CHAPTER THREE

Lawrence Newton never saw a cloud until he was twelve years old. Until then, Amethi's light-time skies had been an unblemished azure from horizon to horizon. When the planet's orbit around its gas-giant primary, Nizana, eventually propelled it into dark-time and the stars came out, they would burn with a steadiness unnatural for any atmosphere, so clear was the frigid air. And with Templeton, the capital where young Lawrence lived, on the hemisphere that permanently faced away from Nizana, he never realized it was possible for anything exciting to exist overhead. In terms of landscape and environment, Amethi was crushingly boring. Nothing moved above, nothing grew on the icy tundra.

To the McArthur Corporation, whose exploratory starship the Renfrew discovered it in 2098, such conditions were perfect In the late twenty-first century, interstellar expansion was at its height, with the big companies and financial consortia funding dozens of colonies. Any planet with an oxygen/ nitrogen atmosphere was being claimed and settled. But these ventures were expensive. The alien biospheres that had produced that precious blend of breathable gases were inevitably hostile and poisonous to terrestrial organisms, some immediately fatal. Establishing human communities amid such conditions was extremely costly. Not so Amethi.

For all it was technically a moon, Amethi's evolution had been fairly standard for a world of its size. It started normally, with a reducing atmosphere that slowly changed as life began to emerge from primordial seas. Primitive organisms that could photosynthesize released oxygen. Carbon was consumed by new lichens and amoebas. An unremarkable cycle that was repeated across the universe wherever such conditions occurred.

Evolution was progressing along standard lines until the asteroid was drawn in by Nizana's immense gravity field. Two hundred million years after the first primitive amoebas began fissioning, the seas were full of fish; plants had established themselves across the land. There were big insects with thistledown wings, and even small creatures not far removed from terrestrial amphibian genealogy. They all died in the aftermath.

The impact explosion threw up enough dust and steam to obscure the entire surface. In doing so, it triggered the ultimate ice age. The glaciers that thrust out from the polar caps in the aftermath encroached farther and farther through the temperate zone until they actually merged at the equator. Seas, oceans and lakes surrendered their water to the single megaglacier as it continued to expand. Temperature plummeted right across the planet, combining with the water loss and darkened atmosphere to eliminate all forms of life except the most resilient bacteria. Amethi returned to an almost primordial state. But now with a fifth of the surface covered in ice to a depth of several kilometers, and the remainder a desert that was Mars-like in its desolation, there was no potential catalyst left to precipitate change. It had become a world trapped in stasis. The isolock.

For the McArthur board members Amethi was perfection, an existing breathable atmosphere and no indigenous life. All that was needed was a slight rise in global temperature to end the isolock and restart a normal meteorological cycle.

Templeton was founded in 2115. At first it was nothing more than a collection of prefabricated igloos with a single track linking it to a runway bulldozed into the frozen dunes. The engineers and administrators who lived there were tasked with establishing a manufacturing base that would be self-sustaining, the idea being that once the initial investment was made, all you needed to do was shovel in local raw materials at one end and ultimately any product you wanted would pop out the other. After that, the only imports would be people and new designs to upgrade and expand the first few factories. Information cost nothing to transport between stars, while people would buy their own tickets to a new land with immense opportunities.

Over the first three years, spaceplanes ferried down their cargo from eight starship flights. At the end of it, industrial facilities in heavily insulated factories could supply most of the burgeoning colony's needs. But not all. There were always a few specialist systems or chemicals essential for the economy or special projects that only Earth with its abundant production facilities could provide. Time after time Temple-ton's governor sent back requests for additional units to be flown out, without which the whole project would stall.

The financial strain that Amethi placed on McArthur wasn't as bad as that for most other colony worlds, where human biochemists fought desperate battles against alien biospheres. Here there was just HeatSmash, the climate project, to initiate. Templeton's first indigenous industrial undertaking was to establish an orbital manufacturing station, Tarona. With that up and running in 2140—after nearly a third of its systems had been shipped in from Earth—they began local production of asteroid capture propulsion engines. Nizana had so much junk rock strewn around in orbit it could have provided HeatSmash with enough material to reheat a dozen worlds. The inaugural impact came in 2142, when a lump of stony iron rock measuring eighty meters across smacked right into the center of Barclay's glacier.

The explosion vaporized nearly a cubic kilometer of water and melted a considerably larger quantity. It had refrozen within a week. The steam clouds never even reached the edge of the glacier before they condensed into bullet-hard snow-flakes and rained down.

Once the planetary engineers had correlated all the data from their sensors, they estimated that the atmosphere would have reheated sufficiently to induce and sustain glacial melt after 111 years of one impact per year, involving asteroids four times the mass of the test impact. With this mildly favorable prognosis, the colonists set about building their new world. By the time Lawrence Newton was born in 2310, economic and social changes on the old homeworld had modified the nature of the colony. Although the physical task of terraforming the world had progressed without interruption, it was no longer a destination for exultant pioneers searching for a little homestead amid a wilderness that was slowly being resurrected.

