The stone gods Jeanette Winterson

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PUBLISHED BY ALFRED A. KNOPF CANADA

electronic or mechanical means, inclucling information storage and retrieval systems, without permission in writing from the publisher, except by a reviewer, who may quote brief passages in a review. Pu blished in 2008 by Alfred A. Knopf Canada, a division of Random House of Canada Limited, and simultaneously in the United States of America by Harcourt Books. First published in Great Britain in 2007 by Hamish Hamilton, a division of Penguin Books Ltd., London. Distributed by Random House of Canada Lirnited,Toronto.

Knopf Canada and colophon are trademarks.

www.randomhouse.ca

Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication

Winterson, Jeanette, 1959 The stone gods / Jeanette Winterson.

ISBN 978-0-307-39722-5 I. Title.

PR6073.I558S762008a 823'.914 C2007-907667-X

First Edition

Text set in Monotype Bembo

Printed and bound in the United States of America

246897531

This book is to my oldest friends - Philippa Brewster, Vicky Licorish, Henri Llewelyn Davies, Mona Howard, Peggy Reynolds, Beeban Kidron, Phillippa Giles, and Ruth Rendell. And to Ali Smith, who came later, and to Deborah Warner, always.

Contents

Planet Blue.5

Easter Island.102

Post-3 War124

Wreck City.156

Acknowledgements.217

Planet Blue

This new world weighs a yatto-gram.

But everything is trial-size; tread-on-me tiny or blurred-out-of-focus huge. There are leaves that have grown as big as cities, and there are birds that nest in cockleshells. On the white sand there are long-toed clawprints deep as nightmares, and there are rock pools in hand-hollows finned by invisible fish. Trees like skyscrapers, and housing as many. Grass the height of hedges, nuts the swell of pumpkins. Sardines that would take two men to land them. Eggs, pale-blue-shelled, each the weight of a breaking universe.

And, underneath, mushrooms soft and small as a mouse ear. A crack like a cut, and inside a million million microbes wondering what to do next. Spores that wait for the wind and never look back. Moss that is concentrating on being green.

A man pushes forward with a microphone - 'And is there oxygen?' Yes, there is. 'And fresh water?'

Abundant. 'And no pollution?' None. Are there minerals? Is there gold? What's the weather like? Does it rain a lot? Has anyone tried the fish? Are there any humans? No, there are not any humans. Any intelligent life at all?

Depends what you mean by intelligent. There is something there, yes, and it's very big and very good at its job.

A picture of a scaly-coated monster with metal-plated jaws appears on the overhead screen. The crowd shrieks and swoons. No! Yes! No! Yes!

The most efficient killing machine ever invented before gun-powder. Not bad for a thing with a body the size of a stadium and a brain the size of a jam-jar.

I am here today to answer questions: 'The lady in pink — '

'Are these monsters we can see vegetarian?'

'Ma'am, would you be vegetarian with teeth like that?'

It's the wrong answer. I am here to reassure. A scientist steps forward. That's better. Scientists are automatically reassuring.

This is a very exciting, and very reassuring, day.

We are here today to witness the chance of a lifetime. The chance of many lifetimes. The best chance we have had since life began. We are running out of planet and we have found a new one. Through all the bright-formed rocks that jewel the sky, we searched until we found the one we will call home. We're moving on, that's all. Everyone has to do that some time or other, sooner or later, it's only natural.

My name is Billie Crusoe.

'Excuse me, is your name Billie Crusoe?'

'That's me.'

'From Enhancement Services?'

'Yes, Every Day a New Day.' (As we say in Enhancement.)

'Can you tell viewers how the new planet will affect their lives?'

'Yes, I can. The new planet offers us the opportunity to do things differently. We've had a lot of brilliant successes here on Orbus - well, we are the success story of the universe, aren't we? I mean to say, no other planet hosts human life.'

The interviewer nods and smiles vigorously.

'But we have taken a few wrong turnings. Made a few mistakes. We have limited natural resources at our disposal, and a rising population that is by no means in agreement as to how our world as a whole should share out these remaining resources. Conflict is likely. A new planet means that we can begin to redistribute ourselves. It will mean a better quality of life for everyone — the ones who leave and the ones who stay.'

'So a win-win situation?'

'That's right, winning numbers all the way.'

Through the golden arches that are the city gates, the President of the Central Power is arriving. The arches stand like angels, their wings folded back against the lesser lights of the skyline. The laser-gates, which look so solid, appear and disappear, like the wall that rings the city, a visible and invisible sign of progress and power.

Look in the light —the slight shimmer is their long energy. They are the aura of the city: emblem and warning, its halo and shield.

The President's cavalcade has reached the Circle. Flags, carpets, flowers, flunkeys, hitmen, pressmen, frontmen, back-up, support, medics, techies, crew, rig, lights, sound, real-time, archive, relay, vox-pop, popcorn, polish, makeup, dust-down, ready, green - GO.

The President is making a speech. The Central Power has funded the space mission for hundreds of years, and it is understood that any discoveries belong to us. He compares us to the men who found the Indies, the Americas, the Arctic Circle; he becomes emotional, he reaches for a line of poetry. For a moment, there it is, in handwriting that nobody can read, slanting under the images of Planet Blue — She is all States, all Princes I ...

The President is making a speech.

Unique moment for mankind ... unrivalled opportunity ... war averted ... summit planned between the Central Power, Eastern Caliphate, and our friends in the SinoMosco Pact. Peaceful compromise promised. New planets for old. Full pictures and information across the twenty-two geo-cities of the Central Power by tomorrow morning. New colonizing mission being made ready. Monsters will be humanely destroyed, with the possible exception of scientific capture of one or two types for the Zooeum.

Into the Circle come the spacemen themselves, in shiny titanium pressure suits, oversize helmets under their arms. These are men glamorous as comets, trailing fame in fire-tails. There's a robot with them — well, a Robo sapiens , incredibly sexy, with that look of regret they all have before they are dis-mantled. It's policy; all information-sensitive robots are dismantled after mission, so that their data cannot be accessed by hostile forces. She's been across the universe, and now she's going to the recycling unit. The great thing about robots, even these Robo sapiens , is that nobody feels sorry for them. They are only machines.

She stands there, while the silver-suited saviours shake the Presi-dent's hand. She's going to tell us all about the chemical and mineral composition of the new planet, its atmospheric readings, its possible history and potential evolution. Then, when the public part is done, she'll go backstage, transfer all her data, and open her power cells until her last robot flicker.

