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And you’ve made the same mistake that January made.”
    “What mistake is that?”
    But the man shakes his head. “That’s for the ending, and it’s a poor end that has but one beginning.”



Goltraí: Wearing Out the Green
    It began on New Eireann, the scarred man says…
    …a world of black volcanic glasses and uplifted basalts. What little green the world owns is in its name and in a narrow winding valley that ends in a small glen just below the summit of Ben Bulben. Like all the worlds, it has been terraformed; but it is too young for such maturity and only this one high valley had been conquered before seed and stock and will gave out. The world was barely weaned from its molten infancy, and still threw tantrums of molten rock and pyroclastic ash, and the Vale remained a great green wound upon the planet’s sullen red-and-black flesh. Little by little, to those who measure these things, the boundaries of the valley contract, as basalt and granite and diorite win back what they had long ago lost.
    (“But let them have their moment,” the scarred man sneers. “For now, they live in a green paradise and the black igneous reality lies out of sight, beyond the crest of the Reeks. All the eruptions, all the steam and lava, burst forth in the Barrens below, where the plates are thinner and the core breaks through. So their future doom is yet to come. Unless…”)
    …unless one day the Vale of Eireann, too, erupts. The Big Blow, they call it, making it a joke. There are hot springs in the glen below Ben Bulben…
    And so it is a world of sad songs ( which should please you, harper ). When they want to make merry, the Eireannaughta don’t sing. They fight. And that they do often enough to lighten the mood that surrounds them.
    They have little enough in the Vale. They can feed themselves and make the most basic things, and they have far more power than they need from thermal stations, but there’s little to do for diversion and their arts are ordinary. Drinking is one (and there they do show considerable talent) and conversation is another (and that they class as a martial art). Orbital factories, built by companies from better-endowed worlds, have come in search of cheap power. New Eireann makes most of its off-world exchange by beaming excess power to them, and a little more by supplying them with fresh food. ICC ships come and go with other supplies for the stations and haul away their products. Very little finds its way to the world below.
    The other major source of off-world income is the tourist trade. People have come from Agadar and Hawthorn Rose, from the Lesser Hanse and Gladiola, from even High Tara itself. They come to climb the Western Reeks and stare at nature raw, at the great geysers and fountains of lava, at the rivers of molten rock and the basalt glaciers. “An’ d’ye be seein’ the wee pyroclastic cloud there? Sure, an’ I hope ’t isn’t blowin’ our way…Ah, mind the drop here, yer honor; wouldn’t want ye t’ fall into yon lava pool.” Oh, they play it up, the Reek Guides do: a great mouthful of the blarney and just enough hint of the danger to make the tourists shiver in delight.
    (“An’ shure ’tis only an image,” the scarred man mocks the accent. “They are no more Irish than you or I are Tibetan. Nor any less. Across so many centuries, everyone on Old Earth was our ancestor. It takes more than eponymous settlers or carefully contrived archaisms to resurrect something that long dead. But what can a people do when they have no future, save reconstruct some storied past?)
    Then the tourists ride the gondolas back down into the Vale from which the rest of the planet, out of sight behind the Reeks, can seem a bad dream. They stay in Da Derga’s Hostel or in quaint tourist cottages in the Mid-Vale or sample the excitements (such as they are) in New Down Town. They spend some more money and remain until they grow bored (which happens soon) or frightened (which happens