7.

When Macy Minnot told Loc Ifrahim that she'd completed the little test he'd set her, he suggested meeting in her room at ten the next morning. And turned up an hour early, planning to put her off balance and give her a hard time about the way she'd rolled over so easily. He didn't expect her to give up anything useful, of course; she would almost certainly have told her Outer friends that he'd tried to recruit her, and they would try to use her to feed him false information. But this wasn't really about intelligence-gathering; it was about causing the woman as much grief as possible to make up for the grief she'd caused him in Rainbow Bridge, and to show her that she couldn't escape the consequences of betraying the trust of her country. He'd already skilfully parlayed Jibril's persecution of Macy Minnot into something much more serious by feeding the cosmo angel titbits about her past, and intended to get a great deal of pleasure from humiliating her and wrecking her life before he was through.

Except that she wasn't in her room, and her slate and some clothes and various small keepsakes were missing. Loc was about to leave when the door opened and Macy's handler, Ivo Teagarden, walked in. The old man didn't seem surprised to see Loc, saying, 'What have you done with her?'

'Not a thing. I was about to ask you the same question.'

'She called me. She was in some distress, told me to come here . . .'

Loc felt a twinge of unease. 'Perhaps you should use the bug you planted in her spex, and find out where she is.'

'I fail to see why that is any of your business,' Ivo Teagarden said.

'Don't be a fool. You know exactly why it is my business. After all, it's the same business that brought you here.'

Ivo Teagarden blinked at him, clearly having trouble processing this. Like all Outers, he wasn't accustomed to direct talk. If he had his way, Loc thought, they'd probably have to spend half an hour making polite conversation that mentioned everything but the plain facts of the matter.

'She asked me to come here, and she also asked you to come here,'

Loc said, as if to an especially dim child. 'She played us. She made sure we'd be here while she went somewhere else. So we must find out at once where she is, and what is she doing.'

With maddening slowness, Ivo Teagarden put on his spex and fitted a tipset glove over his left hand and played a brief arpeggio in the air. After a moment, he said, 'She's in the cemetery park.'

'Can you see her?'

'There are no cameras in the park, out of respect for our dead and people who visit them,' Ivo Teagarden said. 'Hmm. She isn't answering her phone.'

'There aren't any cameras, so you're tracking her using the bug you planted in her spex. Don't bother denying it, just answer this: how can you be sure that's her? Suppose she gave her spex to someone else?'

'Why would she have done that?'

'Because she's trying to escape, and she wants you to think she's in this cemetery park when really she's somewhere else.'

'She was planning to escape through one of the airlocks in the park,'

Ivo Teagarden said. 'If she tries it, she's in for a surprise. Their AIs won't permit her or anyone else to use them without the intervention of a human supervisor. But perhaps I should send peace officers there, just in case. If she really did give her spex to someone else, they can talk to the person-'

'Who won't know a thing about where she is. Have your AIs look for her. Use the inputs from every drone and fixed camera in this rotten little hole.'

'And why should I do what you tell me?' the old man said stiffly.

'Because she's played both of us for fools,' Loc said. 'Because I'd rather help you than let Macy Minnot escape.'

She had escaped him once. He wasn't going to let her escape again. He wanted her to stay here, in this prison of a city, for the rest of her life. With a cold fuse of furious impatience burning inside him, Loc told the old man, 'Hurry, damn you. We have to find her right away.'

Macy was walking through the city's industrial zone, past workshops, refineries, bunkers, recycling plants, tanks and dump bins of raw materials .

. . everything crammed either side of a broad central avenue with steep walls curving up to meet a strip of luminous ceiling overhead. She wore a suit-liner under loose-fitting coveralls. A day bag was slung over her shoulder. She was trying to look as ordinary and unconcerned as possible, trying not to spin into a fantasy of betrayal the fact that Sada had sent the youngest of the refuseniks to pick up the spex rather than do the job herself, suppressing the urge to break into a run.

Every species of robot, from giant trucks to squat machines the size of trash cans, glided to and fro. Some were fitted with cranes and forklifts, others with grabs and manipulators and cutting and welding equipment, and they all moved with swift and secret purpose from building to building, warning lights whirling for the benefit of the humans who worked here. Macy cut through a row of small workshops where people were unloading trays of freshly fired ceramics from a kiln, spinning shapes from lumps of clay on potter's wheels, pouring molten glass into a mould on a bed of sand, hammering sparks from a white-hot chunk of metal on an anvil. No one looked at her as she went past and she told herself that it was a good omen, then cursed herself for looking for portents. She'd be able to use the airlock or she wouldn't. The boy who'd collected the spex had been telling the truth when he'd said that Newt Jones had been released on schedule at eight o'clock this morning or he'd been lying. Newt would choose to come or he wouldn't. Nothing she saw or did now could change any of that.

