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At night he slept in a dorm. This was the most interesting part, because people were packed in on long mattresses that his belt called
matrazenlager—
essentially mattresses as long as the room, with numbers on the headboards marking nominal slots for people, a situation leading to a fair bit of sex in the dark, sometimes even including him. Then up in the morning, eat in a cafeteria, get in a line to get sent out onto the endless plain in rovers, or put in helicopters the size of aircraft carriers to be carried out to the dry ice sea to operate bulldozers, waldoes, snowblowers (the so-called dragons), super-zambonis, and ice cutters much like the asphalt- and concrete-cutting vehicles back in Jersey, but a hundred times bigger. After a few weeks he could operate any of these. They weren’t very complicated; really you told the AI what to do for the most part. It was like being captain of a ship. A day’s work by a team of a thousand would clear many square kilometers of dry ice, and on the horizon the black moving buildings that spread the foamed rock followed inexorably. The far shore of this part of the ice sea was said to be six hundred kilometers away.

Then for a matter of some weeks he worked in a monumental waldo, kicking free what they called stegosaur plates, then carrying them over to the bed of a giant truck. Waldo work was always demanding—it was full-body movement, like dancing—not physically hard, but as it magnified your every motion, it required very close attention and focus to move the waldo in just the way you wanted it to go. So it could be interesting work or just a matter of lifting and carrying, but either way it left you fried.

At the ends of these days he tried to work on his Chinese. No one he met spoke English, so his little translation belt was his best teacher, but it was hard. He would say things to it and then listen to the translation and try to say it back. But when he said it back in Chinese, and it translated what he’d said back into English, it never came out right. He said, “My radar is broken,” in exactly the Chinese he thought he had heard, and it translated back to him “immediate open air meeting.” He tried “Where do you live?” and it came back as “Your lotus has interpolated.”

“If only!” he said, laughing bleakly. “I’d like my lotus to interpolate, but how?”

Clearly he must be sounding crazy to the people he talked to. He was doing something wrong, but what?

“It is a hard language,” one of his dorm mates said when he complained. He tried to memorize that properly.

As it was, his translator was his best friend. They talked a lot. He hoped to start getting more out of it soon. Saying “hello” and “how are you?” and such was working better and better with the people he interacted with. And they were getting friendlier about talking slow.

The workers continued to chip away at the monumental tasks set before them, tasks thousands of times bigger than similar jobs on Earth. But if the job was shoveling snow, was that a good thing?

Once he sent a message to Swan to say he was glad to hear she had survived the attack on Terminator, and in it he mentioned that he never saw Shukra anymore. A message came back a few weeks later:
Try Lakshmi.
With a Venusian cloud address.

He looked into this and found that Lakshmi was a name that caused people to go silent and look away. A big power, based over in Cleopatra; an ally of Shukra’s, or an enemy—people didn’t really know, or didn’t want to say.

So: maybe Swan wanted to shift her informant to a place closer to the action. Or maybe she was just trying to help.

Or maybe he was just on his own.

boreal forest (conifers); temperate forest (hardwoods or mixed hardwoods and conifers); tropical forest; desert; the alpine zone; grassland; tundra; and chaparral, sometimes called shrubland

these are the principal Terran biomes

cities; villages; croplands; rangelands; forests; and wildlands

these are the principal Terran human-use patterns anthromes

mix and match the above, and you get the 825 eco-regions of Earth

450 on land, 229 marine

65 percent of these now exist only off-planet

take an x-y graph to chart a Whittaker biome diagram, with precipitation marked vertically and temperature horizontally. Biomes can be plotted on this graph and will make a clearly shaped map of what kind of biome turns up in what kind of conditions. Left is hotter, right colder; wet is higher, dry lower; and thus the most general version is as follows:

The classifications can be much elaborated. The 450 named terrestrial eco-regions divide biomes by not only precipitation and temperature, but also combinations of latitude, altitude, geography, geology, and other factors

eco-regions themselves can be usefully divided into microenvironments as small as a hectare

34,850 known species went extinct between 1900 and 2100. It was, and remains ongoing, the sixth great mass extinction in Earth’s history

no extinctions from this point onward are inevitable (this has always been true, however)

19,340 terraria are known to exist in the solar system. Approximately 70 percent of these function as zoo worlds, either dedicated to sustaining an eco-region’s suite of animals and plants, or else to creating new combinations of suites, called Ascensions

92 percent of mammal species are now endangered or gone entirely from Earth and live mainly in their off-planet terraria

space: the zoo, the

inoculant

T
here are two problems in dealing with the Terminator incident,” Inspector Genette said to Swan one evening as they flew out to the asteroid belt. They were traveling with a little group from Interplan and Terminator, but often found themselves the last two in the galley at the end of an evening. Swan liked that; the inspector would sit right on the table while eating, on a plush brought for the purpose, and afterward lounge there on one elbow with a drink, so that they spoke eye to eye. It was a little like talking to a cat.

“Only two?” she said.

“Two. First, who did it, and second, how we can find and catch this agent without giving more people the idea of doing it. The so-called copycat problem, and more generally, the problem of preventing any kind of repetition of this attack. That I consider to be the more difficult problem of the two.”

“What about
how
it was done?” Swan asked. “Isn’t that a problem too?”

“I know how it happened,” the inspector said easily.

“You do?”

“I think so. It’s the only way it could have happened, I think, and so there you have it. No matter how implausible, as the line has it, although in this case it’s not implausible at all. But I must confess to you, I don’t want to say more about it when we are both being recorded by our qubes.” Genette raised a wrist and
indicated the thick, almost cubical little wristpad that contained Passepartout. “You have your qube recording always, I assume?”

“No.”

“But often?”

