'I've served the family faithfully,' Sri told her oldest son. 'When we went to Jupiter, it was because I wanted the biome to succeed. I went with the best of intentions. And at the same time I was working for Arvam. Again, with the best of intentions. What else could I do? If I had shown any hint of disobedience, if I had refused either Oscar or Arvam, I would have been punished. Stripped of all I've worked for. But despite my loyalty I'm condemned anyway. I've been forced to betray Oscar, and afterwards, well, you can be sure that I won't be rewarded for it.'

'You did the right thing,' Alder said. 'The only thing you could do, in the circumstances.'

'I know. But it doesn't make it any better.'

Sri and Alder were walking in the grounds of the Peixoto family library. What had once been the Jardim Botanico, before the Overturn and the civil wars. It was early evening. Lights were flickering on along paths that wandered between flower beds and long, lush lawns and stands of trees. The afterglow of sunset lingered low in the west but otherwise the sky was clear and the first stars glimmered in the darkening blue and the freshly minted crescent of the Moon was slung like a cartoon smile above the library's scattering of black cubes.

It was one of Sri's favourite places on Earth. After Oscar Finnegan Ramos had plucked her from an obscure posting in an agricultural research facility and gifted her with one of the famous scholarships that allowed the recipients to work on anything they pleased, she'd spent three years here, cultivating her first truly original ideas, beginning to understand how she must shape herself and her career so that she could win from the world her heart's desire. Right there, on the bench in front of a clump of palms and hibiscus, she had finally realised how to crack an electron-transfer problem in the novel artificial photosynthesis system she'd been trying to develop, a problem that for weeks had remained stubbornly opaque no matter how much she turned and twisted it. She remembered that she'd been watching emerald-green hummingbirds floating on blurred wings about the brash red hibiscus blossoms when the answer had come to her unannounced and fully formed, a true moment of epiphany, a pure and unalloyed happiness unmatched until the birth of her first son.

Sri still maintained apartments in one of the accommodation blocks used by visiting scholars, and loved to walk in the gardens around the library. But now the dear familiar maze of paths and landscaped knolls and ridges felt like a cage, and the warm, humid, darkening air pressed against her like a shroud.

'Euclides isn't working alone,' Alder said.

'No. He couldn't have devised something like this. He's the visible portion of some deeper plot by a faction of the family. They support the war, and they want to humiliate Oscar. To undermine his authority. That much is plain. And I think that they also want to undermine Arvam, too.'

'Are you sure he isn't a part of this?'

'Euclides made it quite plain that he isn't. That he doesn't know that a member of his staff is passing information to Oscar. No, they'll use this against Arvam, too, when the time comes, to make sure that he does not grow too powerful after winning the war. And of course, they'll also use it as an excuse to eliminate me. It's all very neat. Admirably so. A bullet that can strike three targets at once.'

'Why would they want to eliminate you?'

'Because my loyalty is in question. Because I know too much. Because I have outlived my usefulness. Because I have given them everything they need to prosecute their war, and they no longer need me.'

Sri spat out the words like bitter seeds.

'You expected a reward, but instead you feel that you have been punished,' Alder said. 'You are upset because you feel that you have been treated unfairly. But it's an abiding principle that ordinary people who serve the rich and powerful must always be prepared for sudden and unexpected reversals. For the rich and powerful can be unthinkingly cruel and capricious. They can change the lives of their servants on a whim, and think nothing of it. So it's possible that as far as Euclides and this shadowy faction are concerned, you're simply a go-between. A pawn in the game they are playing with Oscar and the general.'

'A pawn they are thinking of sacrificing.'

'If the game is close to the end, perhaps you can win promotion instead.'

'Euclides told me that the family wants me to stay here. That I am forbidden from returning home. If they can cast aside twenty years of my work on a whim, then surely they can cast me aside on a whim, too. Without a pang of regret. I cannot rely on charity, or sentiment. No, if I am to survive this I need to make a move of my own. And besides, there is the other thing.'

Alder understood at once. 'Avernus.'

Ever since the fiasco in Rainbow Bridge, Sri had vowed that if war came, when it came, she would make sure that she was rewarded for her loyalty and hard work by being given sole access to Avernus and her secrets. That prize was hers, and hers alone. Only she was worthy of it; only she deserved it. The thought of one of her grasping, foolish rivals poking and prying into Avernus's work, learning and using the gene wizard's secrets, filled her with bitter helpless anger.