On the far side of the workshops, a service road ran at the foot of a steeply slanted embankment of foamed composite. The tunnel that led to the airlock which Sada and her friends had supposedly fixed to allow Macy to pass through was set in the embankment about two hundred metres away. Macy paused as a robot truck laden with junked machine parts went past, then started across the road - and a drone dropped down through the bright air and hovered right in front of her, and Jibril and the pair of acolytes stepped out of the tunnel.

'You fooled Mr Teagarden, but you didn't fool me,' the cosmo angel said.

'I'm not trying to fool anyone.'

Jibril's smile was duplicated by yo's acolytes, the three of them dressed paramilitary style in black coveralls like tall and slender mannequins stamped from the same mould.

'We're placing you under citizen's arrest, Macy,' Jibril said, aiming something that looked very like a pistol at her. 'Please do try to resist. I'd love to use this on you.'

'I'd love to see you try,' Macy said.

She stood with her back to the sheet-composite wall of a warehouse. A robot truck was trundling down the service road towards her. When it went past, she'd have a couple of moments to duck back into the workshops, try to find another way out of this place . . .

But Jibril must have spotted the truck too. The cosmo angel strolled across the road, yo's acolytes tagging close behind. 'You can run if you want,' Jibril said, 'but you can't get away, Macy. It's a small city and it's ours. Go ahead, run. It'll be a lot of fun, chasing you down. It will make the record of your humiliation even better. A true work of art.'

The robot truck slowed and stopped beside them. It was a low-slung transporter with a fat black sensor rod jutting at its front like a rhinoceros horn, a big bronzed capsule on its load bed, and a multipurpose arm at its rear. The arm swinging up now like a mantis's fore-limb. Something went off with a sharp crack and the three cosmo angels were knocked down, writhing inside the weighted net shot from the fat-barrelled gun clutched by the arm's terminal manipulators.

Something moved inside the capsule. It was Sada Selene, leaning at an oval hatch, beckoning to Macy, telling her to climb aboard. Macy swung up onto the robot's load bed and clambered through the hatch and Sada slammed it down and dogged it tight. She was bareheaded in a white pressure suit. Her eyes masked with spex. She sat down tailor-wise, made a sharp gesture, and the robot truck moved off, turning right towards the central avenue.

'I guess there's been a change of plan,' Macy said. She was braced at the rear of the capsule, looking out through the two-way mirror of the capsule's wall. No one seemed to be following them.

'This has always been the plan,' Sada said, making tight gestures with her gloved hands, steering the truck via a link with her spex. A kitbag stuffed tight as a cocoon lay at her feet. An empty pressure suit was folded behind her.

'How did you know the cosmo angels had followed me?'

'Because we were following them. For people who think they're on the top rung of human evolution, they really are very stupid. The video of your escape will be a wonderful humiliation. Did you see their expressions when they realised that I was going to shoot them with the riot gun?'

'They are going to cause all kinds of trouble for you,' Macy said.

Sada laughed. 'I don't think so. You see, I'm coming with you. Your boyfriend has agreed to take me to the Saturn System.'

'He isn't my boyfriend. And he had no right to agree to take you anywhere.'

'I've been aching to leave this goldfish bowl for years,' Sada said.

'Nothing happens here and I can't bear it any longer. If I can't go up and out right now, I'll die of boredom. Don't look so fierce. We're going to have a lot of fun together.'

The truck rolled out into the wide plaza in front of the main cluster of airlocks, passing robots loading or unloading other trucks with stacks of pallets, containers, crates, and tanks of raw materials.

'Peace officers,' Sada sang out.

Macy saw them, a man and a woman riding fat-tyred trikes towards the truck. A giant's voice ordered the truck to stop. Echoes blatted off the ceiling. The peace officers pulled up alongside, one on the right and one the left, matching the truck's speed.

'They're trying to take control,' Sada told Macy, 'but I'm blocking them.'

The peace officer on the right pulled a gun, aiming it at the truck's sensor rod. A robot crane swung its arm around, plucked him from his saddle, and set him down on the roadway as his trike piddled to a halt. Another crane tipped a pallet into the path of the peace officer on the left of the transporter and she swerved to a halt and was left behind as the truck rolled on towards the open maw of one of the airlocks.

