presence of nitrated compounds has led to an astonishing variety of underground organisms which live in the absence of oxygen and "breathe" nitrate....
• The Isle of the Deep is really not a single creature but a colony of thousands of individual tubules, an aquatic vector of the Mind Worm which terrorizes Planet's continents.
  Over its lifetime certain tubules secrete a tough, gluelike substance which hardens to form the characteristic shell that floats the colony and creates the appearance of a rogue island....
• Eternity lies ahead of us, and behind. Have you drunk your fill?
  -- Lady Deirdre Skye, "Conversations with Planet", Epilogue...
• You waited so long to heed us, earthdeirdre, Almost we pruned you, as we may yet prune your branches.
  -- Lady Deirdre Skye, "Conversations with Plane...
• No longer mere earthbeings and planetbeings are we, but bright children of the stars!
  And together we shall dance in and out of ten billion years, celebrating the gift of consciousness until the stars themselves grow cold and weary, and our thoughts turn again to the beginning....