Macy said, 'I kind of made a promise to Yuli that I'd look after you.'

'You have discharged that obligation admirably,' Avernus said. 'And I thank you for it. As for my daughter, you can tell her that I need some time to think. Tell her that I realise now that I was either too optimistic or too simplistic in believing that I could have any real influence on the collective behaviour of my fellow Outers, or on those who presently rule most of Earth. Tell her that I need to think long and hard about how and why I failed to promote peace and reconciliation when it was obvious that it was the best hope for the greatest number of people.

'In the Outer System we have long believed in the perfectibility of the human mind, that goodness is worth trying, and that happiness is not only beneficial but constructive. In the past hundred years we have built a plenitude of societies founded on principles of tolerance, mutualism, scientific rationalism, and attempts at true democracy. And on Earth people have united in common cause to heal the great wounds inflicted by the Overturn, climate change, and two centuries of unchecked capitalism. I hoped to see these two worthy and hopeful strands of human history unite and go forward together as equals rather than rivals, sharing unselfishly the best of each other's abilities and achievements. But instead we have war, and I must rethink everything. I must return to the most basic questions about the human condition.

'Perhaps the reductionists are right. Minds selected to solve problems that challenged groups of hunter-gatherers roaming the plains of Africa two hundred thousand years ago cannot cope with the difficulties and stresses of the civilisation they later created. We are doomed by the failure of our phylogeny to keep pace with our inventiveness. Or perhaps there is some deeper flaw, something that is useful for the survival of our genes but inimical to civilisation and individual happiness. Perhaps we go to war because we cannot help being other than what we are, because the behaviour of the mob is closer to our true nature than the aspirations of the individual. Because we fear and mistrust the motives and promises of our neighbours. Because we cannot help coveting what we do not have. Because we are unable to forget old grievances, or are unable to overcome patterns and forces set running in the long ago. Do wicked or foolish leaders like Marisa Bassi lead innocent populations to disaster, or do populations choose leaders whose qualities mirror their desires? Or are all of us, good and bad alike, no more than foam carried on the crest of a wave, helpless to stop or direct it? Perhaps human history is the history of the mob, and the stories of old in which heroes change or save the world are no more than stories. Lies told to children.

'I don't know,' Avernus said. 'I don't know. I am old, and tired, and everything I thought proven beyond doubt has been thrown into confusion. I need to think about all this, and much more.'

By now the old gene wizard had prepped the plane and was clambering into its cockpit.

'If you stay on Titan the Brazilians will come looking for you,' Newt said.

'I have many gardens here,' Avernus said.

'Even if they don't find you, you won't be able to leave. Come with us while you still have the chance.'

'But I don't intend to leave. Not for a long, long time,' Avernus said, and told Macy to open a second line-of-sight channel, and a buffer in her suit's comm package. 'I can't go with you. It's quite clear that it would put you in far too much danger. But I can give you something that you may find useful.'

As gigabytes of information flooded into Macy's comms, Avernus closed the transparent blister of her biplane's canopy and started the motor. The transparent prop at the nose spun into a blur and with a puff of vapour and a sharp crack that flew out across the caldera and echoed back from its far side the catapult shot the biplane into the air. It hooked past the peak that rose above the landing field and headed out past the rim of the caldera, climbing beneath the orange haze that roofed the sky from horizon to horizon, a bright red bead, a dot, gone.

Macy and Newt discussed what to do, quickly agreed that even if they could manage to steal the shuttle, the Brazilians would never stop chasing them.

'But maybe we can steal its secrets,' Newt said.

So Macy clumped over to the shuttle, hauled herself up to the hatch of its lock and cycled through into a low dimly-lit cabin. After studying the pictures she transmitted, Newt told her how to plug into the control system. She downloaded a demon that shook hands with the compliant AI and mirrored data on diagnostic and repair schematics and operational parameters of the shuttle's fusion motor through her comms to the aeroshell, and from there up to Elephant. It took five minutes, and only five minutes more for another demon to strip out the shuttle's navigation and drive control systems; if Sri Hong-Owen got free she would have to hunker down here and wait for rescue.