* * *

The big school bus rolled easily along Templeton's main north highway, fat tires clinging to the grubby concrete with its lacework of fine cracks. Twenty-five kids, aged nine to twelve, chattered excitably or threw crumpled biscuit wrappers at each other before ducking down behind their seats to avoid retaliation. Mr. Kaufman and Ms. Ridley, their teachers, sat up at the front, doing their best to ignore what was going on behind. They'd left the school dome only ten minutes ago; it was going to be a long day.

Lawrence was sitting midway along the bus. The seat next to him went unoccupied. It wasn't that he didn't have friends at school; he did, as well as several cousins and a tribe of more distant relatives. He just didn't have any close friends. Teachers described him as restless. He was clever enough, naturally, given he was a Newton, but that intelligence was never quite captured by any of his academic subjects. Report after report filed with his parents had the age-old comment: can do better. In the competitive environment of the school, where application and achievement received the highest accolades, he was too different to fit in comfortably. Not quite a rebel—he was still too young for that classification—but there were plenty of danger signs that he could fall into the dropout category if something wasn't done fairly soon. It was an almost unknown development among Amethi's well-ordered population. For a member of a Board family it was unthinkable.

So he sat by himself ignoring the antics of his peers, watching the city go by outside. On either side of the highway were drab curving walls of nullthene; huge sheets of the ultrathin translucent gray membrane from which the city domes were made. The standard size was four hundred meters across, produced in one piece by the McArthur factory, and wholly indigenous. Relatively cheap, and simple to establish, it was used by every town and city on the planet. All you needed was a flat patch of land over which to spread it The sheet had a built-in hexagonal web of slim tubing made from buckyfilament carbon (extruded up at Tarona) that was pumped full of epoxy. The resultant force was enough to lift the lightweight nullthene off the ground like some giant balloon that never quite managed to become airborne. The edges had to be buried hurriedly as the membrane's molecular structure had been designed to act as a near-perfect heat trap. Air inside quickly warmed to temperate and even tropical temperatures, exerting quite a lifting pressure from within. Large circulation and thermal exchange units (also built locally) were installed around the edge, helping to maintain the required climate inside. Once the dome was up and regulated, all that was needed to reinvigorate the soil was water and terrestrial bacteria, and it was ready for planting.

Right at the heart of the city, most of the domes were communal. Above average in size at six hundred meters in diameter, they had a single apartment block skyscraper in the center, acting as an additional support for the vaulting surface. Inside, rich parkland had been established around the skyscrapers, complete with artificial lakes and streams. Nobody outside top-level management used cars to get about within the city; the domes were all linked by a comprehensive rail transit network. The only vehicles on the road with the school bus were twenty-wheel juggernauts, agroform machinery, and civil engineering trucks, all of them cheerfully pumping hihydrogen fuel fumes out into the atmosphere.

Factories filled the gaps between the dome rims, squat bunkers built from glass and aluminum. Encrustations of dust streaked the big panes, built up over years as heat and moisture creeping out of the city structures loosened up the frozen ground. Even here, the air suffered as it did in every human city, a pollution of particles and vapor that hadn't known freedom for a hundred thousand years, churned up by the whirling zephyrs thrown off by the trains and road vehicles and dome circulation fans—for decades, the only wind on the whole planet. But it allowed plants to flourish. All along the side of the road, Lawrence could see tufts of dark green grass clogging the ruddy native soil. There were even little fissures where free water had on occasion run, fed by trickles of condensation along badly insulated panels or tattered slits in the nullthene.

Farther out from the city center, food refineries began to replace the domes—industrial sites the size of small towns where pressure tanks and enzyme breeder towers and protein convectors were woven together with a maze of thick, insulated pipes. Hot vapor shivered the air for hundreds of meters above the dulled metal surfaces as small fusion plants pumped their megawatts into the elaborate processes that kept Amethi's human population alive. Each refinery had its own quarry, huge vertical-walled craters gouged deep into the frozen soil by AS-driven bulldozers. Caravans of big utility trucks trundled up and down the pitside ramps all day long, bringing hundreds of tons of elusive, rare minerals to the catalytic furnaces.

The trans-Rackliff Basin pipe ended somewhere on this side of the city, too. It stretched a quarter of the way around the planet to the Barclay's glacier runoff, bringing that essential component of life: water. It was actually cheaper to pump it in than to melt it out of local soil. Both the domes and the refineries were greedy consumers.

Lawrence watched the various human enterprises that made up the city with detached interest, visualizing how Templeton and its peripherals must look from space. Some weird plastic flower seventy kilometers in diameter that had blossomed on this barren alien world as the atmosphere warmed. One day it would burst, the nullthene membranes ripping open in the wind so that the terrestrial spawn nurtured within could be flung out across the entire planet Only with that kind of image did he ever begin to appreciate the enormity of the undertaking that was his homeworld. It was the endless statistics and enhanced images that he could never get his head around, everything the school felt impelled to provide and emphasize.

Out past the last of the refineries, the tundra extended away to the sharp horizon—dirty vermilion soil broken only by rocks and ancient crumbling gullies. Swaths of darkness cut through it at random. When Barclay's Glacier formed, sucking the moisture out of the air and sending the temperature plummeting, the forests were still standing. Their trees had long since died from the cold and lack of light, but the slumbering glacier calmed the air rather than enraging it. There were no winds or sandstorms to abrade the sturdy trunks. The scatterings of moisture left in the soil turned to ice, transforming the surface into a hard concrete mantle, keeping a possessive grip on sand and dust particles.

