Orbitsville Departure

Chapter 1

They had decided to spend the few hours that remained to them walking in Garamond Park.

Dallen had been there several times before, but on this occasion his senses were heightened by a blend of excitement and apprehension. The sunlight was almost painful and colours seemed artificially intense. Beyond screens of trees the coppery roofs of the city shone with a spiky brilliance, and the nearby shrubs and flowers — gaudy as tropical plumage — seemed to burn in the sun's vertical rays. Lime-green lawns sloped down to the only feature of the scene which gave relief to the eye — a circular black lake roughly a kilometre across. Its nearer edge was obscured in part by low mounds of masonry and metal which were all that remained of an ancient fortification. Small groups of sightseers, their hats shifting ellipses of colour, sat among the ruined walls or wandered on the lake's perimeter path.

"Let's go down there and have a look," Dallen said to his wife, impulsively taking her arm. Cona Dallen held back. "What's wrong? Can't you wait?"

"We're not going to start all that again, are we?" Dallen released her arm. "I thought we had agreed."

"It's ail right for you to…" Cona paused, eyeing him sombrely, then in an abrupt change of mood she smiled and walked down the slope with him, slipping one arm around his waist. She was almost as tall as Dallen and they moved in easy unison. The feel of her body synchronising with his made him think of their prolonged session of love-making that morning. It occurred to him at once that she was deliberately working on him, reminding him of what he was giving up, and he felt a stirring of the resentment and frustration which had periodically marred their relationship for months. He repressed the emotions, making a resolution to get all he could from the hours they had left.

They reached the path, crossed it together and leaned on the safety rail which skirted the dark rim. Dallen, shading his eyes, stared down into the blackness and a moment later he was able to see the stars.

The surrounding brightness affected his vision to the extent that he could pick out only the principal star groupings, but he was immediately inspired with a primeval awe. He had lived all his life on the inner surface of the Orbitsville shell and therefore his only direct looks at the rest of the galaxy had come during his rare visits to this aperture. When I get to Earth he told himself, marvelling, I’ll be able to drink my fill of stars every night…

"I don't like this," Cona said. "I feel I'm going to fall through."

Dallen shook his head. "No danger. The diaphragm field is strong enough to take anybody's weight."

"Meaning?" She gave him a playful shunt with her hips. "Are you suggesting I'm too heavy?"

"Never!" Dallen gave his wife a warm glance, appreciating the good humour with which she faced her weight problems. She was fair-haired and had the kind of neat, absolutely regular features which are often associated with obesity. By careful theting she had usually kept her weight within a few kilos of the ideal, but since the birth of their son three months earlier her struggle had been more difficult.

The thought of Mikel and of leaving him disturbed Dallen's moment of rapport. It had taken him the best part of a year to secure the transfer to Earth, with its consequent promotion to Grade IV officer in the Metagov civil service. Cona had been aware of his plans throughout her pregnancy, but not until after the birth had she revealed her determination to remain behind on Orbitsville. Her overt reason for not accompanying him had been that Mikel was too young for the journey and the drastic change of climate, but Dallen suspected otherwise and his pride was hurt. He knew she was reluctant to leave her ailing father, and also that — as a professional historian — she was deeply committed to her current book on Orbitsville's Judean settlements. The former had allowed no scope for recrimination, but the latter had been the source of many arguments which had been none the less corrosive for being disguised as rational discussion or banter. Being Jewish is like a religion with some people…

Something huge moved in the black depths below Dallen, startling him and causing Cona to jump backwards from the rail. After a second he identified it as an interportal freighter slipping through space only fifty metres or so beneath his feet, like a silent leviathan swimming for the opposite shore of a black lake. His gaze followed the ship until it was lost in the mirages which overlay the more distant parts of the diaphragm field. At the far side of the kilometre-wide aperture was the space terminal where he would soon embark for Earth. Its passenger buildings and warehouses were a dominant feature of the scene, even though the principal installations — the giant docking cradles for starships — projected downwards into the void and were not readily visible.

"This place bothers me," Cona said. "Everything's more natural in Bangor."

