'Has their loyalty ever been put to the test?'

'They pledge allegiance every day,' Father Clarke said. 'Every moment of their lives is dedicated to service of God, Gaia, and Greater Brazil.'

'And to service of the Peixoto family too, I hope.'

'Well, of course,' Father Clarke said quickly. 'I mean no offence-'

'Then their lives are mine, yes?' The general stepped off the platform and glided up to Dave #8, saying, 'Is your life mine, son?'

He was about thirty centimetres shorter than Dave #8, but his gaze had the force of heat beating from the heart of a forge.

Dave #8 did not know how to answer. He looked over the top of the general's head at Father Clarke, who nodded once, pinch-faced and miserable. Through what felt like a mouthful of hot sand, Dave #8 managed to say, 'I am at your service, sir.'

'You will do as I command.'

'Sir, I am at-'

'My service. Are you a parrot, son, or a soldier? No, don't look at your teachers. Look at me. Answer my question.'

'We are soldiers, sir.' The blade of Dave #8's knife was trembling in front of his face. He willed his muscles to lock tight, but that only made the tremor worse.

'You are a soldier,' the general said.

'Yes, sir.'

'Have you ever killed?'

'Yes, sir. In simulations.'

'But not in real life. You have not fought to the death.'

'They're each worth as much as a singleship,' Sri Hong-Owen said.

'They're worth nothing unless they can fight,' the general said, his gaze locked on Dave #8.

'It isn't their primary purpose,' Sri Hong-Owen said.

'Infiltration, espionage, deep cover, all the rest of that spooky shit, I don't deny it may some day be useful, but it isn't something I understand,'

the general said. 'Fighting though, skill and courage, those I do understand. And they can be tested right here, right now.'

'I can arrange a demonstration of any kind of combat that you wish to see,' Father Solomon said.

The general ignored him, asked Dave #8 to hand him his knife. Dave #8 brought the knife down smartly, reversed it, and offered it to the general hilt-first. The general swiped it through the air, tested the edge of its blade with his thumb, and handed it back. 'Are you ready to use this in my service, son?'

'Yes, sir.'

Dave #8 saw that the slim man in black was poised on the balls of his feet. Ready to make a move because he thought that the general might be about to give the order to kill Sri Hong-Owen.

'Father Solomon thought I wanted the best of you killed as a lesson to the rest,' the general said. 'So he didn't pick out the best, as I requested, but the one he likes least. He disobeyed me. Kill him.'

Dave #8 understood the general's order, but didn't understand why he'd given it; although he'd been trained to obey without thought, his loyalty to the lectors was as strong and deeply rooted and unconditional as love. He might not have done anything at all if Father Solomon hadn't tried to escape, jumping from the platform in a billow of robes and bounding past the boys. Dave #8's training took over and he lunged after the man, caught up with him in three long, floating strides, and knocked him down. The man tried to pull his shock stick from his belt, screamed when Dave #8 slashed his wrist, and kicked out frantically, sliding crabwise across the polished concrete floor. Dave #8 dropped straight down, pinning the man's shoulders with his knees, and slammed his free hand against the point of the man's chin and made a single swift pass with his knife and flipped to his feet.

Father Solomon clapped his hands to his neck. Threads of blood pulsed through his fingers and splattered his white habit. He looked up at Dave #8, his mouth shaping words no one would ever hear: then his gaze lost focus and he shuddered all over and his grip on his neck slackened and his head slumped sideways. A puddle of blood crept out around it, rich and glossy, its smell sweet and heavy in the cold air.

Dave #8 was breathless and trembling violently. His bare chest was spotted with Father Solomon's blood. The light seemed brighter, somehow. Everything in the room stood out with sharp particularity. His brothers were still standing at attention, but had turned their heads to look at him. Off to one side, the general clapped slowly and loudly. He was smiling. On the platform, Sri Hong-Owen was leaning into the embrace of the slim man in black. Father Clarke was bent over a spatter of vomit, making small choking noises. Father Aldos's eyes were closed and he was praying. Father Ramez floated down from the platform, told Dave #8 to step back, and knelt by Father Solomon and put the flat of his palm on the dead man's forehead and began to recite the last rites.