In the centuries after the glacier formed, Amethi's dead, blackened plants stayed resolutely upright in the still air. Time alone aged them, for there were no elements anymore. Over a hundred thousand years, even petrified wood lost its strength. They corroded slowly, snowing ebony flakes onto the surrounding soil until enough had been shed to make the whole unstable. Then the entire brittle pillar would crack, tumbling over to shatter as if made from antique black glass. More often than not, in the denser forests, they would bring down a couple of their neighbors, initiating cascades of devastation. Where the forests once stood were now areas where the soil was blanketed with low black dunes of congealed grit.

The children quietened at last as this new landscape unwound beyond the bus; here was where their future was birthing with pained deliberation. The first delicate effects of the HeatSmash were proudly visible. Crevices and tiny rills in the hard ground were host to tiny arctic plants. They were all heavily v-written for this world, to endure not only its coldness but also the long light-times and dark-times. Plants that grew above Earth's Arctic Circle through long wearisome days and equally oppressive nights had the closest environmental conditions to those on Amethi. This meant their genes needed the least amount of viral modification to withstand the hostility of this frigid wilderness.

Several of them boasted flowers, tiny dainty coral trumpets or golden starbursts. The most significant accomplishment of the geneticists had been modifying the pollination cycle so that the spores were expelled by ripening anthers into the quiescent air. A haze light enough to drift on Amethi's minimalist breezes, little more than a draft of perfume, yet eradicating the necessity of insects. None of these perennials had needed nurturing in greenhouses and planting out; they were self-set. The first naked terrestrial colonists.

While dark bottle-greens flourished in the earth's crannies, dry-rubber blotches of sulfur yellow and cinnamon brown encrusted exposed rock, from entire cliff faces down to pebbles scattered amid the carbon dunes of the old forests. The lichens that were first spread across Amethi's continents from high-flying robot aircraft in order to kick-start the new ecological cycle, expanded now as never before in the rush of warmth and rising humidity.

Lawrence liked the color invasion stampeding across the bleak tundra. It signaled an astonishing level of achievement. Fundamentally reassuring, that human beings were capable of such visionary endeavor. He began to smile, letting his daydreams build out of the landscape where the impossible was happening. It was easy out here; the demands of his family and school restrictions were falling behind as the bus raced on into the realm of possibilities.

His gaze drifted around and up. He squinted, suddenly alert. Hot urgent hands wiped the bus window where his breath was steaming it up, despite the insulative quality. There. In the sky, something very strange was moving. He knocked on the glass to try to show people where they should look. Then, realizing nobody would ever listen to him, he put his hand up above the window and found the red emergency handle. Without hesitating, he tugged it down hard.

Antiskid brakes engaged as the AS driver program brought the bus to a halt as fast as its engineering parameters would allow. A signal was flashed to the Templeton traffic authority, putting emergency services on immediate recovery standby. Sensors inside and outside the vehicle were reviewed for any sign of abnormality. Nothing was found, but the human/manual intervention was not one the AS could ignore. The bus continued its abrupt deceleration, engine and gearbox whining sharply in mechanical alarm. Kids were hauled back hard into their seats as the safety webbing contracted. Yells and screams ran the length of the aisle. Mr. Kaufman lost hold of his coffee cup and biscuit as he cried: "Fatesbloody-sake..."

A second later the bus was motionless and silent, a state almost as alarming as the sudden braking. Then the horn started a repetitive bleat, and amber hazard strobes on the front and back blazed away. Mr. Kaufman and Ms. Ridley gave each other a frantic uncomprehending look and slapped at their web release buttons. The red light above one of the emergency stop handles was flashing urgently. Mr. Kaufman never got a chance to ask whose seat it was before Lawrence was running past him to the front door, which had popped open automatically. The boy was zipping up the front of his baggy coat.

"What...?" Ms. Ridley blurted.

"It's outside!" Lawrence yelled. "In the air. It's in the air!"

"Wait."

She was yelling at nothing. He had already jumped down the steps onto the highway. The other kids wanted a piece of the action; they were laughing wildly, shock already fading as they dashed after Lawrence. They formed a big group standing on the sandy verge. Coats were hurriedly zipped up and hands stuffed into gloves as the bitter air nipped exposed skin. Lawrence stood a little way ahead of them, searching around for the bizarre shape he'd seen. There were several titters behind him as the wait grew.

"There!" he shouted. His finger pointed westward. "There. Look."

The rebuke Mr. Kaufman had been forming died away. A patch of tufty white cloud was floating serenely through the air, the only blemish in a perfect bright azure sky. Silence fell over the kids as they watched the implausible miracle.

"Sir, why doesn't it fall?"

Mr. Kaufman stirred himself. "Because the density is equal to the air at that altitude."

"But it's solid."

"No." He smiled. "It just looks like it is. Remember when we looked at Nizana through the telescope relay and you could see the clouds that made up the storm bands. They were flowing. This is the same, but a lot smaller."

"Does that mean there are going to be storms here, sir?"