Dallen knew she was referring to the fact that their home town of Bangor, 16,000 kilometres into Orbitsville's interior, was situated in Earth-like hilly terrain. Its official altitude was close to a thousand metres, which meant that amount of sedimentary rock had accumulated there in the Orbitsville shell, but Dallen understood that the geological structure counted for little. Without the enclosing skin of ylem, the enigmatic material of which the vast sphere was formed, the inner layer of rock, soil and vegetation would quickly succumb to instabilities and fly apart. It was an uneasy thought, but one which disturbed only visitors and newly arrived settlers. Anybody who had been born on Orbitsville had total faith in its permanence, knew it to be more durable than mere planets.

"We don't have to stay here," Dallen said. "We could try the rose gardens."

"Not yet." Cona fingered the jewel-like recorder which was clipped to her saffron blouse. "I'd like toget some pictures of the Garamond monument. I might want to include one in the book.

You're supposed to be seeing me off — not working, Dallen objected inwardly, wondering if she had brought in the mention of the book to trigger precisely that reaction. Among the things which had attracted him to Cona in the first place was her independence, and he could see that he had no right to try changing the rules of their relationship. It was good that she was self-willed and self-reliant, but — the thought refused to be dismissed — how much better everything would have been had they been going to Earth together, sharing all the new experiences the journey had to offer.

There was, of course, an alternative to his present course, the alternative repeatedly put forward by Cona. All he had to do was delay his transfer by a couple of years, by which time Mikel would be bigger and stronger. Cona would have finished her book by then and would be mentally primed and prepared to enter an exciting new phase of her life.

Dallen was surprised by a sudden cool tingling on his spine. A radical idea was forming in his mind, thrilling him with its total unexpectedness. There was, he had just realised, still enough time in which to change his plans! He could get out of going to Earth merely by not showing up when the flight was called.

Bureaucratic though Metagov departments were, they all recognised- and accepted one fact of human nature — that some people simply could not face the psychological rigours of interstellar travel. Backing down at the last minute and running away so commonplace that there was a slang term for it — the funkbunk — and no passenger's baggage was ever loaded until after he or she had gone aboard.

There was no shame in it, Dallen told himself. No shame in being flexible, in adapting to circumstances the way other people did. He had the opportunity to make a grand, romantic gesture of unselfishness, and there was no need to reveal to anybody, least of all to his wife, that it was actually a supremely selfish act in that it would enable him to hold on to what he cherished.

"Monument. Photograph." Cona wiggled her fingers close to his eyes. "Remember?"

"I'm with you," Dallen said bemusedly, trying to reassemble his internal model of the universe with different building blocks. He walked with Cona along the edge of the aperture to where the path widened into a small semi-circular plaza. Standing at its focus, on the very rim of space, was an heroic bronze of a man wearing a space suit of a design that had been in service two centuries earlier. He had taken off his helmet and was holding it in one hand while, with the other hand shading his eyes, he scanned the horizon. The statue was deservedly famous because its creator had captured a certain expression on the spaceman's face. It was a look of awe combined with peace and fulfilment which struck a responsive chord with all who had had the experience of climbing through an Orbitsville portal from the sterile blackness of space and receiving their first glimpse of the grassy infinites within.

A plaque at the foot of the statue said, simply: VANCE GARAMOND, EXPLORER.

Cona, who had never seen the monument before, said, "I must have a picture." She left Dallen's side and moved away among the knots of sightseers who were standing in the multi-lingual information beams being projected from the statue's base. Dallen, still lost in his own thoughts, advanced until a wash of coloured light flooding into his eyes told him that one of the roving beams had centred itself on his face. There was a barely perceptible delay while the projector stuthed his optical response to subliminal signals and correctly deduced that his first language was English, then the presentation began. Most of his field of view was suddenly occupied by images focused directly on to his retinas. They were of a triple-hulled starship, as seen from space, manoeuvring closer to a circular aperture in the Orbitsville shell. A voice which was neither male nor female spoke to Dallen.

It was almost two centuries ago — in the year 2096 — that the first spaceship from Earth reached Optima Thule. That vessel was the Bissendorf, part of a large fleet of exploratory ships owned and operated by Starlight Incorporated, the historic company which at that time bad a monopoly of space travel. The Bissendorf was under the command of Captain Vance Garamond.

