'There it is,' Newt said.

Elephant was falling around Saturn, closing on Enceladus, and Mimas had just risen past the hazy edge of the gas giant. One window in Elephants memo space showed an enhanced optical view of the Glory of Gaia's oval black shell hanging sharp and clear against the heavily cratered surface of the little moon; another showed the radar display. Something small and fast tracked past the Brazilian ship's fat radar echo. Merging with it for a moment, moving past. Macy asked Newt if it was one of the combat singleships.

'Most likely one of the entourage,' Newt said. 'There are always two or three of our ships keeping a close watch on it.'

He pulled back the optical view to reveal two sparks hanging at different levels behind the Brazilian ship.

Macy said, 'Are those the same size as Elephant?''

'More or less.'

'It's a big ship.'

'And there are two more coming our way.'

'Have you ever done that? Hung around it. Kept watch.'

'I might have buzzed it once or twice.'

'That won't scare them off.'

'Of course it won't. But we have to remind them that plenty of people don't want them here, and we like to keep a close watch on everything they do. So we buzz them. We try to futz their telemetry and radar. Light-bomb them. Just generally annoy them every way we can, and hopefully annoy them and sap their morale. I guess you think it's pretty childish.'

'I think that none of you has ever been in a real honest-to-goodness shooting war.'

'So when things kick off, I should just hope for the best and sit it out, uh? Or even worse, give in before anything happens, like the folk in Camelot.'

'I just hope you aren't harbouring romantic notions about surviving some kind of close encounter with a singleship, coming out a hero. Because you won't.'

'Know why I voted against siding with Paris?'

'I don't suppose it was to please me.'

'Aside from the fact that Marisa Bassi is a blowhard more interested in his reputation than reality, I know we can't defeat Earth by playing it at its own game. We have to be smarter than that,' Newt said. 'And you might want to think about this. If there is a war, you're going to need a good place to hide. Because the Brazilians are bound to come looking for you. Maybe then you'll change your mind about sitting it out.'

Macy knew that he wanted her to ask him what he was planning, him and his friends here, there, and everywhere in the Saturn System, but she also knew that he was flirting with her, teasing her. Having fun. So she said, 'One of the things I learnt in the R&R Corps, no plan survives contact with the enemy.'

Newt laughed. 'I guess you never had any really good plans.'

Enceladus was a bright, white snowball. Its low-relief surface was painted with layers of fine ice crystals that reflected almost all the sunlight that fell on it and were constantly renewed by geysers in the tiger-stripe terrain of its south pole, where pods and leads of liquid water immediately beneath the brittle surface boiled violently when fractures exposed them to the freezing vacuum, driving plumes of ice crystals more than four hundred kilometres into space. Most of this fell back to the moon's surface; the rest escaped its gravity well, going into orbit around Saturn and adding material to the E Ring. Enceladus was just five hundred kilometres in diameter, so small it should have frozen solid billions of years ago, Newt told Macy, but the water was rich in ammonia, which lowered its freezing point by almost a hundred degrees Celsius, and radionuclide decay and tidal stresses provided enough thermal energy to keep it liquid. So there was still plenty of geologic activity on the little moon; as Elephant circled towards Baghdad, Newt pointed out patchworks of complex, fractured terrains, compression ridges, smooth, recently resurfaced plains, softened craters crossed by faulting . . .

The domed city came up above the horizon, standing on an ancient cratered plain whose contours were softened by layers of bright frost. And then they were down, and took a bus from the platform spaceport into Baghdad. The city's tent stood on aerogel and fullerene composite foundations fitted inside the low ramparts of a small impact crater, and its interior had been flooded with melt water to create a circular lake with shellfish reefs, kelp forests, mangrove islets and vast rafts of giant water-lilies. From green islands at its centre rose a spiky city of skeletal spires scaffolded from fullerene spars, bearing platforms and terraces planted with trees or pieced gardens, studded with capsule houses painted in vibrant colours, knitted together by a web of slender bridges and slides, zip lines and cableways.

Following the instructions she'd been given, Macy led Newt to a cafe at the base of one of the outermost towers, where he forked up a plateful of vegetable tagine and drank several cups of mint tea as he made calls to various factors, talking up his cargo of handloomed denim cloth and eight varieties of coffee. Later on he'd sit down with one of them and haggle for an hour or two, using stochastic comparisons with similar exchanges recently recorded on the Bourse and laying off favours and promises on future interest in other goods to get the best deal on the spices and pharm yeasts he wanted to take back to Dione. The Outer System's economy was driven by thousands of deals like this, and by trading in kudos, the elaborate system that tracked and indexed everyone's social esteem and contributions to the common good. At bottom, it was more like a game than a serious monetary system. Traders bluffed each other like poker players; some deadlocked deals were even resolved by a throw of dice.