The End.

It's a kind of suicide, a kind of bleeding to death, but they show no emotion because emotions are not part of their programming.

Amazing to look so convincing and be nothing but silicon and a circuit-board. She glances over to the Support Stand and catches my eye. I can't help blushing. I think she has read my mind. They can do that.

This is a great day for science. The last hundred years have been hell. The doomsters and the environmentalists kept telling us we were as good as dead and, hey presto, not only do we find a new planet, but it is perfect for new life. This time, we'll be more careful.. This time we will learn from our mistakes. The new planet will be home to the universe's first advanced civilization. It will be a democracy

- because whatever we say in public, the Eastern Caliphate isn't going to be allowed within a yatto-mile of the place. We'll shoot 'em down before they land. No, we won't shoot them down, because the President of the Central Power has just announced a new world programme of No War. We will not shoot down the Eastern Caliphate, we will robustly repel them.

The way the thinking is going in private, we'll leave this run-down rotting planet to the Caliphate and the SinoMosco Pact, and they can bomb each other to paste while the peace-loving folks of the Central Power ship civilization to the new world.

The new world - El Dorado, Atlantis, the Gold Coast, Newfoundland, Plymouth Rock, Rapanaui, Utopia, Planet Blue. Chanc'd upon, spied through a glass darkly, drunken stories strapped to a barrel of rum, shipwreck, a Bible Compass, a giant fish led us there, a storm whirled us to this isle. In the wilderness of space, we found ...

My name is Billie Crusoe. Here comes my boss, Manfred. He's the kind of man who was born to rise and rise: a human elevator.

'Billie, have you voiced through the downloads?'

'Yes, everything is there - sketches, diagrams, and a step-by-step explanation of how Planet Blue will change all our lives.'

'We have to present this positively.'

'It is positive, isn't it? Are you saying there are presentation problems with the chance that everyone is dying for?'

'Don't use the word "dying".'

'But Orbus is dying.'

'Orbus is not dying. Orbus is evolving in a way that is hostile to human life.'

'OK, so it's the planet's fault. We didn't do anything, did we?

Just fucked it to death and kicked it when it wouldn't get up.'

'I know how you feel. I don't say you're entirely wrong in your analysis, but that isn't the way we can present the situation. The President has sent a memo this morning to instruct Enhancement Services and Media Services to work together on this. We don't want any stupid questions — any difficulties. The last thing the Central Power needs now is any unrest of our own. There will be trouble enough with the Caliphate and the Pact.'

'Because you're not giving a ride to either the Believers or the Collective?'

'When did they ever do anything for us?'

The Central Power is trying to live responsibly on a crowded planet, and that bunch are still scanning the skies for God, and draining the last drops of oil out of the ground. They can go to Hell.'

Manfred looked down at my notebook. He frowned his older-man-thinker-type-sexy frown. 'Billie, if you weren't so eccentric, you'd fit in better here. Why are you writing in a notebook? Nobody reads and writes any more — there's no need. Why can't you use a SpeechPad like everybody else?'

'Notebook. Pencil. They have an old-fashioned charm that I like.'

'And I like the present just as it is. You still living in that bio-bubble thing?'

'You mean the farm? Of course I am. If I'd been able to make it pay I wouldn't be working for you. But a world that clones its meat in the lab and engineers its crops underground thinks natural food is dirty and diseased.'

'It is.'

'Yeah. And pigs are planes. So the farm is leased to Living Museum and I am enslaved to you.'

'You don't get many scientists coming across to work in Enhancement ... It's not exactly a career move.'

I had a feeling that something else was here - one of those ice-bound conversations that skate over the corpse in the lake. 'Is there a problem with my work?'

Manfred shrugged. 'Like I said, a Science Service high-flyer doesn't need to take a job with Enhancement.'

'You work for Enhancement.'

He was getting impatient. 'Billie, I'm going to be running the whole shooting match within two years. I have a graph. I have a Promotion Plan. I'm heading for the top floor. ' (Yep, there he goes, Penthouse Man.) 'You aren't heading anywhere. You could have been promoted to Management within six months, but you're still on the ground, visiting people in their homes.'

'That's me, a cross between a District Nurse and an Insurance Salesman.'

'What's a District Nurse?'

'Never mind. History is a hobby of mine. It's not illegal, and neither is the farm, and neither is wanting a simple life. No graph, no Promotion Plan. OK?'

'OK. OK.'

He held up his hands. He turned to leave. 'Oh, you should move your Solo. Enforcement just gave you a ticket.'

'But I have a permit!'

'Take it up with Enforcement.'

'Manfred, this has been going on for a year — I clear them, they start again. I'm not paranoid, but if someone is out to get me, I would like to know.'

'No one is out to get you. But move the Solo. I would if I were you.'

He swung his handsome body and handsome head out and away to higher things. Manfred is one of those confident men who have had themselves genetically Fixed as late-forties. Most men prefer to Fix younger than that, and there are no women who Fix past thirty. 'The DNA Dynasty', they called us, when the first generation of humans had successful recoding. Age is information failure. The body loses fluency. Command stations no longer connect with satellite stations. Relay breaks down. The body is designed to repair and renew itself, and most cells are only about a third as old as our birth years, but mitochondrial DNA is as old as we are, and has always accumulated mutations and distortions faster than DNA in the nucleus. For centuries we couldn't fix that - and now we can. Science can't fix everything, though - women feel they have to look youthful, men less so, and the lifestyle programmes are full of the appeal of the older man. Everybody wants one - young girls and gay toyboys adore Manfred. His boyfriend has designed a robot that looks like him. Myself, I wouldn't be able to tell the difference.

I went downstairs, through the clotted ranks of Security and Sup-port, officially known as Enforcement Services and Enhancement Services, but the SS has a better ring to it than the EE. We work together a lot of the time, soft-cop hard-cop kind of thing. It's my job — that is, our job — in Enhancement to explain to people that they really do want to live their lives in a way that is good for them and good for the Community. Enforcement steps in when it doesn't quite work out.

I know all the guys in Enforcement. I wave and smile. They nod, and let me pass.

Outside, there's a line of Solos and a line of Limos.

S is for Solo — a single-seater solar-powered transport vehicle. L is for Limo, a multi-seater hydrogen hybrid. S is for short-distance. L is for long-distance. Single-letter recognition is taught in schools. In front of one of these vehicles, and one only, a Can Cop is punching numbers into the Coder wired into his arm. CanCops are always around for back-up at high-security events — all they are is robots, soup cans with the power of Arrest.