She said, 'It would be better to kill Avernus and destroy her works than let some lesser fool ruin or pervert them.'

They walked through the hot and deepening twilight. Irrigation machines woke amongst the lawns and sprawling flower beds, clicking as they spat arcs of water high into the air.

After a little while, Alder said, 'This isn't one of your tests, is it? You already know what you want to do, you want me to work it out . . .'

He was ten centimetres taller than Sri now, and although he still had a boy's coltish awkwardness she could see quite clearly the lineaments of the handsome, elegant man he was becoming. He was dressed, like her, all in black. A black short-sleeved shirt, pleated black trousers, black boots with pointed steel-tipped toes. His honey-coloured hair cropped short save for a long lock at the right temple, tumbling past his forehead to the tip of his sharp cheekbone. He was no longer a boy. He was an ambitious young man, thoroughly familiar with the processes of politics and power, and the compromises and negotiations required to further his mother's interests and protect her research.

Sri felt sorrow and pride mingling in her heart, even though she'd always known, as she'd encouraged Alder to take on more and more responsibility, that it would be at the cost of his innocence. It was the price paid by everyone with any power, but it did not make it any easier.

She said, 'I don't want you to work out anything. I want to keep you safe, and that means you can't know what I may or may not be planning to do. But I will need your help. Politics, plotting, flattery and all the rest - it isn't what I do. And besides, you're involved in this as much as I am. Even if I survive, our lives will be utterly changed. And if I make the wrong move, well, at best you and Berry will not only be orphaned but also disinherited.'

Alder laughed, and immediately apologised. 'I'm sorry, but it sounds so very dramatic'

'Nevertheless, it is true.'

'I really think that I could help you more if you trusted me-'

'Don't ever think that I don't trust you. This is not about trust. It is about keeping you safe,' Sri said. 'If you know too much, you will never be safe, so don't ever ask me about my plans again.'

'I'm sorry,' Alder said again.

'You'll need to go away,' Sri said. 'Somewhere that puts you out of reach of Euclides.'

'What about Berry?'

'I'll look after Berry. You will have to look after yourself until I call on you for help.'

'Of course.'

Sri stopped. Alder stopped too, and turned to look at her, tall and grave.

'Promise,' she said.

'I swear it.'

She leaned forward, rose on tip-toe and kissed him on the lips.

'Good. It may take a year. Perhaps longer. But not for ever. I will contact you when it is safe, and then I will need all your skills of diplomacy and negotiation. It won't be easy, but it's the only way we can survive this.'

'You have taught me that nothing important is ever won easily,' Alder said. 'And although Euclides and his faction may have power over you, you are more powerful than you think or they realise. You have done very important work for the family. You are a great gene wizard. The greatest the family has ever known. That counts for something.'

'Let's hope so.'

5.

The Jones-Truex-Bakaleinikoff clan held their polls publicly, in the Athenian manner. People voted by placing a white or black glass disc in the ballot box, and the vote was carried or defeated by a simple majority. Newton Jones was one of the last to vote on the proposal to support Paris, Dione. Smiling at Macy as he picked up a black disc and dropped it into the box. Ten minutes later the tally was announced. Black outnumbered white by a slim majority. The proposal had been defeated.

On his way out of the room, Yuldez Truex said to Macy, 'I don't suppose you'll be happy until you see Brazilian storm troopers marching in here.'

'You lost fair and square by more than one vote,' Macy told him. 'Quit blaming me and try to get over it.'

The next morning, she was working in the garage, loading a rolligon with insulated boxes containing bags of seeds, cultures of microorganisms, and flasks of nematodes and springtails and worms, when she received a summons from Newt's mother. Abbie Jones lived in a solitary tower west of the keep. It had the sleek and finned shape of a space rocket from the time three centuries past when such things were no more than unrealised dreams and it was clad in seamless black fullerene polished to a shine that held tenebrous reflections of the formal garden around it. Beds of lilies, pale grasses, ornamental thistles with silvery foliage, all bordered with clipped box. Gravel paths. A bower of sprawling white roses. A square pond with flagstones set around its four edges and fat koi carp patrolling beneath lily pads like coins scattered across the surface of the black water.

