Chapter Eleven

EARTH. ONCE MORE.

The brilliant white-and-blue world continued to fascinate Lawrence as much now as it had during his first arrival five years ago. As always during the transfer flight down from Centralis to low orbit, he spent as much time as possible staring at the real-time images provided by the interorbit ship’s visual sensors. As they curved in over the Americas he watched wide swirls of cloud twisting with soft grace out across the western Atlantic, congealing into a single storm spiral, pure white around the ragged edges, but darkening swiftly toward the dense high center as if night were erupting out of its heart. Within days the Caribbean islands would be cowering from winds and waves and stinging rain, unbound elements stripping the leaves from every tree and washing the land into new shapes. Once again their population would hunker down and wait for the howling winds to pass. And then afterward they’d carry on anew, treating the event like an unwelcome holiday. The palms would sprout new fronds, and people would sport and swim on the clean white sands. He smiled down at them from his angel’s perch. Only on a world so teeming with life could such acclimatization occur, he thought. A world where life belonged, where symbiosis between nature and environment was the governing evolutionary factor. Unlike Amethi.

He still held a nest of feelings for his old homeworld. They weren’t as strong now as they had been when he first arrived, and most of them remained antagonistic. But every now and then, he could recall times and places from that world when he’d actually been happy, or enjoyed himself. None of those times were with Roselyn. He still shielded himself from those recollections. There was too much pain involved, just as sharp and bright now as the day he left.

His hand went to the pendant under his shirt. He’d almost flung it away the day he left Amethi. Then he decided to keep it so he would never forget all of the treachery at loose in the universe. Nowadays it was a kind of talisman, proof he’d survived the very worst life could throw at him.

The Xianti 5005 carrying them down landed at Cairns spaceport in the middle of another of Queensland’s baking-hot afternoons. There was no one waiting to meet Lawrence. He walked past his platoonmates as various families rushed forward in the arrivals hall. Wives and long-term girlfriends flung themselves at their menfolk, clinging tightly and trying not to cry. Until the starship arrived back from Quation two days ago, none of them had heard how the asset-realization campaign had gone; who was alive, who was injured, who wasn’t coming back. Relief and fear echoed through the big air-conditioned hall. Children milled around the embracing couples, smiling and happy that Daddy was home again.

There had been a local girl called Sandy whom Lawrence could reasonably claim to be a regular girlfriend in the time between Floyd and Quation. Sandy had promised to wait for him, but that was just over nine months ago now. She was twenty-one; he never seriously expected her to hang around.

So he walked out of the terminal building into the clean sea air, taking a long minute to look around at the scrub-covered hills behind the space-port, looming dark as the sun sank behind them. The humid breeze blowing in from the ocean. Gulls squawking. Another spaceplane splitting the air overhead like slow thunder. He smiled around at all of it, welcoming the scene as he might an old friend. He would always associate the sea and its smell with Earth.

The taxi rank was at the south end of the terminal. Lawrence walked down to it and slung the only luggage he had, his shoulder bag, into the backseat of the elongated white bubble. It had a human driver rather than an AS, an old Chinese man who wanted to talk about how Manchester United was playing this season. He thought Lawrence’s accent was British.

“Never been there,” Lawrence had to admit.

“But you know about Man-U?” the driver asked anxiously.

“I’ve heard of them.”

“Of course you have. Most famous team on the planet. I access every game. I installed a horizontal hologram pane in our apartment so I can watch the whole pitch. My wife doesn’t like it.”

“No kidding?”

“Yeah, she wanted a new sofa. I access through membranes as well. The last three seasons I’ve paid the team’s media agent for multi-player-viewpoint feed. It costs, but it’s worth it. This way I can see what’s happening on the ground as well as get an overview. I like to stay with Paul Ambrose as my viewpoint when the first eleven play, he’s got good ball sense.”

“Sounds great.”

“First eleven only play once every four days. I have to make do with second eleven and third eleven in between.”

“Uh-huh.”

“Afternoons, I access the under-twenty-one side. Sometimes I have to record them when I’m working. My friends in the other cabs, they have fun trying to tell me who wins. I turn my datapool access off and they drive up next to me and shout the result. I always have to shut my ears those afternoons. One day, when I save up enough, I’m going to Europe to watch them play live. My wife, she doesn’t know that.”

“Really.” They had cleared the spaceport to merge with the short highway into town. To his left, Lawrence could see the thin strip of protected mango swamps running along the coastline. On his right, suburban apartments had colonized the land almost up to the foothills.

“You just down from Quation?”

“Yep.”

“Your wife not meet you?”

“Not married.”

“Wise man. You enjoy yourself while you still can, my friend. When I go to Europe, I won’t take my wife. So you got anywhere to stay tonight?”

Lawrence could have returned straight to barracks; it wouldn’t have cost him anything. But the whole fleet was on four-week leave, and the bonus pay for the campaign was sitting in his bank as well as the whole nine months’ back pay. He’d made no plans at all. Some of the other single guys on the starship were talking about sailing between Pacific islands and raising hell on every beach resort they landed on. Colin Schmidt had invited him on a tour of the casinos in Hong Kong and Singapore. Others promised Perth still rejoiced in its claim to be party capital of the Southern Hemisphere, an easy train ride away. “No,” he said. “I don’t have anywhere to stay.” He pressed the window key and let the glass slide halfway down; wind and highway noise rushed in. Up ahead the glare of lights from the Strip was already flickering through the town’s outlying buildings. Lawrence laughed at the sight of the gaudy neon and holograms beckoning him back greedily. He’d never been so perfectly content. No cares, no obligations, plenty of money and lots of time to spend it in. Life didn’t get much better.

“I know some places,” the taxi driver said, giving him a hopeful sideways glance.

“I’m sure you do. Okay, what I want is a decent hotel, maybe one with a pool. Not too expensive, but somewhere with a wideband datapool feed and twenty-four-hour room service. And where they don’t mind me bringing a guest home for the night. Got that?”

“Ah!” The taxi driver nodded happily. “I know just the place.”

The hotel was just on the seedy side of its two-star rating. But it did have a pool, and Lawrence’s second-floor room had a tiny balcony that looked over the gray geometrical sprawl of southern Cairns. He checked in and wandered down the nearest shopping street, a broad glassed-over concourse whose bargain customers had successfully repelled the bigger chain stores from investing. He bought some clothes in the small shops. Nothing too sharp, just something that he could wear out on the Strip, and that didn’t have a Z-B logo.

He scored with a girl early on that night. A great roundabout walker in her late teens, out on the road with her friends, backpacking their way around the coast of Australia. She was pretty, and slim, with olive skin and her dark hair arranged in tight braids that had colored phosgene beads dangling on the end. When she moved her head quickly, they twirled round like a rainbow halo. He sweet-talked her away from her friends before they all hurried back to the hostel and their prebooked cots. She was fascinated that he’d actually been born on another world, appreciative of the classy foreign bottled beer his money bought, and showed a keen interest in the fact he’d spent months away from Earth.

“Deprived, huh?”

“I guess you could say that,” he admitted. “The natives weren’t very friendly.”

Back in the secluded shadows in his room she screwed like an energetic kangaroo, pounding away up and down on top of him. For the first hour he was sure the dilapidated old bed was going to give way under them. He poured more of that expensive beer over her chest and licked it off before she pushed his head down between her legs. They accessed a thrash-rock feed and tried to fuck in time to the thumping music, eventually collapsing in howls of laughter as the codpiece-endowed vocalist screeched out lyrics about giving his baby some hardassed lovin’. Room service delivered club sandwiches with more drink, and they sat cross-legged on the sagging mattress feeding each other. Then they watched a non-i comedy show before fucking again.

She left first thing in the morning to join up with her friends. They were heading farther north, hoping to get some casual work in Port Douglas to pay for the next leg of their great middle-class adventure. By midday Lawrence had to think hard to remember her name.

That next night, it was another girl. She liked highballs instead of beer, and electric jazz rather than rock, but she was just as randy.

The whole of his first week passed the same way. Sleep during the day. Have a decent meal in midafternoon. Take a walk before the evening started. Hit the Strip after the sun went down. Some days he ran into other squaddies from the fleet, and they’d have a few rounds together, maybe shoot some pool or spend an hour in one of the game arcades. He never got drunk; there was no percentage in that, given his endplay. Once or twice he went out on a club’s dance floor. Each time it was because the girl was keen to dance first.

Seven days after he landed, his bracelet pearl received a message from fleet administration ordering him to report to the base. His application for starship officer college had been processed. He was going to be forwarded to Amsterdam for entry assessment.

He sat up in bed, holding his glasses up in front of his face, reading the message again with a slow-growing sense of delight. His life was finally coming together the way he wanted. His father, Roselyn, Amethi, that was paying his dues. He’d earned his place on Z-B’s starships.

The girl lying in the bed beside him lifted her head and peered around the hotel room in classic morning-after confusion. She blinked at Lawrence. Her expression changed to one of recognition. “Hi,” she grunted.

“Morning.”

“Good news?” She nodded at the glasses he was holding.

Lawrence considered the question. The obvious thing to do would be blurt out the assignment, tell her about what it meant to him. It was the kind of thing that should be shared, leading on to a happy day spent together, perhaps a good meal with a bottle of champagne. But, truthfully, the only person he could tell who’d appreciate what it meant was Ntoko. And he was pretty sure the corp wouldn’t want his own family vacation interrupted by a babbling Lawrence Newton bragging how he was leaving the platoon behind.

That was when he admitted to himself just how lonely he’d become. There really was nobody to call. Nobody on this whole planet who knew him, nobody who cared about him.

He dropped the interface glasses back on the bedside table, then pulled the sheet back off the two of them. A few blades of morning sunlight had crept round the curtains, falling on the bed to illuminate their bodies. The girl gave him an uncertain little smile as he gazed at her. For all of their intimacy during the night, he felt nothing, no connection, no urge to try and make it work. The only reason she was here was for sex. He didn’t even feel guilty about that. She’d been eager enough.

To think, after one night with Roselyn he’d been ready to spend the rest of his life with her. God, how stupid had he been back then? Talk about being straight off the farm. He could teach her a thing or two now.

As always, that treacherous little thought sprang up: I wonder what she’s doing now.

“Nothing important,” he said brusquely, angry with himself for the weakness. Then he rolled closer and put his mouth over the girl’s ear, and in a throaty demanding whisper told her what he wanted from her. With a slight show of reluctance she positioned herself over the edge of the bed the way he instructed, so he could celebrate with her the only way it was ever going to happen between the two of them.

Lawrence took one of Z-B’s twice-daily flights from Cairns to Paris, a big subsonic passenger jet that refueled at Singapore. From Paris he transferred to a train that whisked him across the heavily forested European countryside to Amsterdam. He arrived at the old Central Station that backed on to the harbor in the middle of the city.

Cairns with its eternal heat had made him forget it was only spring in the Northern Hemisphere. He pulled his full-length coat on as he walked out of the station, but didn’t bother to do it up. The sun was shining out of a clear sky, warming the air.

Outside, Prins Hendrik Kade seemed to be a twenty-lane road given over entirely to bicycles. He’d never seen so many of the machines in one place before. They were all the same silk-white color, with the city emblem embossed on the central spar. Bells rang all around him, making him twist his head about in alarm. Twice he had to jump sharply out of the way as cyclists sped toward him. They obviously weren’t going to swerve.

Optronic membranes threw up a city map, and he set off down Dam Rak, the long broad road opposite the station. Trams trundled along rails embedded in the cobbles. He’d never seen machines that looked so ancient, although they were in perfect condition. It was good to be walking through a city and for once not have to be on guard. Quation had not given Z-B a joyful reception. But here, the citizens smiled warmly when they saw his mauve uniform.

He wasn’t surprised. According to the briefing he’d downloaded from the company memory, Z-B was a heavy investor in Holland. And where their primary installations were based sprang up a host of smaller companies to provide support, both specialist and general. The country had a high prosperity index, even by European standards.

His first hint of disenchantment came right outside the officer college. Z-B’s Amsterdam headquarters, containing the college, was a big five-story stone building that was eighty years old, though its exterior had been crafted in nineteenth-century bleak, with tall vertical slit windows. Squatting across a broad cobbled square from the fortresslike Royal Palace its architecture was more than appropriate.