Macy slouched in her sling chair, sucked down sweetened mint tea, and tried not to think too much about why she'd come here. Politics was a game too, and she was painfully aware that she was a naive and inexperienced player who had only a vague idea of the rules. All she could do was declare her hand and play it by ear. Rely on the kindness of strangers.

It was early evening. The chandelier lights dimming, the panes of the city's tent darkening and gradually obscuring the snow-white moonscape outside. Fat, sluggish waves rolled across the lake, under a flexing tessellation of giant water-lily pads. Above it, half a dozen flyers were engaged in a kind of aerial ballet, skimming low over the lake, soaring up, twisting around each other like bats under the black sky, under Saturn. Low gravity made human-powered flight possible in habitats and cities on all of Saturn's moons. It was a popular sport; Macy had tried it several times in the Jones-Truex-Bakaleinikoff hold, gliding from platforms fixed high on one or another of the tent's support struts. On Enceladus, where gravity was so vestigial that human beings weighed no more than ravens or crows on Earth, people flew all the time. They wore wing suits, or like some of the flyers at play above the water had somatic tweaks that gave them membranous folds of skin which stretched from wrists to ankles, and modified their muscle fibres and the oxygen-bearing capacity of their haemoglobin so that they could fly for hours.

Newt finished his business calls, gossiped with a couple of friends, finally took off his spex and told Macy that her mysterious contact was late.

'Not very.'

'If they don't turn up, will you tell me what this is all about?'

'They'll turn up.'

'When you're done, there are a couple of bars I know you'll like. One right under water, in the middle of a kelp forest,' Newt said. 'You swim down, come up in this kind of bell of air.'

'If you get drunk, how do you swim back?'

'It serves tea. All kinds. You drink tea and nibble this and that and kick back. Watch the fishes through the glass.'

'Sounds like fun. What's that?'

A man's voice rose up from somewhere high in the neighbouring tower, an ululant chant floating out into the darkening air, the evening settling all around.

'The call to prayer,' Newt said. 'You don't have Muslims, in Greater Brazil?'

'Sure we do. I've just never met one.'

A shadow flickered over the broad terrace as a flyer swooped past, cruciform in a green wingsuit, catching an updraught and beating up and out over the lake.

'This is a very spiritual city,' Newt said. 'There are Muslims, Christians, Hindu, Jews . . . There's a Buddhist temple in Camelot, Mimas. Some of the people who organised that Permanent Peace Debate in Paris, they're Buddhists, too.'

'What were those monks again? The ones who keep the ryokan up in the rimwall of Dido Crater?'

Macy had gone there six months ago with Newt, Pete Bakleinikoff, and Junko and Junpei Asai. In a garden of moss and bamboo they'd soaked in a hot pool carved from a block of siderite, sipping rice wine and nibbling tiny pickled vegetables, talking telescope business, contemplating the stark empty moonscape beyond the ryokan's tent.

'Shinto,' Newt said. 'Some of the Buddhists are Shinto, too. The people who have Japanese ancestry, anyhow.'

'But none of the clan has any particular religion that I've noticed.'

'We're filthy rationalists,' Newt said. 'You were religious, I guess, at one time.'

'At one time.'

'But not now.'

'No.'

'What happened? Did you lose it when you ran away and saw what the wide world had to offer?'

'I lost it before I ran away,' Macy said. 'I guess that's why I ran away.'

The flyer in the green wingsuit came back towards the terrace, skimming in above the water, swooping up at the last moment to make a neat landing at the far end. Her suit folding around her like a cloak as she ankled towards them, pulling off goggles, shaking black hair loose around her shoulders.

Newt looked at her, looked at Macy, began to laugh.

The flier was Avernus's daughter, Yuli.

Macy and Yuli talked inside a pod with a halflife fur floor and a plexiglass shell, hung high at the edge of a cluster of lighted towers. When Macy started to explain what she wanted to do, Yuli interrupted her, saying, 'I understand everything.'

'Everything?'

'It is quite simple. Marisa Bassi wants you to talk about Greater Brazil. About Earth. If you refuse, he will brand you a traitor. A spy. If you agree to be interviewed by one of his stooges, you will be contributing to his endless round of martial propaganda. You believe that we can help you find a way out of this trap. That by talking with my mother, you can answer Marisa Bassi's public challenge without being beholden to him or contributing to his cause.'

'I came out here as part of the peace and reconciliation effort. To promote understanding between Greater Brazil and the Outer System. I still believe in that, and I'll talk to anyone who wants to listen about Earth. I'll do my best to answer any questions as honestly and fully as I can. But Marisa Bassi only wants to hear about how the great families grab all the wealth and power and oppress everyone else. Horror stories he can use to justify himself.'

'Tell me: can we stop the war?'

'No, probably not.'

'My mother thinks otherwise. That is why she has made herself into a hostage in Paris. She has set herself up in direct opposition to Marisa Bassi. She is using her kudos and all her contacts here and in Greater Brazil and elsewhere on Earth to try to stop the inevitable. And she believes that because our enemies would very much like to capture her alive, they will not strike at Paris while she is there. We have tried to persuade her that she has overestimated her importance and underestimated their ambition and aggression. And their fear of us, of what we might soon become. She will not listen to us. She thinks we are too pessimistic. But she has agreed to talk with you.'

Yuli sat cross-legged on the warm blue fur, slight and slender in her green wingsuit, unbound black hair falling around her heart-shaped face and over her shoulders. Her skin was snow-white and her eyes chlorophyll green. She looked about eight, but she was exactly Macy's height, and her green gaze was bold and serious. Coolly analytical. There were rumours that she wasn't Avernus's biological daughter (and if she was that in itself would have been a miracle, given Avernus's great age) but a construct or a clone. Or that she was really much older than she looked but had been cut so that she didn't age. Whatever she was, she was definitely spooky.

'I don't think I can change your mother's mind,' Macy said.

'I don't expect you to change her mind. Only she can do that, when she is in full possession of all the facts. And perhaps not even then. But we must try to make sure that she is informed. She quit Earth a century and a half ago. She has tried to keep up, but she knows that there are serious gaps in her knowledge. That's where you can be of great help. My mother would like to hear the truth. Raw, unmediated. She would like you to answer her questions as fully and honestly as you can. Will you do that?'

'Like you said, it's why I came here.'

'You can't come to Paris because Marisa Bassi might arrest you. And my mother won't leave Paris. But it isn't a problem,' Yuli said, and pulled a pair of tipset gloves from the pouch pocket of her wingsuit. 'Put these on. Also your spex.'

'You want me to do this right now?'

Yuli laughed, and for a moment looked exactly like an ordinary little girl. 'Of course. We guessed what you wanted and decided that we would accept before you asked to meet me. And as you want to tell the truth, you will surely need no preparation.'

'It goes out on the net.'

'Streamed directly as it happens, raw and unmediated.'

'I guess you really did figure out everything I was going to ask you.'

'I know that war is inevitable. I know that it will change everything. I don't yet know how. I can only hope that in the long run it will change things for the better. And the best hope for the best outcome is that my mother not only survives but also evades capture. That she comes to her senses and quits Paris before it's too late. We are trying everything in our power to convince her. Even this.'

'Do you ever worry that some people might mistake your direct manner for rudeness?'

'The truth should not insult anyone. I am desperate. So are you. We can both help each other. Now, I think you should lie down. And don't try to move your avatar until you have become used to the time delay.'

'Where are we meeting, your mother and me?' Macy said, pulling on the tipset gloves.

'One of her gardens,' Yuli said, and put on her own spex.

Macy's spex blanked as soon as she lay down, and then the telepresence link meshed. She was lying on warm soft fur, and she was inside an avatar that was standing in front of a transparent wall, looking out across a vast gulf of crystalline air towards a churning smog-yellow tornado spout that dwindled towards a lumpy red-brown cloud layer far below. It was midday. The tiny disc of the sun shone overhead in a sky as blue as Earth's and flecked with wisps of white cloud. A flock of tiny sharp-edged rectangles hung off to one side of the giant tornado.

Macy called up the avatar's virtual control stick and turned from the view to see where she'd ended up. A big square room with transparent walls and a faintly gridded but otherwise transparent floor, the topmost of a stack of floors in a tall, cylindrical building that hung in midair. A giant glass test-tube ringed round top and bottom with transparent bladders and studded with attitude jets. Other avatars stood here and there on this floor and on the floors below, like man-shaped chess pieces poised in the middle of a game. One stirred and walked towards her with a delicate swaying motion, and a voice in her ears said, 'I am Avernus. Welcome to Deep Eddy.'

Macy introduced herself, asked if this place was real.

'Oh yes. Quite real. We're floating in Saturn's water belt, about three hundred kilometres below the edge of the atmosphere,' Avernus said.

'Those white clouds are water vapour, and the storm is mostly water vapour, too, a standing vortex driven by a hot spot in the liquid-hydrogen zone far below. It cools as it rises, but it is still much warmer than surrounding atmosphere, and dissipation of heat drives cloud formation, just like a hurricane on Earth. Also, the winds that circle it sweep away the smog created by Saturn's anaerobic chemistry, giving us this splendid view. We can see for about a thousand kilometres in every direction.'

Macy asked if the rectangles hanging out in the air were other buildings; Avernus said that it would be easier to show her than to explain.

'We'll go there as soon as we have finished here. The Brazilians tried to investigate this place during that silly stunt when they flew their singleships deep into Saturn. They didn't quite succeed, but I know they will be watching this now, so what better place for our meeting? I no longer have anything to hide. If they want to find out anything about my work, anything at all, all they have to do is ask. This is not a factory for dreadful weapons, or a hiding place for monsters. It has no function at all, except as a place where people can come to contemplate this beautiful world, or to meet. And that's why we are here, of course. To meet, and to talk. To begin with, tell me how you came out here.'

'It's kind of a long and complicated story.'

'I have plenty of time.'

They talked for almost an hour. Macy told Avernus about her escape from the Church of the Divine Regression, her raggle-taggle life in Pittsburgh that had ended when she'd joined the Reclamation and Reconstruction Corps. Her work in the ruins of Chicago and her promotion after she had saved the life of Fela Fontaine, how she had joined R&R Crew #553, and how she had won a place on a construction crew and gone to Rainbow Bridge, Callisto, by default. Avernus asked many questions. Macy couldn't tell the gene wizard much about politics and the rivalries of the different families, but she tried to answer all the other questions as directly and truthfully as she could.

At last, the gene wizard said, 'I promised to show you the rest of Deep Eddy. If you let me take control for just a moment . . .'

There was a kind of blink, and then Macy's viewpoint was hanging above a long rectangular carpet woven from patches of black and deep crimsons, flecked here and there by tiny patches of white. Slow ripples propagated along its length and its edges beaded with the black spheres. Floats. Beyond it, two more rectangles were silhouetted against the blue sky.

'It's a garden,' Macy said. 'You've made gardens out here!'

'I call them reefs,' Avernus said.

The two of them were patched into one of the little robots that cultivated the reefs, and Avernus sent it trawling low over the floating meadow. Apart from their dark pigmentation, designed to maximise collection of sunlight, the plants of the reef looked remarkably like terrestrial plants. There were mossy hummocks, patches of tall thin blades that looked like grasses, dense tangles of ferny branches or black straps metres long. Things that looked a little like sunflowers, with short fleshy stalks topped by dishes that concentrated the feeble sunlight on a silvery node at their centres. Cottony tangles of dew-catchers that trapped water vapour when the reef drifted through a water-droplet cloud, irrigating nearby plants in exchange for nutrients drawn off from their roots. More than fifty different species crammed edge to edge, rooted in a mesh saturated with a kind of tar of simple carbonaceous compounds, using photosynthetic energy to transmute the tar into useful organic molecules. Floats with black skins a few nanometres thick absorbed solar energy and heated the pure hydrogen inside, providing just enough lift to stop the reefs from sinking as constant winds spun it around Deep Eddy. When the reefs were swept through one of the streamers that extended from Deep Eddy's margins, they were drenched in methane and ammonium brought down from higher, colder layers of the upper atmosphere. Microbes in the tarry 'soil' absorbed these vital nutrients, and so the reefs grew and extended.

'To begin with, they were all seeded with the same mix of species,'

Avernus said. 'They have since found their own different equilibria. We don't interfere in their development, except to try to keep them on station. And to cut one in half, when it grows big enough. We started out with just ten. Twenty years later, there are more than a hundred times that number.'

'Nobody lives here.'

'Not that I know of.'

'You just made it to see if you could make it.'

'I'm interested in exploring the endless possibilities of what Per Bak called self-organising criticality. The complex and delicate equilibria that arise from the symbiotic interdependence of chaos and order that we find in sand piles, free markets, and ecosystems. On my best days, I think that I might be aspiring to something like art. But in any case our worlds would be drab and poor places if we created things only for reasons of utility. I enjoy making my gardens, and I hope people can find their own pleasure in them. Only a few people knew about Deep Eddy before we met. Now its address and the protocols for accessing its avatars have been made public. Anyone can visit it. Even people from Earth. Especially people from Earth. I want them to understand that there is nothing here but my little gardens, and the planet's wild beauty.'

Macy saw something that looked very like a centipede move at a glacial pace through the undergrowth, stalking a clutch of fat worms that were grazing on a dense tangle of black straps. She said, 'Your gardens are beautiful, too.'

'Thank you. And thank you for your candour. I want to think about what you've told me. And then perhaps we can meet in another garden, and talk again.'

'I'd like that,' Macy said. But the link had already dissolved and she was looking up through the transparent lenses of her spex at the fullerene girders and darkened panes of Baghdad's tent.