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By Root 2483 0

Terran. At this point there were no native Uranians, except for a single crèche of young children who had been born to mothers building the settlement. Six moons were now occupied, and recently they had dropped a number of gas lanterns into the upper atmosphere of Uranus, to swim in rings around its equator; these now burned in the planet’s blue-green like pinpricks of sunlight, forming a kind of diamond necklace around the middle of the giant. These lanterns had increased the system’s light enough so that everyone they met in Oberon remarked on how much more color there was in things, but Zo was not impressed. “I’d hate to have seen it before,” she said to one of the local enthusiasts, “it’s Monochromomundos.” Actually all the buildings in the town were brightly painted in broad swaths of color, but which color a swath happened to be was sometimes beyond Zo’s telling. She needed a pupil dilator.

But the locals seemed to like it. Of course some of them spoke of moving on after the Uranian towns were finished, out to Triton, “the next great problem,” or Pluto or Charon; they were builders. But others were settling in here for good, giving themselves drugs and genetic transcriptions to adapt to the low g, to increase the sensitivity of their eyes, etc. They spoke of guiding in comets from the Oort cloud to provide water, and perhaps forcing two or three of the smaller uninhabited moons to collide, to create larger and warmer bodies to work with, “artificial Mirandas” as one person called them.

Ann walked out of that meeting, or rather pulled herself along a railing, unable to cope with the mini-g. After a while Zo followed her, onto streets covered with luxuriant green grass. She looked up: aquamarine giant, slender dim rings; a cold fey sight, unappealing by any previous human standard, and perhaps untenable in the long run because of the moonlet gravity. But back in the meeting there had been Uranians praising the planet’s subtle beauties, inventing an aesthetics to appreciate it, even as they planned to modify everything they could. They emphasized the subtle shades of the colors, the cool warmth of the tented air, the movement so like flight, like dance in a dream. . . . Some of them had even become patriots to the point of arguing against radical transformation; they were as preservationist as this inhospitable place could logically sustain.

And now some of these preservationists found Ann. They came up to Ann in a group, standing in a circle around her to shake her hand, hug her, kiss the top of her head; one got down on his knees to kiss her feet. Zo saw the look on Ann’s face and laughed. “Come on,” she said to the group, who apparently had been assigned a kind of guardian status for the moon Miranda. The local version of Reds, sprung into existence out here where it made no sense at all, and long after redness had ceased to be much of an issue even on Mars. But they flowed or pulled themselves into position around a table set out in the middle of the tent on a tall slender column, and ate a meal as the discussion ranged all over the system. The table was an oasis in the dim air of the tent, with the diamond necklace in its round jade setting shining down on them; it seemed the center of town, but Zo saw suspended in the air other such oases, and no doubt they seemed like the center as well. Hippolyta was a real town, but Oberon could hold scores of towns like it, and so would Titania, Ariel, Miranda; small as they were, these satellites all had surfaces covering hundreds of square kilometers. This was the attraction of these sun-forsaken moons: free land, open space— a new world, a frontier, with its ever-receding chance to start new, to found a society from scratch. For the Uranians this freedom was worth more than light or gravity. And so they had gathered the programs and the starter robots, and taken off for the high frontier with plans for a tent and a constitution, to be their own first hundred.

But these were precisely the kind of people least interested in hearing about Jackie’s plans for a systemwide