There was vegetation, in a riot of colors, wherever it could cling and not be burnt off or knocked off by internal forces. It wasn’t a nice place to live and work, but it was fascinating if only because nobody, not Ishmael Hand nor the vastly larger and more complex thinking machines of the home empire he’d abandoned could figure out how the heck a planet that dynamic and contradictory could possibly exist. Although the Three Kings name was ancient, it remained for the scout to make sense of it, and he called this huge planet Melchior.

And then there were the other large moons, among countless rather standard small ones. One of the larger ones was warm but not a raging madhouse like the huge planet below that held it captive; almost twenty-five thousand kilometers at its equator, a small planet in captivity, it was a wonderland of islands large and small in a continuous sea, more than forty percent land yet with no major gaps so that any part of the water could be called an ocean, nor land masses so huge that they might be considered continents. It was a world of lakes and islands, teeming with plants and perhaps small animals, wild, primitive, and beautiful. This moon Hand called Balshazzar.

The third moon also had an atmosphere, but it was farther out, cold, full of bizarre and twisted rocks and spires, great sand desertlike regions of red and gold and purple, yet somehow it retained, without large bodies of surface water, nor the thick vegetation that would normally go with such an atmosphere, a significant amount of water vapor in the air that rose in the night from the ground in thick mists and vanished in the light, and which, somehow, kept an atmosphere containing oxygen, nitrogen, and many other elements needed for life. The atmosphere was thinner than humans liked it, but they could exist there, as they’d learned to exist atop three and four kilometer mountain ranges on their mother Earth and elsewhere. This third moon Hand christened Kaspar.