"Eventually, yes. But don't worry, they'll be a lot smaller, too."

"Where did it come from?"

"Barclay's glacier, I suppose. You've all seen the pictures of the runoff. This is one of the results. You're going to be seeing a lot more as you grow up." He let them stare at the harbinger for a while longer, then shooed them back onto the bus.

Lawrence was last up the steps, reluctant to abandon his remarkable discovery. And there was also the inevitable censure to face...

The teachers were a lot more lenient than he expected. Ms. Ridley said she understood how strange the cloud was, but he must ask permission to ever do anything like that again. Mr. Kaufman gave a gruff nod, enforcing everything she said.

Lawrence went and sat down as the bus moved forward again. The rest of the kids forgot their games to chatter in an animated fashion about what they'd just seen. Already, this was the best ecology field trip ever. Lawrence joined in occasionally with a few observations and speculations, his discovery giving him kudos previously not experienced. Mainly, though, he tried to keep tracking the cloud through the bus window.

He couldn't stop thinking about the journey it had made. Traveling halfway around the world, with so much unknown territory laid out below it How ridiculous that a cloud had seen more of Amethi than he ever had. Lawrence wanted to be up there with it, soaring over the land and empty seabeds, swooping down to zoom along the crumbling edge of Barclay's glacier where he could see the runoff, a waterfall as long as a continental shoreline. How fabulous that would be. But here he was, stuck in a bus on his way to a poxy slowlife farm, learning about ecology when at some other school he could be learning how to fly. It just wasn't fair.

The slowlife farm was, like all Amethi's industrial facilities, an uninspiring glass and aluminum box. It was situated all by itself on the side of a gentle valley, with an empty river course meandering away below it. The arctic plants were particularly prolific along the low slopes, clustering thickly on the silt bed itself.

Several of the kids remarked on it when they scuttled from the bus to the warmth of the factory. Lawrence was still trying to see the cloud, which had disappeared off to the north some time ago. The lobby's big outer doors swung shut, and a gust of air washed over the group. They'd all been expecting that. The thermal trap lobby was standard across Amethi, a giant leaky airlock arrangement with thermal recyclers instead of vacuum pumps to prevent temperature drop in the domes. Here, there didn't seem much point. The factory was nothing like as warm as any of the city domes, barely a couple of degrees above freezing. They all kept their coats sealed up.

The supervisor came out to meet them, dressed in padded purple coveralls with a tight-fitting hood. Mrs. Segan, who with her three coworkers ran the whole operation. She tried hard not to show how annoyed she was with another bunch of kids touring around and screwing up her timetable.

"What you're going to see here today has no analogue in nature," she told them as they made their way into the building. This first zone seemed more factory than farm, with dark metal corridors lined with sealed glass windows that looked in on vats of some kind. "We grow fatworms here. I'd like to say breed, but the truth is, every one of these creatures is cloned." She stopped beside a window. The room beyond was filled with racks of trays, filled with a clotted jelly similar to frogspawn. "All slowlife is completely artificial; its DNA was designed for us by the Fell Institute in Oxford, back on Earth. As you know, the more complex an organism is, the more prone to illness and other problems it becomes. Therefore, fatworms are kept very simple indeed. The principal biological streamlining is their complete lack of reproductive ability. That's also very useful to us, as they are only needed for this stage of the terraforming process. They've got a lifetime of about ten years, so when we stop making them, they'll die out." She held up a jar of the jelly substance, handing it to the closest boy. "Pass that around, and please don't breathe on it. All slowlife is optimized to function at subzero temperature; your breath is like a flame to them."

When it came to Lawrence all he could see was a mass of translucent eggs with a pinhead of darkness at the center of each. They didn't quiver or shake about as if they were about to burst open—which would have been something. Boring.

Mrs. Segan took them through into the farm's main rearing arena, a long hall with rows of big rectangular plastic boxes separated by raised metal grid walkways. Pipes overhead sprayed gloopy fluid into each of the open boxes with short regular pulses. The air smelled of crushed grass and sugar.

"Each of the fatworms is essentially a miniature bacteria reactor," Mrs. Segan said as she led them along one of the walkways. "We place them on a new section of tundra and they burrow their way through the ground chewing the dead vegetable matter in the soil. When it comes out, it's suffused with the bacteria that lives in their gut. This prepares the ground for terrestrial plants, which all need the bacteria in the soil to live on."

The kids all leaned over the side of the box she indicated, their interest suddenly regained with the prospect of creatures that could poo out fungus and stuff. A glistening mass of oyster-gray fatworms covered the bottom of the box, squirming slowly: they were about fifteen centimeters long, a couple wide. Everyone oohed and yucked as they pulled rictus grimaces at the slimy minimonsters.

"Is that why they're called slowlife?" someone asked. "Coz they don't move fast?"

"Partly," Mrs. Segan said. "The temperature they encounter outside means they don't have a particularly fast metabolism, which makes their physical motion correspondingly slow. Their blood is based on glycerol so they can keep moving through the coldest ground without freezing solid."

