She gave the demolition charge a toss straight up.

“Did you just vote yes?”

“Oh yeah,” she said, watching it dwindle against the stars. The red lights of the LED timer glittered like rubies.

“We’re unanimous,” Ivy said. Dinah understood that Ivy was announcing it to the other women in the Banana.

For the first and last time, Dinah thought.

The red light had shrunk to a pinprick. Like the planet Mars, she thought, except sharper and more brilliant. Then, silently, it turned into a ball of yellow light that darkened as it spread.

Part Three

THE HABITAT RING CIRCA A+5000

FIVE THOUSAND YEARS LATER

KATH TWO WAS STARTLED AWAKE BY PATCHES OF ORANGE-PINK light cavorting across the taut fabric above her. A very old instinct, born on the savannahs of Old Earth, read it as danger: the flitting shadows, perhaps, of predators circling her tent. During the five thousand years of the Hard Rain, that instinct had lain dormant and useless. Here on the surface of New Earth, just beginning to support animals big and smart enough to be dangerous, it was once again troubling her sleep. Her shoulder twitched, in the way that it did sometimes when you were half awake, and not sure whether you were really moving or dreaming of it. She had thought of reaching under her pillow for the weapon. But coming fully to, she found that her arm had not really moved, other than the twitch. Through the thin padding beneath her head she could still feel the hard shape of the katapult.

By then it had become obvious that the moving light on the tent had nothing to do with large predators. It was too dappled and volatile. Not even birds could move so. Its twinkling and swirling were mysterious, but its hue told her it was the first light of the day. This meant that she had slept a little too long and was in danger of missing the dawn breezes that she had hoped would bear her into the sky.

She stumbled out of her little tent, feeling yesterday’s hike in the muscles of her legs. That was surprising. She thought she had trained well. But even in the largest space habitat, you couldn’t go downhill for all that long. On an actual planet, you could go on losing altitude for days. And, as it turned out, those long downhill runs were what really killed your legs. Yesterday she had shed almost two thousand meters, descending from a range of hills toward a blue, water-filled crater thirty kilometers across. She had stopped a few clicks short of its rim, where the ground dropped away toward a swath of grassland between her and the shore. The break in the slope had been subtle, but Kath Two’s throbbing knees had made it obvious enough. She had taken a dozen or so strides down it, gauging its angle in her blistered soles, sensing the air’s currents with her lips, her hair, and the palms of her hands. Then she had turned around and trudged back up to an inflection point that would have been invisible had the low evening sun not been grazing it, casting a sharp terminator on the ground.

Where wind streamed over bent ground, it stretched. The stretching had been faint in the dying wind of yestereve, but she had known that it would become more pronounced in the morning, as the sun rose and the air fled from its warmth. So she had dropped her pack and made her camp.

The source of the dappled light, as she now saw, was sunlight sparkling from waves on the lake below, shooting rays through the branches of trees, perhaps a hundred meters down the slope from her, that were beginning to stir in the morning breeze, making soft noises, as when a sleeping lover exhales.

She bent down, pulled the katapult out from under the sack of laundry she’d been using as a pillow, felt it thrum as it recognized her fingerprint. After a short walk and a careful look around—for she did not actually wish to use the katapult—she squatted and urinated in the largest open space that was handy. Only in the last few decades had the ecosystem here matured to the point where TerReForm—her employer—could seed it with predators. And that was always somewhat hit-or-miss. On the mature ecosystems of Old Earth, predators and prey had, according to the histories, evolved to some kind of equilibrium. On the remade ones of New Earth, you never knew. You couldn’t assume that all the predators around here were getting enough to eat; and even if they were, they might view Kath Two as a bit of tempting variety to add to their diet.

Kath Two was Survey. Whether or not this made her military was a topic of almost theological complexity. But regardless of whether you considered Survey to be a purely scientific corps with ad hoc liaisons to the military—merely for logistical convenience and situational awareness—or viewed it as an elite scout unit working hand-in-glove with Snake Eaters, its stated mission was to observe and report on the growth of New Earth’s ecosystem. Not to kill the animals that the human races had gone to so much trouble to invent and import. During her two-week stint on the surface, she had grown used to the katapult and stopped seeing it as remarkable that she was carrying a weapon. But the awareness that she was going home today made her see all of this through the eyes of the sophisticated urbanites she might be mingling with tomorrow: habitat ring dwellers who would never believe that only a short time earlier Kath Two had been in a place where one did not pee without carefully looking around first, did not venture into the open without a weapon in hand.

During the minutes since she had awakened, the sparkling light had warmed to brassy gold. Everything in the scene was a combination of exceptionally complex and unpredictable phenomena: the wavelets on the lake, the shapes into which the branches of the trees had grown during the century or so since this ground had been seeded by pods hurtling down out of space, tumbling like dice on jumbled ejecta from the myriad bolide strikes of the Hard Rain, finding purchase in crevices prepped by rock-munching microbes. The branches and the leaves responded to the currents of the wind, which were themselves random and turbulent in a way that surpassed human calculation. She thought about the fact that the brains of humans—or of any large animals, really—had evolved to live in environments like this, and to be nourished by such complex stimuli. For five thousand years the people of the human races had been living without that kind of nourishment. They had tried to simulate it with computers. They had built habitats large enough to support lakes and forests. But nature simulated was not nature. She wondered if humans’ brains had changed during that time, and if they were now ready for what they had set in motion on New Earth.

And then, because she was a Moiran, she wondered if all that had to do with the fact that she had overslept. Her previous Survey missions had been quick insertions lasting a few days. And they had typically sent her to less developed biomes: the fringes of the TerReForm process, where the seeding of the ground had occurred more recently, and less complexity struck the eye, nose, and ear. This mission, however, had lasted long enough that she could feel it changing her.

Eve Moira had been a child of London, fascinated by the natural world, but drawn to the city. So, Kath Two looked to the bright lights of the big city. Here that meant gazing up into the sky.

Yesterday had been overcast, with little movement in the air. She might have been hard-pressed to find and organize the energy she would need to get home. But matters had changed during the night. The air was moving. Not strongly enough, yet, that she could feel it on her face, but enough to stir the leaves at the tops of the trees and to wobble the heavy heads of the tall grass. Above, it must be moving more strongly, for yesterday’s sheet of clouds had been shredded to tufts and tissues, purplish-gray on the bottom and pink-orange on their eastern faces. The sky between them, however, was perfectly clear, and still dark enough that she could see a few bright stars and planets. And, to the south—for she was in the northern hemisphere—an orderly ring of brilliant points erupting from the eastern horizon and arching across the vault of the sky until it plunged into the shadow of the world, off to the west. From here she could see nearly half of the ten thousand or so habitats in the ring. Far to the east, just above the horizon, was an especially big dot of light, like the clasp on a necklace. That would be the colossal structure of the Eye, currently stationed above the Atlantic.