A small group of demonstrators were clustered around some kind of stall twenty meters from the main entrance. Potatoes were baking in what had to be the most primitive oven on the planet, a cylinder made out of solid iron. Charcoal glowed behind a grate on the front end, while a black chimney stack at the rear made the whole thing look like the boiler from some kind of steam engine. The sign above the stall was offering the potatoes with a dozen different fillings. Very cheaply, too, Lawrence noticed. There was an emerald-green circle at one end of the sign, with a stylized white bird emblem in the middle, its wings swept wide.

None of the pedestrians filling the square seemed interested in buying the potatoes. The demonstrators, mostly young people, were singing in none-too-tight harmony, which was presumably putting off the prospective customers. Lawrence didn’t know the song; it seemed to be some kind of folk chant, with the ragged voices rising defiantly for the chorus:

Give us back to ourselves

Take back your money

Give us back to ourselves

Turn back your starships

Give us back to ourselves

Several of them were carrying hologram panes on long poles, blazing with anti–Z-B slogans. A couple of bored police officers were standing fifteen meters away, watching over them. They catcalled and jeered anyone walking up and down the broad stone stairs to the entrance of the big headquarters building. Z-B personnel scurrying in and out studiously ignored them.

When Lawrence started up the stairs they directed several insults at him. He smiled and waved cheerfully, knowing how much that always annoyed their type. His gaze found a girl in the middle of the group, more attractive than any of her cause sisters, with compact dainty features amplifying her intent expression. She was wrapped up in an old-fashioned navy-blue duffel coat with wooden toggles, its hood down to show off raven hair that had been frizzled into a thick mass of short curls. Their eyes met, and he broadened his grin to a male-ape invitation. He laughed heartily at the angry scowl she fired back at him.

Minority-cause fascists, no sense of humor.

Three receptionists sat behind a curving teak desk in the vast, empty lobby. One of them gave him directions to the officer college, in an annex of its own at the rear of the main building. “What are they here for?” he asked, pointing out through the tall glass doors at the protesters.

“Regressors,” she said. “They want for us to go away and stop influencing ‘their’ lives with ‘our’ policies.”

“Why?”

The receptionist gave him a pitying look. “We’re not democratic.”

“But anyone can buy a stake in Z-B.”

“Tell them.”

The officer college was a modern glass cube connected to the headquarters building by a couple of bridges on the third and sixth floors. Lawrence walked across the lower one, trying to damp down his trepidation. If all went well he’d be spending the next three years here learning everything from life support engineering to astrogration. Although quite why the flattest country in the world had been chosen as the training ground for starships was a question that his downloaded briefing had never covered. Someone somewhere in the company must have had a strong sense of irony.

He reported in to the corporal in the foyer, saluting sharply. The man gave a disinterested wave back and entered Lawrence into the administration AS.

“Turn up at oh-seven-fifteen hours tomorrow,” the corporal said. “You will receive your introduction to the assessment week. This is your accommodation warrant.” He handed over a small card. “You’re staying at the Holiday Inn. This entitles you to a single bedroom, along with breakfast and dinner. Don’t try ordering room service or beer with it. You have your lunch here in the mess. You’re in group epsilon three. Don’t be late.” The corporal returned to the pane displays on his desk.

“Thanks. Uh, how many others in the group?”

“Thirty.”

“And how many places are we competing for?”

The corporal gave him a tired look. “We process one group per week. And the annual intake is one hundred officer cadets. Work the odds out for yourself.”

Lawrence made his way back through the main building. On average they’d take two from each group. A one-in-fifteen chance. No, he corrected himself. Nothing here is down to chance. I’m going to make it.

When he walked into the Holiday Inn half of the people in the lobby were from Z-B, and several of them were obviously in town for their officer assessment. He could spot them from a long way off. In their early twenties, fit, serious expressions, well-cut clothes, trying to hide fluttering nerves. He guessed they could spot him just as easily.

That afternoon he went down to the basement pool and swam a mile. As always, his fitness had suffered on the starship back from Quation, and the last week hadn’t exactly been dedicated to healthy living. He climbed out, reasonably pleased with his time. The exercise gave him that extra degree of confidence for tomorrow: thanks to their own training, Z-B had kept him in top shape for the last five years.

Lawrence couldn’t stand the idea of having his supper in the hotel restaurant. The place would be full of all the other candidates, forcing themselves to be polite to each other. So he set off on a short walk through the old city as dusk fell. Amsterdam’s heart had been beautifully preserved, with marvelous old houses lining the canals, each with its own hoist on the top. The antique mechanisms still worked, hauling furniture up so it could be brought in through the windows. Houseboats were tied up on the still black water between the arched stone bridges, ranging from tiny cruisers to barges with double decks and roof gardens. Berths had become so valuable that the city hadn’t issued a new houseboat license for over two centuries; his briefing had mentioned that some had stayed in the same families for over eight generations now.

The bar he eventually found on Rembrandtplein served a decent menu of hot food, and beer that claimed to replicate the recipe of an original Dutch lager. It wasn’t the classiest place in town, but it had a lively atmosphere, and a hologram pane was showing a sport feed. He sat at a table near the back and ran through the menu. It took him a moment to work out that the last ten items on the sheet were narcotics, three of which were quite hard. There was an option to have some of the lighter ones as garnish on your food.

His waiter took the order and delivered some of the supposed original-tasting lager. Lawrence settled back and took a look around. The big pane on the far wall was showing Manchester United versus Monaco. He chuckled and took another sip of his lager.

The girl from the protest group was sitting up at the bar, giving him a cool stare. He did a double take, then smiled and raised his glass in salute. She looked away hurriedly.

Too bad, he thought. She was with a couple of other girls, no male companion in sight. Her duffel coat was slung over the back of her stool. She was wearing a thin scarlet rollneck sweater, with an impractically long scarf wound loosely round her neck, and baggy olive-green trousers held up with a broad rainbow bead belt. With those clothes, and an age he estimated at three or four years younger than himself, she had to be a student. Philosophy, no doubt, he decided, that or sociology. Something utterly useless for the real world.

His food arrived. Pasta with a three-cheese sauce and smoked ham. A side order of garlic dough balls. Sprinkling of ground pepper. Hold the hashish.

He wound the first strands around his fork.

“Killed anyone today?”

He glanced up. The girl was standing by his table.

Just like Roselyn, appearing out of nowhere to talk to me.

Somehow, he thought the motive would be different.

“Not today, nor any day,” he answered, politely casual. Her nose was too broad to make her a classic beauty, but she had what people called a fierce intelligence lighting her eyes, analyzing and judging everything she saw. It made her very appealing: that and the raw hostility. Getting her into bed would be quite a challenge.

“You’re one of the cybersoldiers,” she said. “I can see the blood valves on your neck.”

She had an accent he couldn’t quite place. “And you’re a welfare princess. I saw you standing in the Dam square while everyone else was working for a living.”

Her cheeks darkened in anger. “I devote my time to achieving something worthwhile: your downfall.”

“Had any success?” Lawrence had heard of opposites attracting, but this was ridiculous. He was sure she was about to throw her drink over him. Except her glass was back on the bar. She couldn’t be carrying a weapon. Could she?

“We will,” she said.

“So who do you plan to control our factories and revitalization projects once you’ve driven us out of your country? Yourself and your friends, perhaps?”

“We’ll close down your factories. We don’t want that kind of society.”

“Ah, green anarchy. Interesting ideology. Good luck convincing everyone to adopt it.”

“I’m wasting my time. You’re not allowed to think: you just recite company dogma. Next you’ll tell me to buy a stake if I want to change the way things are.”

Lawrence closed his mouth before he said, Well, yes, actually.

“Are your career and your stake worth so much that you have to build them up on the destruction of others?”

She looked so damn earnest when she asked him. It was the worst kind of student politics: we can change the whole world if we can just open a dialogue. Try opening a dialogue to a mob flinging Molotovs at you. “I’ve never destroyed anyone,” he said lightly.

“You’ve taken part in the campaigns to pillage other worlds. If that’s not destruction, I don’t know what is.”

“Nothing is destroyed. And our campaigns help fund the greatest human endeavor there is.”

“What’s that?”

“Establishing colonies on new worlds.”

“My God, you’re worse than a cybersoldier, you’re an ecocide advocate.”

“It’s even worse than that, actually. I’m here in Amsterdam to join the starship officer college. I’m going to find lots of new planets we can ecocide.”

Her head was shaken in soft disbelief. “Why?” she asked, genuinely puzzled. “Why would anyone do such a thing? That’s what I never understand about your kind. Why do you always think that you can only achieve anything by violating what’s right and natural? If you have this urge, why can’t you channel it into something creative?”

“Exploring the universe is the most creative endeavor there could possibly be. It’s the culmination of a thousand years of civilization.”

“Starflight is the most appalling waste of resources and money. Z-B is practicing interstellar imperialism with its expansion program. There’s no worthwhile outcome. We have a planet here that desperately needs our help in just about every domain you can mention, and we can’t provide that help because you’re bleeding us to death.”

“Z-B provides almost as much funding for ecological and urban revitalization projects as it does for starflight.”

“But they’re your revitalization projects. Revitalizing in your image, spreading the dead corporate uniculture into weaker societies.”

“Look, I can see where you’re coming from. You want money devoted to issues you think are important. That’s perfectly natural politics, convincing governments or corporations to pay for your own pet projects, or convincing enough people to win you the popular vote. Fine. Keep on campaigning and raising people’s awareness. But you will never, ever, get my vote, because I will always vote for more starships. And the only practical way I get those is through a stake in Z-B. Sorry, I’m not going to be converted. I’m already doing the one thing I believe in the most.”

“It’s wrong, and in your heart you know that.”

“I do not know that. I’m afraid all your arguments fall down with me, for the simple reason that you can’t look above your own horizon. You have no sense of wonder, no drive. You’ve limited yourself to seeing only the smallest pixel in the picture. You practice the worst sort of parochialism.”

“I see this whole world and how it’s hurting.”

“Exactly. This world and no other. Without starflight I would never have been born. I’m not from this planet.” He smiled at her frown of confusion. “I’m from Amethi. And we don’t practice ecocide there. We’re regenerating an entire living biosphere. Something I happen to think is worthwhile in the extreme.”

“You weren’t born on Earth?” she asked.

“That’s right.”

“Yet you came here to join Z-B so you could fly starships further into the galaxy?”

“Yep.”

Her short laugh was of pure incredulity. “You’re crazy.”

“Guess so.” Lawrence grinned back. “So are you going to wish me luck for my assessment tomorrow?”

“No. That I can never do.” Her expression was sorrowful as she turned away.

“Hey,” he called. “You didn’t tell me your name.”

For a moment he thought she was going to ignore him. Then she glanced back over her shoulder, hand running through her buoyant hair as she made the decision. “Joona,” she said at last. “Joona Beaumont.”

“Joona. That’s good. I like that. I’m Lawrence Newton. And I wish you a happy life, Joona.”

Finally, just before she reclaimed her barstool, she allowed him to see a slight smile tweak her lips.

Breakfast was as depressing as Lawrence expected it to be. The Holiday Inn restaurant was full of his fellow candidates, all being hearty and cheerful. He joined in, putting on that same mannerly facade the way he’d learned back home when his father had other Board members at the house and he had to be a proper little Newton. It was surprising how easily the deceit came.

The other hopefuls were mostly from upper-management families with big stakes in Z-B, fresh out of college, or with a few years spent in one of the company’s various spaceflight divisions. Dressed in his strategic security uniform, and with his starflight experience, Lawrence soon became their focal point. They kept him busy answering questions throughout the meal. He was still telling them about Floyd and the aliens when they walked en masse over to the headquarters building. Lawrence looked around the square, but there was no sign of any protesters. Not that he’d expected them there quite so early in the morning.

Group epsilon three’s morning started with the introduction, a half-hour talk from a captain about what Z-B looked for in its starship officers. The usual bull about devotion to duty, comradeship, professionalism. Lawrence got a different version from a strategic security officer every time the platoon was put through a new training course. The captain ended with: “We expect you to give us better than your best.”

