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“How fortunate.”

“Yes. Felix left Harper’s Dragon and became an Edenist. He had neuron symbionts implanted to give him general affinity, and underwent specialist counselling to help him adapt. The last time Harper’s Dragon visited, I spoke with him, and he was extremely happy. He said he had fitted in perfectly and that she was expecting their first child.”

“That is nice. There are something like a million and a half Adamists who become Edenists every year.”

“So many? I didn’t know.”

“Seventy per cent are love cases similar to your friend, the rest join because it attracts them intellectually or emotionally. Over half of the love cases are Adamists who form relationships with voidhawk crew-members, which is only to be expected given that they have the most contact with Adamists. It leads to many jokes about the voidhawk families having wild blood.”

“So tell me, is the conversion absolute, do these newfound Edenists transfer their memories into the habitat when they die?”

“Of course.”

His neural nanonics displayed a guidance plot, updating his position. Purple and yellow vectors slithered through his head, temporarily displacing his view of the irradiated dust. He was on course. His course. “Then my question is this. Is it possible to transfer a person’s memories into a habitat if that person has neural nanonics rather than affinity?”

“I have no record of it ever having been done. Although I can see no reason why not; the process would take longer, however, datavising is not as efficient as affinity.”

“I want to become an Edenist. I want you to accept my memories.”

“Warlow, why?”

“I am eighty-six, and I am not geneered. My shipmates do not know, but all that is left of my real body is the brain and a few nerve cords. The rest of me perished long ago. I spent far too much time in free fall, you see.”

“I’m sorry.”

“Don’t be. It has been a full life. But now my neurons are dying at a rate which is beyond even Confederation gene therapy’s ability to replace. So, understandably, I have come to think a lot about death recently. I had even considered downloading my memories into a processor array, but that would simply be an echo of myself. You on the other hand are a living entity, within you I too could continue to live.”

“I would be happy and honoured to accept your memories. But, Warlow, the transference must take place at death, only that way can continuity be achieved. Anything less would be that echo of self which you spoke of. Your personality would know it was not complete because its conclusion was missing.”

He flew along a cliff of charcoal-textured rock. A virtual mountain of a particle, worn and abraded by aeons of murmuring dust, the lethal knife-blade spires unsheathed by its fractured formation now a moorland landscape of undulations, barrows of its youthful virility. “I know.”

“Are you worried then that Captain Calvert will not be able to escape through the Lagrange point?”

“No. Joshua will be able to fly that manoeuvre with ease. My concern is that he is given the chance to fly it.”

“You mean eliminating the Gramine ?”

“I do. This mission to mine the rings is the weakest link in Joshua’s plan to escape. It assumes the Gramine will not deviate its orbit by more than five hundred metres in the next two hours. It assumes too much. I propose to position the warhead accurately on Gramine ’s orbital track, and detonate it while it passes. That way I can be sure.”

“Warlow, neither Gramine nor Maranta have deviated their track by more than a hundred metres since the search began. I urge you to reconsider this action.”

“Why? I have only a few years to live at best. Most of those would be spent with my memories and rationality slipping away. Our medical science has achieved too much in that direction. My synthetic body can keep pumping blood through my comatose brain for decades yet. Would you wish that on me when you know you yourself can provide me with a worthwhile continuance?”

“That is, I believe, a loaded question.”

“Correct. My mind is made up. This way I have two chances of cheating death. There are few who can say that.”

“Two? How so?”

“Possession implies an afterlife, somewhere a soul can return from.”

“You believe that is the fate which has befallen Lalonde?”

“Do you know what a Catholic is?” A solid glacier wall of ice appeared out of the dust. The cold-gas nozzles of his manoeuvring pack fired heavily. For a moment he saw the splay of waxen vapour shiver as it was siphoned away into the blue and emerald phosphenes of dust.

“Catholicism is one of the root religions which made up the Unified Christian Church,” Aethra said.

“Almost. Officially, by decree of the Pope, Catholicism was absorbed. But it was a strong faith. You cannot modify and dilute such an intense devotion simply by compromising prayers and services to achieve unity with other Christian denominations. My home asteroid was Forli, an ethnic-Italian settlement. It kept the faith, unofficially, unobtrusively. Try as I might, I cannot throw away the teachings of my childhood. Divine justice is something I think all living things will have to face.”

“Even me?”

“Even you. And Lalonde looks to confirm my belief.”

“You think Kelly Tirrel was telling the truth?”

Warlow’s manoeuvring pack was nudging him gingerly round the rimed iceberg, loyally following the ins and outs of its gentle contours. Its surface was true crystal, but eventually it sank into total blackness, as though a wormhole interstice had frozen open at its core. When his armour-suit sensors scanned round they showed him the constellations returning to their full majesty through the attenuating dust. “I do. I am convinced of it.”

“Why?”

“Because Joshua believes her.”

“A strange rationale.”

“Joshua is more than a superlative captain. In all my years I have never come across anyone quite like him. He behaves execrably with women and money, and even his friends on occasion. But, if you will excuse my clumsy poetry, he is in tune with the universe. He knows truth. I put my faith in Joshua, I have done so ever since I signed on with the Lady Macbeth , and I will continue to do so.”

“Then there is an afterlife.”

“If not, I will live on as part of your multiplicity. But Kelly Tirrel has been convinced that there is. She is a tough, cynical person, she would take a lot of convincing such a thing could be. And, as now appears likely, if there is an afterlife, I have an immortal soul and death is not to be feared.”

“And do you fear death?”

He rose out of the iceberg’s umbra cloak. It was similar to emerging from a dark layer of rain-cloud into clear evening sky, there was only a remote diaphanous shimmer of dust left above him. Gramine shone like a second-magnitude star, forty kilometres away and drifting towards him. “Very much.”

The hovercraft slewed and bucked on the river, tossed about by white-water waves swelling over semi-submerged stones. Theo was concentrating hard on keeping them straight and level, but it was tough going. Kelly didn’t remember yesterday’s journey up this same river as being so difficult. She and Shaun Wallace were sitting on the rear bench, clinging on grimly as they were slung about. The propeller droned behind her.

“Already I feel wearied by the journey, daunted by what we are attempting. This is not even snatching victory from the jaws of defeat, although it might be termed a last vain attempt to salvage the team’s dignity. We came to this planet with such confidence and high ideals; we were going to vanquish the evil invader and restore order and stability to twenty million people, give them their lives back. Now all we dare hope for is to escape with thirty children. And even that will tax us to the limit.”