Macy had met and talked with Abbie Jones several times, but never before alone, and she had never before visited the matriarch's tower. She was received by a small robot with three spidery legs and a transparent plastic carapace much scuffed by age. It led her into an elevator that rose to a room near the top of the tower, where Abbie Jones sat on a cushion studying a slate before one of the big round windows set at the four quarters of the compass. She was as pale and slender and tall as Newt, dressed in a plain tunic of unbleached cotton and trousers of the same material. Her long white hair was brushed back from her face and held in a kind of loose net that hung at her right shoulder. She set the slate aside and asked Macy to sit, asked if she'd had breakfast.

'Yes, ma'am.'

'Well, do you like coffee?'

Macy said that she did and sat on the cushion opposite the old woman as the little robot clattered off to the elevator. The room was small but light and airy. A case of books was set against a wall between two of the windows, facing the frame of a handloom in which a long heavy cloth patterned in red and black stripes hung half-finished. The round windows looked out across the green and white garden to the patchwork of fields and wooded lots and meadows that spread to the rim forest under the bright light of the chandeliers and the high angles of the tent.

Abbie Jones said that she hoped Macy didn't mind the interruption to her work; Macy said that it wasn't anything that couldn't wait.

'You're going out to quicken a new habitat.'

'Yes, ma'am. Out on the plain south of Carthage Linea. There's a crew of robots building a bunch of them there.'

'Please. My name is Abbie.'

'Okay.'

'You've been quickening oases for a while now.'

'About eight months.'

'You like the work?'

'Very much.'

'I'm glad. Everyone should find something they love doing. Then work isn't work. It's a part of themselves. Of who they are.'

'I see you like to weave.'

'It helps me to relax when I've had enough of trying to run this place. We're a non-hierarchical democracy that puts decisions about anything and everything to the vote. But someone has to make sure that those decisions are implemented in a fair and transparent manner. And someone must also deal with day-to-day problems and snags too small to be worth the collective wisdom of the people.'

The little robot returned carrying before it a wooden tray set with a coffee pot and a pitcher of milk, straws of sugar, bone-china cups and saucers, and a plate of thin honey-coloured biscuits. It set the tray on the floor between the two women and its sensor band swivelled through one hundred and eighty degrees and it stepped backward to a spot by the bookshelf and hunkered down with a hydraulic sigh. Abbie Jones poured coffee into the cups and asked Macy if she took cream or sugar.

'Just black is fine.'

Abbie Jones took a sip of coffee and looked at Macy over the rim of her cup. 'You voted against making an alliance with Paris.'

'The majority did.'

'Do you suppose that Marisa Bassi has taken the way you voted as a sign that you do not want to help him?'

'He can take it how he wants.' Macy paused, then said, 'If Marisa Bassi knows how I voted, if he didn't just guess but he's flat-out certain, then someone who was present at the vote must have told him that I dropped a black disc in the box.'

Abbie Jones inclined her head, smiling faintly.

'I think I know who,' Macy said. 'Don't worry, I'm not going to cause trouble over it. Unless you want me to.'

'If necessary, I will deal with it myself.'

'How do you know that Marisa Bassi knows about the way I voted?'

'He called me just before I called you. He presented various arguments about why we were wrong to refuse to support him. And he said that he knew you had voted against the motion, and suggested that you might have been poisoning the minds of some of the clan with what he called pro-Brazilian propaganda.'

'Is that why I'm here?'

Abbie Jones shook her head. 'I am not accusing you of anything. I asked you here because I thought it was only fair to let you know what he said. Has he spoken to you?'

'No, but I bet he will. Most likely he'll ask me to help him again. And if I don't agree, he'll probably make a speech accusing me of being some kind of spy.'

'If you need any help, you have only to ask.'

'That's good of you. But I think I have a way of cutting the ground from under him.'

'The offer stands.'

'I thank you for it,' Macy said. 'But if you don't mind, let me try my idea first. I'm sort of committed to it, anyway.'

After a small silence, Abbie Jones said, 'Sometimes something happens to someone that changes their life for ever. Something divides their life into two. Into before and after. Everything that happened in the before, even those actions and decisions that could be held accountable for causing the divide, becomes afterwards remote. Like a dream, or a story told about the life of someone else. And everything that happens afterwards is different from everything that went before, because the person is never again the same. That's happened to you, I think.'

'My life has changed, that's for sure. I'm not sure yet how it's changed me.'