Day one was devoted to testing their reflexes. The college’s i-environment was the most sophisticated Lawrence had ever experienced. They were given full stim-suits to wear, a tight-fitting one-piece made from a fabric of piezoelectric fibers; then led into a big anacoustic room with three rows of gyroseats. Once they were strapped in, the AS started off with simple coordination tasks. It was easy to begin with, three-dimensional grid alignments, like being inside a hologram pane graph, lining up the glowing green-and-scarlet symbols. They soon progressed to steering fast cars through a maze, and different wheel limitations and engine fluctuations were gradually introduced. Crashes became progressively more violent. After lunch they were given full aircraft simulations, taking up single-seat jet trainers. That was when the AS began to put them under stress, giving them engine flameouts, failed flaps, spins that were so fast they threatened to make Lawrence vomit. Equipment malfunctions at critical moments. Cockpit fires, with real smoke blowing in through the suit helmet vents and heat searing their hands and legs.

When it was finally over, Lawrence had to grip the gyroseat’s support pillar while his legs regained their strength and stopped shaking. There was a noticeable lack of jovial esprit de corps in the locker room afterward as they all showered and changed.

It was raining when they came out of the headquarters building, a thin, cold drizzle whipped up by the erratic gusts blowing out of the streets surrounding the square. Joona Beaumont was standing outside, her duffel coat hood up against the weather, stamping her feet on the cobbles. There were only three other protesters with her, and the potato stall was absent. They propped up their panes, but couldn’t summon up the enthusiasm to shout anything.

Lawrence gave her a quick nod, but she didn’t respond. He wasn’t even sure she saw him.

An hour later it had stopped raining, and he made his way back to the bar on Rembrandtplein. He didn’t bother with a table this time, just sat up at the bar and ordered a mixed mango and apple juice.

Joona arrived a few minutes later. She saw him immediately, and Lawrence offered the empty stool beside him. There was a moment’s hesitation; then she came over, shaking the water from her coat.

“You look frozen,” he said. “Can I get you something hot?”

She signaled to the barman. “Tea, please. Put a gram in.”

“It’s bad for you, you know,” Lawrence said.

“What, it glitches your circuits? I don’t suppose you’d like to lose control, would you?”

“Nothing to do with it. It’s a poison, that’s all.”

“All medicines are to some degree. That’s how they kill germs. It’s perfectly natural.”

“Right. So how did your day go?”

“We made our point.”

“Did anybody listen?”

“Being there is our point.”

“Then I guess you made it well.”

Her tea was delivered. She gave the barman a smile of gratitude.

“You going to ask how my day went?” Lawrence inquired.

“No.”

“Okay.” Lawrence dropped a ten-EZ-dollar bill on the counter, stood up and walked out. And just how cool is that?

He sort of blew it at the door, when he looked back to see how she’d reacted. She hadn’t. She was sitting with her elbows resting on the bar, holding the cup of tea to her mouth with both hands.

He shrugged and stomped off into the night.

Day two was all about puzzles. The AS controlling the i-environment put him on a small tropical island four hundred meters long and barely seventy wide. A few palm trees and spindly bushes grew along the central strip, but it was otherwise desolate. He was in charge of a five-strong party that had been diving along the offshore reef. One of them was badly injured to the extent he couldn’t be moved and needed medical care urgently for decompression sickness and unspecified internal organ damage. There were three islands nearby, one with a resort complex, the second with an abandoned plankton harvest factory, and the third also deserted, but with another diving party visiting it. The resort was farthest away, the plankton plant was known to have an advanced first-aid store with a quasi-AS diagnostic. He only had one boat, which couldn’t make it to the resort before the injured man died. There were no communications systems.

Lawrence took a quick look at the map, comparing island positions. He left two people to look after the injured man and set off in the boat to the third island and the other divers. He told them to go to the plankton factory and take the medical equipment to the injured man, then set out by himself to the resort. With just himself onboard, he jettisoned all the surplus equipment he could find, allowing the boat to go as fast as possible. In theory, the medical equipment collected by the other divers should allow the injured man to stay alive while he made the long trip to the resort to alert a helicopter rescue team.

The AS allowed the scenario, although the chopper paramedics rebuked him for making the boat trip to the resort by himself. There was an experienced sailor in charge of the other diving team who could have made a faster trip. But the injured man survived.

For his second expedition he was in a deep, rocky canyon in a jungle. His little team was moving a lot slower than anticipated because of the difficult terrain; they were starting to run out of food. The canyon walls were too high to be climbed.

Lawrence asked them for their skills and found one member who was proficient with canoes. The team set about chopping down trees and building a makeshift raft. The canoeist was dispatched downriver to contact their base camp.

After two kilometers the canoeist encountered rapids too severe for the raft. He had to wait until the rest of the team caught up on foot and helped rebuild the raft so that it could be taken apart and carried around difficult sections. Right idea, not enough thought for the method.

An Arctic wilderness came next, with Lawrence by himself at the center of a ring of various equipment caches. To get to the food, which was on top of a pressure ridge, he had to collect the climbing equipment to reach it, but the climbing gear was too bulky and heavy to carry in the backpack; he needed the sledge, which was on the other side of a bottomless gorge. The collapsible bridge to get over the gorge needed the sledge to move it.

He just couldn’t work that one out. But he did his best, fetching a single coil of rope from the climbing cache and trying to swing across the gorge. He wound up tumbling down into the black abyss when his ice axe anchor broke free.

After that came a classic cell/maze. The AS put him in a room with five doors, each of which led to another room with five doors. The hazards were mostly visible, with hinged flagstones, spikes stabbing out of the walls, flames, a pendulum, lions, walls that closed in, cutting wire at neck level, electrified segments, stones that fell from their ceiling cavities, tripwire-triggered darts, moss with an acid sap, rat swarms—though there were others like gas and ultrasonics that he didn’t find until he was already well into the room. The doors all carried clues to what was in the room on the other side, sometimes numerical; then there were symbols, star signs, even poetry.

He was allowed five goes. The farthest he ever got was eight rooms from his starting place.

He was put in a starship just after it had suffered a meteor collision. Environmental support systems were failing, air leaking, power dropping, network glitched, no spacesuit, few tools. He had to make his way from his own badly damaged section to the lifeboat capsule halfway around the life support wheel.

After that the AS dressed him in a spacesuit that was low on oxygen and power reserves and left him clinging to a small asteroid with his ship on the other side. There were different types of survey sensors dotted across the surface, which he could cannibalize for components and gas as he tried to crawl his way back. The rock’s microgravity field was just enough to stop him from achieving orbit by muscle power alone, and weak enough to leave him with all the maneuvering problems of freefall. He actually expired within sight of the little silver craft.

The locker room that evening was even more subdued than the previous night. The candidates all looked dazed and shell-shocked. Conversation was all: “But what do you do after that bit where…”

He couldn’t see any protesters in the square. And the weather was a lot better that evening, high clouds and a dry wind blowing from off the land. It was still cold. He quite fancied a hot potato.

Joona was in the bar when he arrived, sitting at her usual place, with empty stools on either side. None too sure of his status, he left a vacant stool between them, and ordered his mango and apple.

“Shouldn’t you have something stronger?” she asked. “I’d say you’ve had a hard day.”

“Alcohol isn’t going to help. I’ve got an even harder day tomorrow. Have to keep a clear head.”

“Is it worth it?”

He took a long drink from his tumbler. “Oh, yes.”

“Doesn’t seem it to me. Look at the state of you. What did they do to you in there today?”

“Put it this way. If you ever crash-land on a frozen desert populated by flesh-eating zombies, then stick with me, I’ll get you out. Piece of cake compared to what I went through.”

Joona cocked her head to one side, giving him an interested look. “And how does that help them select their officers, exactly?”

“It’s testing our ability to think under pressure. They put us in all kinds of impossible situations today.” He rolled the glass between his palms, regarding it with a miserable expression. “I didn’t do very well. I lost count of how many times I got killed. Then again, the others were just the same, judging by what they said.”

“How good are you?”

“What do you mean?”

She slid her hands across the bar, pushing the tea cup ahead of her, moving with feline grace as she leaned in toward him. “I mean, you’re a… you’re a soldier who’s seen action. You’ve been in bad situations for real on those other worlds you plunder, right?”

“Yes. But we’re trained in how to deal with hostile crowd or ambush situations. I know what I’m doing.”

“Right, but what you’re basically taught is how to keep cool under fire. And today they simply turned up the heat. Were those situations genuinely impossible, or did you just flunk them?”

“You don’t take many prisoners, do you? I suppose I could have done better in some of them, if I knew more about engineering and stuff.”

“Has it occurred to you that these tests were actually dual purpose? It sounds to me like they were testing your character as well as your ability to think.”

He slumped down on the stool. “Probably. I’m really up shit creek, then.”

“Why is that?” with lazy amusement.

Lawrence realized just how stoned she was. “I have no character. You said so yourself.”

“I didn’t say you had no character. I said you had the wrong character, which for the purposes of today’s experiment will serve you well. You’re what they want.”

“Let’s hope so. Are you okay to get home from here?”

She straightened up again. “Oh, I don’t need any help from you. I have a citybike card. I’ll just take one off the rack, and zoooom, I’m home.” She caught the barman’s attention and wagged a finger at her cup. “Same again.”

Lawrence drained his juice and stood up. “Take care.” He walked to the far end of the bar where the barman was preparing her tea. “Do something for me,” he said quietly to the barman. “When she leaves, call a cab for her. This should cover it.” He put an EZ twenty on the counter.

The barman nodded and pocketed the bill. “Sure thing.”

Day three was linked teamwork. The AS split them into groups of five and dropped them into a shared i-environment. There were to be eight tests. For the first five, they would rotate the leadership, while the last three were to be a group effort.

Lawrence’s group was given a river to cross for its first task. It was running through a hot, unpleasant jungle, complete with insects that bit exposed limbs and reeking marsh-sulfur air bubbling out of the mud along the foot of the banks. Crocodiles peered at them from midriver, occasionally snapping their jaws in anticipation. Ropes, oil drums and wooden planks were stacked up on the bank. Even laying all the planks end to end, they weren’t long enough reach across the water.

Their designated team leader started snapping out orders. He wanted to build a platform that would go halfway across the river; they would take up the section from behind them and rebuild it out in front to the other bank. Lawrence helped willingly enough, even though he knew they were wasting their time. The scheme was overelaborate. They should be building a raft.

He briefly toyed with the idea of slacking off, or maybe not tying off his rope as tight as it needed to be. Not active sabotage exactly, but as the idea was doomed anyway… There were only two places, after all. But he guessed the AS would be watching for anything less than 100 percent commitment.

Sure enough, when they turned the bridge into a platform in the water and started trying to build the last section, two of them wound up falling in the river along with several planks. The crocodiles moved in eagerly, huge jaws hinging open.

For his own command, Lawrence was given the last stone in a henge to erect. He took a quick inventory of the equipment they’d been given, which was mainly poles, shovels and ropes, and issued his instructions. They measured the length of the stone, and the height of the others. That told them how deep to dig the pit at the base of the stone. With that done, they set about tipping it in, rigging up levers and crude pulleys. This was the part that required a high level of coordinated teamwork, and everyone played his part perfectly, following each of the orders that Lawrence shouted out. Eventually the massive block tilted upright. Lawrence had a nasty moment when it rocked about, but it stayed upright.

It was the final three tests that made him irritable and disappointed. There was just too much competition between the group members for them to have their own idea adopted. Lawrence reckoned the AS had deliberately structured the tasks so that there were multiple solutions to each problem. His fellow candidates began to question him and each other, whining and bitching, especially when their own proposals were turned down. When Lawrence was convinced he had the most efficient solution to the second task he had to shout to make them listen, which they resented. They were competing, not cooperating. The simulations were deviating from the way people behaved in real life. Drawing from his own time in action with the platoon, Lawrence knew there would be a better level of rapport.

Hardly anyone spoke when they left that evening. Lawrence heard that there had been near fights in other teams during the last three tests. At least his own group had managed to keep reasonably civil. That must count in their favor.

Joona was in the square. The potato stall was back, along with a larger number of protesters. She caught sight of him, and intercepted him. Lawrence tried to smile off the startled looks of the other candidates, though he knew exactly what they must be thinking.

“Yours,” Joona said curtly, pressing an EZ twenty into his hand. “I don’t need your charity.”

“It wasn’t charity. I was concerned about you, that’s all.”

“Did I ask you to be?”

“How could you? You didn’t know what planet you were on.”

She turned quickly and started walking back to her friends. “I’ve survived in this city long before you got here, space boy.”

“Sorry I cared,” Lawrence shouted after her.

He had dinner in the Holiday Inn that evening.