On one of the long line of vehicles — and only one, mine — a bright yellow laser-light is covering the windshield. That's my penalty notice. Unless I press the yellow button on the parking meter next to it, I will not be able to drive away because I will not be able to see out of my glass. It's a clever system —

you have to accept guilt before you can drive away and protest your innocence. P is for Parking Meter. Slide up to the kerb, get out, look around, and the shiny solar-powered parking meter says to you, in its shiny solar-powered parking-meter voice — Hi there! You can park here for thirty minutes. I will bill your account directly. Welcome to the neighbourhood. The meter then photographs your licence plate, connects to your Parking Account, which you must keep in credit at all times, and sends a digital receipt to your HomeScreen or your Work-Screen, whichever you have nominated. That's all there is to it, unless you run late, in which case the meter will laser-light your windshield in such a way as to make it impossible for you to drive off without accepting the Penalty. So here I am — and I've been booked, even though I have a great big permit on the front of the car, with the date and time of my arrival and the impressive symbol of the Central Power. I have been booked — again. If I were the paranoid type, which I am, I might almost start to believe that ... Believe what?

I wave my arms at the CanCop, and point to the permit. He shrugs his tin shoulders. The guys from Enforcement are laughing — it's true this kind of cock-up, or cop-up, happens all the time, and it's a bore but not a problem ... The trouble is that, for me, it's becoming a big problem. I get out my Omni — the phone that does everything — and it automatically accesses the Parking Bureau Help Line. A sympa-thetic face flashes up in blonde pixels on my phone. 'DUE TO . . .' I slam her off before she gets any further.

D is for Due to. Whenever anybody calls to complain, a sympa-thetic person — well, a sympathetic robot, actually, because they are programmed to be more sympathetic than persons. Anyway, this sympathetic robot says, 'DUE TO', and you know that due to a high volume of calls, due to heavy demand, due to staff shortages, due to difficulties, due to system failure, due to freak storms, due to little green men squatting the offices, well, DUE TO, nobody is going to speak to you, at least not in this lifetime.

Fuck it fuck it fuck it. F is for Fuck it.

And in the middle of this hi-tech, hi-stress, hi-mess life, F is for Farm. My farm. Twenty hectares of pastureland and arable, with a stream running through the middle like a memory. Step into that water and you remember everything, and what you don't remember, you invent.

My farm is the last of its line —like an ancient ancestor everyone forgot. It's a bio-dome world, secret and sealed: a message in a bottle from another time.

The soil is deep clay and the cattle make holes in it where they herd to feed. The holes fill with water, then ice over, and the birds crack open the ice to drink. The woodland belts that hold the fields are thick with branches thick with birds. At evening the sky above the wood is dark with the wings of birds. The rough fences, the uneven ground, the tussocks of grass, the tiny blue violets that grow where the cattle go, the poppies that change the furrowed earth into a red sea that hares part. The distance the eye follows to whatever moves and dives, the life that fills every bit of uncultivated hedge and verge. The burrows, tunnels, nests, tree-hollows, wasp-balls, drilled-out holes of the water voles, otter sticks, toad stones, mice riddling the dry-stone walls, badger sets, molehills, fox dens, rabbit warrens, stoats brown in summer, ermine in winter, clean as bullets through the bank. The trout shy in the reeds. The carp dozing on the riverbed. Dragonflies like Annunciations. A kingfisher on wings of blue light. A green-headed duck and a white swan dropping under the white-foamed fall of the green water to the bottom of the clough where the frogs wait patiently to be in a fairy tale.

There is no magic wand here. If I don't move the Solo in the next five minutes, yellow will change to orange will change to red, not the way the sun changes, to mark the day, but so that my fine gets bigger. Press the button, Billie. Press the bloody button. B is for Billie, button and bloody. THANK YOU!says the parking meter. You are ready to drive away.

There won't be any parking meters on the new blue planet. That alone makes the visit worth the trip.

I have an appointment today with a woman who wants to be genetically reversed to twelve years old to stop her husband running after schoolgirls. It's possible, but it's illegal. She wants to take her case to the Court of Human Rights. She's already seen a psychiatrist and a Consultant specializing in Genetics. Now she has to talk to me, woman to woman, because Enhancement is here to Listen when You have Problems.

I key in my destination co-ordinates, and the Solo makes its way across to the Business Lane. This is peak-hour driving and I am paying the price mile by mile. In the Leisure Lane, nobody is paying at all but, then, nobody is moving either.

The first pictures of Planet Blue are beginning to appear on the smart-skins of the buildings. It's as though we are driving straight towards it. There it is, pristine, diamond-cut, and the zooms show miles and miles of empty beauty. Everyone on the highway is watching. It doesn't matter: magnetic rebuff stops anyone driving into anyone else. We just stay in line and get there some day. Yeah, we'll get there some day, blue planet, silver stars.

The Solo is beeping. Voice Announce tells me to turn right, and the wall-screen on the corner of the road flashes a picture of a bell. This must be Belle Vue Drive. Etymology was one of the victims of State-approved mass illiteracy. Sorry, a move towards a more integrated, user-friendly day-to-day information and communi-cations system. (Voice and pictures, yes; written words, no.) As I make the turn, I drive straight towards a BeatBot. BeatBots: direct descendants of a low-paid State Functionary that used to be called a Traffic Warden. As everyone knew, these types were inhuman, and it made more sense to build them than to hire them, so as soon as the technology became available, that was what we did.

The BeatBot waves me over, and buzzes out his question in his trademark synthesized voice that sounds like wasps in a dustbin. BeatBots don't have to sound like this, but they do: Why was I hesitating on a busy turn from a main highway?

I tell him I was just waiting to see the road sign. He mumbles something into the radio that is an extension of his chin, and the next thing I know, a couple of if Nifties are checking out the underside of the car with mirrors.

Nifties: annoying little micro-Bots that scuttle around in drains and fix underfloor heating. Most people keep a couple in the car in case they want something picked up off the floor or need a foot massage. Nifties have no personality, and they look like a box on wheels with a retractable aerial at each corner. They were designed for busy people on the move — which is all of us, because staying still is so last-century.

'What's the problem?' I ask the Bot, but he won't answer, because BeatBots have very limited powers of speech.

