The staff were almost all Moirans, with a sprinkling of Camites and one visiting scientist who looked like a Dinan/Ivyn breed. Obvious to Kath Two, and probably to the others as well, was that her kin had slept long and hard after coming to this place, where they were cut off from the rest of their race while continually exposed to the pheromones, smells, calls, and behaviors of those animals and plants. Resulting epigenetic shifts had rendered them well qualified to do this kind of work, to do it all day long, and to live here indefinitely. This truly was the back of beyond—even more isolated than certain boneyard habitats that had become proverbial for remoteness—and the Moirans here all shared a kind of thousand-yard stare that was only intensified by the fact that they were predominantly green-eyed. They moved slowly, they appeared to think slowly, and they were always reacting to stimuli—auditory? olfactory? imaginary?—that Kath Two could not even detect.

The existence of seven distinct human races, as well as various Aïdan subraces, provided modern society with a rich fund of opportunities for socially awkward happenings. The few hours they spent on the beach at Mokupuku, watching the locals unload samples from the vehicle and hose the shit out of it with pressurized seawater, were long ones for Kath Two as she sensed other members of the Seven glancing back and forth between her and these, and wondering how long it would take Kath Two to go that way if she extended her stay. These people had created, and were self-aware and self-proud of having created, an original culture around the place where they lived. Which for all practical purposes was synonymous with the ecosystem that they were installing in it. Not for them scientific detachment. Was it really wise to station Moirans in a place where they could live as closely with epigenetic animal species as medieval Europeans had with their swine and their fowl? Were these animals scientific specimens, livestock, or pets to them? Kath Two watched their uncomfortably familiar interactions with those animals and they watched her watching them. They had woven into their dreadlocks the bright feathers of birds that on Old Earth would have been called exotic: a word that was useless here, since humans had made them, patterning them after the parrots, toucans, and cockatoos of long-extinct jungles on the theory that if colorful plumage had been useful to birds there, it would be useful to them here. “Inotic”? “Anthroötic”? Anyway, they were weird people, and they were lifers in the sense that no conceivable home could be found for them on the ring. Not unless they went back to sleep for a while and tried to roll back the changes that their environment had bent on them. But that was no easy thing. As long as a Moiran kept changing, she could keep changing, but if she stayed one way for too long she would “take a set,” as the expression went, and find it hard to change back. These, Kath Two suspected, had definitely taken a set. They were obviously interbreeding with the Camite staff, who in racially characteristic fashion had adapted to the place where they had found themselves and were looking for ways to make it work for the people surrounding them.

There was nothing wrong with that. So people on the ring kept saying, because it was the polite thing to say. Nothing wrong with breeds. But the truth of it was that breeds, like weeds, tended to be found in disturbed areas. A sprinkling was nice, especially in sophisticated places like Chainhattan, but seeing a lot of them in one community was a sign that everyone on the ring knew how to read, even if they knew it was impolite to say what they were thinking. The behaviors that these Moirans had invented around everyday things like the sunrise, mealtime, and the interpretation of dreams had a ritualistic quality that to Ariane was obviously fascinating and to Kath Two was a little mortifying. For the first time in her life she was feeling the stirrings of what was called Old Racism: the survival into modern times of racial attitudes, or reenactments thereof, that had existed on Old Earth, had been altogether snuffed out, and were known only because documentation thereof had survived. On a certain kind of diseased mind they exerted the same magnetic pull as they had pre-Zero, and so among a population of millions on the ring you might find one person who’d spent too much time delving into a five-thousand-year-old web archive and become infected with ideas about pre-Zero blacks that he fancied were applicable to Moirans, and so on. It was purely an intellectual curiosity and not at all a factor in real people’s lives: a thing Kath Two had heard of, like rabies or Watergate, and she was fascinated to find it stirring in her own mind here of all places. But that was only a passing notion.

Presently her Survey mind kicked in and subsumed all under the scientific method. Here they were at a TerReForm outpost. Many thousands of these existed. Some were huddles of tents presaging more permanent works. Some, like this one, had been around for decades, others for centuries. Some were now abandoned, having served their purpose, and others had become nuclei of RIZes, campuses for gimmicky schools, prison camps, or scientific foundations. A weird culture, utterly nontransferable to the ring, had formed at this one. If it had happened here, something like it must have happened at others. How many? Was New Earth infested with bizarre cultural outliers centered on TerReForm installations? Could you go to what used to be Uzbekistan and find a miniature colony of Ivyn performance artists, developing their own idiosyncratic lichen-based cuisine on the rim of an impact crater the size of Ireland? To what was left of the Iberian Peninsula and visit a colony of Teklan juggernauts making babies with Julian mystics? How far could this go?

Kath Two felt some relief the next morning when, after a pleasant and uneventful campout on the beach, they got back into Ark Madiba, now 90 percent empty, and took off north.

The distance to the south coast of Blue Antimer was half what they had covered the day before. Around midday, when the sun was beating down on the deep eaves and shuttered windows of the military complex above, the ark plowed up the harbor there and settled with a vast sigh into a fresh, sparkling azure chop. A smaller TerReForm post, annexed to the military base, sported a single pier long enough to accommodate an ark. The pilots employed a variety of muttering and whining thrusters to get into its general vicinity. The rest was handled by robot tugs pulling on ropes wrapped around massive bitts. The five humans who’d been sharing the cargo hold moved forward to get out of the way of the local TerReForm staff, who boarded the ark, along with a couple of cargo-loading grabbs, to take charge of what little cargo remained: racks of cages housing large carnivores. It was a mix of canids and felids, with a few big snakes. They’d been stashed in different parts of the hold so that they wouldn’t wear themselves out menacing one another. Anyone who was connected with Survey, or, for that matter, who knew anything about the TerReForm at all, would understand what this meant: the ecosystem of Antimer was far more developed than that of Hawaii, and was now producing small fauna and herbivores at a pace that required the introduction of bigger predators to keep them in check.

The harbor was an almost perfectly circular impact crater with only a small outlet to the sea. Most of its circumference was claimed by the military base. From somewhere in that zone, a launch cut across the disk of blue water and came up alongside the ark’s cockpit door. The Seven descended to it by means of a folding stairway, and thus passed out of TerReForm jurisdiction without any formalities, or even contact with the local staff. Half an hour later they were eating lunch in a private officers’ dining room adjoined to a mess hall, and an hour after that they were aboard an airplane—a conventional, powered military craft—that took off from a runway blasted into the stony shore of the island a few miles away and banked northward after it had gained enough altitude to clear the snowcapped peaks along Antimer’s central ridge. From that height the eye was no longer beguiled by the peaks and valleys that, at a smaller scale, made the place seem like an Old Earth mountain range. Here it was possible, for those looking out the windows on the left side of the airplane, to see a thousand kilometers westward. The curvature of the archipelago’s spine made it obvious that this was the rim of a huge impact crater, created by a big chunk of moon that had come in on a somewhat northward trajectory and pushed a high arc of seafloor and ejecta up above sea level. To the south, a smaller archipelago, curved the opposite way, hinted at the crater’s lower rim. That, however, was not visible from the plane’s windows. Instead they all gazed west, tracing the arc of mountains as it grew higher and the land beneath it broadened. Somewhere along the way it was sliced by the invisible line of 166 Thirty. Bard pressed his heavy brow against the window and looked long and thoughtfully at his homeland, seeming to identify hills and bays that he remembered, thinking of vineyards. Then Antimer fell away behind and they flew for some hours over the featureless Pacific.