Early the next morning she was woken by a call from Dee Fujita. It seemed that Speller Twain was missing. 'He visited the free zone after the reception ended last night. He went into the club he favours, and didn't come out again. We're interviewing everyone who was there. It will take some time - there's no guarantee that people will tell the truth, and unfortunately we can't compel them. But hopefully someone will volunteer something useful.'

Sri closed her eyes. Thought of ice floes bobbing under a cold clean sky. She said, 'He's going to do something. Something that takes time to prepare. While you waste time interviewing unwilling or ignorant witnesses, he is hiding somewhere in the city, getting ready to make his move.'

'That's one possibility,' Dee Fujita said. 'Another is that Mr Ifrahim made good his threat to take care of the man.'

'Did Mr Ifrahim visit the free zone last night?'

Sri was making a calculation. There would have been just enough time for the diplomat to have followed Speller Twain to the free zone before coming to her suite.

'Not as far as we know,' Dee Fujita said. 'If I wasn't certain that he'd hide behind his diplomatic immunity, I'd request an interview with him.'

'I will deal with him,' Sri said. She wasn't about to confess that she was holding Loc Ifrahim prisoner, and she didn't want the peace officer to chase after him and discover that he had gone missing too.

'And I will finish my round of interviews,' Dee Fujita said. 'If they turn up something useful, I will let you know at once.'

But although surveillance footage showed Speller Twain entering the free zone, none of the patrons of his favourite club remembered any disturbance, and a random canvass of other visitors to the free zone found no one who remembered seeing him either. All the investigation achieved was to make Speller Twain's disappearance public knowledge. A group of concerned citizens of Rainbow Bridge set up an instant referendum on whether or not the opening ceremony should be delayed because of the possibility of disruption by unknown and unspecified enemies of the biome project; within an hour, more than eighty per cent of citizens had responded. Opinion was violently polarised between those who felt that any delay would compromise or betray the principles of friendship and cooperation that the biome represented, and those who blamed the Peixoto family and their crew for all the trouble, and believed that it had been a mistake to have allowed them to participate in the biome's construction. In the end, a scant majority voted against any changes to the timing or nature of the ceremony.

After the results came in, Euclides Peixoto called Sri, demanding that she tell him everything she knew about the disappearance of his security chief, ranting about going into the city himself and tearing the whole bunch of freaks brand-new assholes. His anger was impressive, and didn't appear synthetic.

'You better hope that the big lunk is sleeping off the effects of a private party somewhere. That his disappearance doesn't mean that someone is planning to fuck us up,' he said. 'Because the ceremony is going ahead and I want you to be there, Professor Doctor. You'll be standing right beside me. So if something bad does happen, it's going to happen to you and me both.'

The biome's lake had reached its final level, and the wave machines had been turned on. Chandelier-light sparkled on crests of long slow swells that passed down the length of the lake, moving south to north. They broke in broad ruffles of foam on reefs and rip-rap tables and sent up tall flowers of white spray when they struck the rocky shoreline of the main island, where people had been arriving ever since the station had been opened at midday.

It was seven in the evening now, just an hour before the lake was due to be ceremonially quickened, and still they came, families, groups of friends, couples and singletons, surges of people riding up the escalators under the glass wing of the station and melting into the carnival crowds that thronged the lawns spread either side of the forested ridge. Stands were giving away candied fruit and spun sugar, falafel and vegetable curry, sushi and savoury cakes, lemonade and green tea. There were stilt-walkers and fire-eaters. Acrobats pirouetted and threw shapes on top of poles or ladders; one swung through an intricate routine on a trapeze suspended from a giant tethered balloon. Children bounded everywhere like gazelles. Drumming circles drummed. The string quartet was playing a version of Handel's Water Music as Sri boarded the flat-topped maintenance barge moored at the southern end of the island.

The barge was hung from stem to stern with bunting and a tall transparent barrier had been erected around the edge of its deck to protect those unused to Callisto's low gravity from an accidental dunking. Many of the people who had been at the reception last night were already on board, including members of the Callistan Senate, the mayor, Euclides Peixoto, and the construction crew. As Sri came down the gangplank Euclides Peixoto bustled over to her, moving clumsily and unsteadily, getting in her face and demanding to know if she had any more news.