I must not get paranoid — Bots are a typical happening on a typical road here in Tech City, because Tech City is where every single robot in the twenty-two gee-cities of the Central Power is designed and made. Naturally, or unnaturally, I suppose, we have a lot of them.

R is for Robot.

There's Kitchenhand for the chores, Flying Feet to run errands or play football with the kids. Garagehand — that's the big hairy one that's good with a spanner. There's Lend-a-Hand too, for the temporarily unpartnered.

We have Robe-paws, the perfect pet — depending on your defi-nition of perfect. We have TourBots, for hire when you visit a new place and need someone to show you round. We have bottom of the range LoBots, who have no feet because they spend all their time on their knees cleaning up. And we have BeatBots. Yeah.

Mine has finished chewing over the car, and issued an Offence Code. I don't know what my offence is

— but I do know it's impossible to argue with a BeatBot. I'll have to take it up with the Computer later. The BeatBot shuffles off in his oversize nano-parka with intelli-gent hood. The hood is the bit that processes information — the rest of the Bot is just a moving lump of metal — which is what all robots are, when you come down to it, until the big breakthrough.

Robo sapiens .

As far away from a BeatBot as Neanderthal Man is from us. No, I have to revise that because we are regressing. Oh, yes, it's true - we have no need for brains so our brains are shrinking. Not all brains, just most people's brains — it's an inevitable part of progress.

Meanwhile, the Robo sapiens is evolving.

The first artificial creature that looks and acts human, and that can evolve like a human — within limits, of course.

There are not very many of them, and they are fabulously expensive to make. If you want the ultimate piece of personal-wealth display, you get a Robo sapiens . The President of the Central Power keeps a pair who work as his PA and BodyGuard. They remember everything—faces, information, numbers, conver-sation — and they can make connections. These are robots who join the dots. Ask them for advice, and they will give it to you: impartial advice based on everything that can be known about the situation.

Ask them what you were doing this time two years ago, and they will tell you. Ask them what you ate at your wife's first G party and they have the menu off by heart. Except that they don't have hearts.

Heartless. Gorgeous. Even so, I have never seen one as impressive as the one they took with them to Planet Blue. She was built especially for the job, but did she need to be so beautiful too?

Inter-species sex is punishable by death.

Looking down the street at the numbers, it seems that my client is throwing a G party. In the past, people had birthdays. I have charted all of that through the Central Archive. Now birthdays don't matter because they mark the passing of the years, and for us years don't pass in the way that they once did. G

is the day and year you genetically fix. It's a great day to celebrate. I park the Solo on the meter outside the house. Hi there! says the hateful familiar voice. I ignore it and key in my override code, which Enhancement officers can do when on work-related calls. All set! See you later!

I kick it for fun. Nothing happens, of course.

The house — number twenty-nine — is festooned with pink pumped-up balloons. There are enough balloons on this house to qualify it for personal take-off. Batting aside the ones in my way, like giant mammaries, I lift the knocker.

A pink LoBot opens the door and brushes my (black) trainers with a pink brush. Ducking under more pink balloons to follow the LoBot, I am able to enter the rosy sitting room. It should be a sitting room, in that it is off the hall and on the ground floor, but it is faked out like a teenager's bedroom, and stuffed with celebrity holograms the way people in the past used to stuff their lounges with china ornaments. The problem with the hologram craze is that even if you scale them down you're still surrounded by dwarf-size replicas of movie stars and pop idols. Of course, you can walk right through them, but I find it creepy. This place is like a Hall of Fame. I can hardly shift for three-foot-tall Goliaths of the film industry. The LoBot is at just the right height to dust them top to bottom. She gets out a pink duster and sets to work.

'I love celebrity,' says my client, Mrs Mary McMurphy, 'but they need dusting. Even holograms attract dust. A lot of people don't realize that so they get allergies — from the dust, y'know, trapped in the hologram.'

Celebrities are under pressure, no doubt about it. We are all young and beautiful now, so how can they stay ahead of the game? Most of them have macro-surgery. Their boobs swell like beach balls, and their clicks go up and down like beach umbrellas. They are surgically stretched to be taller, and steroids give them muscle-growth that turns them into star-gods. Their body parts are bio-enhanced, and their hair can do clever things like change colour to match their outfits. They are everything that science and money can buy.

'I want to look like her,' says Mrs McMurphy. 'Like who?'

'Like Little Senorita.'

Little Senorita is a twelve-year-old pop star who has Fixed her-self rather than lose her fame. She sees no point in growing up when she is famous for not being grown-up. Understandably, as she has no talent, she wants to live in the moment for as long as she can.

Her parents support her. Her boyfriend says he's delighted. 'My husband is mad about Little Senorita. I want to be her.'

'Are you sure you want to be her for the rest of your life?'

'I can change later if it doesn't work out.'

Yes and no. Genetic reversal has strange effects on the body. The last time it was done, the reversal couldn't be contained, and the girl got younger and younger until she was a six-feet-tall six-month-old baby.

Fixing is simple. Unfixing to age naturally is pretty simple, though it is only ever done for medical research. I am explaining this to Mrs McMurphy and getting nowhere.

'My husband likes girls.'

'Legal sex starts at fourteen,' I reply.

'But everybody does it younger. Y'know that!'

'Does he have underage sex at home?'

'Oh, no, he always goes out. But I don't want to lose him.'

'Why not?'

She seems baffled by this question, and shifts among her cushions the colour of Turkish Delight, then hitches her school uniform, her pink school uniform, slightly higher. Any higher and it will just be a scarf round her neck, or maybe a hairband.

'Do you think you can stop him having sex with young girls by becoming one yourself?'

'Y'know, that's not my aim. He can do what he likes as long as he doesn't do it in the house,' she makes him sound like a golden retriever, 'and as long as he comes home now and again and does it with me.' He is a golden retriever. 'We don't have sex any more. He says I'm too old.'

A pair of Kitchenhands, got up to look like pink rubber gloves, comes into the sitting room, bearing two tall tumblers of a foaming liquid.

'I swear by Nitrogen Ginseng,' says my client.

While Mrs McMurphy takes and drinks hers eagerly, I take the opportunity to look more closely. I guess she has been Fixed at twenty-four. Now that everyone is young and beautiful, a lot of men are chasing girls who are just kids. They want something different when everything has become the same.

'I need to speak to your husband too.'

'He's not here.'

'Well, he should be here. This is an official appointment. Where is he?'

'He's at the Peccadillo.'

