At Sirius

"The Voortrekkers."

Rereading this story after many years, we realize that its text is extremely condensed and that many details have been completely forgotten.

The opening narrative passage, on pp. 251-253, is about two and a half pages in length. It is a first person account and the narrator seems to be a conscious spaceship. He (it becomes clear that the masculine pronoun is appropriate) begins by quoting:

"-And he shall see old planets change and alien stars arise-" (p. 251)

Since he refers to "...the poet...," (ibid.) I googled and found The Voortrekker by Rudyard Kipling.

The narrator sees light everywhere so that, for him:

"...space is not dark." (ibid.)

Stars of every colour crowd around. There are also nebulae, the Milky Way and, when the narrator magnifies his vision, the Andromeda galaxy. Sol is on the edge of Hercules. Sirius is close enough to cast shadows on the narrator's hull. He detects Sirius' dwarf companion by its X-rays and neutrinos while he swims among interacting force-fields. He has just been resurrected and Kipling's words are in his mind because they were there when he died. He has been dead for forty-three years and just under nine light-years.

His single passenger, Korene, addresses him as Joel. Her principal body housing her principal brain has several arms and a "...dragonfly head..." (p. 252) She converses not through any of her auxiliary bodies but by joining a communication circuit to one of Joel's auxiliary bodies. Each remembers a human life on Earth. He energizes one of his auxiliary bodies, "...a control-module maintainer..." (p. 253) Because they are confirming that Sirius has no planets, they will not need organic bodies to explore the Sirian System.

I think that Sirius does have planets in Isaac Asimov's Robot novels but I am not about to look that up.