are you?’ ‘Actually, we weren’t really talking about you at all,’ Felka said. ‘That’s a disappointment.’ ‘Have some tea, Clavain. It should still be drinkable.’ Clavain took the bulb she offered him. ‘Is there anything you want to share with me about what happened in the Closed Council meeting?’ ‘We can’t discuss specifics,’ Remontoire said. ‘All I can say is that there is considerable pressure for you to join. Some of that pressure comes from Con-joiners who feel that your loyalty to the Mother Nest will always be questionable until you come in from the cold.’ ‘They’ve got a bloody cheek.’ Remontoire and Felka exchanged glances. ‘Perhaps,’ Remontoire said. ‘There are also those — your allies, I suppose — who feel that you have more than demonstrated your loyalty over the years.’ ‘That’s more like it.’ ‘But they’d also like you in the Closed Council,’ Felka said. ‘The way they see it, once you’re in the Council, you won’t be able to go around putting yourself in dangerous situations. They view it as a way of safeguarding a valuable asset.’ Clavain scratched his beard. ‘So what you’re saying is 1 can’t win either way, is that it?’ ‘There’s a minority that would be quite happy to see you remain out of the Closed Council,’ Remontoire said. ‘Some are your staunchest allies. Some, however, think that letting you continue to play soldier is the easiest way to get you killed.’ ‘Nice to know I’m appreciated. And what do you two think?’ Remontoire spoke softly. ‘The Closed Council needs you, Clavain. Now more than ever.’ Something unspoken passed between them then, Felka sensed. It was not neural communication but something far older, something that could only be understood by friends who had known and trusted each other for a very long time. Clavain nodded gravely and then looked at Felka. ‘You know my position,’ she said. ‘I’ve known you and Remontoire since my childhood on Mars. You were there for me, Clavain. You went back into Galiana’s nest and saved me when she said it was hopeless. You never gave up on me, through all the years that followed. You made me into something other than what I was. You made me into a person.’ ‘And now?’ ‘Galiana isn’t here,’ she said. ‘That’s one less link to my past, Clavain. I don’t think I could stand to lose another.’ In a repair berth on the rim of Carousel New Copenhagen, in the outer habitat lane of the circum-Yellowstone Rust Belt, Xavier Liu was having considerable difficulty with monkeys. The shop steward, who was not a monkey at all but an enhanced orang-utan, had pulled all of Xavier’s squirrel monkeys out of the workshop at short notice. It was not Xavier’s fault — his own labour relations had always been good — but the orang-utan had ordered the workers to down tools in sympathy with a party of striking colobus monkeys halfway around the rim. As far as Xavier could tell, the dispute had something to do with lemurs who were working at below-union rates and thereby taking work away from higher primates. It was the sort of thing that might have been mildly interesting, even amusing, had it not impacted his latest job. But, Xavier reflected, it very much came with the territory. If he did not like working with monkeys, or apes, or prosimians, or even the occasional group of pygmy sloths, he should not have chosen to set up business in Carousel New Copenhagen. The outer habitat lane was a bristling grey torus spinning within the Rust Belt, the ramshackle procession of habitats and the gutted remains of habitats that, despite all that had happened, still orbited Yellowstone. Habitats came in all shapes and sizes even before they began to suffer age, sabotage and collision. Some were enormous air-filled cylinders or spheres, adorned with mirrors and delicate gold sunshades. Others had been constructed on small asteroids or comet fragments, eased into orbit around Yellowstone by armies of Skyjacks. Sometimes the habitats wormed deep within these solid foundations, transforming their rocky hearts into a confusion of vertiginous plazas and air-filled public spaces. Others were built mainly on the surface, for ease of access to and from local space. These domed low-grav communities were clumped together like frogspawn, shot through with the iridescent green and blue of miniature biomes. Typically, the domes showed evidence of hasty repair work: scars and spider webs of emergency epoxy sealant or foam-diamond. Some had not been resealed, and what lay within was dark and lifeless, like the ashes of a fire. Other habitats conformed to less pragmatic designs. There were wild spirals and helices, like blown glass or nautilus shells. There were enormous concatenations of spheres and tubes resembling organic molecules. There were habitats that reshaped themselves continually, slow symphonic movements of pure architecture. There were others that had clung to an outmoded design through stubborn centuries, resisting all innovation and frippery. A few others had cloaked themselves in fogs of pulverised matter, concealing their true design. Then there were the derelicts. Some had been evacuated during the plague and had suffered no major catastrophes afterwards, but the majority had been struck by collision fragments from other habitats that had already crashed and burned. A few had been scuttled, blown apart by nuclear charges; not much remained of those. Some had been reclaimed and re-fitted during the years of reconstruction. A few were still held by aggressive squatters, despite the best efforts of the Ferrisville Convention to evict them. Carousel New Copenhagen had weathered the plague years more successfully than some, but it had not come through totally unscathed. In the current era it was a single fat ring, rotating slowly. The rim of the ring was a kilometre wide. Seen from a distance, it was a festering blur of intricate structures, as if a strip of industrial cityscape had been wound on the outside of a wheel. Closer, it resolved into a coral-like mass of gantries and cranes and docking bays, service towers and recessed parking bays, spindly latticework exfoliating into vacuum, studded with a million stuttering lights of welding torches, advertising slogans and winking landing beacons. Arriving and departing ships, even in wartime, formed a haze of insect motion around the rim. Traffic management around Copenhagen was a headache. At one time the wheel had rotated at twice its current rate: sufficient to generate a gee of centrifugal gravity at the rim. Ships had docked in the de-spun hub, still in free fall. Then, at the height of the plague, when the former Glitter Band was being downgraded to the Rust Belt, a rogue chunk of another habitat had taken out the entire central hub. The rim had been left spinning alone, spokeless. There had been deaths, inevitably, many hundreds of them. Emergency ships had been parked where the hub had been, loading evacuees to ferry down to Chasm City. The precision of the impact had looked suspicious, but subsequent examination showed that it had been caused by exceptional bad luck. Yet Copenhagen had survived. The carousel was an old one and not especially reliant on the microscopic technologies that the plague had subverted. For the millions who lived within it, life continued almost as it had before. With no easy location for new ships to dock, evacuation was painstaking at best. By the time the plague’s worst months were over, Copenhagen was still mostly inhabited. The citizenry had kept their carousel running where others had been abandoned to the care of faltering machines. They had steered it out of the way of further collisions and taken ruthless measures to stamp out plague outbreaks