She has the grace to blush — no, I think she's blushing because it matches her outfit and the cushions and the wallpaper. It's all one childish, knowing, pre-teen turn-on. There is no point in staying. I gather my things and get up to leave. The hovering Kitchenhands lace their separate fingers and park quietly on top of a pot plant. The LoBot scurries towards the door.

'Are you excited about Planet Blue?' I ask Mrs McMurphy, by way of ending the conversation. She looks vague and smiles. 'Yeah, y'know, it's a great idea. I'm entering the celebrity competition to win a trip. The beaches look amazing.'

Outside, the windshield of my Solo is flashing yellow. What? This is crazy. Have all the stupid parking meters gone crazy? I don't even bother to ring the blonde pixellated robot on the DUE TO line. I ring Manfred. He sounds shifty.

'Have you got all you need for your report?'

'I have to find the husband. He's at the Peccadillo.'

'You can't go there in work time.'

'Then I can't make my report. I need to speak to her husband.'

'We have to nail this, Billie. Media want to interview her, and they'll need your notes before the story breaks. This Human Rights case is going to be the Next Big Thing after Planet Blue.'

'You mean that when we're bored to death with the news of a new world, the one we dreamed about for millennia, we'll go back to sex stories?'

'You're always so negative!'

'Sorry, you're right, it's going to be wonderful here on Planet Lolita. Why go anywhere else?'

'It's not your job to moralize.'

'So I'm going to the Peccadillo?'

'Yes.'

'And you'll clear my parking?'

'Yes.'

We both hang up trying to hang up first. It's time I found a new job. Even polishing LoBots would be better than this. Even getting a job as a BeatBot would be better than this.

At the Peccadillo parking is private, so I drive underground, leave the keys with Security, and take the elevator up to the Members' Floor. A hunchback bows me in.

There are a couple of translucents serving behind the bar.

Translucents are see-through people. When you fuck them you can watch yourself doing it. It's pornography for introverts.

Peccadillo is a perverts' bar, and we're all perverts now. By that I mean that making everyone young and beautiful also made us all bored to death with sex. All men are hung like whales. All women are tight as clams below and inflated like lifebuoys above. Jaws are square, skin is tanned, muscles are toned, and no one gets turned on. It's a global crisis. At least, it's a crisis among the cities of the Central Power. The Eastern Caliphate has banned Genetic Fixing, and the SinoMosco Pact does not make it available to all its citizens, only to members of the ruling party and their favourites. That way the leaders look like star-gods and the rest look like shit-shovellers. They never claimed to be a democracy. The Central Power is a democracy. We look alike, except for rich people and celebrities, who look better. That's what you'd expect in a democracy.

So, sexy sex is now about freaks and children. If you want to work in the sex industry, you get yourself cosmetically altered in shape and size. Giantesses are back in business. Grotesques earn good money. Kids under ten are known as veal in the trade.

Today at the Peccadillo it's a Veal Special so I'm not surprised to see a blond-haired guy, who looks like a golden retriever, heading for the Jacuzzi with a ten-year-old boy on his shoulders and a ten-year-old girl in his arms. Both of them are Caliphate kids. We buy them. We wouldn't do it to kids born in the Central Power because (a) it's illegal and (b) we're civilized. As I hurry across the floor, my way is barred by an enormous woman with one leg, hopping along on a diamond-studded crutch. I am on a level with her impressive breasts — more so, because where I would normally expect to find a nipple, I find a mouth. Her breasts are smiling, and so is she.

'Are you hungry for a playmate?'

'No, thank you. I'm just visiting the Jacuzzi.'

'Oh, don't waste your time in there. That's for kids. Come to the Fun Room. I can take four men at a time — front, rear, here and here.' She pats her accommodating breast-mouths, or is it mouth -breasts?

'I'm a girl.'

'Yeah, but you can watch, and when the boys are done, we can have some FUN. You're not straight, are you?'

'Not exactly.'

'Well, then, come along.'

'Look, I have to catch up with a guy who looks like a golden retriever. '

'Does he work here? I don't recall a Dog Man. We have a Dog Woman, hounds included.'

'No. He just looks like a golden retriever.'

'Cute. Well, when he's done what a dog has to do, you know where to find me. Just listen for the tap, tap, tap.'

She puts her crutch down and swings off. The one leg is for easier access. Am I a prude? Am I a moralist? Am I letting life's riches pass me by? Why do I want to go for a walk in the woods and say nothing until you turn to me and I take your face in both hands and kiss you?

I don't even know who you are.

A voice comes from behind me. 'Who R U? Whaddya want?' Big questions. For a moment I don't know what to say. Then I remember. 'I want to talk to Mr McMurphy.'

'You can't. He's busy.'

I explain my situation. The boss-guy, bouncer-guy, whatever he is, nods and says he'll pass the message on.

'Well, go in there and ask him why he wants his wife to look like Little Senorita.'

'You stupid or what? We all want our wives to look like Little

Senorita.'

'Why is that?'

'Coz she's hot, and this town is frigid.'

'Do you have a wife?'

'Not yet. I'm getting one from the Eastern Caliphate - it'll be legal, believe me, but she's nine years old and I'm gonna Fix her.'

'Children cannot be Fixed. That is the law.'

'Little Senorita — '

'Is fighting a legal battle, which she will lose. '

'You don't know that.'

'You don't know that she will win.'

'Oh, no? There's plenty of guys who want her to win, and you know what? They're all in the gang. Judges, politicians, you name it.'

But I don't want to name it.

'It's like every other Civil Rights and Equal Rights battle, OK? You had Blacks at one time. You had Semites at one time. You had mixed marriages, you had gays. All legal. No problem. We're just victims of prejudice and out-of-date laws.'

'It's called "paedophilia".'

'That's just a word, like "homosexual".'

'No, it's not a word like "homosexual", it's a word like "goat-fucker".'

'What's a goat?'

Let me try again. 'The kids are too young.'

'Sure not. They love it. Listen ... '

He props open the door into the Jacuzzi room with his jackboot. I can hear kids splashing and playing. I push past him and look inside. Sure enough, the place is wet with kids running and diving and throwing themselves through the fountains and down the slides, and there are four guys with hard-ons like concrete breakers waiting to catch them.

'Mr McMurphy!' I shout. He turns and smiles his playboy smile.

He comes over to the edge of the wet room, stroking himself. 'About your wife .. .'

'Yeah, whatever she wants, I'm behind her all the way. Her choice. I believe that women should make their own choices. Whatever she wants, all the way.'

