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‘I’m afraid so, son. Go on, get searching.’

Donn cut across the centre of the plaza, the lifedome’s central floor space. Much of it was given over to green, for the crew of this old ship, his mother’s distant ancestors, had crossed the stars with a chunk of forest brought from Earth itself, a copse of mature trees, oak, alder and lime, old enough to have wrapped thick roots around the struts of the lifedome’s frame. But Donn, twenty-five years old, had never been to Earth, and to him the trees were just furniture.

Of course there was no sign of Benj. Why would he have hidden away among the trees? Benj, at twenty-one, liked his comforts. And even if he was here, the AI’s surveillance systems would have known about it. Donn gave up looking, and stood there, helpless.

Something whirred past Donn’s face, tiny, metallic. It was a robot insect. And a fine spray of water descended on him. He lifted his face and saw droplets condensing out of the air, an artificial rain born in the summit of the lifedome and falling all around him. Above the rain the transparent dome showed a star field that had barely changed for centuries: the Association, a cluster of stars dominated by the Boss, a single monstrous star a million times as bright as Earth’s sun, an unforgiving point of light. He was getting slowly wet, but he didn’t mind; he found the sensation oddly comforting on this difficult morning.

‘Beautiful, isn’t it? The star field.’

The smooth voice made him start. He turned.

Commissary Elah stood beside him. Her eyes were large and dark, her gaze fixed on his face, calculating, judgemental. Taller than Donn, she was dressed in a Commissary’s floor-length black robe, a costume so drab it seemed to suck all the light out of the air. Her scalp was shaved, a starkness that emphasised the beauty of her well-defined chin and cheekbones, and her skin gleamed with droplets of the artificial rain. Donn had no idea how old she was.

‘I didn’t mean to startle you,’ she said.

Something about her made Donn pull his robe tighter around his body. ‘Commissary. It’s good of you to have come out so quickly. My parents will be reassured—’

‘I hope so. I’ve brought some specialist help. A woman called Eve Raoul – a Virtual, actually, but quite expert. This is what we’re here for, the Commission for Historical Truth. To help.’ Her accent sounded odd to a Reefborn, slightly strangulated at the back of the throat – an accent from Earth. ‘The Coalition understands.’

‘I suppose it must,’ Donn said. ‘If it seeks to rule.’

‘Not to rule,’ said Elah gently. ‘To join all of scattered mankind behind a common purpose. And by helping you sort out issues like this with the Ghosts—’

‘Nobody knows for sure if the Ghosts are behind these abductions.’

She eyed him. ‘But the Ghosts aren’t denying it. Are you loyal to the Ghosts or your family, Donn Wyman?’

‘I—’ He didn’t know what to say to that direct question; he didn’t think in such terms. ‘Why must I choose?’

She reached out with a pale hand and stroked the trunk of an oak tree. ‘Remarkable, these plants. So strange. So strong!’

‘They are trees. Don’t you have any on Earth any more?’

She shrugged. ‘Probably. In laboratories. The Earth has other purposes now than to grow trees.’ She glanced around. ‘You know, I’ve visited your Miriam Berg several times. But I’ve never stood in this very spot, beneath these trees. Trade, your profession, isn’t it?’

‘I’m an inter-species factor. Specialising in relations with the Ghost enclaves—’

‘It’s all so deliciously archaic. And anti-Doctrinal, of course, your way of life, your ship’s existence, its very name, all relics of a forbidden past!’ She laughed. ‘But don’t worry, we’ve no intention of turning you out summarily. All things in time.’ She pushed at the earth, the grass, with a bare foot. ‘We’re on the ship’s axis here, yes? Over the spine. Your mother’s family came to the Reef in this ship, didn’t they, a thousand years ago? I imagine there are access hatches. Is it possible to reach the drive pod from here?’

‘That’s nothing to do with you.’ Samm came bustling up. Beside Elah’s cool composure, his father looked a crumpled mess, Donn thought, his hair sticking up like the grass under their feet, his face shining with the sweat of sleep.

‘I apologise,’ Elah said easily. ‘You did invite me here.’

With his arms outstretched, Samm escorted her away from the copse. ‘To help with looking for Benj. Not to go snooping around the Miriam.’ But as she walked with him he backed off, nervous of offending this agency, the Commission for Historical Truth, newly arrived from Earth, which insisted on its right to take over all their lives. ‘We’re all distressed.’

‘I understand . . .’

Donn lingered for another few seconds under the artificial rain. He wondered why his father should care about the Commissary, or any Coalition agent, snooping around this thousand-year-old heap of junk. Maybe he had trade goods tucked down there in the ship’s spine – given the Coalition’s new tax codes, Donn thought was quite likely – but if so he couldn’t have signalled it any more clearly. Not subtle, Donn’s father, whatever other qualities he had.

But as Donn stood there the complexities of Reef politics faded, and the reality of his brother’s loss crowded back into his head, the true story of the day.

For months the abductions had been an arbitrary plague. Nobody could rest, for at any moment you could be taken too, from the most secure place. What a horror it was. And now it had come here, to his own family. He wondered, in fact, how it was he felt so calm himself. Shock, perhaps.

He trailed after his father, and the Commissary. And in a lounge at the edge of the plaza, he found a Virtual woman trying to console his mother.

‘Before I died, I spent most of my working life exploring the principles of remote translation systems . . .’

The Virtual visitor sat beside Rima on a couch. Donn’s mother’s face was twisted with grief and anger. Bots hovered before them, bearing trays of drinks and pastries – breakfast; it was still early.

The visitor was slim, modestly dressed in a pale-blue coverall. Her hair was grey, and she pulled at a stray lock of it absently. Donn had never seen anybody with grey hair before, though he knew it had once been the default shade for the ageing. Evidently the visitor’s projection was good enough to fool the serving bots, but Donn observed that her interfacing with the chair wasn’t quite right, and a haze of tiny pixels shimmered around the underside of her legs.

Rima asked, irritated, impatient, ‘“Remote translation systems”?’

Commissary Elah said, ‘Teleportation, to you and me. Donn Wyman, meet Eve Raoul. The expert I told you about.’

Eve stood. Donn clumsily offered this Virtual visitor a hand to shake. She bowed, apparently unoffended. ‘I’m sorry to meet you in such circumstances.’

‘Eve Raoul,’ Samm said. ‘Do you have a connection to the Raoul, Jack Raoul, of the Raoul Accords?’

The Reef was one place where, for a long time, Ghosts and humans had managed to live together, more or less peaceably. The Raoul Accords, a coexistence agreement only recently abandoned under pressure from the Coalition, had been much admired here. And Jack Raoul himself was well remembered, a hero for the Reef’s multi-species community.

‘Jack was my husband. I died before him.’ She gestured at her slim body. ‘It’s thanks to him that this representation was reconstructed from my old Notebooks. He liked to have me around in person to counsel him about quantum mechanics and the like, in the course of his work. And in the work he did, his dealings with the Ghosts, there was a lot of that kind of discussion.’