Day four was interviews and evaluation. First time up, Lawrence was quizzed by two college officers about his background and motivation and likes and dislikes. He knew he had to be courteous and slightly self-deprecating and honest and relaxed and show he had a sense of humor as well as being overwhelmingly interesting. Tall order cramming those traits into ninety minutes while you’re telling them your life history and slanting it so that your inquisitors believe they cannot possibly afford to let you slip out of the college.

The second interview was with an assistant to the deputy principal, a cheery old woman who dressed in clothes a century out of date, presumably to give her an authoritative schoolmarmish air. They sat on opposite sides of a steel-blue desk in her office, a fourth-story room with a good view out over the canal.

Data was scrolling down her desktop pane, which was just at the wrong angle for him to read it.

“You did very well on the simulations,” she said. “Good reflexes. Good spatial instinct—whatever that is. High proficiency on logical analysis. Integrated well with the group command dynamics. Fast thinker. Care to comment on any of that, Mr. Newton?”

“We were a mess in the last three simulations yesterday. Too much competition.”

“That’s right. That’s why we include them. Think of it as a measure of how unselfish you can be.”

“And was I?”

“You certainly showed awareness of the situation. It was a mature reaction. You have the potential to be an officer.”

“Excellent.” Lawrence couldn’t help his hungry grin.

“Which gives me something of a problem. You see, it’s more than proficiency we’re looking for this week. Your stake also has to be taken into account. And, frankly, there are candidates with an aptitude equal to yours who have a much larger stake in Z-B than you.”

Lawrence managed to hold on to his expression of polite respect. “I suspect they all had inherited stakes. It’s not actually possible for someone of my rank in strategic security to earn a higher stake than the one I have. A lot of the fleet platoon members opt for a much lower percentage. That should tell you all you need to know about my level of commitment to Z-B.”

“It does, Lawrence, and it’s very impressive, as was your commanding officer’s report. But the figures speak for themselves. And we have to stick to our chosen method of selection. You understand that, don’t you?”

He nodded sharply. This is a hatchet job, he realized. She’s turning me down. I’ve failed. Failed! His fingers closed tightly around the end of the chair’s armrests.

“Good,” she said. “What I’d suggest is that you reapply in another couple of years. With the scores you’ve accumulated over the last three days we’d welcome you back again for another assessment. And by then your stake should have risen to a suitable percentage.”

“Thank you.” That was what it boiled down to. Thank you. His life’s dream denied. Thank you. Five years devoted to the company, putting his life on the line. Thank you. He’d left his world behind, his life, his family, his one love. Thankyou. Thankyou. Thankfucking YOU.

It was sunny and cold when he marched down the stone steps to the square, a cloudless deep azure sky overhead. He blinked at the sharp light, which was what must be making his eyes watery. It was normally dark when he came out of the headquarters building. People got in his way as he walked. He pushed past them, heedless of their protests. Trams, too, they could fucking wait. Bastard cyclists always in the way.

Fortunately the bar was almost empty. But then it was only three o’clock in the afternoon. When the evening crowd arrived, Lawrence planned on moving back to the hotel where he could call up room service for the rest of the night. He opened the front of his coat and claimed a barstool. “Margarita, one glass, one jug.” He slapped a couple of EZ twenties on the bar. “And that’s a proper glass, with salt.”

“Yes, sir.” The barman wasn’t going to argue, not yet.

Lawrence dropped his head into his hands and let out a painful sigh, surprising himself by not shrieking in anguish. “Shit! Shit, shit, fuck it!”

Someone pulled out the stool next to his and sat down. Like they didn’t have the whole fucking place to choose from. He jerked round angrily to tell them to—“Oh.”

“I thought I’d better check on you,” Joona said in mild embarrassment. “You nearly got run over by a couple of trams.”

He turned away. “Enjoy your moment of triumph.”

“Suffering in others is not a cause for rejoicing.”

“In that case, give the hippie philosophy a break. It pisses me off.”

“They turned you down.”

“Yeah. All right? They turned me down. Bastards.”

“Did they say why?”

“I’m not rich enough. That’s what it was in the end. My stake in the company isn’t enough. For fuck’s sake, I’ve got a thirty percent investment in Z-B shares. A third of everything I earn goes straight back into the company. What the fuck else do they expect from me?”

“I don’t know. What did you expect from them?”

“A fair chance. No, not really. I should have known. Me of all people. I know how companies really work, what really counts.”

The barman put his margarita jug down in front of him, pushing a coaster forward for the glass. It was a proper margarita glass, with a thin rime of salt around the rim.

“What does count?” Joona asked.

“Internal politics. You want one of these, or have you got to run back to shout at my fellow corporate cyborgs?”

“We’re not exactly on timesheets and shift work.”

Lawrence nodded to the barman. “Another glass, please.”

Waking up was accompanied by its timeless twin: where am I? Lawrence opened his eyes to see a long room with a desk and a couple of worn comfy chairs at one end. The floor was bare wooden boards, with a couple of rugs thrown down, one of which he was lying on. Opposite him was a broad arched window, with thick old curtains drawn. Scraps of street-light shone around the edges, casting a dreary sodium-yellow illumination against the walls. Several large prints had been hung above the small fireplace, posters for various exhibitions and poetry recitals decades out of date. Definitely student digs. Brighter slivers of light silhouetted the door. When he lifted his head he could see a bed at the other end of the room. Joona was sitting on it, her back against the tarnished brass railings. She had a quilt wrapped around her shoulders. A reefer dangled from one hand, its end glowing morosely in the gloom.

“Oh, hell,” he muttered. At least he was still wearing his uniform. “How did I… ?”

“I brought you here,” she said. There was a current of humor in her voice. “My turn to rescue you from the bar.”

“Thanks.” He sat up gingerly. “Do I owe you a twenty?”

“No, a friend helped get you into the tram. There’s a stop close to the end of this street.”

“Uh, right.” He didn’t remember much after the third jug of margaritas. Just bitching on about Z-B and how he would have loved to be the first person to land on a new world. He ran his dry rubber tongue around the inside of his dry mouth. The taste was awful. Apart from that he wasn’t too bad, just stiff from the floor. “How come I don’t have a hangover?”

“I made you take aspirin and vitamin C, and a couple of liters of water.”

“Right. Thanks again.” The mention of water made him want to pee. Badly. Joona told him where to find the toilet, just outside and down the corridor.

“Try to be quiet,” she said as he hurried out. “Everyone else is asleep.”

His watch said it was quarter past two.

When he got back she was still sitting at the end of the bed, the reefer down to its last half-centimeter. “Want some?” she asked.

“No, thanks. Us cyborgs don’t, remember?”

“Of course.”

“Look, thanks again for taking care of me. I’d, er, better be going.”

“Really?” She took a deep drag. “What’s waiting for you?”

“Nothing much, I guess. I’ve still got three weeks’ leave due. I just don’t want to impose on you any more tonight.”

“If I’d thought you were imposing I wouldn’t have brought you here.”

A sharp tingle moved down Lawrence’s spine. He walked over to the bed and knelt down. She didn’t say anything, just kept gazing at him with wide eyes. He took the last of the joint from her fingers and inhaled the way he’d seen it done on the i’s. The smoke was bitter enough to make him cough.

Joona started to laugh. “I win.”

“Win what?”

“I got to you.”

“Yeah.” He grinned and took another drag before handing it back. “You got to me. But then you were never going to run off and join the officer college with me, were you?”

She shook her head as if she’d been admonished and pouted. “No.”

“Can I stay here the rest of the night?”

Joona nodded.

“With you?” he asked softly.

She opened the quilt. She was naked underneath.

When Lawrence woke up in the morning his earlier confusion was replaced by something close to embarrassment. Classic case of now what?

He was lying along the edge of the bed, the quilt covering him, with his back pressed up against the wall. The mattress really wasn’t wide enough for two. Joona was curled up beside him, looking a whole lot more fragile than she had last night. She was thin, skinny enough for her shoulder blades and collarbones to be prominent, and a lot shorter than he recalled. She must have been wearing heels before. Funny he’d never noticed that.

When he tried to pull the quilt up gently around her shoulders she stirred and woke. Pale blue eyes, he saw, a contrast to her darkish skin.

“Well,” she said.

“Morning.”

“Yes, it is.”

She snuggled up closer, closing her eyes.

Again: now what?

“So, er, what time do you have to get up?”

Joona’s eyes stayed shut. “You’re always in a rush to go nowhere, aren’t you?”

“That’s me.”

“I was going to take a break from college. It’s getting heavy there for me right now. I hadn’t got a plan for getting up.”

“You’re at college?”

She sighed and sat up. “Yes, the Prodi. It’s a complete shithole. They don’t even have enough funds to stop the building from falling apart, and the lecturers are all fifth-raters who couldn’t get an appointment cleaning the toilets at a decent university.” She got up out of bed with a sudden energetic motion and padded over to the window, pulling the curtains back with a quick tug.

Lawrence didn’t point out she was nude; he would have sounded like his mother. But the window was smeared with dribbles of condensation, only a few vague gray shapes of buildings were visible. Joona shivered and rubbed her arms. The air in the room was cold enough to make her breath show as thin vapor.

“Are you leaving me?” she asked.

“Like you, I don’t have any plans.”

“Actually, I was thinking I’d go to Scotland.”

He couldn’t figure out if that was an invitation. She certainly wasn’t his usual type, not with all this twitchy energy and commitment to her stupid cause. He couldn’t imagine her ever walking down the Strip at Cairns, hunting a good time as the sun went down. Come to that, he couldn’t even imagine her laughing heartily. He’d never seen her do more than smile wryly every now and then. But then again, she definitely knew her own mind. Just like Roselyn. Unlike Roselyn, she wasn’t happy with life. There was a lot of anger bottled up inside that small frame—a stupid form of anger, though he would never tell her that to her face. She was far too wrapped up in her issues to welcome contrary observations. He guessed that might make her kind of lonely.

The room had a singular imprint that was all her own. It wasn’t just the air that was cold. Most people, he thought, would instinctively keep their distance.

So why didn’t I?

Two lonely people. Maybe that was why they’d kept dancing around each other in the bar. They weren’t opposites attracting after all.

“I’ve never been to Scotland,” he said.

Joona was bending over the heatstore block that sat in the ancient fireplace, turning up its output. The black surface began to glow a deep orange, as if there were still embers in the grate. She gave him a fast, nervous smile. “You want to come with me?” There was surprise and hope in her voice.

“Sure. If you want me to come with you.”

“I don’t mind. It would be nice.”

For a moment he thought she was going to jump back into bed with him. Instead she grabbed a big red-and-green-check nightshirt from the back of a chair and struggled into it.

“I’ll put some coffee in the microwave,” she said. “Then I have to do my yoga: it helps me center myself. We can go after that.”

“Okay,” he said, trying to keep pace with events. “I can pick up my stuff from the hotel on the way to the station.”

“Will you book the train tickets? I hate using the datapool. I can pay you.”

“Sure.” He hunted around for his clothes, wondering what he’d gone and said yes to.

Lawrence and Joona took an express train straight out of Amsterdam direct to Edinburgh, traveling in a big U, down south to Paris, across to London, then up north again to the end of the l-pulse line at Waverley. To start with, Lawrence was impressed by Holland. The old canals were still draining the land. Windmills stood guard along the straight-edged waterways, although little wind now reached their sails, thanks to the extensive forests that had grown up in the last two centuries across the old farmland. There was a huge variety of trees, but with the canals slicing through them they formed such a regular grid it made them look like nothing more than fields. In a sense they were, not that they were cultivated, but the land management teams maintained them carefully. Even now, the drainage system couldn’t be allowed to fall into disrepair, and the roots were a big potential hazard. It gave him an impression of an artificial environment barely one step ahead of Amethi. He thought that in a way Holland must be the first example of large-scale terraforming; human engineering and ingenuity wresting a livable nation out of an alien environment.

Lawrence soon tired of the fenlands, especially as their speed blurred details. “So why Scotland?” he asked.

Joona put her feet up on the table, ignoring the disapproving looks of the other passengers in the carriage. “My grandmother is Scottish. We’re going to stay with her.”

“Where, exactly?”

“Fort William.”

He put his interface glasses on and accessed the datapool to find where that was.

“You spend a lot of time trawling, don’t you?” Joona said.

“My education had a lot of holes. You must do a fair bit of accessing yourself.”

“As little as possible. I prefer books.”