You are now standing at the exact place where Captain Garamond, after forcing bis way through the diaphragm field which retains our atmosphere first set foot on the soil of Optima Thule…

The images were now a reconstruction of the first landing, showing Garamond and some of his crew on the virgin plain which was currently occupied by the sprawling expanse of Beachhead City. Relevant facts were murmured in Dallen's ears only to glance off the barriers of his preoccupation. What was to prevent him from actually doing it? What would it matter to the universe at large if he did not make the flight to Earth? There would be some fierce ribbing from the other pilot officers in the Boundaries Commission if he returned to his old job, but where were his personal priorities? What was the opinion of outsiders compared to the feelings and needs of his own wife? And there was three-month old Mikel…

The ruined fortifications visible to your right are among the few retraining traces of the Printer civilisation which flourished on Optima Thule some twenty thousand years ago. Although we know very little about the Primers, we can he sure they were a very energetic and ambitious race. Having discovered Optima Thule, they attempted to control the whole sphere — regardless of the fact that it has a usable land area equivalent to five billion Earths. To this endt they performed the incredible engineering feat of sealing with armour plate all but one of Optima Thule's 548 portals.

Opinions differ about whether they were vanquished by subsequent arrivals, or whether they were simply absorbed by the sheer vastness of the territories they bad attempted to claim. However, one of the first actions of the Optima Thule Metagovernment was to order the unsealing of all the portals, thereby giving every nation on Earth unlimited and free access to…

Cartoon animations floated on the surface of Dallen's vision. Miniature ships were firing miniature radiation weapons, progressively clearing Orbitsville's triple band of portals, allowing the enclosed sun to spill more and more of its beckoning rays into the surrounding blackness of space.

The migrations from Earth began immediately, and continued at a high level of activity for a century and a half. In the beginning the journey took four months, but there came many rapid improvements in spaceship design which eventually cut transit time to a matter of days. At the height of the migrations more than ten million people a year were arriving at the equatorial portals, a transport undertaking of such magnitude that…

Annoyed by the intrusive voice and images, Dallen turned away sharply and broke the beam contact. He retreated to the curving edge of the plaza and sat down on a bench to watch Cona taking her holographic pictures of the monument. Again it seemed to him that her interest in the statue and its historic associations was a little too evident, that she was putting on a show for his benefit. The message was that she would be fully occupied in getting on with her own life while they were apart, but did he have to interpret that as defiance? Was it not possible, knowing Cona, that she was only trying to make things easier for him by not clinging on? I’d be crazy to cut myself off from this, he thought, poised on the edge of a decision. He stood up and waved as Cona lowered her recorder and turned to look for him. She waved back and zigzagged towards him through the clusters of wide-brimmed hats which were worn almost universally on Orbitsville as protection from the sun's vertical rays. He smiled, trying to visualise how she was going to react to his momentous news. He had the choice of breaking it to her suddenly, going for maximum dramatic effect, or of a more oblique approach in which, perhaps, he would begin by suggesting that they go out of the hotel that light for a special celebration dinner.

Cona had just cleared the groups of sightseers when two boys of about ten ran up to her. She halted and, after a short exchange of words, opened her purse and gave them some money. The boys ran off immediately, laughing and pushing at each other as they went.

"Young monkeys," Cona said on reaching Dallen. "They said they needed carfare home, but you could see they were heading straight for the soda machines."

An inner voice pleaded with Dallen to ignore the incident, but he was unable to control his reaction. "So why did you give them the money?"

"They were just a couple of lads."

"That's precisely the point. They were just a couple of kids and you taught them it pays to ask strangers for hand-outs."

"For God's sake. Carry, try to relax." Cona's voice was lightly scornful. "It was only fifty cents."

"The amount doesn't come into it." Dallen stared hard at his wife, furious with her for the way she was casually destroying what had promised to be the most perfect moment of their lives. "Do you really think I give a damn whether it was fifty cents or fifty monks? Do you?"

"I didn't realise you were so hot on child welfare." Cona, standing within the vertical column of shade from her hat, might have retreated into a separate world.

"And what does that mean?" he asked, knowing exactly what it meant and challenging her to use Mikel as a weapon against him. They were standing on the edge of a precipice and the ground was breaking away beneath their feet, but the big drop might still be avoided if only she held back from using Mikel.

"This touching concern for strange kids," Cona said. "It seems slightly out of place in a man who is about to jaunt off to Earth and leave his own son."

"I…"Am not going Dallen prompted himself. Say it right now — I’m not going to Earth. He strove to force the crucial words into being, but all human warmth had fled his soul. He turned away from his wife, sick with disappointment, locked in combat with the chill, haughty, inflexible side of his own nature, and knowing in advance that it was a battle he could never win.

Three hours later Dallen was on the observation gallery of the passenger ship Runcorn as it detached from the docking cradle and climbed away from the humbling and inconceivable vastness of the Orbitsville shell.

The ship was moving very slowly in the early stages of the flight, its magnetic scoop fields unable to gather much reaction mass in a region of space that had been well scoured by other vessels. As a consequence, the one-kilometre aperture around which Beachhead City was built remained visible for some thirty minutes, only gradually narrowing to become a bright ellipse and then a line of light which shortened and finally vanished. But even when the Runcorn was several thousand kilometres into space the inexperienced traveller could have been forgiven for thinking the ship had come to rest only a short distance "above" the shell. At that range Orbitsville was still only half of the visible universe, a seemingly flat surface which occupied a full 180° of the field of vision, the closest approximation in reality to the imagined infinite plane of the geometer.

Also, it was black.

Except in the vicinity of a portal, there was nothing to see when one looked in the direction of Orbitsville, There were no errant chinks of light, no reflections. As far as the evidence of the eye was concerned the familiar cosmos, which was so richly spangled with stars and galaxies and braids of glowing gas, had been sliced in half. There was a hemisphere of sparkling illumination and a hemisphere of darkness — and the latter was the stupendous, invisibly brooding presence that was Orbitsville. And even at a range of a billion kilometres, a distance which light itself took almost an hour to traverse, the sphere was awesome. It registered as a monstrous black hole which had eaten out the centre of the sky.

What, Dallen wondered, must the crew of the Bissendorf have thought when they were making that first approach all that time ago? What was going through their minds as they saw the edges of the dark circle balloon steadily outwards to occlude half the cosmos?

He could imagine those first explorers inclining to the idea that they had encountered a Dyson's Sphere. The 20th Century concept was that, in order to meet all its land and energy requirements, a highly advanced civilisation would eventually need to englobe its parent sun and spread across the inside of the sphere which had been created. A Dyson's Sphere, however, would have been a patchy and inconsistent construct, laboriously cobbled together over many millennia from dismantled planets, asteroids and cosmic debris. And it would have been leaking various kinds of radiation which would have given abundant clues about its true nature.

Orbitsville, in stark contrast, would have remained enigmatic. Its shell of ylem was opaque to everything except gravitation, and therefore the wanderers of the Bissendorf would have known only that they were approaching a sun which had somehow been enclosed within a vast hollow sphere. Their long-range sensors would have told them that the surface of the globe was seamless and as smooth as finely machined steel, but no more information would have been forthcoming.

Even now, two centuries later, man's understanding of the sphere's origins was sharply limited, Dallen reminded himself. It was a study which had yielded little in the way of concrete fact, much in the way of speculation — a field which offered less to pragmatic researchers than to poets and mystics…

How does one account for a seamless globe of ultra-material with a circumference of a billion kilometres? There can be only one source for such an inconceivable quantity of shell material, and that is in the sun itself. Matter is energy, and energy is matter. Every active star hurls the equivalent of millions of tonnes a day of its own substance into space in the form of light and other radiations. But in the case of the Orbitsville sun — once known as Pengelly's Star — the Maker had set up a boundary, turning that energy back on itself, manipulating and modifying it, translating it into matter. With precise control over the most elemental forces of the universe, the maker created an impervious shell of exactly the sort of material He wanted — harder than diamond, immutable, eternal. When the sphere was complete, grown to the required thickness, He again dipped His hands into the font of energy and wrought fresh miracles, coating the interior of the sphere with soil and water and air. Organic acids, even complete cells and seeds, had been constructed in the same way, because at the ultimate level of reality there is no difference between a blade of grass and one of steel…

"Quite a spectacle, isn't it?" The speaker was a young woman who, unnoticed by Dallen had positioned herself beside him at the curving rail of the observation gallery. "It seems to pull your eyes."

"I know what you mean," he said, glancing down at her. The illumination was subdued, most of it from the extravagant blazing of star clouds, but he could see that she had Oriental features and was attractive in a forthright physical manner. He would have guessed she was an athlete or in some way connected with the performing arts.

"This is my first trip to Earth," she said. "How about you?"

"The same." Dallen was intrigued to find that, for one unsettling instant, he had been tempted to pose as a veteran space traveller. "This is all new to me."

"I noticed you coming on board."

Dallen weighed all the connotations of the remark, including her awareness of the fact that he was travelling alone. "You're very observant."

"Not really." The woman locked her gaze with his. "I only see what I like."

"In that case," Dallen said gently, "you're a very lucky person."

He turned away and left the gallery, easily putting the woman out of his thoughts. He was still angry with Cona, still feeling betrayed over their not making the trip as a family, but rebounding to another woman would have been a cheap and ordinary response, the sort of thing that many men would have done, but not Carry Dallen. His best plan, he decided, would be to make maximum use of the ship's gymnasium facilities, burn off his frustrations in sheer physical effort.

All the other passengers appeared to be tourists — couples, family units, dubs, study groups taking advantage of the heavy Metagov subsidy to visit the birthplace of their culture — and Dallen felt himself to be a conspicuously solitary figure as he wound his way through them to fetch his training clothes. The gymnasium was empty when he got there and he went to work immediately, pitting his strength against the resistance frames, repeating the same exercise hundreds of times, aiming for a state of mental and bodily exhaustion which would guarantee his night's sleep.

His scheme was successful to the extent that he fell asleep within minutes of going to bed, but he awoke only two hours later with the depressing knowledge that it was going to be a long, uphill struggle to morning. He tried to pass the time by visualising his new job in Madison City, with all its opportunities for holiday travel to hundreds of fabulous old cities and scenic splendours so conveniently crowded on one tiny planet. But his brain refused to cooperate. No bright visions were forthcoming. As he drowsed through the small hours, in that uneasy margin between wakefulness and sleep where strange terrors prowl. Earth seemed an alien and inimical place.

And the doors of the future remained obstinately closed, denying him any hint of what was to come.

Gerald Mathieu opened a drawer in his desk and, in spite of a drug-induced sense of tightness, he frowned as he looked down at the object within.

The gun was of a type which had once been known as a Luddite Special, and had been custom-designed for a single purpose — chat of killing computers. It was also one of the most illegal devices that a citizen could own. Even with Mathieu's extensive connections it had taken him nearly a month to obtain the gun and to make sure that no other person in the whole continent knew it was in his hands.

Now the time had come to use it and he was highly apprehensive.

Merely being caught with the device in his possession would bring a mandatory prison sentence of ten years; and if it were established that he had actually used it he could expect to be removed from society for the rest of his life. The severity of the punishment was intended to protect people rather than property, because the weapon — in a consequence its inventors never foresaw — had a devastating effect on anyone caught in its beam. In some vays worse than straight forward murder, had been one judicial comment, and in many ways a greater threat to social order,

"How in hell did I get into this situation?" Mathieu said to his empty office, then dismissed the question, trying to push irrelevancies aside as he picked up the gun and released the safety catch behind the trigger. The whole assemblage was solid and heavy in his hand, evidence of close-packed circuitry within, and a certain angularity and lack of cosmetic finish showed it to be the product of an underground workshop.

Aware that he was in danger of hesitating too long, Mathieu slipped the gun into the side pocket of his loose-fitting jacket and turned to check his appearance in a wall-mounted mirror. He had reached the rank of deputy mayor at the exceptionally early age of thirty-two, and he took a secret pleasure in seeming even younger by virtue of his fair-skinned athleticism. He also had a reputation for the casual perfection of his dress, and it was important that nothing about him should look out of place during the next few minutes. At this rime of the morning his chances of encountering others on his way to Sublevel Three were slight, but the risk was always there and if a meeting occurred he wanted it to be unmemorable, something which would quickly be lost in City Hall's humdrum routine.

Satisfied that he had made himself ready, Mathieu went into the corridor and walked quickly towards the emergency stair on the building's north side. The transparent wall ahead of him provided panoramic views of the city of Madison. Its suburbs shone placidly in the distance, colours muted and outlines blurred in the humid air streams swirling inland from the Gulf. Mathieu, with a final glance back along the empty corridor, opened the door to the stairwell and went downwards. He had chosen to wear soft-soled shoes and his progress was both swift and silent, like the effortless sinking spiral of a gull.

Be careful, he thought; quelling a sudden exhilaration. He had omitted his pre-breakfast shot of felicitin, knowing he would need a clear head for the morning's desperate venture, but the drug was bound to be lingering in his system, subtly persuading him that he was invincible. And a foil at this stage could turn the threat of disaster into hard actuality.

The discovery some weeks earlier that Sublevel Three housed an independent Department of Supply computer had, in spite of the chemical shields around his mind, numbed Mathieu with dread. It had been installed decades ago at the instigation of some forgotten Metagovernment official, back in the days when Orbitsville was more actively concerned with the affairs of Earth, and since then had — unknown to Mathieu — been monitoring the distribution of certain categories of imports.

The computer's specification had apparently been drawn up by a bureaucratic supersnoop with a tendency to paranoia. It had an internal power supply which was good for at least a century, and it obtained its entire data input by direct sensing of product identity tags within a radius of fifty kilometres. The single feature of the system which had operated in Mathieu's favour was that the computer did not interact with Madison City's general information network. It sat in the building's deserted lower levels, like a spider interpreting every vibration of its web, acquiring and storing detailed knowledge of the movement of Metagov supplies throughout the region. The information was jealously guarded, locked inside an armoured data bank — but it would be yielded on receipt of the correct command.

And even a cursory glance at the print-out would show that Mathieu had privately disposed of public property worth some half-a-million monits. The consequences of such a revelation were something that Mathieu could not bear to think about. He had resolved to destroy the evidence, regardless of the additional risk.

On reaching Sublevel Three he turned right and went through a ballroom-sized area which had once been used as a computer centre and now was a maze of movable partitions and discarded crates. He found the door he was seeking, one he would never have noticed under normal circumstances, and went through it into a short corridor which had three more doors on each side. The most distant bore the initials N.R.R.D. in stencilled lettering, a combination which meant nothing to Mathieu, and again he wondered how Solly Hume had chanced upon the troublesome computer in the first place. A junior architect in the City Surveyor's office, Hume was a self-styled "electronic archaeologist" in his spare time and was currently trying to have the machine declared obsolete and redundant so that he could buy it on behalf of some like-minded enthusiasts. It had been pure coincidence that Ezzati, the salvage officer, had mentioned the subject to Mathieu during a meeting, thus alerting him to the imminence of disaster.

Mathieu used his master key to open the door and quietly stepped into the fusty little room. The ceiling globe pinged faintly as it came on, throwing an arctic light over a plain metal table which supported the department of Supply computer, it looked more like a strongbox than a complex electronic monitor, with only a plate engraved with chains of serial numbers to indicate its true nature. In a volume not much greater than that of a shoebox were sensors which could track the incredibly faint signals emitted by product identity tags, plus a computer which converted the signal variations into geographic locations and stored them in its memory. Millions of freight movements had been recorded, going back to before Mathieu's birth, but he was solely concerned with those of the last three years — the evidence of his grand larceny.

He stared at the box for a moment with resentment and grudging respect, and then — feeling oddly guilty — drew the Luddite Special out of his pocket.

He aimed its bell-shaped muzzle at the machine and squeezed the trigger.

Cona Dallen switched off her voice recorder, forced to acknowledge the fact that she was too hot and uncomfortable to do any serious work. She had chosen a seat beneath one of the mature dogwood trees in the City Hall grounds, but the shade meant little in the pervasive humid warmth. It was almost four months since she and Mikel had arrived from Orbitsville, and apparently she was no nearer to adapting to the climate of the area which had once been known as Georgia.

And being seven or eight kilos overweight doesn't help, she reminded herself, resolving to have nothing but green salad for the rest of the day. A glance at her watch showed there was more than an hour until the luncheon appointment with Carry. It seemed a pity not to do as planned and outline the next chapter of her book, but on top of the unsuitable working conditions she had a problem in that her subject was becoming increasingly remote.

With its working title of The Second Diaspora, the book should have been a genuine personal statement about the history of Judaism on Orbitsville, but — somewhat to her surprise — the work had gone slowly and badly after Carry's transfer to Earth. That fact had contributed to her agreeing to join him earlier than she had planned. Also, she had been touched when, trying to conceal his nervousness over venturing into academic realms, he had put forward the idea that distance would improve historical perspective. The prospect of ending a year of separation had helped persuade her he was right, that what she really needed was an overview, but now the two-century adventure that had been the founding of New Israel seemed oddly perfunctory, oddly passionless, when observed from a distance of hundreds of light years.

Was her new perspective valid? Was the fate of a single nation a truly insignificant fleck in the vast mosaic of history, or — as had been the case with other writers — had the very act of voyaging from one star to another leached some vital essence from her mind?

It war a mistake to come to Carry, she thought, and immediately regretted having allowed the thought to form. After four years of one-to-one marriage, it seemed that her relationship with Carry might turn out to be the durable armature around which she ought to build the rest of her life.

"Mum!" Mikel picked up the miniature toy truck he had been trundling through the grass and walked backwards until he was pressed against her knees.

"What's wrong, Mikel?"

He pointed apprehensively at a grey-and-white gull which had landed nearby. "A bee!"

"That's a bird, and it won't hurt you." Cona smiled as she dapped her hands and caused the incurious gull to retreat by several metres. To Mikel, every creature which flew was a bee and all four-legged animals were cats, and yet he had a vocabulary of at least a dozen nouns which he applied accurately to forms of mechanical transport. Cona wondered if a child could show engineering aptitude so early.

"Don't like," Mikel said. He continued to press against her and she detected the pure smell of baby perspiration in his coppery hair.

"It's too hot out here — let's go into Daddy's office and get a cold drink." She stood up, easily gathering Mikel into her arms, and walked towards the north side entrance of the City Hall. Carry's office would be empty till noon and, provided that Mikel was prepared to amuse himself unaided, offered a better environment for working.

The silvered glass doors parted automatically as she reached them, attracting Mikel's interest, and she walked into the air-conditioned coolness of the north lobby. Cona hesitated. The correct procedure would have been to go quarter-way round the building and report at the main entrance before taking an elevator to Carry's second-floor office, but her clothes were sticking to her skin, Mikel seemed heavier with each passing second, and there were no officials around to enforce the rules. Late morning stillness pervaded the lobby.

She opened the door to the emergency stair, a route favoured by Carry when he was in a hurry to get to work, and began the brief climb to the next floor, unconsciously making her footsteps as light as possible. There was a square landing midway between floors, and Cona had barely reached it when the air was filled with the shrill bleat of an alarm signal.

Shocked, filled with irrational guilt, she clutched her son closer to her and froze against the wall, momentarily unable to decide whether to turn back or goon.

The sound of the alarm caused Mathieu to moan aloud in panic. He backed away from the Department of Supply monitor, knowing that the hail of radiation he had sent blasting through it would have erased programmes and memory alike. For an instant he thought the machine had retained the ability to warn of sabotage, then it dawned on him that there was a still-functioning alarm system somewhere in Sublevel Three, a relic of the days when it had housed a computer centre. This was something he had not even considered, yet another proof that it was foolhardy to plan anything important while under the influence of felicitin…

Why are you standing around? The words reverberated between his temples. Run! RUN!

He dragged open the door of the room and sprinted back the way he had come, moving so fast under adrenalin boost that he could actually hear the rush of air past his ears. His sponge-soled shoes made virtually no sound as he zigzagged through the huge outer room at dangerous speed. The continuing screech of the alarm lent super-human power to his legs as he reached the foot of the emergency stair and hurled himself up it in time-dilated dream-flight, taking four and five steps at each stride, his mouth agape and down-curved, scooping air.

I'm going to be all right, he thought as the floor markers appeared and dropped behind with impossible rapidity, fm going to get away with…

The woman with the child in her arms appeared before him as in a vision. Time had now almost ceased for Mathieu. In an altered state of consciousness he recognised Cona Dallen, understood that she could and would destroy him, that she had no option but to destroy him, and in that protracted, tortured instant the weapon he was hardly aware of carrying came up level and his finger worked the trigger. A conical storm of radiation, noiseless and invisible, engulfed the woman and child.

Even before they had time to collapse, Mathieu had passed them, silently flitting upwards like a great bat, and the incident was part of his past. He reached the fourth floor landing, opened the door and saw that the length of corridor separating him from the sanctuary of his office was empty. Concealing the gun in a fold of his jacket, he forced himself to walk at normal speed until the blue trapezoid of the office door loomed large enough Co receive him, then he turned the handle and went inside.

"It's not like murder," he whispered to the uncomprehending walls, again seeing Cona Dallen and her son go down before him, knowing with a bleak certainty that the scene would play itself behind his eyes forever in an endless loop of recrimination. "It's not a bit like murder."