'You did well,' the general told Dave #8. 'If only I had a thousand like you. What do you say, Professor Doctor? Is that possible?'

The woman looked at him with cold scorn. 'You'd have to build a bigger creche. And then wait seven years.'

'Mmm. I don't think we have that long, so we will have to make do with what we've got.' The general smiled at Dave #8 again, turned to survey the other boys. 'We will ride back to Earth on my shuttle, Professor Doctor. It isn't as fast as the ship that brought you here, but that's to our advantage. We have much to discuss.'

6.

Her first night in the women's dormitory wing of the rectification facility, Macy was cornered by three long-term inmates and beaten up. She fought back and lost a tooth and gained a black eye. After that initiation she was mostly left alone and quickly fell into the routine. Eight hours locked in her cell, an hour of free association with the other inmates, the rest of the day taken up by work and remedial activities - interactive tutorials with an expert AI, participation in group exercises supposed to make her understand herself and her failings, and one-on-one sessions listening to the achingly boring, self-centred monologues of a dull-eyed old woman, Sasaki Tabata, who was serving community service without remission because she had murdered her lover and cooked a portion of his buttocks and eaten it.

After that, work was a relief: three hours each day out on the surface, sealed in a pressure suit heavily encumbered with radiation shielding, picking fat graphite buds from vacuum-organism pavements stretched across dusty ice under racks of lights. No doubt this stoop labour was supposed to be humiliating, but Macy didn't mind it: it was the first time she'd been outside East of Eden since she'd arrived on Ganymede and she was astonished and delighted by the alien panorama. Fields of vacuum organisms - highly organised colonies of bound nanomachines that catalysed complex reactions at very low temperatures - pieced across a plain of dark, dusty ice spattered with the pits of small craters and blocky clumps of ejecta, and a ragged scarp curved across the horizon to the north, the rim of a crater more than ninety kilometres in diameter. Jupiter's swollen disc hung high above, waxing from slender crescent to full glory and waning again in a cycle of a little over seven days, fixed in the same place in the black sky because Ganymede, like Earth's Moon, was tidally locked and always presented the same face to its primary. In the middle of Ganymede's night, the moon's shadow was cast small and sharp on the tawny ripple-edged band at Jupiter's equator; when Ganymede swung through Jupiter's shadow during the brief midday eclipse, the gas giant was a black hole in the starry sky, faintly limned by sunlight refracted through its atmosphere, lightning storms ten times bigger than Earth writhing and flickering at its poles.

Working in the vacuum-organism fields, Macy learned to trust her pressure suit's bubble of warmth and air and to appreciate the silence of Ganymede's naked and unforgiving icescapes stretched cold and still under the infinite black sky, and there were blessed moments when her consciousness sank into her muscles and time melted into an eternal now and everything around her, the awkward casing of her pressure suit and its whines and hisses and whirrs, the fields of vacuum organisms and the stark plain beyond, flowed into a single pure experience.

So it went. She slept or tried to sleep in her cell, endured Sasaki Tabata's monologues and the stupid lectures and the tedious remedial exercises, lost herself in physical labour. One day out in the vacuum-organism fields, three weeks into her sentence, she'd just been admonished for about the hundredth time for staring at the scenery rather than working when another voice cut in on the common band.

A man's voice, saying, 'Have some heart. Anyone could get lost in that view.'

'You can look all you want when you have finished here,' the warden said. 'Meanwhile you work.'

Unlike prisons in Greater Brazil, the rectification facility allowed male and female inmates to freely mix at work, in the talkathon sessions, and in the canteen and gymnasium: only the dormitory wings were segregated. Later that day, Macy was eating her evening meal at one end of a mostly empty table when a man slid in next to her and said, 'It's funny how a planet looks at its best when it's hung over a landscape. A lot of people claim Saturn is way more beautiful, but Jupiter has this untouchable grandeur, don't you think? I'm Newt, by the way. Newt Jones. Newt short for Newton, but don't hold that against me. You're Macy Minnot. I hear you're from Earth. Which makes us both strangers here, right?'

