2312

“Not at all,” Wahram said. “ You saved me. And we got through.” And with another awkward bow he left.

Lists (5)

the Vesta Zone, a cloud of terraria forming a single cooperative Aymara, an amazonia with an interior completely overgrown with cloud forest Tatar Soul, a steppes grassland where people speak a resuscitated Indo-European The Copenhagen Interpretation, a canal town with a gift economy The Zanzibar Cat, an anarchist savanna with thousands of big cats and no interior buildings at all Arabia Deserta, a desert occupied by British travelers Aspen, a skiing paradise unnamed prison asteroids with robot guards Hermaphrodite, where all permanent residents are gynandromorphs and androgyns Saint George, a social terrarium in which the men think they are living in a Mormon polygamy, while the women consider it a lesbian world with a small percentage of male lesbians asteroids hollowed not into cylindrical terraria but rather warrens, hives, caves, pits, hotels, etc. The Maldives, an aquarium recreating the drowned islands; Micronesia, likewise; Tuvalu, likewise; all the drowned islands of Earth are reproduced in this fashion Greater Yellowstone Ecosystem 34, the last of thirty-four terraria using versions of the template of this great biome extremophile terraria, deadly to humans but hospitable to growth of organisms creating medicines and inoculants doomed biomes, established with odd parameters and then sealed off like test tubes The Little Prince, an outie terrarium, tent-bubbled with its atmosphere bluing its edges The Whorl, whose inhabitants keep watch for an outsider Miranda, the smashed-together moon of Uranus, now a Trojan freely orbiting the sun, completely tent-bubbled, its deep canyons and stupendous ridges filigreed with snow drifting down in the low g, all Swiss architecture, a dream of the Alps Icarus, a fliers’ world, lit by a sunline in its floor to keep the air clear Source of the Peach Blossom Stream, a Tang dynasty recreation that looks like a Chinese landscape painting come to life Miocene terraria, Cretaceous terraria, Jurassic terraria, Precambrian terraria Water Drop, an aquarium filled entirely with water and ocean creatures Sequoia Kings Canyon, an infolded Sierra Nevada of California — and so on. Estimated nineteen thousand occupied asteroids and moons

SWAN AND MQARET

Back at the spaceport between Schubert and Bramante Craters, Swan sat in a corner, filled with a regret for something she couldn’t name. Surely it was impossible that it should be regret for the utilidor; already she was forgetting that. Let Pauline remember that. Never look back, why should she? Although there had been something there-as if she had been on the border of something important. What had he said? That the tunnel was no different from anywhere else? She would never concede that, never.

When she was about to leave with Genette and the Interplan team, Mqaret came to see her again. “You’re so tough,” he told her, patting her head as if she were a child. But he took her seriously, she knew. So she shook her head.

“No,” she said flatly. “I fell apart. I couldn’t handle it.”

He defended her fondly. “It’s not really what you’re good at, of course. Enforced confinement. Don’t ever get put in prison, or shoot off in a spacesuit on a tangent somewhere. It wouldn’t suit you. Yet here you did very well, I think.”

“I don’t see how.”

“Well, this solar flare that struck you before you got to shelter; your suit dosimeters show that somehow you got hit much harder than the others down there with you. In fact, I don’t mean to scare you, because you’re going to be fine-I’ve already got your renovation well in hand, and you are responding superbly-but really, that was quite a hit.”

“Ten sieverts,” she said dismissively. “That’s not so bad.”

“Quite bad, actually. Did you look at the sun longer than the others? Did you stand in front of your friend?”

“Yes, I did, but I’m only half as wide as him. I’m sure I didn’t protect him much.”

“He only got three sieverts. So you’re only a bit thinner than he is, really. You saved him from the full shot.”

“And then he saved me. He had to carry me for a few days.”

“Fair’s fair. But look, this ten sieverts-that’s enough to kill, and you should have been debilitated. But you will be fine, as I said. So I’m interested to see if we can find out why you did so well. I’ve been wondering if your Enceladan symbiote had anything to do with it. It tolerates radiation well, and as a detrivore it may have bloomed in you to eat all the new food provided for it by all your killed cells. It may have joined your own T cells in clearing your body.”

Swan was startled by this. “You hated me doing that,” she said. “You told me I was a stupid fool.”