'Not a thing.'

'I see you are here alone. Where's your son?'

'He's unwell.'

'And your secretary, he's also unwell?'

'Unfortunately.'

Yamil Cho was in the penthouse suite, guarding Loc Ifrahim and watching multiple viewpoints of the biome's tent transmitted by several dozen drones, trying to spot anything suspicious.

'Just remember that we're both in the same boat in more ways than one,' Euclides Peixoto said, with an unforgiving glare.

The barge's motor started up, its crew prepared to cast off, and a woman and a young girl strolled hand in hand up the gangway. The woman was short for an Outer, brown-skinned, white-haired and broad-hipped, wearing a plain grey shift dress; the young girl's solemn face was half hidden by a tumble of glossy black curls. They paused at the end of the gangway, taking in everything around them, and across the crowded barge people broke into applause.

It was Avernus and her daughter, Yuli. The two of them were overtopped by the eager gaggle of young people who'd followed them onto the barge, several of them scientists from the vacuum-organism farm. Sri had yearned for this moment ever since she had first been told about the project, but now, watching the gene wizard move slowly across the deck of the barge at the centre of a crowd of dignitaries, with the barge's motor throbbing underfoot like a monstrous heartbeat, she was seized by a sudden claustrophobic dread. Something bad was going to happen and as in a nightmare she couldn't do anything about it.

Perhaps she had taken a step forward without thinking or noticing, because Euclides Peixoto put a hand on her arm and told her in a harsh whisper to stand fast.

At the same moment a murmur went up from the people around Avernus. They were turning, looking out across the lake, pointing. Sri shook off Euclides Peixoto's grasp and floated to the edge of the transparent barrier. Something was moving towards the barge. A man. At first Sri thought that he was walking on water. Then she saw that his body hung limply in a webbing harness, and three drones anchored to the harness by short cables were dragging him puppetwise, his head lolling, his arms limp at his side, his legs washed to the thighs by the slow, broad waves rolling across the surface of the lake.

Along the shore of the island, people began to clap and cheer, thinking that this was part of the ceremony. But the people on the barge were much nearer, and could see that the man's throat had been cut. Could see as he was dragged closer by the drones that it was Speller Twain.

14.

The recriminations over Speller Twain's death were immediate, vicious, and highly damaging. Euclides Peixoto incontinently blamed the city and demanded a full-scale investigation. The Callistan Senate countered by ordering a complete review of every aspect of the construction crew's work, and an inquiry into the deaths of three of its members. And as soon the Senate's investigations were completed, the crew's presence in the city would be put to a referendum. Supporters and opponents of the link with Greater Brazil were already gearing up for the political contest, throwing accusations and counter-accusations at each other.

Sri had her own idea about who had murdered Speller Twain.

'You told me you had contacts in the city,' she said to Loc Ifrahim, just before she let him walk out of her apartment. 'I should have known that they were working against this project. As were you.'

'I have made many friends in this city, ma'am.'

'Including people like the three citizens of Paris, Dione who left the city just before the ceremony. One of whom was seen several times in conversation with you in a bar in the free zone. They killed Speller Twain, didn't they? They kidnapped him when he visited the free zone, and they killed him.'

'I would not know, ma'am. After all, I was being held prisoner here.'

'Yes, I was stupid enough to give you an alibi while your friends did your dirty work.'

Loc Ifrahim didn't bother to hide his amusement. 'If you have no further use for me, I have much to do at the embassy. The ambassador has to deliver a response to the Senate's request for the facts surrounding the recent events. Perhaps I will see you at the inquiry.'

'I very much doubt it.'

Avernus had already quit Rainbow Bridge and was on her way back to Europa. Sri was determined to follow her. Perhaps she could redeem something from this farrago.

