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dark. That wasn’t Rowland’s style at all, no matter what uninformed observers might think of his retreat to the wilds of Venezuela and his long silence. He might have set his sights on stranger skies than the Hive’s starry firmament, but they were definitely not earthbound.
    That, at any rate, was what I thought as I made my way toward Magdalen’s marquee, expecting to see him there, if not center stage, then as close to Rosalind as anyone would ever be permitted to get.

CHAPTER TWO
    As I was still studying the colored dome from without, with what I hoped might pas for a connoisseur’s eye, I finally caught a glimpse of someone I knew—who seemed distinctly relieved to catch sight of a familiar face. He hurried to meet me.
    â€œPeter?” he said, as if he were uncertain as to the reliability of his memory. “Peter Bell?” He didn’t add “the Third” because he hadn’t known my father and grandfather, who had passed through the hallowed halls of Imperial College before his time—the time of his tenure, that is, not his life; he was considerably older than my father, and looked it. Even if he had overlapped with the time of my father’s passage, he wouldn’t have known him, because my father and I had studied different subjects.
    I nodded my head, in case he really was in need of confirmation. “Professor Crowthorne,” I said. I tried to remember exactly how long it had been since I’d seen him, and settled on nine years, a couple of years after my doctorate had been conferred. I also tried to remember his first name, although I didn’t imagine that I’d need to use it, but I couldn’t. His initials were J. V., but whether he was a John, a James, a Julius or a Justin I had no idea. He hadn’t changed a bit—but that was hardly surprising. He hadn’t attempted to make use of somatic engineering to restore any kind of travesty of his lost youth, but he had made use of active cosmetics to freeze his features at the apparent age of fifty. At a rough estimate, he must have been seventy-five, but I knew that he hadn’t retired from research, or even from teaching.
    â€œHave you seen Rowland?” was, inevitably, the professor’s next question. He had been Rowland’s personal tutor at Imperial, and Magdalen’s too, though not mine. He only knew me as a participant in his seminars.
    â€œNot yet,” I told him. At that point in time, of course, I still expected to, although the fact that the professor hadn’t seen him either did sound a slight semi-conscious alarm bell.
    â€œI don’t think any of the family have emerged from the Pyramid yet,” Crowthone was quick to add. “I suppose I should have said, have you seen Rowland recently? I tried to keep in touch, but…these days, distance isn’t supposed to matter any more, but Venezuela hasn’t recovered from the Crash yet, has it? How could it, having lost ninety-five per cent of its peak population?”
    â€œThings still seem to be pretty bad out there,” I confirmed, although I only had the same newsfeeds to draw on as the professor.
    One of the reasons why Rowland had moved to Venezuela was that it had one of the shorelines hit hardest by the ecocatastrophe. The delta region where he had taken up residence had been under the sea for more than a generation, and still suffered freak tides, as well as frequent hurricanes, on an irregular basis. It might have been feasible for the natives to begin building harbors again, but it would probably be another twenty years, at least, before any sort of local fishing industry became viable, and there were no custodians of that particular cultural tradition left in on the coast in question. Moving in had been a challenge even for someone with Rowland’s inherited wealth and biotechnological abilities.
    A bold gantzer was supposed to be able to erect buildings anywhere, but it had