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always visible in the daytime. The nights, thanks to those same orbital mirrors, seemed unn a turally brief, embellished by a natural moon which seemed the right size, but of the wrong color and pattern.
    Trees, for the most part seeded by ultralight aircraft during the final stages of terraformation, were all exactly the same height, giving the landscape a contrived look which was appropriate but oppressively su r real, like living in a cartoon. It was estimated that in the low-mass regions of Pallas they might eventually grow to be a thousand yards tall.
    Even worse, like the trees, the children who managed to be born alive and healthy were beginning to turn out gangly, attenuated, their growing bodies responding to a feeble pull of gravity which varied, depending on the location and its underlying geology, from just one-tenth of Earth normal to the merest twentieth.
    And worst of all, Pallas was dull. Having long ago—and not without sufficient reason, thoroughly and humiliatingly laundered in public—lost interest in the intimate aspect of marriage herself, Gwen felt deprived of the cultural and social benefits to which any Washingtonian of wealth and status becomes accustomed. Her husband had argued that, through r e cordings and realtime transmissions to the Residence from the home planet, she was free to enjoy any drama, dance, or spectacle that anyone enjoyed on Earth. She’d replied that, while everything he said might be true, no one of any importance could see her enjoying them. And this telling if somewhat irrational point had long since settled the argument.
    At least for her.

Tragedy and Hope
From 1917, Americans wondered why they aided Russia with food she could not grow herself. The truth was, those who had saddled them with a federal reserve and income tax did more than just keep Soviet Marxism going, they had created it. During the first half of the century, government grew 500 times faster than the population. Could that have happened without an enemy to frighten voters and reluctant taxpayers?
—Mirelle Stein, The Productive Class
     
    A s it was intended to be, stepping into the official residence of the Chief Administrator was like stepping a quarter of a billion kilometers, all the way back to Earth.
    “Dinner’s ready, Senator, and Mr. Brody is at the gate.”
    As she always did at this time, Alice Ngu had come to fetch him in from the verandah. Short, plump, and brown, wearing a plain dress which failed as a servant’s uniform only because nobody else here wore one like it, she was second- or third-generation Cambodian or Vietna m ese—Altman could never remember which—and delivered her English with that lilt Orientals seemed to retain no matter how many of their a n cestors had lived and died in America. Her husband and children had been among those he’d watched returning from the fields.
    As usual, he’d already started in and met her in the family’s private living room. “Thank you, Alice, I’ll talk to the gate. Please tell Mrs. Altman I’ll be there shortly.”
    As she left, closing the double doors behind her, it struck him all over again how Gwen had made a point of maintaining things as if they were still living on Earth. Given certain constraints, the place combined the ambience of the executive mansion she’d grown up in with the self-conscious rusticity of the high-tech hideaway where she’d spent most of her vacations. Altman had to concentrate sometimes, remember to slide his feet along as he did outdoors, avoid lifting them too far from the carpet in a pull of gravity only a tenth as powerful as that of Earth, in order to keep from dashing his brains out on the ceiling beams.
    The room appeared pine-paneled. There wasn’t a tree on Pallas that could have provided the boards—not that anybody was willing to cut, anyway. The cost of importing the rolls of photoprinted plastic had e x ceeded what many a family had spent simply getting here, but the pan e ling—and the