Lawrence sighed impatiently as she droned out long statistics, then started to explain about other slowlife forms. Some were like fish, swimming in the snow-slush runoff rivers round Barclay's glacier; others were distant relatives of caterpillars, munching their way across the huge dunes of carbon granules left behind by Amethi's original forests. He glanced down into the big box again. It was a bunch of worms wriggling around sluggishly. So what? Who in Fate cared what grubbed around under the soil? Why didn't they come up with birds or something interesting? Dinosaurs maybe.

Mrs. Segan moved on, the group buzzing along behind her. Lawrence trailed at the rear. He craned his neck back, looking through the farm's grimy glass roof to see if the cloud had returned. The next thing he knew, he'd tripped on some ridge in the walkway, and went flailing onto his back. One scrabbling hand caught a shallow plastic bin, and when he landed painfully a whole bunch of fully grown fatworms were dropping on top of him.

He rolled away from them quickly, disgust overriding the pain along his jarred spine. These adults were some forty centimeters long, seven or eight in diameter. Their tips waved about blindly. Lawrence clambered to his feet, automatically checking the position of the teachers. Nobody had actually seen him fall. He looked down at the fatworms, the only evidence. Gingerly, telling himself they weren't in the slightest bit dangerous, he groped down and tried to pick one up. It was revoltingly cold and slimy, with a texture like sodden carpet, but he managed to grip it tight. As he lifted it up, the slight wavering motion began to speed up. Instead of putting it back in the bin, he held on and watched. After a while the fatworm was almost thrashing. He dropped it back down onto the floor, and it slithered off along the walkway. There was a claret-colored patch around its midsection where his hand had been. "All right," he murmured. "Not so slow after all." Which was logical. They were slow in the cold; therefore they'd be fast in the warmth.

He scuttled after the group. "Alan," he hissed. "Hey, Alan. Come and look at this."

Alan Cramley stopped munching on his Toby bar, curious about the furtive tone. "What?"

Lawrence took him back to the adult fatworms and showed him. They quickly turned the discovery into a challenge. Pick up the fatworms in tandem and hold them for thirty seconds, then drop them on the walkway and see which reaches the end of the grid first. In the end they were holding on to two each, turning it into a real race.

"What exactly is going on here?" Mr. Kaufman demanded.

Lawrence and Alan hadn't seen him approach from a walkway intersection. He was staring down at the four fat-worms twisting their way across the metal. Several of the other kids were behind him, and Mrs. Segan was scurrying up, anxious to see what the fuss was about.

"I knocked a bin over, sir, and we were trying to pick them up," Lawrence said, holding out his icy hands as proof. Slime dripped from white, cold-crinkled fingertips. "I'm really sorry."

Mr. Kaufman was frowning, not fully convinced.

"Don't touch them," Mrs. Segan called urgently. She slipped past Mr. Kaufman, pulling on a pair of thick gauntlets. "Remember what I told you about them being adapted to the cold."

Lawrence and Alan traded a look.

Mrs. Segan picked up the first fatworm. Her eyes narrowed as she took in the big red mark around its middle. She took it over to the nearest bin. "What have you done?" she yelled. All the fatworms inside had the same red mark. None of them were moving. She hurried to the next bin, and gasped. In the third bin there were some fatworms left undulating slowly; Lawrence and Alan hadn't raced all of them yet. She whirled around. Lawrence took a step back, afraid she'd strike him. Her face was rigid with fury. "You burned them all, you little..." She turned to Mr. Kaufman. "Tour's over. Get these brats out of here."

Lawrence had taken over the robot garage several years ago. The compact tracked machines that originally tended to the elaborate gardens of his family's domes had been replaced by newer, more efficient models when they upgraded their AS groundskeeper program. He'd found the old concrete ramp in the middle of a clump of copper-flowering bushes that had been allowed to expand and merge into a shaggy wall now the entrance was no longer needed. At the base of the ramp was a swing-up door with stiff old lever arms. It took a commendable amount of effort and persistence for a nine-year-old to prize it open, but Lawrence did it, to be rewarded with a musty concrete cave stretching out ahead of him for a good ten meters. Its roof was less than two meters from the ground, and it had strange metal tracks bolted to the floor, walls and ceiling where waldo arms had once run. But there was still power, and a data node.

Since then it had become his den. He'd moved in life's essentials, cluttering it with a dilapidated magenta-colored leather settee, piles of cushions, a couple of tables, an old-model desktop pearl, a sound system with a decibel level that most hard-rock bands would envy, two active memory towers his father had salvaged from the office for him, an eclectic array of tools and boxes of toys he never played with. He'd tacked sheet screens over the walls and even part of the ceiling. A mosaic of images played as soon as the door was opened, some from the memory towers while others broadcast live camera feeds from the datapool.

It was a grand refuge from his family and the rest of Amethi. Even his four younger siblings knew to stay out unless he explicitly invited them in.

He'd gone there as soon as he got back after the ecology field trip. The sheet screens were showing several images of Templeton from cameras mounted on the apex of various domes. One of them showed Nizana's bright crescent, relayed from a near-side school's astronomy department telescope. Another was a telescope tracking Barric, the third-largest moon.

Lawrence told the desktop pearl to find a spaceport feed and switch it to the biggest sheet screen, the one hanging opposite the sofa, which took up half the wall. The camera must have been sited on the control tower: it showed the thick gray runway stabbing out across the bleak rusty-colored tundra. Nothing was landing or taking off.

