He watched their departure from an observation cupola near the prow of his ship, feeling an obligation to wait until he could no longer make them out. Each shuttle carried a valued crewmember, plus a quota of fuel that he would rather not have had to spend before reaching Resurgam. If all went well, Clavain would get back the four shuttles and their crew. But he would never see most of the fuel again. There was only a tiny margin of error, enough that one ship could bring back a human-mass payload in addition to its pilot. He hoped he was playing this one correctly. It was said that the taking of hard decisions was something that became easier with repetition, like any difficult activity. There was, perhaps, some truth in that assertion. But if so, Clavain found that it most certainly did not apply in his own case. He had taken several extraordinarily difficult decisions lately, and each had been, in its own unique way, harder than the last. So it was with the matter of Felka. It was not that he did not want Felka back, if there was a way that could be achieved. But Skade knew how much he wanted the weapons as well. She also knew that it was not a selfish issue with Clavain. He could not be bargained with in the usual sense, since he did not want the weapons for his own personal gain. But with Felka she had the perfect instrument of negotiation. She knew that the two of them had a special bond, one that went back to Mars. Was Felka really his daughter? He didn’t know, even now. He had convinced himself that she might be, and she had told him she was… but that had been under possible duress, when she had been trying to persuade him not to defect. If anything, that admission had only served to slowly undermine his own certainties. He would not know for sure until he was again in her presence, and he could ask her properly. And should it really matter? Her value as a human being had nothing to do with any hypothetical genetic connection with himself. Even if she was his daughter, he hadn’t known that, or even suspected it, until long after he had rescued her from Mars. And yet something had made him go back into Galiana’s nest, at great risk to himself, because he had felt a need to save her. Galiana had told him it was pointless, that she wasn’t a thinking human being in any sense that he recognised it, just a mindless information-processing vegetable. And he had proven her wrong. It was probably the only time in his life when he had ever done that to Galiana. And yet still it didn’t matter. This was all about humanity, Clavain thought, not about blood ties or loyalty. If he forgot that, then he might as well let Skade take the weapons with her. And he might as well defect back to the spiders and leave the rest of the human race to its fate. And yet if he failed to recover the weapons, what use was a single human gesture, no matter how well intentioned? The four ships were gone. Clavain hoped and prayed that he had made the right decision. A beetle-backed government car hissed through the streets of Cuvier. It had been raining again, but recently the clouds had cleared. The dismantled planet was now clearly visible during many hours of each evening. The cloud of liberated matter was a lacy many-armed thing. It gleamed red and ochre and pale green and occasionally flickered with slow electrical storms, pulsing like the courtship display of some uncatalogued deep-sea animal. Hard shadows and bright symmetric foci marked the sites within the cloud where Inhibitor machinery was coming into existence, aggregating and solidifying. There had been a time when it was possible to think that what had happened to the planet was some rare but natural event. Now no such comfort existed. Thorn had seen the way people in Cuvier dealt with the phenomenon. For the most part they ignored it. When the thing was in the sky they walked down the streets without looking up. Even when the fact of its existence could not be ignored, they seldom looked at the thing directly, or even referred to it in anything but the most oblique terms. It was as if a massive act of collective denial might make it go away, an omen that the people had decided to reject. Thorn sat in one of the car’s two rear seats, behind the driver’s partition. There was a small flickering television screen sunk into the back of the driver’s seat. Blue light played across Thorn’s face as he watched footage taken from far outside the city. The clip was fuzzy and hand-held shaky, but it showed all that it needed to. The first of the two shuttles was still on the ground — the camera panned over it, lingering on the surreal juxtaposition of sleek machine and jumbled rockscape — but the second was in the air, coming back down from orbit. The shuttle had already made several trips to just above Resurgam’s atmosphere where the much larger in-system craft was in orbit. Now the camera view jogged upwards, catching the descending ship as it lowered itself towards the landing site, settling down on a tripod of flames. ‘It could be faked,’ Thorn said quietly. ‘I know it isn’t, but that’s what people will think.’ Khouri was sitting next to him, dressed as Vuilleumier. She said, ‘You can fake anything if you try hard enough. But it isn’t as easy as it used to be, not now that everything’s stored using analogue media. I’m not sure even a whole government department could produce something convincing enough.’ ‘The people will still be suspicious.’ The camera panned across the sparse, nervous- looking crowd that was still on the ground. There was a small encampment three hundred metres from the parked shuttle, the dusty tents difficult to distinguish from fallen boulders. The people looked like refugees from any world, any century. They had come thousands of kilometres, converging on this point from a variety of settlements. It had cost them greatly: roughly a tenth of their number had not completed the journey. They had brought enough possessions to make the overland crossing, while knowing — if the underground intelligence network was efficient in its dissemination of information — that they would be allowed to bring nothing aboard the ship but the clothes they stood in. Near the encampment was a small hole in the ground where belongings were tossed before each party boarded the shuttle. These were possessions that had been treasured until the last possible moment, even though the logical thing would have been to leave them behind at home, before making the difficult journey across Resurgam. There were photographs and children’s toys, and all of them would be buried, human relics to add to the million-year-old store of Amarantin artefacts that the planet still held. ‘We’ve taken care of that,’ Khouri said. ‘Some of the witnesses who made it this far have returned to the major population centres. They needed persuading, of course, to turn around when they’d got that far, but…’ ‘How did you manage it?’ The car negotiated a bend with a swish of tyres. The cubiform buildings of the Inquisition House district loomed into view, grey and slab-sided as granite cliffs. Thorn eyed them apprehensively. ‘They were told they’d be allowed to take a small quota of personal effects on to the ship with them when they came back.’ ‘Bribery, in other words.’ Thorn shook his head, wondering if any great good deed could be entirely untainted by corruption, no matter how useful a purpose that corruption served. ‘But I suppose you had to get the word back somehow. How many, now?’ Khouri had the numbers ready. ‘Fifteen hundred in orbit, at the last count. A few hundred still on the ground. When we’ve got five hundred we’ll make the next trip up from the surface, and then the transfer ship will be full, ready to shuttle them to Nostalgia .’ ‘They’re brave,’ Thorn said. ‘Or very, very foolish. I’m not sure which.’ ‘Brave, Thorn, there’s no doubt about that. And scared, too. But you can’t blame them for that.’ They were brave, it was true. They had made the