“There’s a time and a place for hard copy. My dad had a thing for books, too. I guess that’s why I never use them.” He grinned at the face she pulled. “What’s your subject at Prodi?”

“I’m taking ecological management.”

“Right.” It wasn’t what he expected. “Doesn’t that mean you’ll wind up working for a company?”

“There are companies, and there are companies. And then there are government agencies, at least by name. In practice they’re another branch of corporate reclamation and revitalization divisions. But I won’t take a job with any of them. There are still some private landowners who use the land in the traditional fashion. They farm, or log timber or run stables. That’s what I want to help keep alive.”

“Farming?” he said skeptically. “I thought that’s what damaged the land in the first place?”

“Industrial farming did, yes. Pesticides and nitrates were poured over the soil in the quest for higher yields and to hell with the consequences. Agricultural machinery actually got so big and so heavy that it compacted the subsoil. By the end, in the developed nations, topsoil was little more than a matrix that suspended chemicals and water so the crop roots could absorb them. Then the companies developed protein cell technology and killed farming altogether.”

“And stopped us raising and slaughtering animals for food. I mean, can you imagine how barbaric that was? Eating living things. It’s disgusting.”

“It’s perfectly natural. Not that people think that way today. And I didn’t say protein cells are a bad thing. After all, it means no one on Earth starves. But, as always, they went to extremes and eliminated every valid alternative. All I’m asking for is to keep a few pockets of independence alive.”

“You mean like working museums?”

“No! These are havens for people who reject your corporate uniculture existence. There are more of them than governments and corporations like to admit. More of us.”

“Ah, right, communes of back-to-the-earthers. So will you also be refusing the kind of medical technology that comes out of our wicked corporations?”

She gave him an exasperated stare. “That’s so typical, denigrate something you know nothing about. I never said I was rejecting technology. It’s the current global society that I refuse to obey. Technology doesn’t have to come only from corporate labs, to be exploited for profit and policy implementation. It could come from universities where it would be made freely available to benefit everyone. Even small independent communities could support researchers. If we all had free access to data we could build a culture of distributed specialization.”

“The old global village idea. Nice, but you still need factories and urban centers. You should know that culture always flourishes at the heart of society.”

“The datapool is the heart of our society. You’re still thinking in physical terms when you talk about cohesion. You can live in a cottage in the middle of a forest with every need taken care of, and still be totally in tune with the rest of the world.”

“But why live there, when you can also live in a city, and interact with people, and go down to a bar in the evening and have a laugh and a drink? We don’t all want to be hermits.”

“I know. But your companies don’t want anyone to be a hermit or anything else. According to them, we all have to fit into this uniculture they’re trying to establish like neat little blocks on a circuit board. I don’t want to be a part of that. I want my freedom.”

“I think you’re exaggerating.”

She pointed to a badge on her coat lapel. It had a single eye at the center. “Open your eyes.”

He managed to steer the conversation off politics and got her talking about music, which was always a relatively safe topic. You could disagree about bands, performers and composers without storming out or throwing things. She enjoyed orchestral symphonies from several classical and modern composers; from postelectronic music she listened to what he thought of as ballads and street poetry. Although she had thousands of hours of tracks loaded into her multimedia player card, she became animated about live concerts, telling him about all the venues she’d visited, the bands and orchestras she’d heard. As far as entertainment went, she was scornful of the i’s, although she admitted to watching several current soaps. The i’s, she claimed, were something she grew out of. And she really hated AS-generated dramas, preferring to visit theaters. Amsterdam had a host of small nonmainstream theaters where her student status got her reduced rates, she said, and the city had hundreds of performance groups eager to put on their works.

Lawrence almost pointed out that having so many groups evolve in a city proved his argument about culture. But he still wasn’t sure how she’d respond to that kind of teasing. Even after lunch in the buffet car, when she drank over half a bottle of wine, she was still tense.

That afternoon she asked what he enjoyed, and he was foolish enough to admit accessing Flight: Horizon. It was the first time he’d ever seen her truly laugh.

“I can’t believe we export that kind of crap to other worlds,” she chortled. “No wonder you have such a screwed-up vision of starflight. My God, and that ending.”

“Ending?”

“The last episode. Unbelievable! Pretty hot, though.”

“You saw that?”

“Yeah. Told you I was into i’s when I was a kid. Why?” Her eyes narrowed, giving him a curious gaze. “Didn’t you see it?”

“No,” he said lamely, unwilling to admit the associations the show had for him. Even though he knew he was totally and completely over Roselyn, he’d somehow never quite got round to accessing those last few episodes. “We only ever got a couple of series on Amethi.”

“Oh wow. You’ve got to access it now you’re here. You missed a treat.”

“That part of my life is over. I can do without revisiting it, thank you.” Her eyebrows rose at the finality in his voice. “Okay.”

Fortunately she didn’t pursue it, or even try to tease him. Their conversation rambled on. The one thing that they never mentioned was sex. He found that strange. It was as if last night simply hadn’t happened. At least for her. They talked around just about everything else. As he was taking his cues from her, he didn’t try to bring it up.

He wanted to. Joona was good company. Not necessarily pleasant company. If their opinions clashed she would argue until he gave up. That made her interesting, as much as her diametrically opposed worldview. When he thought about some of his barracks conversations he couldn’t believe how dumb they were in comparison. It was that quality he’d first noticed in her, the fierce intelligence, that’s what attracted him. So he wanted to know where they stood, which basically meant was she coming to bed with him tonight, and every other night of this jaunt? At one point he decided she was saying nothing in order to tantalize him, an intellectual’s idea of fore-play. Though there were always doubts about that theory. She was too highly strung to avoid talking about anything important in her life. Which made her silence on the subject slightly puzzling.

He’d booked a double sleeper cabin for them that night. When she’d paid him for the ticket there had been no mistake or misunderstanding, she saw exactly what he’d got for them. The thought stayed with him all that afternoon. They’d slung their luggage in there as soon as they got onboard, his shoulder bag, her rucksack. The cabin was tiny, its fittings as compact as modern design allowed.

All the time they spent talking in the main coach he knew that she knew they’d be going back there after dinner. They’d strip off in the confined space, then climb into the low bunk together. The prospect was highly arousing. It would be almost like their first time. Last night, from what he could recall, had involved little passion and hadn’t lasted long anyway, some perfunctory fumbling brought to a swift climax. First-time sex was always hot. And here on the train it was inevitable, which added that extra twinge of excitement as he spent the afternoon looking at her.

They went to the restaurant as the train slid out of Paris. Joona ordered a bottle of red wine. Lawrence had two glasses; she finished the rest and ordered another. Her conversation, which had arrived at the global uniculture’s contamination of Africa, allowed less and less opportunity for him to say anything. Eventually it became a bitter rant. Lawrence didn’t have any of the second bottle. Joona ordered a brandy for herself, which she finished before they left for their sleeper cabin.

When they got to it, they found the conditioning was faulty, leaving the little room chilly. Joona swayed about, looking at him with a lack of certainty in complete contrast to her usual attitude. She gave him a brief who-cares grin and started to pull her clothes off. It was Lawrence’s turn to hesitate.

“Look,” he said reluctantly. “You’ve had a lot to drink.”

“I can handle it. This is nothing.” She got the sweatshirt off over her head, then put an arm out to steady herself as she undid her jeans.

“I’m sure. I’m just saying, we don’t have to do anything tonight.”

“Yes, we do.” Her grin widened into something close to defiance as she slipped her briefs down her legs. “Don’t you get it? We have to. We must.” She began kissing him. The smell and residual taste of the wine was off-putting. He put his arms around her in a mechanical fashion, trying to respond with the same intensity.

“We’re building a bridge,” she mumbled. “The two of us, two worlds joining. That means we’re human after all.”

He wanted to ask what she thought she meant. But he was busy freeing his own shirt, and she’d sat down heavily on the edge of the bunk. The cold air didn’t help his mood, it actually raised goose bumps on his skin. He climbed into the bunk beside her, quickly pulling the thin quilt over the pair of them.

She started kissing him again, ranging over his face and neck. A hand closed round his cock. One elbow rested uncomfortably on his sternum. What she must have intended as a suggestive caress felt more like an irritable tickle down the side of his ribs. The whole event was completely unerotic. He couldn’t believe it; not after he’d spent most of the day anticipating this moment.

Finally he managed to roll the pair of them around so she lay underneath him. He could barely keep his erection going; to help he had to keep thinking about a couple of the girls from the Strip last week, how lively they were. Joona smiled up drunkenly at him and groaned as he slid farther inside her.

Fortunately, the whole miserable entanglement was concluded quickly. “God, I love you,” she said. “This is what I want.”

“What is?” He managed to find a space on the bunk that didn’t squash the two of them together, even though he was in danger of falling off. When he looked back at her she was already asleep. She started snoring.

He found a thick T-shirt and put it on, then spent ages lying beside her, staring up at the cabin’s invisible ceiling, unable to sleep. Nobody’s fault, he kept telling himself, the circumstances were wrong, that’s all. The cabin, the air-conditioning, the wine: an unfortunate combination. Tomorrow will be better.

The express terminus at Edinburgh Waverley had been dug underneath the original station, leaving the surface structure untouched. They hauled their luggage up the escalators to the big old sprawl of platforms underneath their arching glass-and-iron roofs, and found the local train over to Glasgow. Old-style induction tracks still threaded through the center of the city, passing below the ancient castle perched on top of its rocky pinnacle. Lawrence watched it slide past, fascinated by the massive stone blocks and wondering how the hell the builders had moved them into position without robots.

Once it was outside the suburbs, the train accelerated smoothly up to two hundred kilometers an hour. That was the fastest it could manage: the track in this part of Scotland was still using the same route that it had for centuries, laid down in the first decades of steam engines. It followed the contours of the rugged Highlands, curving too sharply to allow the train to reach its usual top speed. Even though there were no more farms, the district parliament had never obtained enough funds to straighten the route through the wild glens and restored woodlands. The cost of drilling new tunnels through hard Scottish rock and constructing viaducts over broad valleys was simply uneconomical given the volume of traffic. So anyone traveling the Highlands had almost the same journey as the Victorians who’d originally pioneered the route. There was even an old iron rail laid alongside the induction track, where enthusiasts kept a couple of old steam engines chugging up and down the coast, pulling early-twentieth-century first-class passenger coaches along behind them. A huge tourist attraction in the summer.

As they had arrived at Edinburgh station in the early morning, Lawrence was able to see the countryside in clear daylight. Queensland and some sections of Europe he’d seen were just as rugged, but nothing on any planet he’d been on was as green. With spring coming to the Northern Hemisphere, the trees were fresh with new leaves. Heavy rains had soaked the ground, giving the grass a healthy, vigorous start to the season. He took the window seat and pressed himself against it, smiling contentedly.

This section of the journey was the one that he enjoyed the most.

They reached Glasgow in the middle of the morning and changed trains for Fort William. If anything this journey was even slower. But the scenery made up for it. He couldn’t believe the long, rugged glens, and the lochs with their dark mirror water that went on forever. Their splendor made him aware of how much humans belonged in this environment.

Joona sat beside him with her arm through his, pointing out various landmarks. Ever since she woke up she’d acted differently. Attentive and eager, as if their night together had allowed them to reach some new level of understanding and commitment. He didn’t know what to make of it at all, though the affection was enjoyable. It made it seem as if they were more of a couple. Certainly anyone walking through the coach would assume so.

Fort William was the end of the line, its station just above the shore of Loch Linnhe. They stepped out onto the platform and Lawrence tipped his head back to look up at the mountain looming over the small town. The entire slope was covered with pine trees, their dark shapes packed tightly together.

“Is that Ben Nevis?”

“No,” Joona said brightly. “That’s Cow Hill; the Ben’s away behind it. You’ll be able to see it from Grandma’s over in Benavie, if the weather stays fine.” She glanced out at the choppy gray water of the loch. Dark clouds were streaming in from the southwest. “Rain’s on its way.”

Her grandmother was waiting in the station parking lot. Joona let go of his arm and waved frantically as she ran forward. Preconceived notions Lawrence had built up about Granny Beaumont being some quiet little old lady with her gray hair wrapped in a bun and wearing a long tartan skirt vanished there and then. The woman was only as tall as Joona, but she was a picture of health, with dark red hair only slightly tidier than her grand-daughter’s. She was wearing tough cord trousers and a long olive-green coat splashed in mud. He didn’t see how she could be a grandmother to anyone in their twenties; she couldn’t possibly be past fifty.