'It happened to me, too. The same abrupt change. Before I set out on my long voyage through the Kuiper Belt, I had a modest amount of fame in the small circle of people who were interested in the outermost reaches of the Solar System. A little kudos. Nothing more. But when I came back I was for a short time the most famous person in the Outer System, and my fame attracted rumours that I had encountered something strange in the outer dark. An alien or the ghost of an astronaut from a lost expedition. A true artificial intelligence grown from the seed of an ancient robot probe. A profound hallucination that regressed me through a parade of past lives. Something that made me something more than human. That gave me a godlike perspective on the little comedies and tragedies of ordinary lives. It was all nonsense of course, but understandable nonsense. People like dramatic explanations for dramatic situations and dramatic changes. And it was certainly true that my life had been changed, utterly and for ever. I will not deny that spending four years alone might have had something to do with it, but the fact is that I discovered nothing out there that I didn't expect to find, and if I changed then it was no sudden thing that changed me but the simple day-by-day evolution that everyone experiences. The voyage itself made me famous, and fame alone cut my life in two. Into the before and the after. One of the reasons I set out with my husband and some of my friends to found a settlement on Titania was to escape from the goldfish bowl of fame. And we were all very young then, and had the arrogance of the young. We believed that we could not fail at anything. But we did. We were too far from everywhere else and we were divided by petty disagreements magnified into vicious grievances by our loneliness. And so we came back, and my husband and my children and I made a new start, and here we are.' Abbie Jones dipped a biscuit in her coffee and took the smallest bite. 'The point being, I was wrong to think that I could find a way back to the life I had had before I became famous. No one can go back to what they were in the before. Because there is no longer any before.'

There was another small silence. Both women sipped their coffee. The ancient little robot stood quiet and still by the bookcase, a pinlight in its sensor band glowing red. At last, Macy said, 'I kind of ended up here through a series of accidents. It definitely wasn't planned. But I'm not looking to go back to what I was. At one time I thought it might have been possible. I hoped it was. But now I know that it isn't.'

'That's good. It means you are free to find out what you've become.'

'I'm an outsider. I know that. Maybe I'll always be one. But I'm trying my best to make a place for myself here.'

'You are also more famous than you once were. It can be useful, if you accommodate yourself to it. Or it can become a burden, if you are not careful. A constant fight against the expectations of other people.' Abbie Jones took a sip of coffee. 'We can look back at the place where our lives changed. At what defines us. Not everyone has that advantage. Some people must struggle all their lives with the question of who they are, and never find a satisfactory answer. My youngest son, for instance.'

Macy didn't say anything, but she knew then, with cold iron certainty, that the matriarch knew exactly what she was planning to do.

'Newton is restless,' Abbie Jones said. 'He tries out different things. Different ideas, different attitudes. As someone else might try on different clothes. He hasn't yet found something that satisfies him.'

'I'm sure he will.'

'He doesn't want to be known as the son of Abbie Jones. He wants to be his own person. He hopes to find something that will lay a line or boundary across his life, something that will define him ever afterward. As you and I are defined by what happened to us. He is not stupid, and he is brave enough, although it is the kind of bravery that hasn't yet been tested. The kind of bravery that could be mistaken for bravado or recklessness. And he is also easily led.'

'I wouldn't try to make Newt do anything he didn't want to do. I wouldn't even know how to try,' Macy said.

She wondered if Abbie Jones was probing her, trying to find out if she knew what Newt got up to on his solo trading trips to the various cities and settlements of the various moons. Who he met, who he talked to, what they talked about. Well, she didn't. Oh, Newt liked to drop hints and teasing suggestions, but Macy, who didn't know half as much about how things worked out here as she would have liked, lacked the context to sort out facts from his usual brags, boasts and tall tales, let alone fit them into any kind of sensible story. And besides, his mother, who was ferociously well-connected, and respected, too, with deep reserves of karma, a power in the world, probably knew more about Newt's escapades than Macy did. So maybe this was a warning; maybe Abbie Jones thought Macy was somehow plugged into Newt's fantasy world . . .

'Well, in this particular case I hope that you are successful,' Abbie Jones said. 'Not only for your sake. If Marisa Bassi is able to convince the right people that you are some sort of spy, the reputation of the clan will be damaged. We'll be made to look like fools for taking you in, or worse.'

'I won't let you down.'