He held out his hand, a curious, old-fashioned gesture. Macy shook it. His grip was bony and cool.

She said, 'How did you know who I was? I mean, from out in the fields.'

'Suit ID.' Newt Jones was studying her in a frank, friendly fashion. He was tall and pale, his long, angular face softened by a guileless grin. Macy had trouble guessing Outers' ages, but he didn't look much older than her. Maybe even a year or two younger. He said, 'You don't know about suit ID?'

'I barely know which end of a suit is which. I guess I'm more of a stranger than you.'

'Oh, I don't know. Where I originally come from, it's a lot further from here than Earth.'

Newt told Macy that he'd been born in a short-lived commune on Titania, Uranus's largest moon, that although his family had moved back to the Saturn System and settled on Dione after the commune had split up, as far as he was concerned he would always be a Uranian, one of the few. He ran his mother's ship, towing any kind of load to every kind of destination. He'd come to Jupiter on what he called the Grand Tour because Jupiter and Saturn were presently in conjunction, had done some excellent business on Callisto and Europa, but had ended up in East of Eden's rectification facility after being caught trying to smuggle interdicted pharmaceuticals into the settlement.

'Nothing serious, but they're famously puritanical here. They talk a lot about elevating and improving their minds, how they think better than anyone else, yet they ban every kind of psychotropic stronger than caffeine or theobromine. How crazy is that? All I was trying to do was put a little sparkle in the lives of a few of their citizens, but they caught me and they gave me ten days. It's nothing. Nada. I can do it standing on my head. Despite the heavy gravity they have here - did you know that it's more than five times the pull on Dione? People can fly on Dione. Really. Before I started out on the Grand Tour I had to build up some muscle with doses of promoter and a fearsome exercise regime. But why are you here? You're famous, the hero who put a stop to some nasty business in Rainbow Bridge. Or so I heard. I guess you must have done something pretty serious to piss them off. Did you murder someone? Put plastic in the glass recycler? Hoard kudos? Pick a flower?'

'I wouldn't say sorry.'

'That'll do it. What was it that you weren't sorry about?'

'I hit someone.'

'I bet they had it coming.'

Macy couldn't help smiling. 'Let's put it this way: I felt a lot better after I did it.'

'If you don't want to talk about it you don't have to talk about it.'

'It's just that I have to talk about it every day in the group sessions.'

'I had to stand up in one of those this morning and explain what I did,'

Newt Jones said. 'Someone asked me if I was willing to learn from my errors and I said sure, if it meant not being caught the next time.'

He asked Macy how she came to be living in East of Eden in the first place, asked her if she'd mind telling him how she'd been caught up in the murders and attempted sabotage that had famously brought an abrupt end to Greater Brazil's participation in the Rainbow Bridge biome project. She was halfway through the story when a bell rang. It was the end of free-association time.

'We can talk tomorrow,' Newt said, as he and Macy scraped the remnants of their suppers into the recycling bin. 'It isn't as if we have anything else to do.'

Macy found herself looking forward to it all the next day. At the end of the shift in the vacuum-organism fields, they sat together in the canteen and she finished her story. Newt asked all kinds of questions about it, and about life on Earth, too. The usual run-of-the-mill stuff she'd learned to answer by rote, how people lived and why they couldn't move about freely, the reclamation projects and the vast ruined areas yet to be reclaimed, and questions that arrived sideways, unexpected and jolting. What did the air taste like? Were there places with no oxygen? Did rain hurt? Was it true that weather changed the way you thought? What was it like to sleep under the stars with no roof overhead?

'I tried that once,' Newt said. 'Inside a plastic bubble I inflated outside the ship. It bugged the hell out of me, frankly.'

'I guess it helps to have a horizon,' Macy said.