“So you’ll be Lawrence, then.” Her accent was thick, but easy enough for him to understand. They shook hands.

“Yes, ma’am.”

“And we’ll have none of that nonsense. I’m Jackie. Now come along with the pair of you, into the van. I’ve to pick up a few things first; then we’ll go straight home.” She ushered them forward. The van was a three-wheel pickup, with an egg-shaped driver’s cab ahead of an open cart section. It must have been twenty years old, composite bodywork fraying along the edges with fiber strands bristling out of the cracks and odd-colored patches epoxied over the larger splits. The cab’s curving wind-shield had yellowed with age and ultraviolet, reducing the visibility considerably. There was no steering wheel, just a broad handlebar.

“Still works, then?” Joona said.

“Of course. Sugarhol is the easiest fuel you can brew, and no duty on it, either. That’s why they stopped making cells that could burn it.”

Lawrence kept a perfectly straight face as he climbed into the rear of the pickup. The chassis rocked about as he tried to find a reasonably clean piece of floor to sit on. Joona passed their luggage over the tailboard to him, then climbed up. She pulled a thick woolen hat out of her coat pocket, then produced some gloves. “Don’t worry, it’s not far.”

“Great.” He zipped the front of his coat right up to his chin, then jammed his hands into the pockets.

Jackie climbed into the cab and fired up the converter cell. A cloying smell of burned sugar burped out of the exhaust, swirling around the vehicle. Lawrence wrinkled his nose up; his eyes started to water.

“There’s a still up at the cottage,” Joona said. “She ferments her own fuel. See what I mean about people hanging on to their independence?”

“Absolutely.”

She laughed and gave him a hug before the pickup lurched off. Jackie Beaumont drove them north along the A82, which ran through the middle of Fort William. This section of town had large civic buildings on both sides of the road. He saw the hospital first, a modern two-story complex with an arched silver roof, its geothermal power turbine housed in a small igloo at the side. Two search and rescue helicopters were parked on their pads behind the accident and emergency annex. The information and heritage center was opposite. Next to that were several sports pitches, each covered by big translucent domes, similar enough to Amethi’s nullthene to give Lawrence an unexpected twinge of nostalgia. The town administration office resembled a Georgian mansion with its vivid ginger brick and broad white stone windows. Only arches leading to the underground vehicle bays gave away its true century of origin. A line of buses had drawn up outside the secondary school. Kids in smart gray-and-turquoise uniforms were running around them, chasing balls and snatching each other’s bags.

Just past the theater, Jackie turned into a parking lot serving a single-story wooden building that resembled a long barn. It had wide windows under the overhanging eaves, with displays of just about every kind of camping and walking gear ever manufactured. A carved sign over the door said Grimmers. Jackie hopped out of the cab and headed inside. Lawrence and Joona climbed down and followed her in. A cleaning robot was rolling through the nearly deserted parking lot, sweeping up leaves and mud.

“Looks like a good little community,” Lawrence said as they went through the door.

She nestled up beside him. “A rich one, you mean. They can afford the facilities. A lot of companies combined to build the reclamation plants. There’s a lot of tourism as well. The other end of town is virtually all hotels. Between them, they bring a lot of money into the area.”

“That’s good, surely?”

“Only if you’ve got a stake in it.”

Jackie was picking up several boxes from a counter while the assistant chatted to her. Lawrence hurried over and took a couple of the boxes from her. She smiled her thanks and gave him a further two. They were heavier than he expected. The labels said they contained some kind of dyes.

“For the wool,” Jackie said as they went back out to the van.

“Wool?”

“I’m part owner of a flock.”

“Of sheep,” Joona said, grinning.

“Right.” It was a bizarre notion.

The rain had arrived, a thick, heavy downpour driven by strong winds. Turbulent clouds boiled overhead. Lawrence could see the last of the day’s sunlight shining over the mountains on the other side of the loch. There was no sign of a rainbow. He put the boxes next to his own bag and clambered back into the van.

It was another ten minutes’ drive back to Jackie’s cottage, which was a few kilometers out of town. She drove them along the side of the Caledonian Canal before finally turning off onto a dirt lane that led through woodland of silver birch, oak and sycamore. Her cottage sat in a rambling garden, a long building with sturdy stone walls and lead-rimmed windows. A diamond brick chimney stack at one end was crowned by tall clay pots, with smoke curling away into the darkening sky. He expected to see a thatch roof, but the blue slate was just as acceptable.

Jackie drove the van into a wooden lean-to outbuilding on the gable end, which served as a workshop and garage. Water was overflowing from the guttering, sending a thick curtain pouring down across the doorway. The final deluge finished the soaking that the rain had been persevering with. Lawrence squelched down onto the concrete floor.

“Inside with the pair of you,” Jackie said as she swung the big doors shut. “Go on now.”

Joona led him through a side door into the cottage’s kitchen. It was a wide room, taking up at least a third of the ground floor. The brick hearth was filled by a four-door Aga: its racing-green vitreous enamel had darkened down the decades, and there were plenty of little chips in it. But it was still functioning, throwing off a welcome heat. Joona shrugged out of her coat and went to lean against it, gripping the tarnished chrome bar along the front.

“Good to be home,” she said, and beckoned him urgently.

He stood in front of the ancient iron monstrosity, not quite sure what it was. Jackie took his hands and pulled him closer to it. Heat crept back into his dripping fingers.

“That’s better,” he said. “That wind chill was killing me.”

“I spent many an hour drying out in front of the Aga. We’ve even used it to save some lambs.”

“Huh?”

“If their mother dies, the plate-warming oven is just right for keeping them warm. Poor wee things need all the help they can get for the first few days.”

“This is a stove?”

“It is that,” Jackie said. She stood in the doorway, taking her boots off. “Installed over three centuries ago, I’ll have you know, and still going strong. The burner ring was modified to use methane, but other than that, as sound as the day it left the factory.”

Lawrence gave the stolid behemoth a suspicious look. If she was telling the truth, it predated the human settlement of Amethi. Amazing.

“You two had better have a hot shower and change your clothes,” Jackie said. “You’ve turned blue. There’s plenty of hot water. I’ll have some tea for you when you come down.”

Joona nodded. “This way.” She took Lawrence’s hand again and started to lead him playfully out of the kitchen.

“He’s a big healthy lad you’ve got yourself, there,” Jackie called after them. “You’ll be needing the double bed tonight.”

“Gran!” Joona yelled back. But she was smiling up at Lawrence, hunting his approval. He managed to smile back.

A kettle was whistling away on top of the Aga when he came back downstairs. He’d managed to find a clean T-shirt in his bag, and Joona had given him a thick apricot-colored sweater to wear on top. The arms were only a few centimeters too short.

He sat at the big oak refectory table in the center of the kitchen, watching Jackie make the tea. She used a china pot, spooning in dark flakes before pouring the water in. He’d never seen tea textured that way before.

“It takes longer, but it tastes better than your microwaved cubes,” she said when she caught him staring. “Life’s not so fast up here, we’ve time to let tea brew as it should.”

“Fine by me, I could do with some slow living.”

Jackie sat in a chair in front of a new-model desktop pearl. Its pane was showing a sweater with an elaborate pattern of bright colors. She told it to switch off, and the pane folded itself back into the casing. “I expect our Joona has been filling your head with stories of glorious revolution.”

“Not really. She just has a real bug about the companies.”

“Aye, well, she blames the companies for splitting up her parents. Her mother used to work for Govett; they handle a lot of the transport for the reclamation plants in town. Trouble was, Govett has an enlightened social policy; they move their personnel around every five years so they don’t get stale or deadended. Her father, my Ken, there was no way he was going to leave the Highlands. How that woman didn’t realize his commitment to the area I’ll never understand.” She sighed. “Then he went and got himself killed over in Glen Coe, a skiing accident. Joona was twelve at the time.”

“And after that you brought her up here by yourself?”

“Aye. She refused to have anything to do with her mother. Stubborn, she is. Her mother helped us out with money and got her into the Prodi, but that’s the only contact they’ve ever really had.”

“I can see why she’s so attached to this place.”

Jackie poured some milk into a big mug, then used a strainer to add the tea. “Not just to Fort William, it’s our whole way of life she’s devoted to.”

He waved a hand round the kitchen with its age-darkened wooden furniture and scrubbed flagstone floor. Plates, cups and glasses stood along the shelves of a big Welsh dresser, probably all antiques. Copper pots and pans hung above the Aga, along with bundles of dried rosemary that gave off a mild scent. Despite the room’s old-fashioned appearance, he could see a modern dishwasher and fridge built into the fitted cupboards. There had been a small cleaning robot in the lean-to outside. The only thing the kitchen really lacked was a texturalizer unit to make up basic food from raw protein cells. He suspected Jackie simply bought precomposed packets from town. A lot of people couldn’t be bothered with home preparation these days. “You seem to be doing all right. I was worried I was going to be spending my holiday in a mud hut.”

“I’ve a few interests, but the flock brings in enough to get by.”

“How does that work?”

“There’s a lot of land up here that they can’t plant their damn forests on, you know. So we still have mountain sheep, and shepherds, and even sheep dogs. That part of our lives is the same as it has been for centuries.”

He frowned. “You don’t like the forests?”

“Oh, I don’t mind them. But there’s a difference between restoration and uberretrogression. These days if the ecological agency finds a clear piece of land bigger than a patio they want to plant a tree on it. It’s a direct continuation of the Greenwave policy that came in after protein cells were developed. The old radical Greens saw that as their chance to finally repair the damage that farming had done. It’s all a load of bull. Farmers were good for the countryside; they took care of their land. They had to, they depended on it. And I swear there was never so much woodland in Europe before, no matter how far back you go into prehistory to try to justify today’s acreage. What we’ve got now is no more natural than the intensive arable farming that went on in the second half of the twentieth century and first half of the twenty-first.”

“What I’ve seen of it looks magnificent.”

“It certainly does, aye. Though you’ve no idea how many walkers get lost around here every year. And that includes the ones that have full navigation and communications functions in their bracelet pearls. Idiots, every last one of them. Our rescue teams are busy practically the whole year round. And we reckon to lose at least fifty sheep in the trees each season. There’s supposed to be fencing, but even the robots can’t keep it all maintained.”

“Don’t forget the wolves,” Joona said. She came into the kitchen wearing a baggy blue robe, a big green towel wrapped around her hair. She sat next to Lawrence and gave him a quick kiss on the cheek. “They take dozens of sheep each year.”

“Aye,” Jackie said ruefully as she poured tea for her granddaughter. “Another species reintroduced courtesy of the environmental agency. As if we didn’t have enough to contend with up here. But we get by. There’s a fair weight of fleeces collected each year, and they keep the likes of me busy.”

“You turn the fleeces into wool here?”

“Not directly. There’s a couple of small local mills, cooperatives that we keep going; they wash the wool and weave it into yarn. Then it gets sent out to me and all the other crofters that are left up here. I knit it into sweaters like that one you’re wearing. There’s some that do blankets, and ponchos, and hats, and gloves. All sorts, really.”

Lawrence looked down at his sweater, feeling it. “You knit these?”

Jackie laughed. “We’re not Luddites, you know. I design the patterns. I’ve an old barn down at the end of the garden where I’ve got three cybernetic knitting machines. They do the hard work. I know how to maintain them, mind. I’m quite handy with an Allen key and diagnostic program, I’ll have you know.”

“All the tourists buy them,” Joona said. “Natural wool sweaters sell for a premium. Those damn factory texturalizers can’t get the artificial fibers quite right, they just feel wrong. And Gran’s designs are best of all.”

“So where’s the problem?” Lawrence asked. “You’re doing what you want, and the rest of society appreciates that.”

“The corporations and district parliament tolerate us because there are so few crofters,” Joona said. Her earlier good humor had faded. “They wouldn’t welcome too many of their kind taking up our lifestyle.”

“Now don’t go getting her started, young Lawrence,” Jackie said. “And you, my lady, can forget about politics for an evening. I get quite enough of that at the association meetings. Boring old farts, they are. So, Lawrence, were you really born on another planet?”