“Yes, I suppose so. Like anyone else.”

“Well, in any case I want to see some things in the belt before I will be sure of my hypothesis. So we’ll talk about this more when we’re out there. But I want you to think about the second problem; assuming we catch a perpetrator and explain the deed, perhaps in a prosecution—how are we going to keep someone else from doing it? This is where I think you could help me.”

T
hey were traveling in the terrarium
Moldava
, which ran in an Aldrin cycle that would take them out to Vesta in eight days. The interior of the
Moldava
was given over to growing wheat, and many of the people traveling in it congregated after their day’s labor in the fields at a resort on high ground near the bow, set on a broad hilltop, overlooking and then looking up at the upcurve of a big patchwork pattern of fields, different green and gold textures created by the many different strains being grown. It was like a quilter’s version of heaven.

Swan spent much of her time talking to the local ecologists, who had lots of little wheat disease problems they wanted to discuss. Inspector Jean stayed in the Interplan rooms and, as they passed Mars, spent time calling ahead to people in the terraria clustered around Vesta. At the ends of these days Swan would meet with the Interplan group to eat, then talk late with the inspector. Sometimes she talked about her daytime work. The locals were trying out wheat varieties that shed water from the seed heads better, and were exploring the genetic creation of microscopic “drip tips” like those seen in the macro world of tropical leaves, where the drip tips were long tips on the leaves that allowed water to break its surface tension and run away. “I
want to have drip tips in my brain,” she said. “I don’t want to hold on to anything that will hurt me.”

“I wish you luck with that,” the little inspector said politely, staying focused on the meal, and eating a lot for such a small person.

A few days later they came to the Vesta Zone, one of the crowded areas of the asteroid belt. During the Accelerando many terraria had relocated near each other, creating something like communities, and the Vesta Zone was among the largest of these.
Moldava
released a ferry with the Interplan team on it, and when the ferry had decelerated and was near Vesta, they transferred again, this time to an Interplan ship with an Interplan crew.

This was an impressively fast little spaceship named
Swift Justice
, and in short order they were moving against the flow of the great current of asteroids, stopping once or twice at little rocks for the inspector to talk with people. No explanation for these conversations was offered, and Swan held off asking, while they visited the
Orinoco Fantastico
, the
Crimea
, the
Oro Valley
,
Irrawady 14
,
Trieste
,
Kampuchea
, the
John Muir
, and the
Winnipeg
, after which she just had to ask.

“All these little worlds had recent perturbations in their orbits,” the inspector explained, “and I wanted to ask if they had explanations for them.”

“And had they?”

“There were some abrupt departures from the Vesta Zone, apparently, and people think those threw the neighbors off course.”

Vesta itself proved to be very substantial for an asteroid—six hundred kilometers in diameter, roughly spherical, and entirely tented, which made it one of the biggest examples of the paraterraforming method called bubble-wrapping. Usually tents covered only parts of a moon, like the older domes; they were the most common structures on Callisto and Ganymede and Luna, but those moons were all so big that covering them entirely hadn’t
even been considered. To cover a little moon with a tentlike bubble represented the next stage, and a viable outie option to the hollowed-out innie worlds. Swan supposed that Terminator itself was a case of paraterraforming, though she was not used to thinking of it that way and had a prejudice against outies in the asteroid belt as being overexposed and low-g, compared to burrowing into a rock and spinning it.

But now, as she regarded Vesta from a short distance out, it looked good. It was a place that would have weather and a sky (the tenting was located two kilometers above the surface), and Pauline told her the Vestans had established boreal forests, alpine ranges, tundra, grassland, and lots of cold desert. All that would be in very low g, which meant everyone would be flying and dancing around a lot, in a puffy, almost floating landscape. Not such a bad idea. They even had an immense mountain.

So Swan was interested to visit Vesta, but Genette had a different destination in mind, and after a few more Interplan people joined them, they headed to a nearby terrarium called
Yggdrasil
.

A
s they approached
Yggdrasil
Swan saw it was yet another potato asteroid, in this case dark and unspinning. “It’s abandoned,” the inspector explained. “A cold case.”

In the hopper’s lock Swan floated to the suit rack with a graceful little plié, suited up, then followed Genette and several Interplan investigators out the outer lock door into the void.

Yggdrasil
had been a standard innie, perhaps thirty kilometers long. They entered it by way of a big hole left in the stern; the mass driver had been removed. They jetted in gently, using their suits’ thrusters to keep them upright. Flowing forward side by side, they looked like a reversal of one of those pharaonic statue pairs in which the sister-wife is knee-high to the monarch.

Inside they jetted to a halt. The interior of the asteroid was a pure black, dotted with a few distant reflections of their headlamp
beams. Swan had been in many a terrarium under construction, but this was not like those. Genette tossed ahead a bright lamp, jetted briefly to counteract the toss. The pinpoint flare floated forward through the empty space, illuminating the cylinder quite distinctly.

Swan spun a little under the force of her own looking around. So dim, so abandoned; she spun in some gust of emotion that perhaps came from her poor Terminator: fist to her faceplate, suddenly she heard herself moaning.

“Yes,” the little silver figure floating by her said. “There was a pressure failure here, with no warning. This was a chondrite and water-ice conglomerate asteroid, very common. The accident review found a small meteorite had by chance hit an undetected seam of ice in the cylinder wall, vaporizing it and depressurizing the interior catastrophically. It wasn’t the first time something like that had happened, although in this case the rock readers had given it a triple A rating. Usually the ones that have cracked have been Bs or Cs, and were occupied unwisely. So I’ve been reanalyzing old accidents, looking for certain flags, and decided I wanted to have a look at this one. Mainly at the outside, but first I wanted to check the inside.”