Before they left Callisto, Sri and Alder flew north in a boxy little gig, to Avernus's secret garden. Callisto was too far from Jupiter to be significantly heated by tidal stresses like those that warmed Io, Europa, and Ganymede, and its lithosphere had cooled quickly after formation. So its shell of water-ice had not been modified by upwelling from the mantle or tectonic deformation, showed relatively little relief, and had preserved a record of the early period of heavy bombardment. There were several large impact basins, most notably Valhalla and Asgard, with central bright zones surrounded by numerous concentric rings of ridges separated by bright-floored troughs or furrows. And everywhere else the terrain was like a vast and ancient battlefield, spattered with craters of all kinds and sizes, many exhibiting fluidised ejecta morphologies, including lobed ramparts and pancake or radial fluid ejecta, that had modified or overlain older craters around them.

Avernus's garden was hidden inside a central pit crater some forty kilometres in diameter. The weight of the crater's rim, pressing down on the icy crust, had caused up-bowing of its floor, creating a fractured terrain of ridges and mesas dissected by riverine crevasses. Alder guided the gig to a spot near the centre of this maze and led Sri down a long, shallow pitch of ice gravel between sheer cliffs that pinched a ribbon of black sky high overhead. Although the ice seemed rock-hard it retained a little plasticity; in the deepest parts of the crevasse, pressure of the overlying mass had squeezed out an interlocking series of smooth lobes some twenty or thirty metres high.

Eighty years ago, Avernus had sprayed these bellying contours with mineral-rich dust quickened with the seeds of a carefully selected mix of vacuum organisms. They had grown and spread into a patchwork mosaic that glowed pink and orange and dusky red in the headlamps of Sri and Alder's pressure suits, each patch a different strain, each rimmed with black borderlines where neighbouring strains were attempting to overgrow each other. Some were as smooth as polished ice; others were crusted with scales, or ridged like brain tissue. A few extruded wiry tangles of crystalline ferrous sulphate, red as fresh blood.

It was a random act of weird alien beauty that Sri had to admit was imposing, despite its obvious lack of utility. She felt that she had been afforded a glimpse of the great gene wizard's mind, even though she didn't yet understand what it meant, and took photographs and added to the samples that Alder had snatched when he had been brought here by the gang of young scientists. Then they tramped back up the long slope to the gig, flew back to the city, and took the shuttle up to the Luis Inacio da Silva and departed for Europa.

Avernus had a head start of about twenty-six hours, but the Luis Inacio da Silva, equipped with the powerful new fusion motor, was able to cut a straight course between lobes of Jupiter's radio belts rather than follow the usual looping, fuel-saving, gravity-assisted orbital path. Just six hours after departing from orbit around Callisto, Europa swelled ahead of the swift little ship.

Like Callisto, Europa was a ball of silicate rock wrapped in a shell of water-ice, but tidal stresses caused by the competing pulls of Jupiter and Jupiter's largest moon, Ganymede, heated its interior, and beneath its icy crust was a world ocean some twenty kilometres deep, kept liquid by hydrothermal rifts and vents where water was subducted into the lithosphere. Impacts, internal stresses, and plumes of warm water lofted by especially active and long-lived vents cracked the sheet ice of Europa's surface and liquid water welled up through the cracks and froze in long ridges. The moon's fractured surface was a palimpsest history of floodings and freezings, and its yellow-tinged sheen and delicate craquelure reminded Sri of an ancient ivory billiard ball that she had once seen in a museum of environmental atrocities in Quito, or ancient maps of Mars that showed fanciful networks of canals.

The Luis Inacio da Silva entered orbit around Europa just three hours after Avernus's tug touched down, but there was a long delay before the flight plan of its shuttle was approved by Europa's traffic control. Sri was happy to give Avernus a head start. She didn't want to turn this into an all-out chase. She wanted to find out where the gene wizard was staying and then open a line of communication, an overture to what she hoped would be a series of fruitful discussions. She had obtained the blessing of Oscar Finnegan Ramos for the mission, and he had reached out to an old friend of his in Europa's only large settlement, Minos.

From humble beginnings as a small and remote science base, the city of Minos had expanded downwards, burrowing deep into the ice to escape Jupiter's radio belts, which delivered enough radiation to Europa's surface to kill an unprotected person in just two or three days. The crust where Minos was sited was just thirty kilometres thick, eroded by plumes of warm water lofted by a complex of hydrothermal vents along a ridge fault, and the city had extended shafts that reached down to the bottom of the ice and the buried ocean beyond.