When she was finished, Macy cycled back outside and took a last lingering look at the strange beauty of the caldera before clambering into the aeroshell beside Newt. He took off while she was still strapping herself into her acceleration couch. There wasn't much time left before the Brazilian dropship arrived. He took the aeroshell up at a sharp angle and lit the main motor and knifed through kilometres of smog into the empty blackness of space. They caught up with Elephant high above Titan's nightside, crept close with a shivering stutter of attitude jets. By the time they had abandoned the aeroshell and pulled themselves inside the familiar cramped space of the tug's lifesystem, the bloodied point of the sun was rising through the hazy outer layer of Titan's atmosphere and a sliver of light was widening into a crescent across its leading edge.

Macy kept watch on the approaching dropship as Newt brought Elephant's fusion motor on line and calculated the parameters of the burn that would take them out of orbit. It would take them more than twenty weeks to reach Uranus because they couldn't risk another slingshot around Saturn, and they didn't know who if anyone would be waiting for them when they arrived, but they didn't care. They would have plenty of time to plan what to do with the rest of their lives, as long as they could escape the forces that had taken control of the Saturn System.

So Macy was running away yet again. It seemed to be the recurring pattern of her life. But this time she wasn't alone, she knew where she was going, and she and Newt had a wealth of plundered technical data that might help the Outers to reverse engineer a better fusion drive. And they had Avernus's little gift, too. Macy was flipping through the headers of the vast database when Newt asked her what she was looking at.

'Life,' she said, and gave him a glimpse of one corner of the vast matrices of genomic data, proteome maps, and intricate multidimensional trophic spaces.

'Think you can use any of it?'

'I'm going to try my best.'

'We're about ready to go. Want to give the countdown?'

'Let's just do it.'

'I hear that,' Newt said, and lit the motor.

Macy was pushed gently against the couch as the low rumble of the fusion motor shivered her bones and Elephant's frame creaked and groaned, adjusting to the stresses of acceleration. The sun rose and passed above them as they drove in a rising curve around the dayside. Night swept in across the hazy orange cloudtops and then Titan was falling away as the little ship raced into the outer dark.

14.

He woke to dim red light and the mingled noise of pumps and fans near and far. The air was hot and stank of ozone and disinfectant. He was weightless, zipped naked and cathetered into a cocoon hung in a small cubicle hard against an angled bulkhead painted black and curtained on three sides with stiffly pleated grey cloth. His mouth was dry and his tongue swollen with thirst. His shoulder throbbed steadily but not unpleasantly under a halflife bandage that clung to it like a leech.

He'd been rescued, then, brought aboard one of the Brazilian ships. The war was over. His mission was over . . .

Fragments of memory came back. A shuffle of bright fractured pictures. The battle along the outskirts of Paris. A ship cartwheeling across a stark plain. Machines fighting machines with swift silent fury. The rolligons chasing him across vacuum-organism fields. He'd found Zi Lei and the people he had been ordered to retrieve. And then a hiatus. Something had happened, he'd been hurt, and someone had rescued him and brought him here.

He was struggling to free himself from the cocoon when a medical technician slipped through the margin of the curtain. He asked for water but the man ignored his request, tightened the straps that held him in place and checked his wound and his pulse and temperature with the brisk and impersonal efficiency of a butcher inspecting a side of meat, then touched the flat end of a short wand to the skin behind the hinge of his jaw. He felt a brief sharp jolt, and passed into sleep almost at once.

When he woke again, a pale-skinned young man was studying him, hung in midair with his back against the grey curtain, steadying himself with fingertips splayed on the angle of the bulkhead. A smooth cap of black hair, black eyebrows plucked to thin dashes above sharp blue eyes, a cool and knowing smile.

He recognised the eyes, the lively intelligence that lived behind them and licked his dry lips and said, 'Twenty-seven.'

'How are you, Dave?' Dave #27 said.

'I'm good, Dave. How are you? I see they gave you some hair.'

'They changed you more than they changed me. How's your shoulder?'

'It isn't anything.'

'It looks like someone shot you.'

'I'll tell you about it if you find me something to drink.'

Dave #27 went out and returned a few minutes later with a pouch of water. He sucked it dry while Dave #27 explained that he was aboard the Glory of Gaia, brought there by marines who had found him locked in a research station fifteen kilometres northeast of Paris, Dione.

'You'd been given a dose of tranquilliser and you had a bad reaction. Someone gave you a knock on the head, too. You don't remember anything?'

He said that he definitely remembered being shot, and gave a short account of how he had escaped from the city and tracked Avernus, the traitor Macy Minnot and the captured diplomat Loc Ifrahim to the research facility. He didn't mention that he'd found them because of the transmitter he had forced Zi Lei to swallow.

