Seen that way, the circle was chopped into eight arcs of roughly equal size, each subtending about forty-five degrees. At long zoom, these were glinting and luminously iridescent, with much shorter gray arcs—the boneyards, they were called—sticking them together.

At a closer zoom, the pointillistic nature of the image became obvious, and the system began helpfully to superimpose labels and numbered meridians. There were more than nine thousand active habitats distributed among those eight segments. The boneyards contained another several hundred—mostly obsolete ones being cut up for scrap—as well as unused fragments of the moon and the odd captured asteroid, there to serve as raw material for new construction.

Any object that was not inhabited—because it wasn’t finished yet, because it was abandoned, or because it was just a rock—was rendered as a gray dot. This accounted for the dull appearance of the eight boneyards.

Sparkling with pure colors were the eight much longer arcs between them. Seen from a distance, each arc had a predominant color. Encoded in those colors was the history of their building, and in turn that of the human races during the last thousand years—the Fifth Millennium, the Millennium of the Ring. Prior to that—during the first four thousand years of the Hard Rain—space had been so dirty that the human races had been obliged to hunker down in the shelter of massive nickel-iron bodies such as Cleft, whose orbits were, of course, similar to that of the moon whose core had once comprised them—nine times farther away from Earth than the habitat ring was now. As Dubois Harris had foreseen, the orbit of the former moon had been a fine place—the only place, really—to restart a civilization, as long as hellfire was raining down on Earth. But to the extent that the human race, as a whole, was capable of having a plan, it was to return to Earth eventually. The Hard Rain diminished, gradually at first, and then, during the Fourth Millennium, more steeply as fleets of robots, issuing from their nickel-iron fastnesses like bats from caverns, began to sweep the skies clean, policing the rubble cloud, herding specks and pebbles together, and spiraling them down into disciplined orbits at geosynchronous altitude. Most of the work was accomplished using the pressure of sunlight, a weak form of propulsion that took hundreds of years to have its effect.

At the dawn of the Fifth Millennium, about a thousand years ago, the first new habitat in geosynchronous orbit had been constructed. It was called Greenwich because it was positioned above Old Earth’s prime meridian. In the way of neighbors, it at first had nothing but rubble and worn-out robots. As soon as Greenwich was complete, however, construction of more habitats had spread outward from it. The human races and their robots had begun burning their way through the ring of raw material in both directions, consuming it like fire on a fuse.

Greenwich had been a joint project of all seven human races. The same was true of its first neighbors: Volta, then Banu Qasim to the east, Atlas and Roland to the west, later more in both directions. All of these were, therefore, colored white in the display that Kath Two was seeing in her varp.

Greenwich was one of eight equidistant points plotted around the ring. The other seven, proceeding west, acquired the names Rio, Memphis, Pitcairn, Tokomaru, Kyoto, Dhaka, and Baghdad. In due course, each of them was seeded with a new habitat as well as the production capabilities needed to manufacture more yet. As the centuries went by, their inhabitants likewise burned their way through the raw materials lying to their western and eastern sides, building new habitats at a pace to match the growth of their populations.

It was self-evident that if that process went on long enough, the arc of habitats reaching west from, say, Greenwich would make contact with that growing east from Rio. The increasingly narrow bands of unused material and recyclable junk between segments became the boneyards, and might have disappeared altogether had they not been so useful—in the early going, as materials depots, later as political buffers and as liminal zones, akin to frontiers, to which people could escape when they had learned that the close-packed life of space habitats was not for them. The one halfway between Greenwich and Rio was called Cape Verde. Other boneyards, proceeding westward from Cape Verde, were Titicaca, Grand Canyon, Hawaii, Kamchatka, Guangzhou, and Indus. Completing the circle, the one between Baghdad and Greenwich was called Balkans. Some were bigger than others. Guangzhou, which formerly had separated the Aïdan and Camite segments, had been used up entirely as the populations to either side had grown.

When pronouncing her Curse, Eve Aïda had said much that was true. It had become clear within the first few generations after the Council of the Seven Eves that the seven races were going to be around forever. They were as permanent in the human picture as toenails and spleens. Though no official policy had ever been proclaimed to that effect, they had tended to vote with their feet. Rio had become predominantly Ivyn. Moirans had flocked to Memphis, and Teklans to the next one around the arc in that direction, which was Pitcairn.

Baghdad, flanking Greenwich on the other side, had been settled by Dinans. Proceeding east from Baghdad, Dhaka had filled up with Camites. Aïdans and Julians had found a way of expressing their perpetual sense of alienation from the other races by opting for the Antipodean habitats of Kyoto and Tokomaru respectively; closing the ring, this brought the Julians, on their eastern end, up against the Teklans’ western extremity, separated only by the Hawaii boneyard, which was relatively large, if only because the Julian race was not numerous enough to make much headway in using its resources.

The levels of racial purity varied. Greenwich had been founded by all of them together, and so it would forever be the most diverse part of the ring. Baghdad and Rio, flanking it, also tended to have a lot of residents who were not, respectively, Dinans or Ivyns. That three-segment arc was, therefore, fairly cosmopolitan. The other races, in general, tended to be more inward looking, so their segments were not as thoroughly mixed. Anomalous outposts speckled the ring: a habitat containing fifty thousand Julians located spang in the middle of the Dinan segment, for example.

Eve Moira had employed a color-coding scheme to keep track of the lab samples from which all the races had spawned. It was purely the result of what she’d had lying around in the way of office supplies: an assortment of colored test-tube stickers and felt-tipped pens. Nevertheless, it had become a universal convention.

Blue: Dinah

Yellow: Camila

Red: Aïda

Orange: Julia

Cyan: Tekla

Purple: Moira herself

Green: Ivy

White: no particular race

The same code was used to render the dots that made up the ring. So, a predominantly Dinan habitat would be colored blue, and so on. Because they were so tiny and so numerous, the dots all merged into an iridescent, sparkling arc on the screen. But general trends could be seen. Whether or not it had been a deliberate choice on Eve Moira’s part, colors in the cool part of the palette—blue, green, purple, cyan—were linked to the four Eves she was personally closest to, while warm colors—red, yellow, orange—were saved for the others.

When the entire ring was plotted according to this scheme, and the plot was viewed as a whole, with Greenwich at twelve o’clock and Tokomaru at six, one therefore saw a great arc of cool colors starting at about ten o’clock (the western end of the Indus boneyard) and sweeping around to about five o’clock (the eastern end of the Hawaii boneyard). A shorter arc of warm colors ran from a little before six o’clock to a little after nine. The ring’s “top”-most segment, centered on Greenwich, was frosty white, like a polar icecap flanked by purple mountains, green hills, and blue water. But on its bottom left side, the ring looked as if it were being heated by a blowtorch, glowing in the warm tones that spoke of predominantly Camite, Aïdan, and Julian populations.