Free Manhattan in Reverse by Peter F. Hamilton

instructed the AI on establishing a communication link.
    It wasn’t difficult. The Caesars were obviously treading as carefully as we were. Once the Kuranda was in orbit, the captain requested spaceport clearance for our ground-to-orbit shuttle, which was granted without comment.
    The ride down was an uneventful ninety minutes, if you were to discount the view from the small, heavily-shielded ports. Jupiter at a quarter crescent hung in the sky above Ganymede. We sank down to a surface of fawn-coloured ice pocked by white impact craters and great sulci , clusters of long grooves slicing through the grubby crust, creating broad river-like groupings of corrugations. For some reason I thought the landscape more quiet and dignified than that of Earth’s moon. I suppose the icescape’s palette of dim pastel colours helped create the impression, but there was definitely an ancient solemnity to this small world.
    New Milan was a couple of degrees north of the equator, in an area of flat ice pitted with small newish craters. An undisciplined sprawl of emerald and white lights covering nearly five square miles. In thirteen years the Caesars had built themselves quite a substantial community here. All the buildings were freestanding igloos whose base and lower sections were constructed from some pale yellow silicate concrete, while the top third was a transparent dome. As the shuttle descended towards the landing field I began to realize why the lights I could see were predominately green. The smallest igloo was fifty yards in diameter, with the larger ones reaching over two hundred yards; they all had gardens at their centre illuminated by powerful lights underneath the glass.
    After we landed, a bus drove me over to the administration centre in one of the large igloos. It was the Mayor, Ricardo Savill Caesar himself, who greeted me as I emerged from the airlock. He was a tall man, with the slightly flaccid flesh of all people who had been in a low-gravity environment for any length of time. He wore a simple grey and turquoise one-piece tunic with a mauve jacket, standard science mission staff uniform. But on him it had become a badge of office, bestowing that extra degree of authority. I could so easily imagine him as the direct descendant of some First Era Centurion commander.
    ‘Welcome,’ he said warmly. ‘And congratulations on your flight. From what we’ve heard, the Kuranda is an impressive ship.’
    ‘Thank you,’ I said. ‘I’d be happy to take you round her later.’
    ‘And I’ll enjoy accepting that invitation. But first it’s my turn. I can’t wait to show off what we’ve done here.’
    Thus my tour began; I believe there was no part of that igloo into which I didn’t venture at some time during the next two hours. From the life-support machinery in the lower levels to precarious walkways strung along the carbon reinforcement strands of the transparent dome. I saw it all. Quite deliberately, of course. Ricardo Savill Caesar was proving that they had no secrets, no sinister apparatus under construction. The family had built themselves a self-sustaining colony, capable of expanding to meet their growing population. Nothing more. What I was never shown nor told, was the reason why.
    After waiting as long as politeness required before claiming I had seen enough we wound up in Ricardo Savill Caesar’s office. It was on the upper storey of the habitation section, over forty feet above the central arboretum’s lawn, yet the tops of the trees were already level with his window. I could recognize several varieties of pine and willow, but the low gravity had distorted their runaway growth, giving them peculiar swollen trunks and fat leaves.
    Once I was sitting comfortably on his couch he offered me some coffee from a delicate china pot.
    ‘I have the beans flown up and grind them myself,’ he said. ‘They’re from the family’s estates in the Caribbean. Protein synthesis might have solved our food-supply