Oscar Finnegan Ramos's friend, Tymon Simonov, was a gene wizard more than a hundred and sixty years old, one of the pioneers who'd taken part in the great exodus from the Moon. It took Sri and Alder more than a day to reach him, travelling in stages down a series of elevator shafts, a vertical journey that on Earth would have taken them to the edge of the discontinuity where the continental plates rafted on molten lava. On Europa, it delivered them to a canyon cut into the underside of the ice and filled with air. Huge biome chambers had been excavated on either side of the canyon, and its walls were hung with tiers of platforms gardened with alpine meadows and dwarf pines and firs, jutting out above a silvery halflife membrane that flexed and undulated with the heavy wash of currents beneath. Despite the elaborate seals along the edges of the membrane, a faint curdled-egg odour of hydrogen sulphide leaked in from the anoxic ocean, and although chains of sunlamps brightened the air and panels of ice were tinted with bright, cheerful colours, it was very cold. The older citizens wore long fake-fur coats and tall fake-fur hats, and many of the younger citizens had been cut to give them thick, lustrous coats of fine hair and insulating layers of fat - seal-people with human faces and human hands and feet, clad only in shorts and many-pocketed vests.

Tymon Simonov lived in a pressurised, triple-skinned can that hung in black water to the west of the canyon, beneath a solid ceiling of ice that stretched away in every direction. His laboratories occupied all five decks, and he and his small retinue of robots seemed to be the only occupants. He told Sri and Alder that he preferred his own company these days, and was contemplating a solo voyage around Europa that would take at least two years to complete. He was hospitable enough, though, a spritely gnome with a pale, waxy face and a fringe of shoulder-length white hair around a bald pate. He wore patched shorts and a toolbelt, nothing else, talking animatedly as he explained that there shouldn't be any problem contacting Avernus once she reached where she was going.

It seemed that she had taken a shielded capsule along the half-completed equatorial railway, riding several thousand kilometres around the circumference of the little moon to the junction with a spur line to the farms at Tyre Macula. There was a very active hot spot under the great plain there. The crust was just a kilometre thick, eroded by an upwelling plume that in a hundred years or so would melt through to the surface and create a temporary sea, a slurry of ice and water boiling furiously in vacuum as it flooded the surrounding terrain before freezing over again. Water from the plume, rich in dissolved minerals, was pumped through huge tanks where bacteria extracted metals, nitrates and phosphates, and yeasts fixed carbon using metabolic pathways copied from indigenous microbes that grew around hydrothermal vents in the crushing blackness at the bottom of the ocean. Although carbon was not in short supply on Europa, most of it was in the form of carbon dioxide dissolved in the ocean. Apart from patches of vacuum organisms grown on the sites of meteoritic impacts, for many years the tanks had been the main source of carbon for construction diamond and fullerenes needed for the expansion of the city and the smaller settlements on Europa. Avernus had designed the bacteria and yeasts used by the tank farms many years ago, and still maintained an apartment there. Sri wondered if she had created any secret gardens. Wondered if she was travelling across the radiation-drenched surface of Europa because she planned to visit them.

Tymon chattered on as he gave Sri and her son what he called the 'ten-cent tour' of his laboratories. Sealed aquaria contained various kinds of autolithotrophic weed cut from species of red algae and native bacteria, tube worms like slimy flowers as long as Sri's arm, sluggish albino crabs that sulked under rocks, and specimens of an eel-like fish, pale blind fingerlings wrapped in ragged filmy cloaks - external gills rich in symbiotic bacteria - that undulated with dreamy slowness around and around a cylindrical tank of armoured glass several centimetres thick and blood-warm to the touch.

The ancient gene wizard explained that he was planning to clone up thousands of specimens of this pseudo-eel and release them into the deepest parts of the ocean. 'They will carry chips that will transmit data to clouds of microscopic receiving stations. And their batteries of modified muscle cells will sustain them for many months while they explore the trenches and vents.'

