“You don’t know anything about it,” Ann said.
Zo shrugged. “The past is the same for all of us. I know as much about it as you do.”
A group of the Jovians walked by, pale and big-eyed, utterly absorbed by their own talk. Zo gestured: “Look at them! They’re so focused. I admire them too, really— throwing themselves so energetically into a project that won’t be completed until long after their death— it’s an absurd gesture, a gesture of defiance and freedom, a divine madness, as if they were sperm wiggling madly toward an unknown goal.”
“That’s all of us,” Ann said. “That’s evolution. When do we go to Miranda?”
Around Uranus. four times as far from the sun as Jupiter, objects were struck by one quarter of a percent the light that would have struck them on Earth. This was a problem for powering major terraforming projects, although as Zo found when they entered the Uranian system, it still provided quite enough illumination for visibility; the sunlight was 1,300 times as bright as the full moon on Earth, the sun still a blinding little chip in the black array of stars, and though things in the region were a bit dim and drained of their color, one could see them perfectly well. Thus the great power of the human eye and spirit, functioning well so far from home.But there were no big moons around Uranus to attract a major terraforming effort; Uranus’s family consisted of fifteen very small moons, none larger than Titania and Oberon at six hundred kilometers in diameter, and most considerably smaller— a collection of little asteroids, really, named after Shakespeare’s women for the most part, all circling the blandest of the gas giants, blue-green Uranus, rolling around with its poles in the plane of the ecliptic, its eleven narrow graphite rings scarcely visible fairy loops. All in all, not a promising system for inhabitation.
Nevertheless people had come, people had settled. This was no surprise to Zo; there were people exploring and starting to build on Triton, on Pluto, on Charon, and if a tenth planet were discovered and an expedition sent out to it, they would no doubt find a tent town already there, its citizens already squabbling with each other, already bristling at any suggestion of outside interference in their affairs. This was life in the diaspora.
• • •
The major tent town in the Uranian system was on Oberon, the biggest and farthest out of the fifteen moons. Zo and Ann and the rest of the travelers from Mars parked in a planetary orbit just outside Oberon, and took a ferry down to the moon to make a brief visit to the main settlement.
This town, Hippolyta, spanned one of the big groove valleys that were common to all the larger Uranian moons. Because the gravity was even more meager than the light was dim, the town had been designed as a fully three-dimensional space, with railings and glide ropes and flying dumbbell waiters, cliffside balconies and elevators, chutes and ladders, diving boards and trampolines, hanging restaurants and plinth pavilions, all illuminated by bright white floating lamp globes. Zo saw immediately that so much paraphernalia in the air made flying inside the tent impossible; but in this gravity daily life was a kind of flight, and as she bounded in the air with a flex of her foot, she decided to join those residents who treated daily life that way; she danced. And in fact very few people tried to walk in the Terran way; here human movement was naturally airborne, sinuous, full of vaulting leaps and spinning dives and long Tarzan loops. The lowest level of the city was netted.~;~;Dé0#0;:
The people who lived out here came from everywhere else in the system, although of course they were mostly Martian or 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.