Divisions Read Free Page B

sighted on, not low-looming Jupiter, but the Moon. I squatted, spreading the dress carelessly, and reached up and scratched the monkey’s head and whispered in its ear.
    The monkey began to melt into the jacket’s shoulder, and then dress and jacket together flowed like mercury, and reshaped themselves into a ten-foot-wide dish aerial within which I crouched, my head covered by a fine net that spun itself up from where the collar had been. A needle-thin rod grew swiftly to the aerial’s focus. Threads of wire spooled out across the deck, seeking power sources, finding one in seconds. The transformed smart-suit hummed around me.
    ‘It’s still no,’ I said. ‘Going for the second option.’
    ‘Tight-beam message sent,’ said the suit. ‘Acknowledged by Lagrange relay.’
    And that was that. The recipients of the message would know what I meant by ‘the second option.’ Nobody else would. My mission was confined to more than radio silence; the whole reason I’d come here myself was that we couldn’t even trust word-of-mouth. The narrow-beamed radio message would be picked up and passed on by laser, which had the advantage that the Jovians could neither interfere with nor overhear it. It would be bounced to our ship, the Terrible Beauty , which was at this moment on the other side of the Earth, and sent on to the Division’s base on Callisto. There would be a bare acknowledgement from Callisto, in a matter of hours. I was not going to wait around for it, not like this. I stood up and told the suit to resume its previous shape. When the dress was restored I gave it an unnecessary but celebratory twirl, and spun straight into somebody’s arms. As I stumbled back a pace I saw that I’d bumped into Stephan Vrij, the photographer.
    We stood looking at each other for a moment.
    ‘The things you see when you don’t have your camera,’ I said.
    ‘I didn’t follow you,’ he said awkwardly. ‘I was just looking around. Last
part of my job for the evening. It’s amazing the crazy things people do up here, after a party.’
    ‘Can you forget this?’ I asked.
    ‘OK,’ he said. He looked away.
    ‘Then I’ll promise to forget you.’ I reached out and caught his hand. ‘Come on. I’ve had a lot of drinks, and you’ve had none, right?’
    ‘Yes,’ he said, looking a bit puzzled as I tugged at his hand and set off determinedly towards the elevator shaft. I grinned down at him.
    ‘What better way to start the night?’
    ‘You have a point there,’ he said.
    ‘Well, no,’ I said, ‘I rather hope you …’
    Laughing, we went to his room.
    When you are among another people, or another people is among you, and you lust after their strange flesh, go you and take your pleasure in them, and have sons and daughters by them, and your people shall live long upon the lands and your children shall fill the skies.
    So it is written in the Books of Jordan, anyway. Genetics , chapter 3, verse 8.
     
     
    I woke in a comfortable, if disorderly, bed. Stephan Vrij snored peacefully beside me. We were both naked, and I was under a quilt. I drew the quilt over him and he rolled over in his sleep.
    From the angle of the light through the window, it was mid-morning on another fine day. The room was made of something that looked and smelled like pine, but it had never been cut into planks then hammered or glued together (which some people on Earth still do, as I later discovered, and not all of them because they have to but because they can afford the time to indulge such fads). Instead, it had been grown on-site, the walls and floor curving into each other, utility cables emerging like vines from the knotholes. Glossy monochrome pictures—of people, landscapes, seascapes—were stuck to the walls. They looked detailed and precise, just like photographs, apart from the lack of colour. Scattered about, on the low chairs and table or on the floor, was a rather embarrassing quantity and diversity of lingerie. Evidently I had been