'It sounds like an amusing little project,' Sri said. 'But wouldn't robots be more efficient? And aren't you worried about contaminating Europa's native ecosystem?'

Europan vent microbes, the only known examples of exo-life forms in the Solar System, were closely related to life on Earth. They contained DNA and RNA which coded for amino acids in triplet base sequences identical to those of terrestrial organisms, and according to the reliable clock of point mutations in tRNAs, evolutionary divergence between Europan and terrestrial organisms had begun three and a half billion years ago, long after life had become established on Earth. So it was likely that Europa had been seeded by a chunk of terrestrial rock that had been kicked into orbit around the sun by a mega-impact and had spiralled outwards before being captured by Jupiter's gravity field and striking Europa's surface, and bacterial spores that had survived the journey deep inside the rock had been released into the moon's internal ocean when an upwelling melted the impact point. On Earth, certain species of bacteria had combined and evolved into multicellular plants, fungi and animals, a major evolutionary step that had been possible only because of efficient energy-generating metabolic pathways that exploited free oxygen released into Earth's atmosphere by photo-synthetic organisms. But in Europa's anoxic ocean, evolution had stalled at the level of colonial microbes, which formed crusts and sheets, lacework baskets and vases, and vast beds of long filaments around the hot, black water rich in minerals and hydrogen sulphide that issued from the vents.

Tymon explained that this rare and delicate ecosystem could not be harmed by his eels because the symbiotic bacteria in their gills had been cut from strains of native bacteria. 'In any case it's too late to worry about contamination,' he said blithely. 'I'll show you why, if you like.'

He led Sri and Alder through a crawl space into a tiny room with a round window of monomolecular diamond. Outside, the water seemed at first to be pitch black, but as Sri peered into the cold dark, shoulder to shoulder with her son, she began to make out hazy, linear constellations at the limit of sight . . .

There was a sharp jolt. The dim constellations pitched sideways, righted themselves. Sri turned and saw that little clusters of pinlights had lit up across the ceiling and a hatch had closed behind Tymon Simonov, who was sitting cross-legged, skating his fingers across a slate in his lap. The little room was a mini-submarine, she realised, a self-propelled pod moving away from the can to which it had been docked.

'We're taking a trip out to the farms,' Tymon said. 'You really should see them since you've troubled to come all this way, and it won't take long.'

The pod's running lights came on, illuminating an ice ceiling that slid past a hundred metres above, undulating in long smooth swales, eroded by the relatively warm upwelling current, decorated by swathes of ferny platelet ice, no end to it, a ceiling wrapped all the way around the world ocean. And below was a yawning plunge of freezing, oxygen-free water, black, salty and acidic: a fish would drown in it as quickly as a human. Sri suppressed a spasm of claustrophobia, told herself that this compact little pod, with its pinlights glittering between strips of padding, its ticking fans and whirring little motors and humming gyros, was quite safe.

Perhaps Alder sensed her queasy moment of alarm, because he squeezed her hand and said, 'I think those lights must be some kind of farm.'

Behind them, Tymon said, 'You have sharp eyes. That's exactly what it is.'

The lines of little lights spread apart as the pod approached, resolved into long rows of lamps suspended from cables bolted to the ice above, each lamp illuminating a cross-braced frame some thirty metres long from which trailed long streamers that rippled to and fro in a sluggish current.

'Weed,' Alder said.

'You've broken the quarantine barrier,' Sri said.

She felt a strong pang of misgiving, wondering why she hadn't known about this. How could it have been kept secret? What else could the Europans be hiding, in their vast basement? What else could all the Outers be hiding, in crevasses and tunnels in their myriad moons large and small, in orbit around the gas giants, on lonely asteroids?

'Quarantine was broken as soon as the first aquanaut came through the shaft,' Tymon said. 'And it doesn't mean as much as we once thought it might, given that the native life is more or less the same as Earth's. Besides, these weeds can only grow if supplied with light. And apart from a temporary glow here and there where lava breaks through at a flow ridge, this is the only place there is any light in the whole ocean.'

