'It was Mr Twain, wasn't it?' Ursula Freye said.

Macy nodded. She had decided to be as candid as possible, hoping that Ursula would be candid in return. 'Him and Loc Ifrahim.'

'The diplomat?'

'Yup. He did the talking and Speller Twain hung around in the background, flexing his muscles.'

Ursula Freye thought about this for a moment. She and Macy were sitting on the fur-covered bench of a booth now. Two of Ursula's companions had left without speaking a word. The third sat next to Ursula, robed in a hooded floor-length white fur coat and, like the two who'd left, wearing a mask, this one in the form of a fox's sharp-snouted features.

At last Ursula said, 'When he asked you to talk to me . . . Did you get the impression that it was government business, or something else?'

'That's what I've been wondering,' Macy said. 'He seemed to imply that it wasn't exactly official. That he wanted to do you a favour. To talk to you, tell you-'

'I know what he wants to tell me. What did he tell you?'

'Only that you were meeting with people who could cause trouble.'

Macy looked across the table at the robed, fox-faced person who sat beside Ursula. 'No offence. He said that, not me.'

Fox-face didn't reply, but for a chilling moment the mask's amber gaze seemed to swallow Macy whole. It was uncannily realistic, every hair on the muzzle (white on the underjaw, auburn above) in place, every whisker. Its black lips were slightly parted, revealing a hint of sharp white teeth.

Ursula said, 'Mr Ifrahim told you that I was meeting with people. Did he tell you anything else?'

'He said that it could compromise the project.'

'Do you believe him?'

'I don't trust him.'

'You realise that you can be arrested for intruding on my privacy,'

Ursula said. 'That's one of the few things that is against the law down here. I could cause all kinds of trouble for you, Miz Minnot. And if I did, I expect Mr Ifrahim and Mr Twain would let you take the fall.'

'That would only be fair,' Macy said, feeling a warmth growing on her forehead and cheeks despite the chilly air, 'because it was my idea to come here, not theirs. I thought we could talk freely here. But if all you want to do is threaten me, then fine, I'll go.'

'And what will you tell your friends?'

'They're not my friends. I'll tell them that you didn't want to talk to me about whatever it is you're doing down here. That if they want to find out they'll have to come talk to you themselves.'

'Do you think they will be satisfied with that?'

'I doubt it. But if they ask me to do anything else, I'll tell them that maybe I need to talk to Mr Peixoto about it first. Get it all out in the open.'

'And is that a threat?'

Sitting straightbacked in a black fur coat, shining blonde hair combed and neatly parted into wings that slanted either side of her face, Ursula Freye didn't looked in any way touched by grief or craziness. She looked cool, utterly self-possessed. She was more than twice Macy's age, but her skin was unlined and porcelain-perfect apart from tender pouches under her eyes, and her sharp blue gaze was lively and acute. Back on Earth, she could have had Macy flogged or jailed for insubordination. Or flogged and jailed, for that matter. But this wasn't Earth, they were sitting at the heart of a zone where ordinary rules had been suspended, and Macy felt emboldened.

'Whatever you're doing here is your business,' she said. 'And as long as it stays here I'd have no reason to tell Mr Peixoto or anyone else about it. But if it affects the project, then it affects all of us.'

'Have you ever been in love, Miz Minnot?'

Macy hesitated for only a moment. She had decided to be candid, and as long as she could keep Ursula talking she might learn something.

'There was a boy once. We thought we were in love for a little while.'

'What happened?'

'I wanted to do better than scuffling a living in the streets, looked into joining the R&R Corps. Jax said no way he was going to leave Pittsburgh. It was where he grew up. It was all he knew. So . . .'

'You went your way, and left him behind.'

Macy shrugged. 'Something like that.'

She remembered how she and Jax had argued about it for most of that summer. Finally, Jax had told her to do what she wanted, just as long as they didn't have to talk about it any more. She'd signed up the next day. By the time she shipped out for basic training, two weeks later, she and Jax had broken up. And then she'd been so busy, learning Corps discipline, how to use a gun and a pickaxe, that she hadn't had time to think of him that much, although she had wondered now and then, in the brief quiet time between lights-off and sleep, if he ever thought of her.

Ursula Freye said, 'If you loved him, you would have stayed with him.'

'We were both pretty young.'

Ursula looked somewhere else for a few seconds, then pressed the button set in the centre of the table and told the robot that responded to the call that she wanted two brandies. Looking at her silent, fox-faced companion, saying, 'Unless you want one too.'

