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9:30 hours each. Each eclipse provides enough cooling to keep the shielded locality within the parameters of viability.
    Coming around toward nightside, the field functions as a mirror. A period of 10:30 hours, centered on midnight, becomes a darkday of illumination reflected off the underside of the field and focused on the same locality. Adjacent shields (when there are adjacent shields) provide additional illumination until their own localities approach darkday or are past it. Darkday occurs for a locality when its shield is directly opposed to the sun; before or after, the moonstar’s light spills onto adjacent darkdays, leaving its locality in night, but the bulk of any region’s illumination always comes from its own moonstar because the moondrops of adjacent shields are too far off their reflective axes.
    Because a shield covers a larger arc of sky than either the Godheart or Satlin’s own shadow-cone, it will appear as a phasing organ of light in the night sky; first, a glowing lens, growing brighter—too bright to look at directly; then as the shadow-cone begins to slide across it, an oval with a sidewise bite out of it, becoming a crescent, then an elongated ring—a silver-brilliant eye of zenith—then the process reverses, the ringstar becoming a crescent open to the opposite side, then an egg with a missing bite, then a glowing orb sliding back into dimness. “Noon” of the darkday is its twilight; its brightest moments come at the hours of morning and evening. Throughout, the adjacent shields can be seen as large moondrops in the eastern and western skies; larger even than the sun, they turn through phases as the planet rotates. Night and day, the sky of Satlin is a dome of wonder.
    Although not ideal, the adjustment works. Since initial colonization, the Satlik have opened up fourteen shielded regions: Goah, Dhosa, Allik, Tartch, Nona, Bundt, Lagin, Kessor, Kabel, Weerin, Oave, Dorinne, Astril and Asandir. The first nine of these are in the southern hemisphere, the latter are northern shields. The bulk of Satlin’s population lives in a belt that stretches across half of the South Wilderness Seas and diagonally up into the north, on the islands bordering the continent of Lannit.
    The third phase of terraforming—what most persons consider the actual process—began with the early seeding of massive doses of organic catalysts, bacteria, lichens, fungi and various tailored one-celled organisms designed to turn a reducing atmosphere into an oxygen one. The sea was seeded with diatoms and algae and plankton, the land with earthworms and mushrooms and ferns; as the atmosphere began to stabilize, creating a green-house effect, the heat absorption and radiation properties of the growing biosphere began to stabilize. The polar caps began to grow again, this time H2O; oxygen began to appear in significant quantities, aerobic bacteria followed; each encouraged the other. The introduction of more complex organisms followed that; plants and small water animals to feed on them; insects, both land-crawlers and airborne; fish, small ones to feed on the plankton, larger ones to feed on the small ones. An ecology was being born. Land-growing plants were followed by small animals to feed on them, and almost immediately by predators to keep them in check. Each new creature had at least two major food sources and one major predator following after.
    The Satlik bio-circle was monitored and watched; each new creature was carefully considered; simulations and ecology models were manipulated for years to establish the parameters of every change—and even so, each change was introduced only on a local scale until it was known that it was functioning within the predicted limits. Stingfish, for example, were not introduced as predators except on a controlled breeding basis; no fertile stingfish have very swum free in the oceans of Satlin for fear the resultant population explosion would