The pod sank lower, passing beneath the racks. There were hundreds upon hundreds of them, stretching away as far as Sri could see. Weed dangled from cables attached to the stretchers of the racks, filmy ribbons that in the pod's harsh floodlights glistened violet or purplish red or the reddish-brown of dried blood. Mature specimens were a hundred metres long. The long rows of racks and the dangling weed flexed sinuously in the current like the hide of a gently breathing beast. A haze of molecular sulphur, the waste product of carbon fixation, smoked off them.

Although the upwelling water was rich in nutrients, there was little energy that native life could use this high in the water column. The hydrogen sulphide that issued from the hydrothermal rifts and drove oxidising reactions in the bacterial colonies around them was quickly broken down into unusable sulphates by water chemistry. The rifts were rare and rich oases of life; everywhere else in the vast and lightless deserts of Europa's ocean only thrifty chemolithrophs survived by splitting hydrogen from scanty molecules of metal oxides. But just as green plants on Earth used light energy to drive reactions that transferred hydrogen ions and electrons from water to carbon dioxide, forming the simple sugar glucose with oxygen as a by-product, so Tymon's weeds used light to reduce inorganic compounds containing sulphur and iron. They soaked up carbon dioxide and nutrients from the water and grew at a tremendous rate, each frond extending two or three metres a day. And it was easy to generate the power for the lights by capturing the energy of perpetual currents, or by utilising temperature gradients.

Sleek robots with pairs of articulated arms and rear-mounted fan motors moved here and there, cutting and gathering up long strands of weed, towing the harvest towards a distant processing station. Tymon steered the pod to an outer edge of the vast array, where construction robots were extruding new racks like bees busy in a hive. The farm was almost eleven square kilometres in area, presently contained some eighteen thousand racks, and was growing at the rate of twenty new racks a day.

It was a phase change, Sri thought. Like dropping a seed crystal into a beaker of supersaturated solution. Liquid one moment; a solid lattice the next. She saw in her mind's eye thousands of square kilometres colonised by these self-perpetuating farms, huge rafts hung at different levels in the deep ocean, and communities growing up around them, floating towns of seal people . . .

Tymon talked on, answering Alder's questions about the robots and the weed. The pod circled one of the stations where tanks and bio-reactors set inside a web of scaffolding processed the weed. At the moment, the fixed carbon was used only for construction materials, and most of that was used to make new racks to grow more weed. But Tymon and others were working on various strains of edible weed, and weed that produced medicines, plastics . . . There was no limit, really, to what they could grow here.

By the time the pod turned back to Tymon's laboratory, Sri had worked out how the family could cut itself into this new business. She told the gene wizard that cheap and compact sources of power based on the new fusion technology could provide enough light for farms a thousand times the size of this one. She spun a vision of an ocean as full of floating farms as the night sky was full of stars: each farm would be like a little sun with village communities orbiting it. It might even be possible, she said, to seed the ocean with self-replicating electro-hydrolysis plants that could oxygenate the water from top to bottom, so that a fully aerobic ecosystem could be installed, from bacteria to whales. And it would be easy enough to work out how to cut people so that they could breathe the water.

When she had finished, Tymon laughed and said that Oscar had been right about her. 'You think big.'

'Life is an unbalanced equilibrium. Once it's given the right conditions, it will thrive and spread. And you've given it the right conditions here. Unless you think very hard about the direction you want to take it, it may well take you somewhere you do not want to go.'

'The farm is an experiment,' Tymon said. 'A successful one, if I may say so, but still, no more than that. The city will have to decide what to do next. That's where we differ from Earth. We decide by discussion and majority vote, and then we act on that decision.'

'Without dissent?'

'Why not?'

'Perhaps not for much longer. Your so-called consensus is really a polite fiction, sustained by an environment in which dissent is limited by lack of resources. Give dissenters the opportunity to grab resources of their own, and see how long your consensus lasts. All they need are a handful of robots, construction materials, and a few weed spores. In a year they could parlay that into a farm the size of this one. In a decade they would have a city of their own. Imagine that happening a thousand times. You've taken the first step in colonising your ocean. You can't turn back from it.'