"Get me a Flight: Horizon episode," he instructed the pearl.

"Which one?" it's AS program asked.

"Doesn't matter. No. Wait. Series one, episode five: 'Creation-5.' I want third person with the edit I chose last time. Put it on the big screen, and close down the others." He flopped into the settee and stuck his feet up on the armrest. The remaining sheet screens blacked out. Right in front of him the credits started to roll and the soundtrack kicked in, making the thin screens tremble.

He'd found Flight: Horizon two years ago when he sent an askping through the catalogues of Amethi's multimedia companies; as far as he was concerned it was the greatest science fiction series ever made. Not fully i, but it allowed personae selection so the episode could be viewed from any of the principal characters' viewpoint. And it wasn't educational like all of Amethi's i-dramas aimed at the youth audience.

Set hundreds of years in the future, it featured the amazingly cool starship Ultema, which had been sent to explore a section of the spiral arm halfway round the galaxy from Earth: several of the crew were alien, and the weird planets they visited were superbly scary. They were also facing some awesome evil aliens, the Delexians, who wanted to prevent them from getting home. It had been imported from Earth thirty years ago, though the copyright was 2287. There were only thirty episodes in the multimedia company's library, and Lawrence knew them so well now he could almost recite the dialogue from memory. He couldn't believe that was all that had been made. The Earth datapool address of the show's fanclub was tagged in the expanded features menu of every episode, so he'd paid a starship carriage fee and sent them a text message asking for more information. Every time a star-ship arrived back at Amethi he checked its communication AS, but they'd never sent him a reply.

The Ultema was locked in a gigantic energy battle against a blue dwarf star that the Delexians had imprinted with a sentience matrix when a green priority script icon opened in the center of the sheet screen. The starship froze, and the script scrolled down.

Lawrence, please come to your father's study.

He checked the clock. Quarter to six. His father had been back home ten minutes. Mr. Kaufman hadn't wasted any time filing his report package. "Gimme the study pearl," he said to the den's AS.

"I have it online," the AS said.

"I'm busy right now," Lawrence said. He pushed some injured annoyance into the tone. The AS running in the study's desktop pearl was smart.

"Lawrence, please, I accessed the message from your school and prioritized it. Your father wants to see you now."

He kept silent.

"Do you want me to bring your father into this conversation on real time?"

"All right." Grudgingly. "I'm coming, I suppose. But you have to explain to the school AS why my homestudy is short tonight."

"You're not doing homestudy."

"I am. I just have Flight: Horizon on as background."

Lawrence swung the garage door shut behind him and wriggled through the bushes. The garage was near the rim of the main dome, which was approaching the end of summer. There were six of the big structures making up the Newton family estate: the large one in the center with its temperate climate, and five smaller ones ringing it, each with a different environment inside. It was one of the larger estates in the Reuiza District, which was where the capital's wealthiest citizens clustered.

He had a three-hundred-meter walk across the grounds to the house itself. The landscape designer had gone in for split levels, with a chessboard of English manor lawns walled in with near-vertical borders of flowering shrubs and perennials. Each lawn was themed with classical plants: one had roses, one with fuchsia, another had begonias, magnolias, hydrangeas, delphiniums; for variety several lawns were enclosed by rockeries sprouting dozens of alpines. Two serpentine pools led away into shallow rocky cascades with reeds and lilies sprouting from outcrops and shelves in the slope. Tall trees stood above the corner of every lawn, again selected for traditional appearance: willow, spruce, birch, horse chestnut, larch. Each of them had had boughs that drooped, either naturally or by judicious shaping, forming massive verdant skirts that swept the grass. Fabulous adventure caves for small children. Lawrence had enjoyed a lot of summers playing in the gardens, as his siblings did now.

A stream ran through the dome, a rough horseshoe shape around the outside of the formal lawns, where the grass was permitted to grow shaggy and daisies and forget-me-nots flourished. He crossed over a narrow moss-cloaked humpback bridge and walked the flagstone path to the house, going up or down steps at the end of each square lawn. Ahead of him, the Newton residence was a stately home built from a yellow stone, with big bay windows protruding from walls swarmed by honeysuckle. Several peacocks strutted around on the gravel path surrounding the house, long folded tails swishing the pebbles about. Their mad penetrating cackle-cry was virtually the only sound in the dome. They scattered as Lawrence crossed the path and made his way up the steps to the front door.

The entrance hall inside was cool. Heavy polished oak doors opened into the formal ground-floor rooms. Their furnishings and decorations were all exquisite antique pieces. Lawrence hated them; he was frightened to go into any of the rooms for fear of breaking some priceless chunk of the family's precious heritage. What was the point of having a house like this? Nobody could use it properly, not like the real homes some of his schoolmates had. It cost a fortune to build. And it didn't belong on Amethi anyway. This was how people used to build. It was the past.

A wooden staircase curved up to the second-floor landing. He trotted up it, footfalls absorbed by the dark crimson carpet.

His mother was standing at the top, holding two-year-old Veronica on her hip. She gave him a worried look. But then that was Mother, always worried about something. His little sister smiled brightly and held out her hands to him. He grinned and kissed her.

