Star of Gypsies by Robert Silverberg

breeze: that's your basic Gaje world. If they colonize any nastier ones-Megalo Kastro, say, or Alta Hannalanna-it's because there are raw materials on it that are too valuable to pass up. Otherwise, considering how many millions of planets there are just in our one galaxy, the Gaje don't see much reason to settle on the uncomfortable ones. Can't say I blame them, either.
    The one exception to that is the world they all started from, Earth. Of course they didn't colonize Earth, they simply evolved there. And got away from it as quickly as they could. As any sensible being would have done. Ah, the climate of Earth! A hellish cantankerous thing, that climate. I know that from my studies and my occasional little ghosting trips. Aside from a few really sweet places not very well suited for large blocs of population it was all either too hot or too cold, too wet or too dry, too barren or too lush. Where you had a decent climate you usually got earthquakes or volcanic eruptions or hurricanes as part of the package.
    (The Gaje like to argue that natural adversity of that sort is what makes a race great, and maybe so. But I have to point out that according to the account in the Swatura the climate on Romany Star was absolutely perfect, and we nevertheless managed to create a pretty impressive civilization there, thank you.)
    (On the other hand, Romany Star got hit by two lethal solar flares within six thousand years of each other. You win some and you lose some, I guess.)
    Anyway, a little chilly weather has never bothered me much. And Mulano, being outside Empire control and not totally unlivable even at its most blustery, was just the sort of planet where I could take a quiet little sabbatical from the cares of government. I wasn't likely to be bothered by tourists or slave-traders or synapse-peddlers or body-farmers or agony-mongers or census-agents or stockbrokers or encyclopedia salesmen or prospectors or tax-collectors or any of the million other piffling distractions of 32nd-century life. The snow was piled so deep that even the archaeologists stayed away. Maybe the occasional ghost would turn up, but those were my own people, so no problem. And I knew I could live comfortably enough in an ice-bubble, because I had spent a couple of years once on Zimbalou, which is one of the Rom nomad worlds. Ice-bubbles are standard lodging there for anybody living at surface level. Zimbalou as it wanders here and there around the galaxy is never allowed to get within thawing range of any sun, because its major cities are nestled way down deep in tunnels far below the ice, and anything approaching warmth would mean total disaster. It's a dark and dismal place but its people love it. I almost came to love it myself. At any rate I learned the art of constructing ice-bubbles there.
    So I walked up the side of the glacier and over the top and down the other side and headed north until I came to the right place. It was a special place on a planet that doesn't have many special places. I had found it and marked it for myself a few days before Chorian had turned up.
    Though Mulano is basically nothing but a huge glittering empty white ice-field, this part of it was different. It had one astonishing feature, something truly strange. God, how I love a good strangeness! And this was a strangeness so strange that even from ten kilometers away I could feel it emanating toward me, and the force of it was like the roaring of a tremendous pipe-organ whose music filled half the heavens.
    What it was, you came over a low snubby hill out of the whiteness and suddenly there was green in front of you, stretching ahead as far as you possibly could see, across snow-blinking valleys and hills and up the side of a distant glacier. And what the green was, was thousands upon thousands of fleshy sea-green tentacles as thick as your arm above and as thick as your thigh below, jutting up through the snow every few meters apart to a height of five or ten or twenty meters