Macy looked all around, but couldn't see any trace of the refuseniks who must have hijacked the cranes. They could be anywhere, she realised, plugged into the robots via the city's net. Far off, she saw someone dressed in yellow and black bounding down the central avenue. He collided with a robot shaped like a trash can, lost his balance, fell flat on his ass and bounced up and ran on. He seemed to be shouting. Nearer at hand, the two peace officers had picked themselves up and were chasing after the truck too, but it rolled straight into the airlock and the inner door slid shut in their faces. A moment later the outer door slid back and the truck moved out onto a mesh road that cut across the dark plain towards the spaceport. Sada told Macy to hold tight as the truck swerved, bumped over the low kerb, and headed across a dusty and gently undulating terrain.

'Another change of plan. You don't have to go to the spaceport because your boyfriend is coming to meet us. You might want to climb inside that pressure suit.'

Macy stripped off her coveralls, feeling peculiarly vulnerable. The capsule was transparent and there was nothing outside its thin wall but killing cold and hard, radiation-drenched vacuum. High above, the sun's tiny disc burned close to Jupiter's skinny crescent. She stepped into the pressure suit, pulled its segmented torso up to her shoulders, punched her arms down the sleeves and sat down so that she could snap the cuffs of the overboots to the seals at her ankles.

All the while, Sada had been scanning the black sky, turning this way and that. She yelled and flung up an arm, pointing high overhead, and Macy saw a star moving swiftly across the black sky, growing brighter, resolving into the bug shape of a tug. The truck slowed to a crawl and stopped as the tug swept above it, jets flaring as it killed its forward momentum and settled towards them. Macy laughed. When Newt had said that his ship would be easy to spot, he hadn't been kidding.

Elephant was pink.

8.

Apart from some bruising to his pride, Loc Ifrahim wasn't in any way damaged or embarrassed by Macy Minnot's escape from East of Eden. He spent some time finessing his report so that it laid the blame squarely on Ivo Teagarden and others in East of Eden, but he needn't have bothered. No one important took any notice of the incident: it was considered to be a minor footnote to an embarrassing but otherwise trivial affair. Four weeks later he was at last rotated back to Brasilia, where he was rewarded with a small promotion and a place on the commission tasked with the responsibility of analysing information about the political players in the cities and smaller settlements of the Saturn System.

The commission was an excellent and exciting place to work, staffed by bright and fiercely ambitious young people committed to the urgent and supremely important task of bringing the Outer System under the control of Earth. Its offices were as hectically busy as an old-fashioned newsroom, with people tossing ideas back and forth around memo spaces, laboriously constructing or dissecting dynamic socio-political models, interviewing everyone who had ever visited the Outer System, and turning out reams of position notes and situation updates.

An entire floor was given over to the AIs, immersion tanks, and high-definition memo spaces of the Theoretical Strategy Group who were modelling every conceivable way of invading and securing the cities and settlements of the Outer System. Wargamers. Crews of earnest, pallid young men with no actual military experience who cleaved to the theories of various gurus and eminences grises with holy passion. They worked in a haze of stimulants, adrenalin, and testosterone, sleeping and eating in their cubicles as they ran enormous and intricate real-time simulations. Rivalry between crews was intense. It wasn't unusual for Loc to arrive at work of a morning to find some catatonically dazed or raving wargamer who'd tipped over the edge being led out by security guards; once, a huge fist-fight erupted between rival groups and had to be quelled by riot police who tear-gassed the entire floor.

A vocal minority insisted that genocide was the only solution to the Outer System problem, and devised plans to smash the tents and domes of the cities and settlements with smart pebbles, or obliterate them with H-bombs, or eliminate their populations with bioweapons, poison gases, and gamma-ray flashover devices. But these extreme tactics were generally considered to be unworkable. The number of H-bombs required would seriously deplete Greater Brazil's arsenal and leave it vulnerable to attack; the most hostile cities, such as Paris, Dione, were constructing missile-defence systems; most cities and settlements contained refuges and hardened buildings where the population could shelter if the main tents lost integrity, and parts of some cities were so deeply buried that they were impervious to conventional weapons; and in any case, the Outers were scattered so widely over the surfaces of the moons of Jupiter and Saturn that it wouldn't be possible to kill all of them, and a rump of survivors would most likely attempt revenge attacks against Earth. Besides, genocide was considered to be politically unacceptable and would destroy the valuable assets that for many were the only justification for going to war. The Outers had been engaged in every kind of theoretical and applied science for more than a century: the profits that could be made by plundering their databases and genome libraries, and seizing their scientists and gene wizards, were incalculable. And the intrinsic value of the cities and settlements was not inconsiderable, either. So most of the wargamers were engaged in what they called asymmetric or 'quiet war' strategies that mixed propaganda, espionage, sabotage, and political coercion with conventional military tactics tailored to the unique conditions of the Outer System.