"Oh, Lawrence," his mother said. Her voice carried a unique tone of despair and disapproval that always made him lower his head. It was awful, not being able to look at his own mother. And now he'd upset her again, which was a terrible thing, because she was six months' pregnant. It wasn't that he didn't want another brother or sister, but pregnancy always tired her so much. Whenever he said anything she smiled bravely and said it was why she had married his father, to continue the family line.

Family. Everything was for the family.

"Is he really cross?" Lawrence asked.

"We're both disappointed with you. It was a dreadful thing to do. Imagine treating Barrel like that."

Barrel was one of the family's dogs, a shaggy black Labrador. Lawrence's favorite out of the pack that roamed around the house. They'd grown up together. "It's not the same," he protested. "They're just worms."

"I'm not arguing with you. Go and see your father." With that she turned her back on him and started down the stairs. Veronica gurgled happily, waving.

Lawrence waved back forlornly and walked slowly to the study. The door was open. He knocked on the wooden frame.

Kristina was just coming out. The new junior nanny for the Newton children. She gave Lawrence a sly wink, which lifted his spirits considerably. Kristina was twenty-one and utterly beautiful. He often wondered if he had a crush on her, but wasn't sure how you knew. He certainly thought about her a lot, if that's what qualified. Anyway, crushes were stupid. Beauty aside, it was great when she was on duty: she was fun, and she joined in the games his brothers and sisters played, and she didn't seem to mind what he got up to or how late to bed he was. All his siblings liked her as well, which was fortunate because she wasn't a whole load of use when it came to changing diapers and preparing food and things. Pity she wasn't on duty more often.

Like the rest of the house, the study wasn't for the use of children. There was a high marble fireplace that had never seen any flames other than the holographic variety. A couple of green leather reading chairs. You had to look hard to see any accommodation to modern technology: the two largest oil paintings were actually sheet screens, and the desk diary was a case for a pane. The walls were covered in bookcases holding leather-bound volumes. Lawrence would have loved to open up some of the classics (definitely not the poetry) and read what was inside. But they weren't books to be read, just to be looked at and assigned high dollar values.

"Shut the door," his father ordered.

Sighing, Lawrence did as he was told.

His father was sitting behind the walnut veneer desk, throwing a silver Dansk paperweight from hand to hand. He was Doug, to his friends—and a lot of people in Templeton fought over gaining that classification. In his mid-forties, though his extensive germline v-writing made it difficult to tell. With a lean build and a face to which smiling came easy, he could have passed for twenty-five without too much problem. Rivals on McArthur's Board had mistaken that smile for an easygoing nature, an assumption they never repeated.

"All right," he said. "I'm not going to shout at you, Lawrence. At your age it's just a waste of time. You just curl up into a sulk and let it all wash over you. If I didn't know better I'd say you were hitting puberty."

Lawrence blushed furiously. This wasn't what he was expecting, which was probably why his father was talking in such a fashion.

"Want to tell me what happened today?"

"I was just messing about," Lawrence said, making sure there was plenty of regret in his voice. "They were only worms. I didn't know getting them hot could kill them. I didn't mean to do it."

"Only worms. Humm." Doug Newton stopped throwing the paperweight and stared at the ceiling as if lost in deep thought. "That would be the same fatworms that are vital for preparing our ecology, would it?"

"Yes, but they clone millions of them in there every day."

The paperweight was tossed between his hands again. "That's not the point, son. This is just the latest episode in a very long line. You're twelve. I can put up with you misbehaving and slacking off at school; it comes naturally at your age. That's why teachers send us reports; so we can make you do your homestudy and ground you when you pee on the security cameras at the museum. What I don't like is the pattern that's developing here. Lawrence, you show a disturbing lack of respect for everything we're doing on this world. It's as if resurrecting the ecology doesn't matter to you. Don't you want to be able to walk outside the domes in just a T-shirt and shorts? Don't you want to see grass bloom on the deserts and watch forests grow?"

"Course I do." He was still smarting over the peeing remark. He hadn't known his father had heard about that.

"Then why don't you show that? Why don't your actions betray these thoughts? Why are you being such a total pain in the ass these days, and incidentally upsetting your mother who happens to be pregnant and is in no condition to be worried by your absurd antics?"

"I do think it. I saw a cloud today."

"And pulled the emergency stop on the bus. Yes, most impressive."

"It was fantastic. I really loved that part of the ecology."

"Well, that's a start, I suppose."

"It's just... I know how important HeatSmash is for Amethi, and I really admire everything McArthur is doing here. But it doesn't apply to me as much as it does you."

Doug Newton caught the paperweight in his left hand and stared at Lawrence, quirking an eyebrow. "As I recall, we had you v-written for an improved physique and intellect I don't recall specifying traits that allow you to live naked and alone on an unmodified isolocked planet. In fact, I'm pretty sure about that"

"But, Dad, I don't want to live on Amethi. At least not all the time," he added hurriedly. "I want to be a part of McArthur's starflight operations."

"Oh shit."

Lawrence's jaw dropped. He'd never heard his father swear before. He knew now he must be in some pretty deep ... well, shit "Starflight operations?" Doug Newton said. "Has this got anything to do with that stupid show you're always watching?"

