The beast out there.(Excerpt)

Some lead a life of mild content ...

--Saki

Around me as I flew the evening sky of Wunderland was full of light. Alpha Centauri B, so brilliant in its time as to cast its own sharp shadows at dusk and to fill the air with colour, yet at an average of 25AUs easily distant enough to be looked at with the naked eye. There too was the red jewel of Proxima and the diffuse, braided lines of the Serpent Swarm. There, a routine sight in this system, was the sliding and flash of meteors, plus a couple of fair-sized moons and other smaller satellites, natural and artificial. There were other points of light that were in fact potato-shaped stony worldlets of various sizes, some carrying loads of instruments, the axled wheels of the old space station, the squares and rhomboids of advertising signs (hardly used now--they proved unpopular and counter-productive), high aircraft and spacecraft, and, higher still and parked in their plodding orbits, the old Slowboats that had brought the original colonists.

The towns and city too had their high points of light, not because population pressure in a limited space had forced them upward--Wunderland's chief cities were still quite small--but because 0.61 Earth gravity made for both high but easily conquerable hills and a few relatively inexpensive architectural flights of fancy.

Wunderland. Humanity's first interstellar colony was well named, I thought, watching the landscape pass below me, high crests and ridges still lit by the rays of setting Alpha Centauri A, mountain-sides glowing. I had seen pictures of Earth, and understood again the delight our ancestors must have felt in their first days and nights on this new world.

Not a new thought but still a good one. With its towering hills and mountains, sparkling seas and lush life, its forests, parklands and savannahs where the red-gold of the local vegetation now mixed with the green of Earth plants, its brilliant sky, a gravity that gave good health, good looks (if we exercised hard) and long life, it was impossible to imagine a more wonderful place. Someone had once compared it to the valleys of Malacandra in Lewis's ancient fantasy Out of the Silent Planet, and noted how Lewis, even if his Mars was a billion years or so behind the times, had anticipated the effects of low gravity on waves. The frustrations of my personal life could be seen in their proper perspective as I flew over that glorious landscape, under those stars.

I have often remembered the details of that night, and the contentment I did not then know I felt. In fact, I was relieved to be getting away for a few hours from my own thoughts and from the political intrigues and pressures that were becoming more and more obvious between Herrenmanner and Prolevolk on the one hand, and Teuties and Tommies on the other, with the declasse jumping about on the edges.