Brought together by the death of Alex, one of the system's upper management team, they witness a terror attack on Mercury's rolling capital city and crisscross the system in search of answers. They grow to love and treasure their differences. Warham is mature and steady, Swan a little flighty and self-centred. He's large, froglike and a Titan, she's thin and from Mercury neither of them is really a he or a she, of course. Into this utopian mix of sandbox and civic responsibility are brought Warham and Swan. What redeems them, to some extent, is Robinson's insistence on the work ethic. They look forward to the regrowth of limbs. They say such things as "reality made a mistake, and now you're fixing it!" Biologically modified, computer-augmented, successfully "multi-sexed" and on their way to sub-speciation, they can live for 200 years. Despite that, his characters have a fully space-operatic sense of entitlement. At human speeds, the author warns us, the stars are too far away: they "exist beyond human time, beyond human reach". They would leave the system altogether, but physics forbids.
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