"No, Dad. I watch Flight: Horizon because it interests me. It's just a drama show. But that's the kind of thing I want to do. I know I can qualify. I'm doing well in all the subjects you need to get into flight training. I've accessed the application packages and the career structure."

"Lawrence, we're a Board family. Don't you understand that? I sit on McArthur's Board. Me. Your dear old father. I make the decisions when it comes to running this entire planet. That's your future, son. Maybe I haven't emphasized that enough. Maybe I shied away so that you'd grow up as normally as you can, without always having that prospect gnawing away at the back of your mind. But that's the way it is, and I think deep down you know it full well. Maybe that's what's upsetting you. Well, I'm sorry, son, but you're a crown prince in this bright new land of ours. It's not easy, but you gain a hell of a lot more than you lose."

"I can come back and be a Board member. Captaining a starship will be the best sort of training for that"

"Lawrence!" Doug Newton stopped himself, and groaned. "Why do I feel like I'm telling you Father Christmas doesn't exist? Listen to me. I can see how flying a starship looks like the greatest thing ever. But it's not, okay? You go from Amethi to Earth, and then Earth back to here. And that's it Six weeks locked up in a pressurized module with other people's farts and no window. Even calling the staff crew members is a polite lie. People on starships either interface with an AS, or they're mechanics trained in freefall engineering maintenance techniques. You can interface with an AS here in safety and comfort from an office or a park seat. If you do it from a starship cabin for any length of time, your body will suffer. We've got good medicines to cope when your bones thin, your heart muscle decays and your head clogs with every body fluid in existence. They can just about get you through a flight without thinking of suicide—God knows enough of us have done it. I hated going to Earth and back. I was throwing up half the time, I bounced around so much I had more bruises than stepping into a boxing ring can ever give you, and it's impossible to sleep. But a trip back to Earth is a oneshot, people can endure that. If you stay up there ten or fifteen years, even with long planet leave periods, the effects are cumulative. That's just the ordinary damage. It's also a high-radiation-risk profession. Cosmic radiation will tear your DNA to shreds. And all this is the good job; I'm not even going to mention what'll happen to you if you become an engineer who has to go spacewalking. If you think I'm joking, or painting it blacker than it really is, just look up the death rates and life expectancy among crew members. I'll get you access to McArthur's classified personnel files if you want to do it."

"That's not the kind of starflight I'm interested in, Dad. I want to join a starship on a deep exploration mission."

"Really?"

Lawrence didn't like the look of his father's amused smile. It implied some kind of victory. "Yes."

"Find new planets to colonize, make first contact with a sentient alien race, that kind of thing?"

"Yes."

"When you trawled up McArthur's application form for starship crew, did you bother to look up which of our star-ships are dedicated to interstellar exploration? It's in the same information block."

"It doesn't say. That part of operations is all run from Earth." He watched his father's smile widen. "Isn't it?"

"Nothing is run from Earth, son, not since twenty-two eighty-five. In any case, McArthur canceled all interstellar exploration missions in twenty-two thirty. We haven't flown one since, not one. Know why?"

Lawrence didn't believe what he was hearing. It was all part of some fancy ploy to make him study harder at school, or something. "No."

"Too expensive. Starships cost a fortune to build, and a fortune to run. And I do mean fortune. We got nothing in return for scouting around this section of the galaxy. It's an investment black hole."

"We got Amethi!"

"Ah, at last, some pride in your home planet. Yes, we got Amethi; we also had Anyi, Adark and Alagon. That's what twenty-two eighty-five was all about. We had to get rid of them. Colonization costs money that shareholders on Earth will never see a return on. We're never going to make a commercial consumer product and ship it over interstellar distances and sell it for less than it costs to be produced locally. Investment must come from Earth. There was no way McArthur could fund four planets, so we sold three of them to Kyushu-RV and Heizark Interstellar Holdings in merger deals. That canceled a huge part of the debt we were running up, and in parallel with that we divested some other assets to holding companies and reassigned share ownership of the core company to Amethi residents. It was quite innovative really. Several other companies copied us later. The result is that fifty-eight percent of McArthur shares are owned by Amethi residents. The company on Earth, with all its factories and financial services, now exists for one thing, to fund Amethi. It also offers Earth-based shareholders the eventual dividend of emigration—it's like the ultimate benefits and pension scheme."

"But there's so much out there in space we need to see and understand."

"No, there isn't, son," his father said firmly. "Government space agencies sent ships to just about every kind of star there was to collect data right back at the start of the interstellar age. We've examined every stellar anomaly within range and found more planets than the human race can afford to exploit. We've been out there and done it all. That's over, now. This is the time when we benefit from all that knowledge and effort and expense. It's our golden age. Enjoy it."

"I'll go to another company then, join their starship program."

"Hello? This universe calling Lawrence. Did you not hear everything I just said? Son, nobody is exploring anything anymore. There is nothing left to explore. That's why your school concentrates on the courses you'll need to manage Amethi. You have to know what's required to complete the terraforming project. Your future is here, and I want you to start focusing on that, right now. So far I've been tolerant of all this misbehavior, but it ends today. It's time you started measuring up to this family's expectations."