He yawned again, and stretched, and then looked out, ahead, to see what was to be seen. The dirigible was clearing the last low ridge of the Ne Theras. Before it, stretching out southward from the mountains’ arms, brilliant in the afternoon sunlight, lay a great sloping bay of green.

He looked at it with wonder, as his ancestors, six thousand years ago, had looked at it.

In the Third Millennium on Urras the astronomer-priests of Serdonou and Dhun had watched the seasons change the tawny brightness of the Otherworld, and had given mystical names to the plains and ranges and sun-reflecting seas. One region that grew green before all others in the lunar new year they called Ans Hos, the Garden of Mind: the Eden of Anarres.

In later millennia telescopes had proved them to be quite correct. Ans Hos was indeed the most favored spot on Anarres; and the first manned ship to the Moon had come down there in the green place between the mountains and the sea.

But the Eden of Anarres proved to be dry, cold, and windy, and the rest of the planet was worse. Life there had not evolved higher than fish and flowerless plants. The air was thin, like the air of Urras at a very high altitude. The sun burned, the wind froze, the dust choked.

For two hundred years after the first landing Anarres was explored, mapped, investigated, but not colonized. Why move to a howling desert when there was plenty of room in the gracious valleys of Urras?

But it was mined. The self-plundering eras of the Ninth and early Tenth Millennia had left the lodes of Urras empty; and as rocketry was perfected, it became cheaper to mine the Moon than to extract needed metals from low-grade ores or sea water. In the Urrasti year IX-738 a settlement was founded at the foot of the Ne Theras Mountains, where mercury was mined, in the old Ans Hos. They called the place Anarres Town. It was not a town, there were no women. Men signed on for two or three years’ duty as miners or technicians, then went home to the real world.

The Moon and its mines were under the jurisdiction of the Council of World Governments, but around in the Moon’s eastern hemisphere the nation of Thu had a little secret: a rocket base and a settlement of goldminers, with their wives and children. They really lived on the Moon, but nobody knew it except their government. It was the collapse of that government in the year 771 that led to the proposal, in the Council of World Governments, of giving the Moon to the International Society of Odonians—buying them off with a world, before they fatally undermined the authority of law and national sovereignty on Urras. Anarres Town was evacuated, and from the midst of the turmoil in Thu a couple of hasty final rockets were sent to pick up the goldminers. Not all of them chose to return. Some of them liked the howling desert.