The figure shook its head once, right to left.

'One thing I know,' Ursula said to Macy. 'You don't choose to fall in love. It's something that happens to you, like a wonderful accident. I didn't plan to fall in love with Manny or anyone else on the crew. But it happened the first time we saw each other, right at the beginning of talks between our family and the Peixotos. It caused a political problem and it caused me all kinds of personal problems too. But it happened. People I thought were close to me, my friends, tried to get me to resign from the project or promise to stop seeing Manny. But I wasn't going to give him up, there was no one else of my rank remotely qualified to join the crew, and I was able to persuade the people who mattered that I was still loyal to the family, and that my relationship with Manny would help forge a closer alliance with the Peixotos. It caused Manny a fair amount of grief, too. Although he had already done most of the design work on the biome there were people in the Peixoto family who wanted to throw him off the project. But Oscar Finnegan Ramos had the final word on that, and he said let it be. So it worked out. We stayed together, and we came here. But if Manny had been forced to quit, I would have quit too. It wouldn't have been easy, because I would have had to go against the wishes of my family, but I would have done it. And now I wish that he had been forced to quit . . .'

There was a scratching noise overhead as the robot returned. It lowered two balloon glasses with swift precision, retracted its tentacles, scuttled away. Ursula Freye cupped her glass in both hands and raised it to her face and breathed in the fumes of the little puddle of amber liquid before drinking. After a moment, Macy took the smallest possible sip from her own glass. It was good stuff, a whole universe away from the jackleg liquor that R&R crews brewed from sugar and wild apples or cherries. Smoothly coating her tongue with a biting sweetness, burning a hot wire to her stomach.

'I'm going to tell you something that you can pass on to Mr Twain and Mr Ifrahim,' Ursula said, sounding like a boss for the first time since she'd surprised Macy, decisive and definite. 'They already know about it, but they didn't trouble to tell you. So if you tell them about it, they'll know that you really did talk to me. You understand?'

'Before we go any further, maybe you can tell me who your friend is.'

'I can't do that. And really, you should know better than to ask. It's not just horribly rude down here; it's also illegal. What I want you to do now is listen carefully. Because I'm going to tell you why I know that Manny was killed.'

'Okay.'

'After I was told that Manny had died, I asked to see his body. And that's when I found out that something was wrong. I found out,' Ursula said, looking straight at Macy, 'that his slate had gone missing. And I knew right away that someone had killed him. They killed him, and they took his slate.'

Macy waited, hunched in her heavy fur coat, cradling her balloon glass of brandy, feeling the cold of the ice table on the backs of her hands, the heat of her own blood on her face. Feeling that she had stepped over the edge of something.

'There are at least three different ways he could have been killed,'

Ursula said. 'Someone could have sabotaged his hibernation coffin, or spiked him with drugs, or with a failed form of neuronal therapy that causes damage very similar to CND . . . Well, the details don't matter right now. All that matters is that Manny was murdered, and his slate was stolen.'

'Do Mr Ifrahim and Mr Twain know that it's missing?'

Ursula nodded. 'And if you tell them that I told you about it, they'll know that you talked to me. That you did what they asked you to do.'

'I guess I should ask you what you're planning to do about it.'

'Would you tell your two friends about it if I did?'

'If you tell me, sure. Why not? You're telling me what you want them to hear, aren't you?'

Ursula studied Macy for a moment, a smile touching her lips, gone. 'I believe they may have underestimated you.'

'I'm counting on it.'

'Perhaps you think that I am crazy. That I have constructed a paranoid fantasy because I can't accept that Manny's death was a tragic accident. Oh, I wouldn't blame you if you did. I admit that I wasn't especially rational back then, and I can't have made a good impression when I burst into that meeting and vented my frustration. But I am rational now. I am utterly calm. And I know what I know. Part of what I do, a large part of it, is to locate and define places where emergent phenomena might arise from the interaction of two or more ecological parameters. In other words, I'm very good at spotting patterns before they have fully formed. So if you think that I'm seeing a conspiracy where none exists, let me assure you that it's as real as this glass,' Ursula said, finishing off her brandy in a quick swallow and setting the glass down on the slab of black ice and sitting back, fixing Macy with a bright, starry gaze. 'Maximilian Peixoto did so much to make sure that this project would be a success, and he died a few days before we arrived here. Our chief supporter in the European Union, Val-Jean Couperin, also died. And now Manny . . . They could have killed all of us, of course. Blown up the ship that brought us here, say, or the shuttle that took us up to the ship. But that would have been too obvious. Mass murder. There would have been a massive investigation, and it might have uncovered their identity. And at the moment, the enemies of the alliance between Greater Brazil and the Outer Colonies very much want to work under cover. They are not ready to reveal themselves because it would be a declaration of war. And they do not yet have the means to go to war.'

