original timber looked
like hills above the second growth. Those trees had been standing when
the planet had been colonized.

That had been two hundred years ago, at the middle of the Seventh
Century, Atomic Era. The name of the planet--Poictesme--told that: the
Surromanticist Movement, when the critics and professors were
rediscovering James Branch Cabell.

* * * * *

Funny how much was coming back to him now--things he had picked up from
the minimal liberal-arts and general-humanities courses he had taken and
then forgotten in his absorption with the science and tech studies.

The first extrasolar planets, as they had been discovered, had been
named from Norse mythology--Odin and Baldur and Thor, Uller and Freya,
Bifrost and Asgard and Niflheim. When the Norse names ran out, the
discoverers had turned to other mythologies, Celtic and Egyptian and
Hindu and Assyrian, and by the middle of the Seventh Century they were
naming planets for almost anything.

Anything, that is, but actual persons; their names were reserved for
stars. Like Alpha Gartner, the sun of Poictesme, and Beta Gartner, a
buckshot-sized pink glow in the southeast, and Gamma Gartner, out of
sight on the other side of the world, all named for old Genji Gartner,
the scholarly and half-piratical adventurer whose ship had been the
first to approach the three stars and discover that each of them had
planets.

Forty-two planets in all, from a couple of methane-giants on Gamma to
airless little things with one-sixth Terran gravity. Alpha II had been
the only one in the Trisystem with an oxygen atmosphere and life. So
Gartner had landed on it, and named it Poictesme, and the settlement
that had grown up around the first landing site had been called
Storisende. Thirty years later, Genji Gartner died there, after seeing
the camp grow to a metropolis, and was buried under a massive monument.

Some of the other planets had been rich in metals, and mines had been
opened, and atmosphere-domed factories and processing plants built. None
of them could produce anything but hydroponic and tissue-culture
foodstuffs, and natural foods from Poictesme had been less expensive,
even on the planets of Gamma and Beta. So Poictesme had concentrated on
agriculture and grown wealthy at it.

Then, within fifty years of Genji Gartner's death, the economics of
interstellar trade overtook the Trisystem and the mines and factories
closed down. It