Divisions Read Free Page A

moment of what it might be like if we ever had to treat them as an outbreak and hit them with an orbital zap. There would be no warning, no evacuation, no lastminute work for the ecologists.
    The monkey-thing bounded from Meg’s lap to mine. I let it scurry up my arm and nestle on my shoulder, and smoothed out the lap of my skirt. I looked up.
    ‘That’s fine,’ I said. ‘It’s up to you.’ I shrugged, the false animal’s false fur brushing my cheek. ‘You do what seems best.’ I stood up and smiled at them both.
    For a moment Wilde looked nonplussed. I hoped he’d be so thrown off balance by my lack of persistence that he would change his mind. But the ploy didn’t work. I would have to go for the second option: more difficult, more perilous and, if anything, less likely to succeed.

    ‘Goodbye,’ I said. ‘See you around.’
    In hell, probably.
     
     
    I leaned over the guardrail around the roof of the Casa Azores and looked down. The ground was a thousand metres below. I felt no vertigo. I’ve climbed taller trees. There were lights along the beach, bobbing boats in front of the beach, then a breakwater; and beyond that, blue-green fields of algae, fish-farms and kelp plantations and ocean thermal-energy converters, all the way to the horizon. Airships—whether on night-work or recreation I didn’t know—drifted like silvery bubbles above them. The building itself, although in the middle of all this thermal power, drew its electricity from a different source. Technically the whole structure was a Carson Tower, powered by cooled air from the top falling down a central shaft and turning turbines on the way.
    It was cold on the roof. I turned away from the downward view, wrapped the bolero jacket around my shoulders, and looked at the sky. Once my irises had adjusted, I could see Jupiter, among the clutter of orbital factories, mirrors, lightsails, satellites, and habitats. With binoculars, I could have seen Callisto, Io, Europa—and the ring. It was as good a symbol as any of the forces we were up against.
    Our enemies, by some process which even after two centuries was, as we say, not well understood , had disintegrated Jupiter’s largest moon, Ganymede, to leave that ring of hurrying debris and worrying machinery. And—originally within the ring, but now well outside it—was something even more impressive and threatening: a sixteen-hundred-metre-wide gap in space-time, a wormhole gate to the stars.
    Two centuries ago, the Outwarders—people like ourselves, who scant years earlier had been arguing politics with us in the sweaty confines of primitive space habitats—had become very much not like us: post-human, and superhuman. Men Like Gods, like. The Ring was their work, as was the Gate.
    After these triumphs, nemesis. Their fast minds hit some limit in processing-speed, or attained enlightenment, or perhaps simply wandered. Most of them distintegrated, others drifted into the Jovian atmosphere, where they re-established some kind of contact with reality.
    Their only contact with us, a few years later, was a burst of radio-borne information viruses which failed to take over, but managed to crash, every computer in the Solar System. The dark twenty-second century settled down like drizzle.
    Humanity struggled through the Fall, the Green Death, and the Crash,
and came out of the dark century with a deep disapproval of the capitalist system (which brought the Fall), for the Greens (who brought the Death), and for the Outwarders (who brought the Crash, and whose viral programs still radiated, making electronic computation and communication hazardous at best).
    The capitalist system was abolished, the Greens became extinct, and the Outwarders—
    The Outwarders had still to be dealt with.
     
     
    I checked that I was alone on the roof. The chill, fluted funnels of the Carson process sighed in their endless breath, their beaded condensation quivering into driblets. I moved around in their shadow, and