'I found diem,' he said. 'But there were other prisoners there. Too many of them. I suppose I was overpowered.'

'You were wounded. You were lucky to escape with your life.'

He had a dim and unclear memory of a conversation held over him and said, 'I failed.'

'Nonsense,' Dave #27 said cheerfully. 'The war is over. Paris has been captured. Most of the cities that didn't immediately surrender when war was declared have been captured too. You were part of that. Your work and the work of our brothers weakened the infrastructure of those cities and demoralised their populations. Of course you didn't fail!'

He hadn't been thinking about his mission, or the war. 'Were you part of it too?' he said.

'I'm as yet untested, but that will soon change.' Dave #27 talked eagerly of the need to infiltrate the cities of the Outer System and search for leaders of the resistance who had not yet been captured. He explained that many Outer ships had fled the moons of Jupiter and Saturn for Uranus. Although there were as yet no plans to extend the campaign, spies would be needed there too. 'They'll need us more than ever. You'll see.'

'So the war isn't over for us.'

'It's what we were made for. Why else do you think they are patching you up? These are great times,' Dave #27 said. 'And we will do great things.'

'It wasn't like I thought it would be,' he said. 'It wasn't like our training.'

'Of course it wasn't. We'll talk more when you have rested. I want to hear everything!'

'Would you loosen my straps before you go? They're a little tight.'

After his brother had left, he rested for a short while, examining his fragmented memories of what had happened after he had broken into the research facility. He recalled every word of his brief argument with Zi Lei, his anger and his guilt, the cold stab in his heart when she had refused to come with him, when she had turned away . . . But he remembered little of what had happened after that. At one point he had been lying somewhere, so weak that he couldn't even open his eyes, listening to the dim voices of people arguing about him.

Someone had wanted to kill him, but a woman, perhaps it was Zi Lei, perhaps not, had said that they weren't like those who considered themselves their enemies. 'We'll lock him up here,' she'd said, and perhaps he imagined that a little later Zi Lei had bent close and whispered that she knew that he was a good man who had become confused about right and wrong.

For a timeless time he hung in his cocoon and studied the ghostly reflection of his face in the glossy black paint of the bulkhead, as in another life he had once studied his reflection in the chest-plate of a disassembled pressure suit. The face he saw now was not the face he had been born with, but it was no longer a mask either. The mask had eaten the skin beneath. He had been number eight. Dave #8. Now he was Ken Shintaro. Twenty-two years old, born in Rainbow Bridge, Callisto, currently on a wanderjahr that had just brought him to the Saturn System . . . And there had been a war, but the war was over.

He wriggled his right arm free of the straps, delicately pulled out the catheter, and unzipped the cocoon and pushed out of it. He peeked around the edge of the stiff curtain and checked the narrow companionway and the curtained cubicles on either side of it, then kicked off and shot neatly and accurately down its length. In less than a minute, he was inside an airlock, pulling on a suit-liner and fastening himself into a pressure suit. It wasn't a good fit, but it would do. He hooked the helmet to his belt and went out and found the nearest cluster of dropcapsules. He disabled the alarm of one, climbed into it, and started the evacuation sequence. It was little more than a coffin with a one-shot chemical motor, but it would take him where he needed to go.

A jolt of compressed air shot the dropcapsule out of its tube. He waited until he was clear of the Glory of Gala's dark bulk, then used the capsule's attitude jets to spin it through ninety degrees. Flying backward above Dione, packed inside the padded space in his pressure suit, plugged into the capsule's simple mind. HUD controls hung lines of code on the faceplate of his helmet. An inset showed the moonscape unravelling below, a wilderness of ridges and rounded hills and branching troughs like dry rivers and bright plains spattered with craters of every size, each crater with a narrow parenthesis of shadow caught in its westward side.

Green sparks in the pale floors of craters, on the rolling land between.

Zi Lei must be down there somewhere, one of ten thousand refugees scattered amongst habitats and oases and shelters. Many of them no doubt still loyal to Marisa Bassi and the resistance, hard and desperate fighters who might well recognise him for what he was. If he survived the landing. If he was not hunted down by marines or by his own brothers. He faced every kind of danger and knew that he had little chance of finding Zi Lei and that even if he found her she might spurn him, but he didn't care.

All that mattered was that the war was over.

He ignited the capsule's engine and in a bright streak of flame fell out of the sky towards the moon. Nothing would ever be the same again.

end.