Robust predictive models generated by the wargamers and databases worked up by the intelligence groups were passed on to laboratories and think tanks where scientists, engineers and psychologists were developing hardware and techniques for covert and paramilitary operations, infiltration, sabotage, and dissemination of black propaganda. Politicians and officers from the three branches of the armed services were given one-on-one briefings. It was a rare day when a VIP didn't turn up, escorted through the ferment and hubbub of the offices by knots of aides like a great liner being manoeuvred into a berth by fussy, anxious tugboats.

With his extensive field experience and his many contacts, Loc quickly made himself indispensable. He strengthened his ties to Arvam Peixoto's crew, made many new friends, including senior politicians and members of the inner circles of several families, and became the go-to guy for anyone who needed a quick fix on some aspect of the intricate protocols, customs and rivalries of the cities and settlements of Jupiter's various moons, a snap opinion on one or another of the important political players, or the attitude and mood of the general population.

The work was important and timely. After the failure of the peace and reconciliation initiative, it was vital to gain direct control of the Outer System as quickly as possible, and the government was dominated now by those who believed that war was not only inevitable but necessary. A holy duty. Yet the programme to establish trade initiatives and cultural exchanges with the Outer System was being strengthened rather than abandoned because it provided a useful cloak for gathering intelligence and forging links with sympathetic cities on the moons of Jupiter and Saturn that could later be used as strongholds in the coming war.

A year after returning to Earth, Loc Ifrahim was on his way out again, this time to Saturn, to the little city of Camelot, Mimas. Like East of Eden, Camelot was an inward-looking city with a very high proportion of conservative first-and second-generation Outers in its population. Its mayor and several of its senators, laughably amenable to flattery and mild bribery, voted through a bill that granted Greater Brazil a permanent presence on Mimas, and gave their enthusiastic assent to plans to send an expedition deep into the atmosphere of Saturn - scientific inquiry fronting what was really a shock-and-awe demonstration of the latest model of combat singleship.

Schmoozing and sweetening the amiably corrupt politicians of Camelot was a full-time job, but Loc found time for his own private research, discovering that Macy Minnot had been adopted into the Jones-Truex-Bakaleinikoff clan. She was currently resident in their garden habitat, a tented crater on Dione, and was working as a biome designer. She had been doing some theoretical work on closed ecosystems, too, collaborating with a crew responsible for highly rated research on one of the extra-solar terrestrial planets, Tierra. He also discovered that the matriarch of the Jones-Truex-Bakaleinikoff clan, Abbie Jones, mother of the tug pilot who'd been instrumental in Macy Minnot's escape, was a good friend of the gene wizard Avernus. He forwarded that nugget of information to Sri Hong-Owen, out of spite. As for Macy Minnot, he had no particular plans to call on her at present, but he had no doubt that their paths would cross again. War was a quickening drumbeat, and when it finally came Loc was determined to make sure that she would be properly punished for choosing the wrong side.

Meanwhile, the Glory of Gaia, a modified freighter that was a carrier-battleship in all but designation, had arrived in orbit around Mimas. Operation Deep Sounding was about to embark into the depths of Saturn. Loc had much work ahead of him, capitalising on the operation's success by entering into negotiations for licensing the new fusion motor to municipalities and family trusts. The Brazilian government had no intention of granting any such licence, of course, but it would be an effective way of exacerbating tensions between the different generations of Outers and weakening civic cohesion. Four hundred years after the American Civil War, Loc and the other war-hawks held that this truth was still self-evident: a house divided against itself cannot stand.

PART THREE.

1.

After the death of Father Solomon, the lectors and instructors were replaced by a squad of military trainers: lean, tough men who treated the boys with rough disdain and wore at all times pistols and shock sticks on their hips. There were no more exercises on the surface. Instead, the trainers introduced the boys to something they called drill, marching them around the gymnasium in close formation with rifles slanted on their shoulders, teaching them how to shift the rifles into various positions with precise, mechanical sequences of movement. The trainers continued the boys' training in use of weapons and sabotage and infiltration techniques, and the boys spent many hours in flight simulators, learning how to fly little rocket-propelled drop-shells out of orbit in various strengths of gravity and land them safely on all kinds of moonscape. They spent a lot of time in immersion scenarios, too, practising how to talk and behave like the enemy. Previously, the scenarios had all been set in a detailed virtuality based on the city of Rainbow Bridge, Callisto. Now the boys were studying the structure, history, socio-economic conditions and cultural milieux of other cities, too. They'd had it easy for too long, their trainers told them. They'd been training for training's sake, but now their training had a purpose, and they must be forged and tempered so that when the time came they would be able to carry out their duties without hesitation.

