They passed a line of wooden buildings; the wood came from forested islands, floating around like rafts on the far side of the lake. Streetgrass gleamed greenly, and gardens grew in oversized planter boxes behind the buildings, under long bright lamps. Zo showed a bit of the stick to their companions on the walk, confused functionaries from Ganymede; she reminded them of Mars’s military might, mentioned again that lo was considering defection from their league.

The Ganymedans went off to get dinner, looking dismayed. “So subtle,” Ann remarked when they were out of earshot.

“Now we’re being sarcastic,” Zo said.

“You’re a thug. Put it that way.”

“I will have to enroll in the Red school of diplomatic subtlety. Perhaps arrange for assistants to come along with me and blow up some of their property.”

Ann made a noise between her teeth. She continued down the promenade, and Zo kept up with her.

“Strange that the Great Red Spot is gone,” Zo remarked as they crossed a bridge over a white-bottomed canal. “Like some kind of sign. I keep expecting it to come around into view.”

The air was chill and damp. The people they passed were mostly of Terran origin, part of the diaspora. Some fliers cut la/y spirals up near the tent frame. Zo watched them cross the face of the great planet. Ann stopped frequently to inspect cut surfaces of rock, ignoring the town on ice and its crowds, with their tiptoe grace and their rainbow clothing, a gang of young natives greyhounding past — “You really are more interested in rocks than people,” Zo said, half-admiring, half-irritated.

Ann looked at her; such a basilisk glare! But Zo shrugged and took her by the arm, pulled her along. “The young natives out here are less than fifteen m-years old, they’ve lived in point-one g all their lives, they don’t care about Earth or Mars. They believe in the Jovian moons, in water, in swimming and flying. Most of them have altered their eyes for the low light. Some of them are growing gills. They have a plan to terraform these moons that will take them five thousand years. They’re the next step in evolution, for ka’s sake, and here you are staring at rocks that are just the same as rocks everywhere else in this galaxy. You’re just as crazy as they said.”

This bounced off Ann like a thrown pebble. She said, “You sound like me, when I tried to get Nadia away from Underbill.”

Zo shrugged. “Come on,” she said, “I have another meeting.”

“Mafia work never stops, does it.” But she followed, peering around like a wizened court jester, dwarfish and oddly dressed in her old-fashioned jumper.

Some Lake Geneva council members greeted them, somewhat nervously, by the docks. They got on a small ferry, which threaded its way out through a fleet of small sailing boats. Out on the lake it was windy. They puttered to one of the forest islands. Vast specimens of balsa and teak stood over the swampy mat of the floating island’s heated ground, and on the island’s shore loggers were working outside a little sawmill. The mill was soundproofed, nevertheless a muffled whine of saw cuts accompanied the conversation. Floating on a lake on a moon of Jupiter, all the colors suffused with the gray of solar distance: Zo felt little bursts of flier’s exhilaration, and she said to the locals, “This is so beautiful. I can see why there are people on Europa who talk about making their whole world a water world, sail around and around. They could even ship away water to Venus and get down to some solid land for islands. I don’t know if they’ve mentioned it to you. Maybe it’s just all talk, like the idea I heard for creating a small black hole and dropping it into Jupiter’s upper atmosphere. Stellariz-ing Jupiter! You’d have all the light you needed then.”

“Wouldn’t Jupiter be consumed?” one of the locals asked.

“Oh but it would take ever so long, they said; millions of years.”

“And then a nova,” Ann pointed out.

“Yes yes. Everything but Pluto destroyed. But by that time we’ll be long gone, one way or another. Or if not, they’ll figure something out.”

Ann laughed harshly. The locals, thinking hard, did not appear to notice.

Back on the lakeshore Ann and Zo walked the promenade. “You’re so blatant,” Ann said.

“On the contrary. It’s very subtle. They don’t know if I’m speaking for me, or for Jackie, or for Mars. It could be just talk. But it reminds them of the larger context. It’s too easy for them to get wrapped up in the Jovian situation and forget all the rest. The solar system entire, as a single political body; people need help thinking about that, they can’t conceptualize it.”

“You need help yourself. It’s not Renaissance Italy, you know.”

“Machiavelli will always remain true, if that’s what you mean. And they need to be reminded of that here.”

“You remind me of Frank.”

“Frank?”

“Frank Chalmers.”

“Now there’s an issei I admire,” Zo said. “What I’ve read about him, anyway. He was the only one of you who wasn’t a hypocrite. And he was the one that got the most done.”

“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.