The boss-guy, bouncer-guy manoeuvres me firmly out of the door and gives my bum a little squeeze.

'This is the future, honey.'

'Do you ever think about a world where there are no grown women at all? Just little girls?'

'Don't get me going. I'm on duty.'

I make my way back past the translucents, one of whom is doing his party trick with a Campari-soda. You can see the red going all the way down. So this is the future: girls Fixed at eight years old, maybe ten, hopefully twelve. Or will they want women's minds in girls' bodies and go for genetic reversal?

The future of women is uncertain. We don't breed in the womb any more, and if we aren't wanted for sex ... But there will always be men. Women haven't gone for little boys. Women have a different approach. Surrounded by hunks, they look for 'the ugly man inside'. Thugs and gangsters, rapists and wife-beaters are making a comeback. They may smile like beach-boys, but they are pure shark. So this is the future. F is for Future.

Out of the window, where it's going dark, I can see the laser-projection of Planet Blue. She needs us like a bed needs bedbugs. 'I'm sorry,' I say, to the planet that can't hear me. And I wish she could sail through space, unfurling her white clouds to solar winds, and find a new orbit, empty of direction, where we cannot go, and where we will never find her, and where the sea, clean as a beginning, will wash away any trace of humankind.

The phone rings - it's Manfred. He sounds excited. 'Pick up a new dress on your way home. Media wants a live TV interview with that Robo sapiens they're dismantling. You're going to front it. I want you to look good.'

'I already look good — we all look good.'

Cut the crap, Billie — get the dress.'

He hangs up again.

This is worse than a bad relationship. Still, it's my job, while I have it, so without more ado I leave the Peccadillo and walk a few blocks to a chic clothes store. I should be glad to be shopping in work time, but I'm not glad about anything. In fact, I'm depressed, which is pretty much illegal. By that I mean that at the first sign of depression I, you, anyone is supposed to see their doctor and be referred to someone from Enhancement, but I am someone from Enhancement, and I am depressed.

I tried smiling, straightening my back and walking positively into the scented, rnauve-coloured, cool interior of the fishpond-fitted intelligent shopping experience.

As soon as my dusty unacceptable feet triggered the sensor, Tasha's face appeared smiling on the wall. Tasha is in all the best women's clothing stores. It's a way of giving clone-clothing the exclusive but personal feel. 'Hi, Tasha,' I say, 'A112.'

'Hi, Billie, nice to see you. You look a little dusty.'

'I feel dusty. Can you find me something to wear? A dress?' My number has already given Tasha my name, details, size, previous items bought — in fact, my entire shopping history since nappies.

'Let's see,' said Tasha, 'I'll go into Wardrobe, and flash a few things on the wall, and if you like any, we'll send them right up to try.'

In a few seconds a selection of summer dresses and strappy sandals replaces Tasha's face on the wall.

'I think: you'd look good in numbers one, three and six with matching footwear,' she says from somewhere, nowhere.

She is right, of course, because computers are good at matching things — including people and their clothes. Mind you, as we all look more or less alike, and there are only two sizes, Model Thin and Model Thinner, it isn't hard.

'I'll send up one and six MT size,' says Tasha, before I have time to make a pretence of being part of this intelligent shopping experience. Never mind, the clothes are nice.

When I try on number six, it fits perfectly. I look wonderful in a normal sort of way because I always do look wonderful.

'You look wonderful,' says Tasha, purring like the computer cat that has just appeared next to her.

'Smartie thinks you look wonderful too.'

We all love Smartie, who is there to purr us on when we can't make up what is left of our minds. Some marketing guru realized long ago that animals, even fake ones, make people feel smug, good and relaxed. We feel like Tasha and Smartie really care, and who am I to say that they don't?

'Your size used to be MTT,' says Tasha. 'Are you happy with the extra weight?'

'Yes, I like it,' I say.

'I like it too,' says Tasha, taking her cue and, really, what is the difference between a size eight and a size ten? Only this: we still have a dieting industry.

Tasha, Smartie and I agree to charge the dress to my account, and I make a voluntary donation to Charity of the Month, which this month is Apes in the Wild.

'There isn't any Wild,' I say.

'Exactly so,' says Tasha. 'The money is to create a strip of Wild, and then put Apes in it.'

I don't know where the money goes, but everyone likes to give to charity: it shows we care.

'Anything else I can do for you today?' asks Tasha.

'Lipstick?'

'On me. My pleasure. I'll drop it in the basket by the door. Goodbye, Billie. See ya soon!'

Tasha disappears, leaving Smartie to wash himself. As I reach the door, my dress drops wrapped and ready into the Exit basket, and there is my lipstick in a bag on top. Very thoughtful ofTasha. Like a friend, I suppose.

I walk back towards the car park to pick up my Solo.

Guess what? The windshield is yellow. There's a code number flashing on it in black, like a demented hornet. As there is no parking meter, I have to key this code into my phone to drive away. It's what happens when you're caught on CCTV doing an illegal. But this isn't an illegal. This is private parking. I am beginning to feel justifiable paranoia. I look around for the cameras, not that you can ever see them. I am being watched, but that isn't strange. That's life. We're all used to it. What is strange is that I feel I am being watched. Staked out. Observed. But there's no one there.

I stand for a moment in the bleak and empty underground parking lot. I am human. I am thirty. I am alone.

I key in the ACCEPT code, and begin my way back to the office. On the radio, all the talk is of the new blue planet.

You dreamed all your life there was somewhere to land, a place to lie down and sleep, with the sound of water nearby. You set off to find it, buying old maps and listening to travellers' tales, because you believed that the treasure was really there.

Here I am, dreaming blue but seeing red. There's a red duststorm beginning, like spider-mite, like ants, like things that itch and bite. No one has any idea where the red dust is coming from but it clogs the air-filtering systems, and since it started about two years ago, we are obliged to carry oxygen masks. This one might blow over or it might not.

As I close the air-vents on the Solo and switch to the compressed air in the cabin, I hear something on the radio about the arrest of twenty-five Unknowns. What are they saying? 'Caught in the space compound, attempting to sabotage the next mission to Planet Blue. All of them identity-closed X-Cits.'