She remembered nights in the ruins during her early days in the Wreckers' corps. The smell of campfire smoke and the sound of wind walking through trees or whining about broken walls, night air cold on her face and bare arms and the stars slowly wheeling overhead, the bright points of satellites and ships moving amongst rigid constellations. Talking with Newt woke all kinds of memories in her and with those memories came feelings and emotions that she had almost forgotten. She felt homesick at times: not hopelessly so, as she had during her first days of exile, but definitely wistful.

They talked for an hour every evening for five days. Newt was amused by her stories about life on Earth and tried his best to amaze her with tall tales about his life hauling cargo and passengers from moon to moon. She felt at ease with him, as if she had known him all her life. He wasn't especially handsome and was far too bony to be cute, but he was animated and funny and easygoing.

He couldn't understand why Macy was stuck in East of Eden, why she couldn't just pick up and go when her sentence was over. He said that there was plenty of work on any moon she cared to name for someone who knew microbial ecology. Maintenance work in city farms and in habitats, quickening new oases...

'You could write your own ticket,' he said.

'I'd have to persuade East of Eden to let me go first.'

'They don't really want you; you don't want to stay. What's the problem?'

'Politics. People in Rainbow Bridge still want to try to make some kind of accommodation with Greater Brazil. I'm a speck of grit in that particular oyster, so they sent me here. Out of sight, out of mind. They don't want to let me loose because I might cause more trouble.'

'Would you?'

'I've seen enough trouble to last me the rest of my life.'

'So tell them that. Tell them you want to go somewhere so far from Rainbow Bridge that they'll never hear from you again.'

'You mean travel out to Saturn.'

'Why not?'

'Because I'm not sure if I'm ready to take a step like that.'

Macy tried to explain to Newt that leaving East of Eden and moving further out could mean giving up the idea that some day she might be able to return to Earth. 'Greater Brazil wouldn't welcome me back unless I was in chains. But things could change. And if they don't, well, Greater Brazil isn't the only nation on Earth with a space programme.'

'You'd go back to Earth if you could, but you can't go back right now.'

'That's about the size of it.'

'So while you're waiting for things to shake out the way you want, why not have some fun?' Newt said.

The next day, a warden came up to Macy as she was stripping off her pressure suit at the end of a session in the vacuum-organism fields, and told her that her sentence had been commuted. 'What does that mean, "commuted"?'

'It means that someone must like you a lot more than I do, because I don't think you've earned it. It means that you are to go to your cell and pack right now - there's a bus waiting to take you home.'

Macy found Newt amongst the press of prisoners taking off and stowing away pressure suits, told him what had happened.

'I'd come visit when I get out,' he said, 'but they'd arrest me for it. They took away my right of entry into their crummy little city in case I corrupt the youth. But you can find me on the net. It isn't hard, just look up the name of my ship. Elephant.'

'Elephant?'

'After the beast of burden. Don't you still have them on Earth?'

'I don't know. Maybe they're extinct.'

'We have them, but they're small. Miniatures about so high,' Newt said, holding his hand about a metre above the tabletop. 'She's a good ship. Easy to spot, too.'

'I'll talk to you when you're out,' Macy said.

'You better,' Newt said.

There was an awkward moment when they might have hugged or even kissed, but the warden told Macy that the bus wasn't going to wait for ever, she should get her shit together right now.

'Remember what I said about having fun,' Newt called after her. 'I reckon they have a law against it in East of Eden.'

On the long bus ride back to the city, sealed in a windowless cubicle, Macy had plenty of time to think about Newt's parting words. One thing she knew, she wasn't sorry about taking down Jibril. And she would do it again if the cosmo angel tried to cause her any more grief. She also knew that everyone in the settlement would know where she had been, and why, that all she could do was brazen it out as best she could. So when at last she reached Lot's Lot, she went straight to the refectory and ignored the frank stares of people as she walked past them to Jon Ho's cafe and sat at the counter and ordered an espresso and a shot of brandy.

'You didn't stop by your apartment?' Jon said.

'I guess I miss your coffee more.'

'It might be an idea if you went there right now. And I'm sorry, but you better take this,' Jon said, and set on the counter the half-full bottle of cherry brandy, with her signature on the tape wrapped around its waist.

'What's wrong?'