A deep, purring voice said, 'There will be no war.'

Macy started. It was the fur-robed, fox-faced figure who had spoken. She realised that the person wearing the mask must be subvocalising through a throat patch that disguised his or her voice, but the effect was uncanny nonetheless.

'There will be no war if we can help it,' Ursula said.

A silence stretched, and when it became clear that fox-face was not going to say anything else Ursula took up the thread of her argument again.

'When I was told that Manny had died during revival, I thought at once that it could have been murder. Because if they hoped to damage the project by killing one of us, Manny was the obvious target. He was the ecosystem engineer. He oversaw the design of every detail of the biome's ecosystem. He was responsible for recruiting and training the crew. And it was his will and personality that welded us into a single unit. But I couldn't be sure that he had been murdered until I found out that his slate was missing. Then I knew. I knew that they had killed him, not just because of who he was but because his slate contained something that his killers wished to keep hidden. Not the plans of the ecosystem. There are plenty of copies of those. I have a full set, fully annotated. So does Euclides. And people here in the city also have copies. No, they killed him because, even though he didn't know it, he was close to finding something they wanted to remain hidden.'

'You don't know what it could be,' Macy said. 'This hidden thing.'

'I have several ideas, of course. But no evidence pointing towards one or another.'

'And you don't know who . . .'

'There are plenty of candidates. It could be someone in the Peixoto family who wants to diminish the considerable power of Oscar Finnegan Ramos. It could be a pro-war anti-Outer faction in one of the other Brazilian families, or the families of the Pacific Community or the European Union. Not to mention the numerous factions in the city states of the Outer Colonies that want nothing at all to do with Earth ... At this point, it doesn't matter who did it. It only matters why they did it. And that's where you can help me, Miz Minnot. I won't ask if you are loyal to our family. I know very well that most of the people in our territory aren't. But are you loyal to this crew, to what Manny was trying to build? Do you want it to succeed?'

'That's why I'm here. For the crew. The project.' Macy was having a hard time meeting Ursula Freye's starry gaze. She knew what was coming and she dreaded it and she didn't know how to stop it.

'I have made friends here,' Ursula said. 'You and I want this project and all it stands for to succeed. So do they. I want to help them. And you can help them too.'

'I'm here because I was told that you might be putting the project at risk,' Macy said.

'And you can see that it's quite otherwise.'

'I see no such thing. I'm sorry, but I don't. All I see is someone chasing after something that might not exist-'

'It exists. You will help me prove that it exists.'

'You know something?' Macy said. 'You're just like them. Like Loc Ifrahim and Speller Twain. They want to use me to get at you. You want to use me to get at them.'

'I understand that I am putting you in a delicate position-'

'I don't think you understand it at all,' Macy said, so loudly that the group of Outers at the next table, bulked like seals in their fur coats, turned to look at her. She hardly noticed, transported by a sudden rush of anger.

'People like you, you don't see how it is for people like me. You float above it all. As far as you're concerned, life is effortless. But people like me, we're down in the muck. When things go wrong, we're the ones who suffer. We're the ones who get hurt. You have a whim: we pay for it.'

She felt her pulse beat in her head, felt a giddiness that was nothing to do with the exiguous gravity. She didn't care, at that moment, what Ursula Freye did to her. This was the free zone, wasn't it? Well, she'd spoken freely.

Ursula surprised her. She laughed, a delicate, girlish chime, and said, 'You really don't have any idea, do you? You think that I'm free to do what I want? My whole life has been shaped by service to the family. The same family that protects you, makes sure that you have a job, food, shelter . . . All my life, I've done what I was told; what was best for the family. All my life, until I met Manny, and fell in love. We fell in love. We weren't supposed to, but we did,' Ursula said, looking down at Macy from the remote height of her desolation.

After a moment, the fox-faced person spoke. 'We will get to the bottom of it, Ursula.'

'And that's another thing,' Macy said. 'Why should I consider for even a second helping out someone who won't even show their face?'

'This isn't about you and it isn't about me,' Ursula told her. 'It's about the project. It's about Manny. I know you respected him. I know you know that he was the heart and soul of this project. If there's even a remote chance that he was murdered, don't you think it's worth following through?'

