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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 plie, 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.