The evening that followed was one of the most pleasant he’d had for a long time. There was no pressure on him at all, no worry. He didn’t have to go out hunting girls or drink. It was, he thought, what a real family evening should be like. Nothing like the ones he’d endured in his own home back on Amethi, not forced and littered with expectation. More like the ones he would have wanted his own family to enjoy, the ones they would have enjoyed if things had worked out between himself and Roselyn.

He gave Joona a quick, guilty look. But she just smiled at him. She was helping Jackie make the pasta for supper.

“Traditional Scottish spaghetti,” Jackie had announced. They both laughed when he nodded eagerly and said: “Great.”

They turned down his offer of help, for which he was quietly thankful. He was left to stroke a huge black cat called Samson, while they busied themselves up at the long counter. A bewildering variety of ingredients were produced from big earthenware pots that were fitted with wide cork lids. The bolognese was mixed, cooked, tasted, remixed.

He did make himself useful lighting the log-burning stove in the parlor. It was soon roaring away, throwing out such a heat he had to take his borrowed sweater off. Jackie produced a malt for supper, which he had to water down to drink.

The spare bedroom—with the double bed—had an uneven floor. When he walked across it cautiously he realized the oak boards were so old they’d hardened into something approaching steel. They creaked occasionally, but they were totally solid. There was no quilt on the bed, only sheets and blankets, which he was dubious about. But the blankets were obviously produced by Jackie and her fellow crofters, brightly colored with a thick weave, so he expected they’d be warm enough. A single light fitting hung from the low ceiling, its cone a lambent yellow, casting mellow shadows. Wind soughed stealthily round the cottage’s gable end; he could hear the trees rustling around the garden.

He grinned expectantly at Joona after she shut the door, and hurriedly started pulling his clothes off. Her own movements as she undid the buttons of her blouse were hesitant, which he took as modesty. Which was arousing. By the time she’d finished undressing he was already waiting for her on the bed, determined that, finally, tonight should be good fun.

“Are we having the lights on or off?” he asked.

A troubled expression fluttered briefly over her face. “Off.” There was an unspoken of course. She flicked the switch by the door. The faintest moonlight seeping through the curtains allowed him to see her as a dark, flowing shape as she moved toward him. The bedsprings bent and shifted as she climbed on.

Lawrence reached for her immediately, sliding his hands over her body. He cupped her small breasts and began teasing the nipples with his fingers. He licked at her neck, her shoulders, her face. Her breathing quickened and they kissed, his mouth smothering hers.

It wasn’t that she didn’t respond, exactly. She just wasn’t as active as the girls he was used to romping with. He took that as his cue to start whispering suggestions and compliments, telling her of the acts and positions he wanted from her, promising how marvelous she would be performing them. Silently, Joona followed his directions.

Lawrence woke to the sound of some deranged bird being throttled very noisily just outside the bedroom window. Even the old peacocks back home never made so much racket.

At least the night’s wind and rain had stopped. Daylight fluoresced the curtains a radiant jade.

Joona was sitting up with her back resting on a mound of pillows. A microsol tube was dangling loosely from her fingers, just like a reefer. She wasn’t looking at anything within the room.

He wondered if he should say something about it. Sure, he liked a drink himself. But only when he was out for a good time. Her habit seemed to be on the wrong side of casual.

He settled for stretching elaborately and giving her a broad smile. Truly, there was nothing better than waking up in bed with a naked girl after a night of hot sex. He could feel his erection stirring already at the sight of her little breasts. “Morning,” he said, and there was a lot of happy lechery in his voice.

Her focus came back inside the bedroom walls. “Now do that to yourself.” Her voice was as calm and dense as the loch outside. “That’s what you said.”

“I, er…”

“The only time I’ve ever heard someone say that before was in a porno.”

“Ah. Well, it just seemed right. Then.” His face was hot as he tried to remember exactly what he had asked her.

“Some of those things you had me do; I don’t even know the names for them.”

Lawrence wanted to wake up. Now, please. This was not the way it was supposed to be the morning after. A few bashful grins exchanged when you’re off-guard and reminiscing, silent acknowledgment how you both got carried away in the heat of it all, but as we’re civilized folk we won’t actually mention it. Certainly we don’t talk details out loud.

“It’s never been that way for me before,” she continued. “You were so demanding.”

“You… Why didn’t you say if you didn’t like it?”

“I didn’t dislike it. You’re my man. We have to meet on that level as well. I wasn’t ready for so much at once.”

You’re my man. What kind of thing was that to say? Hell, this was excruciating. He hadn’t a clue what to say. Any normal girl would tell him outright if he’d gone too far. A simple no would have sufficed. He wasn’t an animal, he respected other people. “Sorry,” he mumbled. And that just came out like he was sulking.

“I felt left out,” she said. “That’s what hurt me the most. You were having this fantastic time with me, with my body. And I played no part in it.”

It was an effort not to put his hands over his ears. He just wanted her to shut up, which was the absolute last thing he could ask right now. Guilt verged toward being a physical pain. He’d been so proud of himself during their lovemaking. And he thought he’d roused her as well. “You should have said. You didn’t say anything.” Even to his own ears that sounded desperate and defensive.

She put a hand on his arm. “Of course not.”

What? He didn’t get it, he really didn’t. He eyed the microsol again, suspicions bubbling through the turmoil of thoughts. “We won’t do anything like that again. Okay?”

“That will be denial. Which is wrong and stupid, and would mess us up. The whole time, I’d just be thinking of what you really want to do to me.” Her voice was the kind of sharp monotone used by prosecution lawyers.

Actually, what he really wanted to do right then was get out. Out of bed, put his clothes on, and walk back to Fort William where there’d be a train back to the real world. But he didn’t want to leave her. Not just from the extra guilt he’d suffer from running away after last night. There had been good times in the last few days, times when they’d connected, times when they’d cared about each other. That was something that hadn’t happened to him since Roselyn.

And didn’t all couples have problems? Admittedly not quite as raw as this… “It won’t be denial,” he said slowly. “It’ll be inclusion. Sex should be for both of us.” Hey, fast thinker, Lawrence. It was a good block. She’d obviously accessed way too many self-help pop psychology manuals.

“Yes,” she said seriously. “Yes, it would, wouldn’t it? We must discuss what we are going to do first. That way we’ll know each other better.”

He managed not to shudder at the prospect. Sex should be spontaneous and fun, not analyzed clinically before. But if it meant ending this conversation… “That’s that, then.” He leaned forward and gave her a quick, awkward kiss.

“Do you want to start now? We could do one of last night’s positions again, if you tell me which one.”

“No. I think, er, breakfast is good for me right now.” It’s not cowardice, he told himself, it’s just polite and practical.

Lawrence had a distinct sensation of déjà vu when they walked into the kitchen. Joona had become clingy again, laughing and smiling, giving him a quick kiss every minute. Touching him for reassurance that he was still there.

He suddenly wondered if the family were Catholics. Roselyn had always said nobody could beat orthodox Catholics when it came to guilt from the enjoyment of sex.

Forget about Roselyn, he told himself firmly. He kissed Joona back and received a bright adoring smile.

“Oh, you two,” Jackie chided with a smile. “Cover your eyes,” she told Samson.

It was a sunny morning, and when Lawrence accessed the forecast he was assured of clear skies for the rest of the day. They cycled into town, though as soon as they emerged from the woodland around the cottage Lawrence jammed the brakes on so hard he nearly skidded his wheels out from under. Ben Nevis was directly ahead, presiding over a quarter of the skyline. Its peak was still covered in snow, which broke up into jagged ribbons over the massive north-facing ridges of gray-brown rock. Long ribbons of glistening water slicked the near-vertical face. At the base of the rock, scree had spread outward like an invasive tide across the grassy slope.

“Now that is impressive,” Lawrence said, and meant it. The sun was shining off the snow, making him squint against the glare. He was intimidated and challenged by the scale of the damn thing, wanting to know what it would be like to stand up there and look down. “You must be able to see half of Scotland from up there.”

“We’ll take a walk up it if you’d like.”

“You’re kidding. I’d never get up there without a muscle skeleton. Those cliffs look lethal even for technical climbers, and that scree is damn steep as well.”

“You don’t go up from this side, silly. There’s a walkers’ path that leads up from the glen. It only takes a few hours.”

“Yeah, right.” He gave the mountain a hard look before getting back on his bike.

Jackie had given them a list of things she needed from the town. He suspected it was makework, allowing them to wander around together. He didn’t mind.

“Nice town,” he said as they walked along the pedestrianized main street. The buildings with their little shops on the ground floor either dated back four centuries, or were good replicas.

“It is now,” she said. “The council has cleaned up and refurbished a lot of our old important buildings. There’s enough money for that kind of urban regeneration now.”

“Hey, does that mean you finally agree that the big companies are good for the economy? They’re the ones who generate that money in the first place.”

“I knew you’d approve. Fort William’s very ordered now it’s surrendered to the uniculture. Just how you like things to be.”

“All this is a bad thing? I’ve seen towns in a much worse state than this and I’ve only been on Earth for five years.”

They reached the southern end of the main street, where the main road had been diverted along the side of the loch. The rest of the town was composed almost entirely of houses, spreading back up the shallow slope from the water for over a quarter of a mile. Each one sat in its own lush garden, large enough for several trees. From where they were standing the intense verdant green of new silver birch leaves vied with the cotton candy swarms of cherry blossom to produce the most luminous array. Daffodils and tulips had colonized most of the lawns, speckling the grass with masses of yellow and red flowers.

“Oh, no,” Joona said quietly. “This is a lovely place to live, even in winter. All these fine houses are well built and well insulated, and if you’re ever invited inside one, tastefully furnished, too. Something like ninety-five percent of the town’s housing was built in the last two centuries. They leveled the old housing estates that were put up before the building industry started using robotics; those kind of high-density houses were never made to last—not like Gran’s cottage. So now we’ve got one house where there used to be two or three.”

“Money, again.”

“Yes. But that’s not the only factor. The town’s population is down almost twenty-five percent since the twentieth century.”

“I thought the rural population has been declining ever since the start of the Industrial Revolution.”

“It has. But I don’t mean that. The total population is down, and still falling. That’s why you can have bigger houses and gardens these days without putting pressure on the environment.”

“Not having farmland helps, too, I’d imagine.”

“Yes. It all fits together neatly, don’t you think?”

The way she said it betrayed how scornful she was. He didn’t reply.

Joona led him into a quiet café on the main street. The young waitress behind the counter greeted her warmly, and the two of them had a few quiet words. Lawrence found a free table near the window. Their hot chocolate arrived a minute later, along with some fresh-baked muffins. A small paper bag was passed to Joona, who vanished it into her coat pocket. She put three EZ tens on the table. There was no change.

Lawrence blew across the top of his mug. “Does Jackie know how much of that stuff you use?”

“You mean, does she care? Half of this is for her, Lawrence. Our kind of lifestyle has always included narcs of one kind or another.”

“I still think you should ease off a bit.”

Her blank face clicked on, as if she’d already inhaled a microsol tube. “Thank you for the interest. It’s not necessary.”

That night they did talk about what they would do in bed. It wasn’t as bad as he was anticipating. Actually, it was quite arousing, almost as if he was her tutor, a reasonable enough male fantasy. At least it put their relationship back on what he considered a more even footing.

The next few days were spent in and around Fort William. They visited the theater: twice to watch live plays, once to see a cinema screening of Cameron’s Titanic. Lawrence helped Jackie out around the garden, which had suffered the usual winter’s worth of neglect and damage. A few broken branches needed sawing off. Fenceposts had snapped. He spent an entire morning stripping down and cleaning her ancient gardening robot, trying to get the rusty mechanical components to run smoothly again. The blades on the mower attachment’s cylinder had to be taken to one of the shops in town for sharpening. Another morning was spent helping out with the knitting machines. They were housed in a barn at the end of the garden, a stone building as old as the cottage, with an open truss roof that was elegant in its simplicity, sturdy beams of thick untreated oak holding up the thin lathing that the slates were nailed to. But it was dry inside, if not terribly warm. The three machines clattered away enthusiastically, slinging out their finished sweaters every few minutes. They changed over the bales and refilled the dye chambers, then packed the finished sweaters into boxes ready for collection.

At the start of his second week, they climbed the Ben as Joona had promised. It was a short bike ride from the cottage to the visitor center perched on the banks of the River Nevis, which meant they were among the first to arrive that morning. They locked the bikes into the rack, then pulled on their walking boots.