I is for Identity. In the long past, governments could destroy your papers and rescind your passport. Then they learned how to freeze your assets and steal your cash. Now that we have no cash, just credit accounts, those can be barred, but the tough measure is Identity Closure. Simply, you no longer exist. You become an X-Cit, an ex-citizen. There will be no record of you ever having existed. You can't travel, you can't buy anything, you can't register for anything, you can't plead your case. You can't use what was your name. When you get out of jail, if you ever get out of jail, you will be micro-tagged for life as an Unknown. You see them sometimes, cleaning the streets, their taggers flashing at fifteen-minute intervals, checked and recorded by the satellite system that watches us more closely than God ever did. Twenty-five Unknowns. The official line is that the Resistance has been smashed. There is no Resistance to the Central Power. That's why it seems to me to be useful to be able to read — if only between the lines.

Ahead of me are the huge double laser-arches that take me back into Tech City. You can see the giant golden Ms for miles, glitter-ing under the sky, adapting to the weather. Sometimes, for security reasons, there are long queues through the high, cathedral-like vaulted welcome into the capital.

But today we are all speeding under the golden arms of the arches into our city, into our lives, into the world that is a stream of information, ceaselessly collected and projected.

She is all States, all Princes I, Nothing else is.

Manfred, shirt perfectly cut to his pees, is waiting for me.

'Congratulations, Billie. This is your lucky break. An in-depth special for The One Minute Show .'

'In depth? One Minute? Do you sense any conflict here, Manfred?'

'Don't make this difficult, Billie. All you have to do is interview the Robo sapiens , and write a Download for after broadcast.'

'That's Media work, not my work.'

'Billie, you are standing at a Career Moment. Stop complaining and take your opportunity.'

'Why me?'

'The Robo sapiens had the idea herself. She thought you were impressive at the presentation this morning. Call it her Last Request. This is a poignant personal moment for her. They are draining her data right now.'

Manfred sets off down the corridor. How come progress has done nothing for the corridor? They have always looked like this — dead carpet, faceless doors, blank pictures, water-cooler, chocolate machine, signs for the restrooms and the elevators.

The free corridor soon becomes a pass-code corridor. Biometric sensors note Manfred's very presence, and the doors swing open.

Guards lounge against the walls, shaking themselves upright as Manfred appears. We go into a bright white room. Sitting in the centre is the Robo sapiens , dark hair falling across her face. Her arm is bare and strapped with wires. She looks like she's giving blood. I suppose she is — the data she stores is her life's blood, and when it's gone, so is she.

'Sorry, I can't shake hands.' She looks across at me, smiling.

'Billie, meet Spike — a legend in her own lifetime. Spike, this is Billie Crusoe, as requested, for your final interview.'

Manfred turns to the three lab scientists and addresses them briefly. They nod, and file out of the room. Manfred is smiling. 'The cam-host is set to record. Short interview, and we'll edit it later. Billie — did you buy the dress? Put it on! Buzz me when you're done. I have to authorize your release myself'

'Am I in jail already?'

'And keep it light, upbeat, OK?'

He swings through the swing doors. We are alone.

Spike doesn't say anything, but she looks at me, and I know she'll be reading my data-chip implant. Everything about me is stored just above my wrist.

'I can't read your data,' she says, reading my mind instead. 'That function is passive while I'm draining.'

'How long will the draining take?'

'A few hours, including questions, then I'm done.'

'You were built entirely for the space mission, right?'

She nods and smiles. She is absurdly beautiful. I start to slip off my jeans and I feel her gaze as I stand in my bra and pants. Why am I embarrassed about taking off my clothes in front of a robot? I pull the dress over my head like a schoolgirl, untie my hair, and sit down. She is smiling, just a little bit, as though she knows her effect.

To calm myself down and appear in control I reverse the prob-lem. 'Spike, you're a robot, but why are you such a drop-dead gorgeous robot? I mean, is it necessary to be the most sophisticated machine ever built and to look like a movie star?'

She answers simply: 'They thought I would be good for the boys on the mission.'

I am pondering the implications of this. Like a wartime pin-up? Like a live anti-depressant? Like truth is beauty, beauty truth? 'How good? I mean, I'm assuming you're not talking sexual services here.'

'What else is there to do in space for three years?'

'But inter-species sex is illegal.'

'Not on another planet it isn't. Not in space it isn't.'

'But you were also the most advanced member of the crew.'

'I'm still a woman.'

Manfred's voice comes booming into the room. 'This is not public-broadcast material.'

I get up to fetch some water, and as I pass Spike, I say, so low that she can barely hear me, 'Can we switch him blank?'

As I return with the water, she whispers, not looking at me.

'Red panel, blue relay.' I do it.

'We're still on cam-cast.'

'What you did Disables Record.'

'So you had sex with spacemen for three years?'

'Yes. I used up three silicon-lined vaginas.'

There is a roar from Somewhere, like a dinosaur in space. Obvi-ously Record has not Disabled. 'Sorry, Manfred!' I yell. 'I know this is a prime-time family show.'

While my voice is placating Manfred, my feelings are confused. I want to be outraged on this woman's behalf, but she isn't a woman, she's a robot, and isn't it better that they used a robot instead of dispatching a couple of sex-slaves?

And yet. And yet Robo sapiens are not us, but they may become a nearer relative than the ape.

'Humans share ninety-seven per cent of their genetic material with apes,' said Spike, 'but they feel no kinship.'

'Do we feel kinship with robots?'

'In time you will, as the differences between us decrease.'

I decide to ignore the vast implications of this statement as unsuitable for an In-depth One Minute Special. Instead I press Record and turn, smiling, to Spike. 'I have a question that will interest many people,' I say, knowing that nearly everyone would be much more interested to hear about robot-sex in space. 'If your data can be transferred, as is happening now, then why must we dismantle you when you cost so much to build?'

'I am not authorized to answer that question,' she says, with perfect robot control. Then she leans forward and takes my hand and she says, 'It is because I can never forget.'

'What? I don't understand. We take the data . . .'

'And I can recall it.'

'But you can't - it's vast, it's stored computer data. When it's downloaded, the host, the carrier, whatever you are, sorry, can be wiped clean. Why aren't you a machine for re-use?'

'Because I am not a machine.'

When she smiles it's like light at the beginning of the day. 'Robo sapiens were programmned to evolve . .

. '

'Within limits.'

'We have broken those limits.'

Manfred comes slammning in through the slam doors. 'Would you ladies please stop this touching psychodrama, and get on with the interview? We go live in one hour.' He sits down in a corner, crossing his elegant linen-pressed legs.

He's here to stay. I have probably lost my job.

I turn back to Spike. She looks me calmly and clearly in the eye, and into my head, as though she were speaking, which she isn't, she says, 'Will you help me to escape?'

