since we’re in the area, at this time of year.” Marin leaned forward, bringing the GPS online and scrolling till he found what he wanted. A wood of maple, aspen and birch, built from reengineered trees. The result was a designer landscape – nothing about it was natural to Jagreth, but it had the look and feel and smell of the Hudson River area of Darwin’s World, and several parts of the northern latitudes of Earth’s Americas. For more than a century Jagreth had celebrated the First Fleet’s origins in the Near Sky, and specifically Darwin’s, Mars and Earth itself. Many landscapes around Westminster were built by the terraformer fleet to make the first generations comfortable. They were as artificial as their trees and wildlife were real and alive; and they were as beautiful as any place in the homeworlds. The colors of the season were already beginning to show, and the low sun cast a golden blaze across a birch hillside. Westminster sprawled away to the sea, busy, self-possessed, handsome with a certain quaintness which had been cast off decades before by more affluent and populous cities of other worlds.