The trek was a lot easier than he was expecting, just as she said it would be. Once they crossed the small bridge by the visitor’s center, they picked up a simple track running along the side of the hill, heading steadily upward. It was paved with rough stone, with neat steps cut in on the steepest parts, which seemed slightly incongruous for a supposed wilderness walk. Joona told him that the Scottish Environment Agency had to maintain it at this standard to prevent erosion. It had to cope with thousands of walkers during the course of the year.

As they climbed he could see more and more of the glen with its astonishingly green vegetation stretching away below him. The path had already started to lead through the huge swath of bright, fresh bracken that had sprung up along this section of the hill. Small wooden bridges took them over narrow fissures.

It wasn’t long before the path curved around into a deep, grassy cleft with a stream at its head, white water coursing noisily through the rocky gully it’d cut into the slope. They walked toward the water, then suddenly switched back to climb the steepening slope at a reasonable angle. Another turn brought them out to a marshy saddle with its own lochan of dead, peaty water. Lawrence took a look at the vast scree-smothered slopes looming above them and sighed in mild dismay. He still couldn’t see the actual top of the mountain yet. They stopped for a while above the lochan to drink some tea from their flasks and put on another layer of clothing. It was getting colder with every meter they ascended. The air below the cleft had been perfectly clear, giving them grand views across the beautiful Highland peaks. Here the mountain was accosted by thin strands of mist pushed along by the constant wind, reducing visibility.

For the next stage the path zigzagged up a steepening scree-covered slope. The tufts of grass and heather became less and less frequent until it was just stone and raw soil under their feet. Each sharp turn in the path was marked out by a cairn. Slush began to build up on Lawrence’s boots as he trudged onward. Patches of snow appeared more frequently on either side of the path. The mist was thickening. He couldn’t see the bottom of the glen anymore.

“It’s so clean up here,” he said as they stopped for another rest. “I love it.”

Joona eased herself onto a boulder and pulled the flask out of her backpack. “I thought your whole planet was clean.”

“It is. But that’s a different sort of clean. I was expecting Scotland to be different. You had so much heavy industry around here, I thought there’d be more… I don’t know, remnants. Streams that are half rust from all the old machines dumped in the lochs, mounds of slurry out of abandoned coal mines, that sort of thing.”

“Scotland’s heavy industry was mostly down south. Besides, you saw the reclamation plants outside town; they’re busy little bees.”

“Yeah.” He’d noticed them on the first morning when they cycled into town, gently disturbing the landscape on the other side of the River Lochy from Benavie: underground factories strangely reminiscent of the chemical plant on Floyd, long flat-topped mounds covered in lush grass. This time there were no heat exchange pillars on top, only rows of black vents that could have easily been overlooked. The real giveaway to how much industry was hidden below the earth were the pipes running down the rugged side of Creag Chail above them: twenty wide concrete tubes that emerged from the mountainside a couple of hundred meters up only to vanish into the ground behind the mounds. They carried enough water down from the Highlands to power the whole reclamation site.

Joona told him the site had grown up from a single aluminum plant that had been built there in the twentieth century to take advantage of the hydro power. As the Brussels parliament of that time slowly started to introduce stricter legislation governing recycling, the plant had expanded, with subsidiaries springing up to reclaim other types of materials. Now almost all of Earth’s consumer products were designed so that at the end of their lives they could be broken down into their constituent elements, which were then fed back into the start of the manufacturing cycle.

Fort William handled just about every breakdown procedure, from the original aluminum cans to electronic components, glass to concrete, and the whole spectrum of polymers. One of the most modern facilities of its kind in the world, it employed everything from smelters, catalytic crackers and v-written enzyme digestion right up to ionic fission for toxics. Junk from all over Europe arrived by train, ship and canal barge to be sorted and extracted.

“I guess there’s not much pollution these days,” he said.

“Not in the industrialized nations, no, not after the Greenwave. Even the nonindustrial regions like Africa and Southern Eurasia are relatively clean as well. It’s not in the corporate interest to foul up their future territory.”

“Joona, you’ve got to stop looking at everything so cynically. Just because people have different goals from yours doesn’t automatically make them evil.”

“Really?” She gestured down the glen. “One day if they have their way the whole world will be just like this. Everyone living in their big cozy house in their tidy suburban estate.”

“Yeah, terrible. Imagine that, everybody having to put up with low crime and good medical benefits.”

“But no freedom. No difference. Just the corporations and their uniculture.”

“That’s bull,” he said. “People have been complaining about multinational companies and creeping globalism since the middle of the twentieth century. The world still looks pretty varied to me.”

“Superficially it is. But the underlying trend is unification. National economies are becoming identical, and it’s all due to the corporations.”

“Fine by me. I have no objection to them investing money in poor countries and spreading their manufacturing base. It gives everyone a chance to buy a stake.”

“There is no chance. If you want to get any kind of decent job, then you have to join up. And once you’re in, so’s your family.”

“Your family benefits from the stake, yes. You get a say in what school your kids go to, everybody receives medical benefits, there’s a good pension at the end. Stakeholding is a great social development. It involves, motivates and rewards.”

“It destroys individuality.”

“Taking a stake is the choice of the individual.”

“A forced choice.”

“Life choices usually are. Look at me, I took my stake in Z-B because it’s the only one with a decent policy on interstellar flight. Other companies have different priorities, the choice is endless.”

Joona shook her head wearily. “I will never sell myself out for a fancy house and full medical coverage.”

She was rejecting everything her mother was a part of, he realized. “Then I’m happy for you. Your principles make you what you are. And that I like.”

She gave him a brief grin, and sat up. “Come on, not much farther now.”

After the last zigzag in the path, they were walking over a vast field of loose stone. The route ahead was easy enough to see through the thickening mist; a thousand footsteps had worn the thick covering of snow down to a compacted slushy brown trail. As they moved forward, the mist became patchy, with the wind propelling it along. Nothing else seemed to change. The path was the same ahead as it was behind. Occasionally, large boulders poked up through the snow. Other people on the path would appear as dark shadows in the brightly lit vapor before resolving into focus.

Abruptly, the ground fell away. They were standing at the top of a cliff. The base was invisible in the mist below.

“Almost there,” Joona said cheerfully.

A few hundred meters brought them to the top of the Ben. Lawrence held back on his disappointment. It was just a flat uninspiring patch of snow-covered ground close to another section of the cliff. The mist meant they couldn’t see more than fifty meters. Over the centuries there had been several structures built around the concrete survey marker that was the absolute pinnacle. Broken walls of stone protruded from the snow, outlining these ambitions of the past. Not one of them had a roof. The only intact building was a rescue center, a modern composite igloo that had a red cross on the side, and a small aerial protruding from the top. It was almost buried by snow. Lawrence spotted several small flat stones that had been laid carefully against it. When he bent to examine one he saw an inscription had been scratched on the surface. A couple of lines of poetry that he didn’t recognize, then a name, and two dates, ninety-seven years apart.

“Not a bad place to be remembered in,” he muttered.

They made their way over to the survey marker and climbed up it, just so they could say they had actually reached the top. The mist was starting to thin out when they made their way over to one of the collapsed walls where other walkers were huddled. Once they hunched down out of the wind they opened their lunchboxes. Jackie had packed them some thick beef sandwiches. Lawrence wasn’t particularly hungry, the cold had taken his appetite away, but he munched away at one of them anyway.

Then the mist cleared completely and he stood up to look at the view. “Oh wow.” You really could see half of Scotland. Mountains and glens and forests stretched away into a hazy horizon. Long tracts of water sparkled dazzlingly in the brilliant sunshine. He stared at it in a mixture of wonder and hopelessness. How could Amethi ever hope to achieve vistas such as this? All that effort…

Joona cozied up beside him. “When it’s really clear you can see Ireland.”

“Yeah? Have you? Or is that just a local myth for gullible tourists?”

She slapped at him playfully. “I have seen it. Once. A few years back. I don’t come up every day, you know.”

The sun was bright enough to make him squint. And the wind was bringing tears to his eyes.

“Stay here.”

She said it so quietly he thought he was mistaken at first. Then he saw her expression. “Joona… you know I can’t.”

“Yes, you can. We’re that new society you’re looking for, Lawrence. This is where you can have your fresh start. Down there in the glens are free people building their own lives and doing what they want with them.”

“No.” He said it as gently as he could. “This is not for me. I’ve loved being here, especially with you, but I have to go back eventually. I’m too different.”

“You’re not,” she insisted. “Your precious officer college rejected you, and you found us, me. It’s inevitable. You must see that.”

It was that earnestness of hers again. Sometimes it made her the strongest character he’d ever known. But there were occasions when it betrayed a worrying degree of vulnerability. She really didn’t understand what went on around her, insisting on her own interpretations of events.

“Don’t do this,” he said. “We’ve had a great time together, and there’s still another week to go.”

“You have to stay, Lawrence. I love you.”

“Stop it. We’ve only been together a few days.”

“But don’t you see how well you’ve fitted in here?”

“I’m a guest,” he said in exasperation. “What the hell could I do here? Carve statues of Nessie for tourists?”

“You’re a part of our lives. You lived with us. You made love to me. You even ate real food. All of this you welcomed.”

“Joona, I stayed a few days. We’re having a holiday romance, that’s—” His subconscious sent out a disconcerted warning, almost like a physical jolt. “What do you mean I ate real food?”

“Real food.” Her entreating smile never wavered. “Vegetables grown from the soil.”

“Oh shit!” His hand came up to cup his mouth, and he stared aghast at the half-eaten sandwich. “Is this—is this?” He couldn’t even bring himself to ask it. Not that. In his schooldays he’d always been revolted by the notion his ancestors had been forced to farm so they could eat—all the history class had.

“Aberdeen Angus beef,” she said. “The best there is.”

“Is it real?” he yelled.

“Well, yes,” she said, oblivious to his horror. “Old Billy Stirling keeps a herd of them down past Onich. He slaughters a couple every month. There’s quite a demand for it from the crofters. Gran always gets her meat from him.”

Lawrence’s legs gave way, pitching him forward. He vomited onto the snow, his whole stomach heaving violently. The spasms lasted for ages. Even when there was nothing left to bring up, his muscles were trying to squeeze out the last drops of acidic juices.

Finally, when he was through, he was on all fours with his limbs shaking unsteadily. He scooped up some snow and wiped it across his forehead, then tried to chew it to take the taste from his mouth.

“What’s the matter?” Joona asked.

“What?” He looked up to see her frowning in concern. Several other walkers had come over to see if they needed help. “Did you say what’s the matter?”

“Yes.” She looked confused.

“You gave me a piece of a fucking animal to eat, and you ask me what the fucking matter is. An animal! A living creature. You’re fucking crazy, that’s my problem. You fucking… oh hell. How long have I been eating this shit?”

Her expression became pained. “You’ve lived our life with us, Lawrence. What did you think we ate?”

“Fuck it.” He thought he was going to vomit again. The muscle reflex was certainly there, the inside of his mouth sopping wet, but by now there really was nothing left to bring up. He smeared some more snow against his head and slowly rose to his feet.

“Lawrence.” Her voice was urgent, becoming shrill. She held out a hand to steady him.

He twisted from her reach. “Stay away from me. You hear? Stay away, for fuck’s sake.” He stumbled away from her, then managed to get his legs under control and picked up speed. Joona took a few paces toward him. “Lawrence!” she cried. “Lawrence, I love you. You can’t go.”

He started jogging down the track of compacted snow. “Don’t call. Don’t come after me. It’s over.” He stopped and turned to face her. “Over! Do you understand that? It’s over. And I am leaving.” He glared at their small bemused audience. “Thank you, and good-bye.”

By now he’d regained almost full coordination. He ran. Ran down to the zigzag section of the path. Slowed slightly as he pounded over the slippery loose rocks and scree. Kept on jogging until he was long past the stream running down the cleft. Even then, when he was exhausted and dizzy from effort and shock, he kept moving fast along the final descent.

He took his bicycle from the rack at the visitor center, and pedaled to the train station in town. From there he caught the late-afternoon train to Glasgow. Changed for Edinburgh Waverley, where he could get an express to Paris. He had to wait two days in the French capital until there was a seat on a Z-B flight back to Cairns. He spent most of it drunk, moving from café to café in the old artists’ quarter, trying to blot out the memory of the mad-woman and everything he’d eaten at the cottage.

He never tried to contact Joona again. There was never any message from her, either.