We were on the monorail to Kesata for a week of family business and enjoying the capital city of my home planet. I had fallen asleep for a few hours and was awoken by the afternoon lightning. I couldn’t stop staring out the window as I noticed we came upon an astonishing cluster of six or seven hoverports. I’ve always been fascinated with how they and their goings-on seem un-phased by the weather.

As I’ve said, my home is a largely terraformed desert planet. The weather stabilized several thousand years ago in a turbulent pattern of daily sunshine and thunderstorms from the middle latitudes inward – rendering half of the globe as a veritable inter-tropical convergence zone. This is great stuff for an ag planet.

The train ride from Celroneta to Kesata is roughly five hours unit hours and a distance of about 4800 kilometers. It beats the space route for many reasons, especially the price. The ride is smooth as silk in the roughest weather with a sound best described as a breathy hum, peppered by the nearly inaudible sound of rainfall on the windows, and sometimes interrupted by the occasional buzzing of someone’s holograph. The window can be fogged or opaqued at the rider’s discretion. The holographs can display anything from the internet, to intergalactic media, and even to the rail network’s regional information channel which documents information and history about your location relative to the next location. I love those linear stories that travel with the landscape. There is a lot of technological history in these farms.

The hoverports are not unique to Celrionia, but are especially attuned as adapted to the use of food processing, packaging, and delivery to the orbiting spaceports. Short-hop deliveries are made directly from the launch platforms. The reason for such mobility is that each port will specialize in one of several seasonal growth chapters, and sometimes even a specific crop. They then travel with the harvest seasons. The opening on their underside is for delivery from the harvester robots – huge double or tri-balloon dirigibles that ride atop roving “monitors”. The monitors are white platforms on treads which can span several rows of fruit trees. Robots or people actually do the tending and/or picking under the shade of the monitors.

There is something of a driving and balanced order to this world. The combination of storms and seasons seem to evince a living presence in the land that either interacts or operate obliviously to its observers like the discretionary attentiveness of a great specimen of wildlife that roves the countryside. This place is always quiet, yet brimming with technology despite its organic industry; sometimes, the lightening can be startling but the thunder is always soothing.