The changes in their routines and the brusque treatment by their handlers bound the boys closer together. None of them blamed Dave #8 for what had happened; in fact, they were protective and solicitous towards him. Dave #7 tried to make a joke of it, telling him that at one time or another every one of them had dreamed of killing Father Solomon after being zapped by his shock stick. Dave #14 told him gruffly that orders were orders, he'd done what he'd had to do. Dave #27 told him that they were all of one mind and one heart. His had been the hand that had wielded the knife that had cut Father Solomon's throat, but any one of them would have done the same thing. And so all of them were guilty, and no one was more guilty than anyone else. Besides, Dave #27 said, it was in their nature to kill.

'It is what we were born to do, and we have been trained for it all our lives. Is the lion guilty when it kills the lamb? Of course not, for it is only expressing its nature. It is the nature of lions to kill, and lambs to be their prey. We are like lions, and men are our prey.'

'Even if that's true, the enemy is our prey,' Dave #8 said. 'And Father Solomon was not one of them.'

'Perhaps he transgressed in some way that we don't know about,'

Dave #27 said. 'He did something that could have threatened the success of our mission. Something that made him as dangerous as any of the enemy. But we don't need to know what it was. For we are merely the arm and the hand, brother, obedient to a will we must not question.'

Dave #8 was not convinced or comforted by this. It was probably true that any one of his brothers could have done what he did; nevertheless, he was the one who had been selected. General Peixoto had asked Father Solomon to choose his most apt pupil, and Father Solomon had chosen him. Not because Father Solomon had believed that he was the best of all the boys, but because he'd thought that the general had wanted to kill one of the boys to make a point, and as far as he'd been concerned Dave #8 was the most flawed. And perhaps he had been right; perhaps he'd known what Dave #8 had suspected and struggled against all his life. Perhaps he'd known that Dave #8 was different, for all that he tried his best to be unexceptional, to look and behave exactly like his brothers. Perhaps Father Solomon had seen that mirrored in Dave #8's face, and so he'd chosen him out of all the rest, unaware that he hadn't chosen a sacrifice but his own killer. And so he had died, and Dave #8 had to live with his guilt and his growing certainty that he was not who he was supposed to be.

He did his best to atone by throwing himself into the new regime of training and education. He practised drill harder and longer than anyone else, and was the first to hit the floor for another punishing round of push-ups whenever one of the trainers detected a mistake or hesitation in the ranks. He tried to outshine his brothers in everything else, too. He wanted to prove that he was no different from them by being the best of them all.

And then one night he went to sleep as usual and woke up in another room, and realised that his punishment for being different and for having killed Father Solomon had come to him at last. He had been disappeared.

He was lying in a bed higher and softer than the narrow bunk in which he had slept every night of his life, in a small room lit by dim panels in the ceiling. His wrists and ankles were chained to the side rails of the bed and his face hurt. There was a dull ache in his nose, which felt as it had been packed with cotton wool, throbbing discomfort in his jaw and cheekbones, a maddening prickly itch across his scalp.

He lay there a long time, and for a long time nothing happened. It didn't matter. He'd been trained to wait, and now that the worst had happened all his anxiety and fear was gone and he felt only an oceanic calm. Presently, he became aware that the light in the room had brightened and a man was sitting beside his bed, and he came fully to himself once more as the man asked if he recognised him.

'Yes, sir. You are Colonel Arrees. One of our instructors. You taught us psychology.'

'I also helped design your training programme, for my sins,' Colonel Arrees said. 'The way you were raised, the way you were taught, until things . . . changed.'

Dave #8 dared to ask if he was being punished, and Colonel Arrees smiled and shook his head. He was a burly man with a bald pate and a kindly face. It was strange to see it in the flesh instead of floating in the visor of an avatar.

He said, 'You are thinking of what happened to poor Father Solomon. You are in no way to blame for that. Both you and Father Solomon were caught in a power struggle in which one side asserted its right over another to take control of this project. But it doesn't matter who is in control, because the outcome is unchanged. You are about to begin the final part of your training. From now on, you will train alone, because in the end you will have to work alone. And because you will soon be put to work on a real mission, we have had to change your face. After all, we can't send out spies who all look the same, can we? How are you feeling, by the way?'

'I am fine, sir.'

'You'll heal quickly enough. You have had your nose surgically broken, and your cheekbones and jawbone reshaped. Nothing serious. Minor plastic surgery, completely routine. You will no longer be called Number Eight, Number Eight. From now on your name will be Ken Shintaro. Do you understand?'