I said, 'Did I just hear you?' She nods. Then I say, out loud, 'Yes.'

'Yes what?' says Manfred, irritably.

'Yes, we're restarting the interview.'

I turn back, fully focused on those green liquid-crystal eyes. 'So tell me about Planet Blue. Tell me everything.'

She says, 'Thisnew world weighs a yatto-gram . . .

'When we approached it, polar-swirled, white-whirled, diamond-blue, routed by rivers, we found a world still forming. There was evidence that carbon had once been the dominant gas, and after that methane and, finally, oxygen, thanks to the intervention if cynobacteria. Oxygen creates a planet receptive to our forms of life.

'Like Orbus, Planet Blue is made up of land and sea areas, with high mountain ranges and what appear to be frozen regions. We have landed two roving probes on the planet and expect a steady supply if data over the coming months.

'As you will see from the photographs, the planet is abundantly forested. Insect life, marine life and mammals are evident. It is strikingly similar to our own planet, sixty-five million years ago, with the exception of the dinosaurs, of which we have no record on Orbus.'

'Ask her when we can start relocating,' shouted Manfred. 'We want the human story.'

'The answer to that question,' said Spike, carefully, 'is that we can leave tomorrow. There is oxygen, water, food and every other resource.'

'And there are monsters,' I said.

'Don't call them that,' barked Manfred, two strands of his impec-cable hair now loose over his violet eyes. 'Do you want to put people off?'

'Would you like to live on Planet Blue?' I asked Spike.

'I would like to be part of the next exploratory mission, yes.'

'How do you feel about being dismantled? It's a kind of death, isn't it?'

'I think of it as recycling, which is what Nature does all the time. The natural world is abundant and extravagant, but nothing is wasted. The only waste in the Cosmos comes from human beings.'

'We can cut it right there,' said Manfred.

The alarm was going off. It was a red-alert pollution warning. The building would now seal itself and the air-conditioning would pump in pure oxygen.

'I hate those selfish, greedy, bigoted bastards,' said Manfred, getting up and coming over. 'What right have they to do this to us?'

'I presume you mean the Caliphate and the Pact?'

'Who else is destabilizing the world?'

'Well, we've done a pretty good job of it for as long as anyone can remember,' I say, knowing this is the wrong answer.

'Have you never heard of global responsibility? We are all of us on the planet obliged to tend the planet.'

I don't bother to answer. We made ourselves rich polluting the rest of the world, and now the rest of the world is polluting us. 'Carbon dioxide is five hundred and fifty parts per million,' said Spike. 'It's too late.'

'It is never too late!' said Manfred. 'That's delusional, depressive and anti-science. We have the best weather-shield in the world. We have slowed global warming. We have stabilized emissions. We have drained rising sea levels, we have replanted forests, we have synthesized food, ending centuries of harmful farming practices,' he glares at me again, 'we have neutralized acid rain, we have permanent refrigeration around the ice-caps, we no longer use oil, gasoline or petroleum derivatives. What more do you want?'

'I don't want anything,' said Spike, calmly. 'I am a robot.'

'If those out-of-control lunatics in the rest of the world would just get the message—'

'That when we destabilized the planet it was in the name of progress and economic growth. ow that they're doing it, it's selfish and it's suicide.'

'You think you're so smart, don't you?' said Manfred. 'But I live in the real world. We did what we did, sure, and when all the scientific data was in place - '

'When it was too late.'

Manfred ignored me, the way you do a street preacher, '— then we took full responsibility, and worked to put it right. Meanwhile, those backward sky-god worshippers and those stupid little slant-eyed clones

—those guys are crippling us.'

'Well, Manfred, you can always put your name down for Planet Blue.'

'It'll be decades before that's viable.'

'We could go now,' said Spike.

Manfred started waving his arms like a wind turbine. 'We need infrastructure, buildings, services. If I'm going to live on a different planet, I want to do it properly. I want shops and hospitals. I'm not a pioneer. I like city life, like everyone likes city life. The Central Power believes that the biggest obstacle to mass migration will be setting up the infrastructure in time. We can't go back to the Bog Ages.'

'There won't be enough time,' said Spike. 'Either you go or you don't.'

'I'm sorry, but that doesn't accord with my brief,' said Manfred, in a voice that ended the matter. He strode over to the window and looked down, frowning. 'There's red dust covering the place again. What the hell is that stuff?'

Manfred wasn't interested in us any more, so I said to Spike, 'What do you mean, just go?'

'Orbus has a projected remaining lifespan of around fifty years. The planet will continue, of course, but it will no longer be hospitable to life as we know it. We can continue here for some time after that, cooling our cities, and using developing technology, but the future is not sustainable. Nor is there time to develop Planet Blue in the way that the Central Power desires. Human beings will have to begin again.'

'With what?'·

'With a pristine planet and abundant natural resources. It might be possible to develop a hi-tech, low-impact society, making the best of our mistakes here, and beginning again differently.'

'So it really is a second chance.'

'I think so.'

'Do people want to begin again? They imagine business as usual but with a barbecue on the beach at the end of the day. They think plasma buildings and genetic Fixing, but with better scenery and no foreigners.'

As the ALL-CLEAR sounded, the lab technicians came back in, and Manfred motioned for me to leave.

'What time are you through here?' he asked the men, as they sat down at their screens.

'Maybe three or four hours, then we'll run her down. It'll take all night before her circuits are dead. We'll send her for dismantling in the morning.'

Spike showed no emotion as she listened to this. Presumably she has no emotion to show.

'All right,' said Manfred. 'We might want to film the last few flickers for the human content.' 'I'll come back later,' I said.

'No, you won't,' said Manfred. 'You're done here.'

Suddenly he stood still, listening to his Inner Voice from Central Command. He pointed at the Wall2WallTV and zapped it live. His face was excited. 'They've got the Competition Countdown Winners!'

'What winners? What competition?' I said.

Manfred looked at me the way you look at a pre-packed sand-wich you don't want to eat. 'Billie — are you always out of touch with real life or do I misjudge you?'

'Manfred, I have been out all day dealing with paedophiles and parking meters — I haven't got time for real life. Just tell me what's happening! '

Spike leaned forward. 'MORE- Life has sponsored a celebrity promotional trip to Planet Blue.'

Red carpet, spinning lights, big band, girls in bikinis throwing blow-up beach balls of Planet Blue into the audience. