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“Darvin! Darvin!”

“Hello, Handful.”

“New moon! New moon!”

Darvin smiled, the technician laughed. “That’s a smart trudge all right.”

“Clever Handful,” said Darvin. He reached over and scratched the trudge’s ear. “Clever boy, Handful.”

“No,” said Handful, grabbing the hair on Darvin’s wrist and tugging. “New moon. See new moon.”

“I’ve seen them lots of times, Handful. Please go away. Be a good boy.”

“New moon!” The tugging became painful.

“Give me a minute,” said Darvin to the technician. “I’ll just take the little pest back to his — back to Kwarive.”

He scooped the trudge into the crook of his elbow and stalked out. Handful pointed to the blue-black sky, in which the first stars pricked into visibility and, just above the last glow of sunset, the Fiery Jester burned bright. Darvin’s exasperated glance followed the pointing finger to the south. The inner and outer moons hung like sections of white rind. Close to them and a little above, a tiny but distinct triangle glinted like a faceted gem brighter than the Queen.

“New moon,” said Handful.

19 — A Full and Frank Exchange of Views

14 366:02:25 11:37

Even after two days—

There are several lines of thought and conversation that could begin with these words.

So let me start with the easy one.

Even after two days, crew quarters are a strange environment. It’s unlike the habitat or the settlements. The habitat is a ground environment, a pseudogravity environment, an imitation — strange as it may seem — of a planet’s surface. Yes, the ground curves up and over your head, which I know from the virtualities would seem as strange to anyone from a real planet as a real planet with sky overhead would to us. But that difference is less than it might seem — all on the surface, you might say. Think of the things they have in common, lakes, vertical building, plains, forests and parks, tame and wild animals roaming about, trees growing upward, rain falling downward, sun(line)-light from above. The eye and the inner ear tell you the same thing, most of the time.

The microgravity homesteads were different again. The living spaces are small. They feel like site huts, not yet like homes. Everything was a bit raw, even though we were beginning to grow plants. Everywhere smelled of rock dust, except where it stank of leakage from organic cycles. And no, living in spacesuits or smart-fabric clothes all the time is not a solution.

The crew quarters of the cone are quite unlike either. This is a mature free-fall environment. It’s like a rainforest canopy. And it’s old. The habitat’s present landscape has existed for only a few decades. The settlements, only a few months. This place is thousands of years old, almost as old as the ship, and behind it stretches another ten thousand or so years of precedent and practice. Millennia of trial and error, of artificial and natural selection, of genetic and mechanical engineering, until the long backward view fades out in the haze of legend: of Skylab and Mir, of the Space Stations and the Moon Caves. You see trees that buckle steel plate. You see ecosystems that have grown up around a water leak or a warm spot. You see sculptures whose details have eroded in the flow of air from a ventilator. You meet people who have lived thousands of years and never been outside — not just the ship, but — this cone. You encounter activities that are either immensely slow, subtle tasks or symptoms of wetware crashes. You see women with foetuses growing inside them. You hear children talking and not sounding like children, nor acting like them, but working together with adults. There are no child-raising estates here, no teen cities, no full-time careparents. Small children zoom around in a chaotic, tumbling, noisy and unsupervised way that reminds me of the bat people’s young. Of course there are not many children, but they make their presence felt out of all proportion.

That sounds a little cantankerous. The fact is, I like it here. Even after two days—

That phrase again. OK, now for the hard part:

Even after two days, I can’t understand or forgive the Council. I can hardly believe it.

They tried to nuke us!

It may have been “only” an BMP hit, but the effects of that could still have killed people. Suppose some critical systems had gone down? Suppose the nuke had gone off a fraction of a second too soon or too late? I can’t believe that the founders would risk killing people just to get their way. This will not be forgotten or forgiven.

I’m almost as shocked, in a way, with what Constantine and his scientist clique have done. They used us (obviously — lots of fusion plants, huh). They went behind the backs of the Council. They’ve left us no choice but to make some kind of intervention. I can see why the Council members were furious. But how anyone on the Council could have thought that the crew would allow Constantine to be detained I don’t know. Maybe what I now see of the crew, and the crew quarters, helps to explain it. The founders just didn’t understand how different and strange the crew are. Only people as clannish and devious as the crew could have come up with the scheme to enlighten the slaves and translate the languages. Giving them speech and then reverse engineering from the language module! I ask you. Not to mention using as amplifiers, of all things, the underground bodies of fungi and lichens: fairy rings.

But, you know, kudos for the panache.

Horrocks Mathematical’s viewpoint hung in space, looking down at ruins. Even though he was safe inside crew quarters, guiding a tiny telemetry probe, it helped to think of himself as looking down, and not as looking straight ahead — or worse, up — at a vast unstable cliff. Most of the rock at the base of the reserve tank had remained trapped by the web of buckyrope cables. The mesh had been devised to hold the asteroid and cometary chunks in place under normal acceleration and manoeuvres. Under the five or six gravities of the cone’s headlong flight from the nukes, the entire content of the tank had slammed against the base, the impact cushioned somewhat by the gigantic elastic cables. As soon as the drive had been turned off, the cables had recoiled. Most of the larger rocks had remained trapped, but broken-off masses of rock had been catapulted against the sides of the tank. The fragile material from carbonaceous chondrites and cometary ice had been smashed and partly melted. Smaller fragments had ricocheted around, their gradual ablation under repeated collisions pitting the interior walls and filling the space with drifting dust and granules.

As for the habitats and machinery, everything that had not been salvaged to crew quarters had been flung about or crushed. Dust-covered diamond bubbles bulged from the wreckage, but anything inside might as well be written off. The original plan had been for the separation to be prepared in clandestinity and to be sprung as a surprise. A gentle acceleration would have left the habitats and fabrication units intact, for later release into the asteroid belt or among the gas-giant moons. Now colonization would have to proceed from scratch. At least the ship kids now had some real experience under their belts, but their disappointment would be deep, and their financial losses severe.

“Compensation claims,” Awlin Halegap said when Horrocks backed out of the view and gave him his assessment of the disaster. “No problem.”

“What?” said Horrocks. “It could be years before we get compensation out of the founders.”

“Assuming the legal software even agrees,” added Genome. “The issue of who broke the Contract, or if anyone did, is so complex—”

Halegap looked at both of them and shook his head. “You’re so naive,” he said. “We start a market in compensation claims. The ship kids can sell their claims for ready cash. They’ll lose out on the discount, but they’ll still raise enough capital for start-ups.”

“Oh yes?” said Genome. “And who will they sell their claims to?”