It rained most of last night and it was delicious, sitting on the balcony with the raindrops drumming on the roof, distant lightning and thunder over the lake. The smell of clean water and crackling ozone. I took out the harp and taught Charlee the words to “House of the Rising Sun” and “Nine Hundred Miles.” I had to explain railroads to her.

Of course she’d never seen rain before. It frightened her at first, the suddenness and force of the storm, but she did learn to enjoy it. What frightened me was seeing one of those floating spiders, frozen in the strobe of a lightning flash, skimming along in the wind down at the water’s edge. Charlee was looking the other way and so I didn’t say anything about it, but I was glad for the weight of the knife on my belt.

AGE 57

SETTLING, UNSETTLING

PRIME

The first couple of years after O’Hara arrived on Epsilon constituted a time of exploration rather than colonization. The towns Hilltop and Lakeside grew slowly, since most of the Engineer Pioneers were off on various foreign adventures. The primaries who were left behind, and most of the secondaries, were less enthusiastic about backbreaking labor than those indefatigable youngsters had been.

The slow pattern of growth, in both towns, reflected the kind of design conservatism you would expect from people who had lived for generations inside circumscribed space-settlement and starship environments. The dwellings were close together and uniform in design, if individual in decoration; streets were no broader than they had to be; there were elaborate recycling systems, including a composting toilet for each pair of dwellings. (The idea of actually letting water escape down the drain was wildly extravagant to them; letting it carry away valuable sewage would be literally unthinkable.)

The unwisdom of building so close together was exposed by a lightning bolt that set a house on fire. The reeds that formed the roof and walls weren’t especially flammable but they could burn, and by the time the fire was put out, by a combination of mobile pump and fortuitous downpour, the struck building had burned almost to the support timbers and the two adjacent ones were half ruined. Two people died, either from electrocution or immolation; the other three residents had been able to jump to safety from the balcony. By the time a neighbor’s ladder could be worked into place underneath, the inside was a red inferno.

There was a tall lightning rod a couple of hundred meters away, but the bolt had apparently bounced off it, according to the only eyewitness, though he said it could have been a trick of perspective. Should the rods be taller, thicker? Should there be more of them? The only information they had to go on was a single diagram from Key West, with two paragraphs of text.