The workers continued to chip away at the monumental tasks set before them, tasks thousands of times bigger than similar jobs on Earth. But if the job was shoveling snow, was that a good thing?

Once he sent a message to Swan to say he was glad to hear she had survived the attack on Terminator, and in it he mentioned that he never saw Shukra anymore. A message came back a few weeks later: Try Lakshmi.With a Venusian cloud address.

He looked into this and found that Lakshmi was a name that caused people to go silent and look away. A big power, based over in Cleopatra; an ally of Shukra’s, or an enemy—people didn’t really know, or didn’t want to say.

So: maybe Swan wanted to shift her informant to a place closer to the action. Or maybe she was just trying to help.

Or maybe he was just on his own.

Lists (6)

boreal forest (conifers); temperate forest (hardwoods or mixed hardwoods and conifers); tropical forest; desert; the alpine zone; grassland; tundra; and chaparral, sometimes called shrubland

these are the principal Terran biomes

cities; villages; croplands; rangelands; forests; and wildlands

these are the principal Terran human-use patterns anthromes

mix and match the above, and you get the 825 eco-regions of Earth

450 on land, 229 marine

65 percent of these now exist only off-planet

take an x-y graph to chart a Whittaker biome diagram, with precipitation marked vertically and temperature horizontally. Biomes can be plotted on this graph and will make a clearly shaped map of what kind of biome turns up in what kind of conditions. Left is hotter, right colder; wet is higher, dry lower; and thus the most general version is as follows:

Tropical rain forest

Tropical seasonal forest

Temperate rain forest

Savanna

Temperate deciduous forest

Taiga

Subtropical desert

Temperate grassland

desert Tundra

The classifications can be much elaborated. The 450 named terrestrial eco-regions divide biomes by not only precipitation and temperature, but also combinations of latitude, altitude, geography, geology, and other factors

eco-regions themselves can be usefully divided into microenvironments as small as a hectare

34,850 known species went extinct between 1900 and 2100. It was, and remains ongoing, the sixth great mass extinction in Earth’s history

no extinctions from this point onward are inevitable (this has always been true, however)

19,340 terraria are known to exist in the solar system. Approximately 70 percent of these function as zoo worlds, either dedicated to sustaining an eco-region’s suite of animals and plants, or else to creating new combinations of suites, called Ascensions

92 percent of mammal species are now endangered or gone entirely from Earth and live mainly in their off-planet terraria

space: the zoo, the

inoculant

SWAN AND THE INSPECTOR

There are two problems in dealing with the Terminator incident,” Inspector Genette said to Swan one evening as they flew out to the asteroid belt. They were traveling with a little group from Interplan and Terminator, but often found themselves the last two in the galley at the end of an evening. Swan liked that; the inspector would sit right on the table while eating, on a plush brought for the purpose, and afterward lounge there on one elbow with a drink, so that they spoke eye to eye. It was a little like talking to a cat.

“Only two?” she said.

“Two. First, who did it, and second, how we can find and catch this agent without giving more people the idea of doing it. The so-called copycat problem, and more generally, the problem of preventing any kind of repetition of this attack. That I consider to be the more difficult problem of the two.”

“What about howit was done?” Swan asked. “Isn’t that a problem too?”

“I know how it happened,” the inspector said easily.

“You do?”

“I think so. It’s the only way it could have happened, I think, and so there you have it. No matter how implausible, as the line has it, although in this case it’s not implausible at all. But I must confess to you, I don’t want to say more about it when we are both being recorded by our qubes.” Genette raised a wrist and indicated the thick, almost cubical little wristpad that contained Passepartout. “You have your qube recording always, I assume?”

“No.”

“But often?”

“Yes, I suppose so. Like anyone else.”

“Well, in any case I want to see some things in the belt before I will be sure of my hypothesis. So we’ll talk about this more when we’re out there. But I want you to think about the second problem; assuming we catch a perpetrator and explain the deed, perhaps in a prosecution—how are we going to keep someone else from doing it? This is where I think you could help me.”

They were traveling in the terrarium Moldava, which ran in an Aldrin cycle that would take them out to Vesta in eight days. The interior of the Moldavawas given over to growing wheat, and many of the people traveling in it congregated after their day’s labor in the fields at a resort on high ground near the bow, set on a broad hilltop, overlooking and then looking up at the upcurve of a big patchwork pattern of fields, different green and gold textures created by the many different strains being grown. It was like a quilter’s version of heaven.

Swan spent much of her time talking to the local ecologists, who had lots of little wheat disease problems they wanted to discuss. Inspector Jean stayed in the Interplan rooms and, as they passed Mars, spent time calling ahead to people in the terraria clustered around Vesta. At the ends of these days Swan would meet with the Interplan group to eat, then talk late with the inspector. Sometimes she talked about her daytime work. The locals were trying out wheat varieties that shed water from the seed heads better, and were exploring the genetic creation of microscopic “drip tips” like those seen in the macro world of tropical leaves, where the drip tips were long tips on the leaves that allowed water to break its surface tension and run away. “I want to have drip tips in my brain,” she said. “I don’t want to hold on to anything that will hurt me.”

“I wish you luck with that,” the little inspector said politely, staying focused on the meal, and eating a lot for such a small person.

A few days later they came to the Vesta Zone, one of the crowded areas of the asteroid belt. During the Accelerando many terraria had relocated near each other, creating something like communities, and the Vesta Zone was among the largest of these. Moldavareleased a ferry with the Interplan team on it, and when the ferry had decelerated and was near Vesta, they transferred again, this time to an Interplan ship with an Interplan crew.

This was an impressively fast little spaceship named Swift Justice, and in short order they were moving against the flow of the great current of asteroids, stopping once or twice at little rocks for the inspector to talk with people. No explanation for these conversations was offered, and Swan held off asking, while they visited the Orinoco Fantastico, the Crimea, the Oro Valley, Irrawady 14, Trieste, Kampuchea, the John Muir, and the Winnipeg, after which she just had to ask.

“All these little worlds had recent perturbations in their orbits,” the inspector explained, “and I wanted to ask if they had explanations for them.”