Vorpis. A world has so much in it, on it— "Welcome, travelers ..." — while a moon, Katin thought as they left the spacefield by dawn-blazed gates, a moon holds its gray glories miniatured in rock and dust. " ... Vorpis has a day of thirty-three hours, a gravity just high enough to increase the pulse rate by point three of Earth normal over an acclimating period of six hours ..." They passed the hundred-meter column. Scales, burnished under the dawn, bled the mists scarfing the plateau: the Serpent, animated and mechanical, symbol of this whole sequined sector of night, writhed on his post. As the crew stepped onto the moving roadway, an oblate sun rouged away night's bruises. " ...with four cities of over five million inhabitants. Vorpis produces fifteen per cent of all the dynaplasts for Draco. In the equatorial lavid zones, more than three dozen minerals are quarried from the liquid rock. Here, in the tropic polar regions, both the arolat and the aqualat are hunted by net-riders along the inter-plateau canons.
