Golden carambola – star fruit, appropriately enough – thrive in my southern uplands, their sweet flesh swelling with anti-oxidants for my colonists. Higher grow the Yangmei trees, their scarlet fruit bursting with healthful juice. Fields of teff spread across the plains, swirling into bright green waves when caressed by winds from the southern ocean. Twenty grains, a hundred fruits and two hundred vegetables grow in my fields, orchards and gardens.

I have twelve thousand hands to work my crops and twelve thousand eyes to watch them.  Some of my hands are small enough to cup molecules; some are as large as dozers. Some of my eyes are diamonds for viewing exotic wavelengths under just tolerable pressures. Others view ordinary readouts on ordinary screens. One such alerts me now.

A red light is blinking.

I activate a monitor I rarely use, the direct channel to Chelsea Home. A rather homely face appears on the monitor, that of my farmer’s ten-year-old daughter, Eloise Parker. She’s flushed and her eyes dart quickly from side to side.

“Eloise, is something troubling you?”

“Duo! Thank God, it’s you!”

“Why wouldn’t it be me? I’m the only entity on this channel.”

“You picked up. I thought you might be destroyed!” Eloise pants to catch her breath.

“Destroyed?”

“We’re under attack by pirates!”

…

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