Satrap of Saturn

All over Mars the terraforming crews cautiously tinker with new rhythms. Ravens and barrowrats, podrats and b-kats and mites, j-dogs and a hundred kinds of gaussian and non-gaussian humans. In only a few centuries no colonist can fully claim to have *adapted*; that's generational work. Several among the postterrestrial daughter species hibernate each winter, sharing dreams along their webworked nervous systems. Their deep slow sleep, filled with shared locations and artefacts held in common, spreads across the months of cold like landscape. Congenetics of the Martian colonists, estranged in small bands and barrios across the solar system occasionally dip, too, into the homelanders' vision. Each spring, the barrowrats emerge from their tunnels in the arctic zone to attend to their waking affairs. They monitor the solar collectors and windtraps, play in the glacial ravines, every spring a different landscape. While the barrowrats work above ground, migratory podrats extend the tu...

The Pharos could be seen halfway to Kupros: a mechanical star, a fire focused through the largest lenses ever cast. Sailors whispered that its beam could be directed down in a ship-smashing spear should invaders ever threaten Alexandreia's harbor. I saw no ships broken by the Pharos, only men: philosophers, castrated holy men, a hundred kinds of charlatan fluttered to the halls rooted at the base of the tower. Every text in every language of the civilized world was to be found there, or so it was said, and every kind of nonsense could be heard in the agora, old lies in new robes, new lies dancing naked, myriad whispers of secret techniques, jealous muttering after quick power. The scholars of the Pharos produced mostly lists — the five greatest tragedies, biographies of the seven mightiest kings, collections the 10 noblest poets — and these too found their places in the library. Every Ptolemaios lavished funds on the library, seeking to increase its holdings beyond those hoarded by...