'Believe me, we would prefer not to ask you to do this,' Fox-face said.

'But it is the only way forward. It may be the only way to save the project.'

Macy's first impulse was to get up and walk away. But she was in enemy territory, she didn't know how many people in the bar, the free zone, the whole strange, low-rise city, were involved in this. She had been given privileged information and there was no telling what might happen if she didn't agree to help. So she took a deep breath, and said, 'All right. I guess I'm fucked if I do and fucked if I don't, so tell me what you want and I'll see what I can do. For the sake of the project. Nothing else.'

'It isn't anything,' Ursula said. 'Really it isn't. All I need are copies of the records and logs of everything that has been done since the crew started work on the biome. I can use them to run a dynamic reconstruction and integrate it. Look for emergent patterns, conjunctions - anything that might hint at potential sabotage.'

'I thought you already had all that stuff. I mean, you're the economist. Don't you need it to do your work?'

'I have been locked out of the crew's database by Mr Twain. If I need anything, I have to go through him. He's watching me, Macy. He downloaded a spy into my slate - for my own protection, he said. And he follows me everywhere. Everywhere but here. But you can do it, and besides, it really isn't anything. All you have to do is access the database and make a copy of the work logs and pass them to me. That won't be so hard, will it?'

6.

It was all nonsense, Macy thought as she rode the tram through the night-time city back to the biome. She was angry and anxious and scared, and now that the ordeal was over, anger was winning out. It was all nonsense. All of it. There was no conspiracy. Manny Vargo had died because of some awful but unambiguous medical accident. There were a thousand reasons why his slate could have gone missing, from bureaucratic error to simple theft. And Ursula Freye had taken those two completely unrelated facts, her lover's death and the missing slate, and had forced a connection, and had kept adding other connections, selecting what suited her and rejecting anything contradictory until she'd caged herself in a paranoid fantasy.

And she wants to put me in that cage, Macy thought. She and her fox-faced friend. Speller Twain and that devious little creep Loc Ifrahim. They all want to use me in this joint fantasy of theirs.

She had agreed to make a copy of the work logs because at the time it had seemed to be the only way she'd get out of the free zone in one piece. Ursula Freye's craziness was catching. But now the implications of that promise were sinking through her, and she felt that she'd been caught in a trap. Making a copy didn't present any practical problems; apart from Ursula Freye, everyone on the crew had access to them, and they weren't copy-protected. But if Macy ripped a copy of the logs to a data needle, Speller Twain would most definitely want to know why, so she'd have to go to him first, explain what Ursula wanted, ask his permission to do it . . .

Well, Speller Twain and Loc Ifrahim would no doubt want to talk to her anyway, find out what Ursula had said to her. There was nothing she could do about it until then, and she hoped they'd veto the idea at once, tell her there was absolutely no way they were going to let her feed Ursula's fantasies by giving her a copy of the logs. Because then she could go back to Ursula and explain that she'd been denied access too, and that would be that.

Meanwhile, she still had her own work to do.

After a restless night, Macy got up early and ate a bowl of microwaved porridge and sipped lukewarm coffee (atmospheric pressure in the tent was just six hundred millibars, significantly reducing the boiling point of water) while studying the results of growth experiments using the problematical Skeletonema cultures that Argyll Hall and Loris Sher Yanagita had finished up last night, while she'd been off wasting her time playing silly spy games. The data pointed to a clear and simple conclusion: the lag in growth rates of the Skeletonema diatom could be overcome by adding supplemental phosphate to the melt water. The simplest explanation was that natural levels of the macronutrient were somehow limiting growth of the diatom, although cultures of the other microorganisms were growing well and showed no deficiencies. Or it could be that there was a problem with the Skeletonema culture - it had mutated and acquired a kink in a key metabolic pathway. Still, Macy decided that it wouldn't hurt to investigate if something in the melt water, most likely the suspended clay fines, was binding phosphate and making it unavailable, and she was working up the experimental protocol when Speller Twain glided in, moving smoothly and quickly for such a big man, telling her that he wanted a word.

'Speak your mind,' Macy said, trying to sound as cool as possible.

As usual, the security chief was wearing green coveralls with the sleeves torn off, a black rubber bag hitched high on his broad shoulders. He looked around at the cluttered benches, looked up at the cameras strung amongst the lights hanging from the high ceiling.

'Not here,' he said, and steered Macy to the smallest of the store cubicles and told her to close her eyes tight.

She squeezed them shut and something bright went off, a flash that printed the blood vessels of her eyelids on her retina.