Sri felt exhilarated, fully engaged. Forget the setback at Rainbow Bridge. She could hone her arguments against this old man and put them to Minos's Citizens' Assembly. And she could talk with Avernus, too. Plant a few seeds now, and come back later for the harvest.

'We have enjoyed a hundred years of consensus. I see no reason to change it,' Tymon said.

'Yes, yes. Clever, cooperative, compassionate people living in a true Utopia. I heard enough of that at Rainbow Bridge. But as far as I can see, the old impulses are still there, barely disguised by a few cosmetic cuts and tweaks.'

Tymon laughed again, and said that she was forgetting that environment shaped human nature at least as much as genes.

'I haven't forgotten that at all,' Sri said. 'This ocean is a very different place from the ice caves of Minos, or the tents and domes of Rainbow Bridge. And there must be many more places where people can thrive too, all radically different from each other, calling for radical adaptions. And people will colonise them. The new fusion motor my family has developed will shrink distances, and make many places more accessible. Outers claim that they are evolving away from people on Earth, when in fact they're evolving away from each other at a much faster rate. What will happen to your consensus when the human race splits into a hundred species?'

She would have gone on to use the same kind of threat she had used against the Callistans, that if the Europans didn't colonise their ocean someone else would, other Outers or people from Earth, that the process of adaptation and colonisation must be controlled and directed, but Tymon interrupted her and said that she had a call from her secretary, and ported it from his slate to her spex.

'There's been a development,' Yamil Cho said. 'The citizens of Rainbow Bridge have voted for the immediate deportation of the construction crew. You must return to the ship at once, madam. Its captain has orders to return to Callisto to pick up Euclides Peixoto and his people as soon as possible.'

15.

And so the attempt to forge a closer link between the Peixoto family and the Outer System broke up in disarray. The Luis Inacio da Silva returned to Earth with the construction crew nested in hibernation coffins and packed into the hold, and Sri spent the next three weeks trying her best to avoid Euclides Peixoto in the cramped lifesystem as the little ship fell towards Earth.

Sri, Alder and Yamil Cho rode a shuttle down from orbit to Brasilia. Bone-aching gravity, hot thick air, brawling avenues glimpsed through the tinted glass of the limousine that drove them from the airport to the clinic. Although they had exercised regularly and assiduously in the ship's centrifuge, it took them two weeks to recover from the debilitating effects of microgravity. In all this time, Sri heard nothing from General Arvam Peixoto. At last, she had Yamil Cho deliver to the general's offices a copy of the hours of raw footage she'd shot with her spex. He returned without any message from the general, and the general did not call during the days following. Sri told herself that it didn't mean anything. She had done what she had been asked to do. If Arvam Peixoto's silence meant that he was displeased she couldn't do anything about it, and trying to contact him would only make things worse. It was time to move on.

Alder went south, to Antarctica, and Sri and Yamil Cho travelled north and west, to the coast of Baja California. They took a train from La Paz, crossing the sea-drowned coastal plain of Baja California Sur and turning east, through a mountain pass to the little town of Carrizalito, where they picked up a car and drove thirty kilometres along the sea road. Sri hiked the last kilometre on foot, across a fleet of dunes that stretched between dry brown hills and the sea, to Oscar Finnegan Ramos's hermitage.

It sat in a broad notch at the seaward edge of the dunes, a low hut built from sheets of plastic in the shape of a ship's prow, shaded by a clump of wind-bent Norfolk pines, lashed and guyed with cables. Beyond it was the wide curve of the beach and the Gulf of California twinkling away under the achingly pure blue sky. Oscar waved to Sri as she came down a sandy slope combed with dry grasses, past a paddock where three goats grazed on bundles of cut brush. He was small and stoop-shouldered, wearing only a pair of baggy, faded blue shorts. His skin deep brown, his head hairless. He had tea brewing in a blackened kettle on a driftwood fire, poured it strong and dark into two chipped mugs.

'You walked here,' he said. 'Does that mean you are fully recovered from your trip?'

'Absolutely,' Sri said. And although her legs and back ached, she did feel good, fit and strong and alert. She was slathered with sunblock and wearing a close-fitting micropore jumpsuit and a broad-brimmed hat.

'And Alder?'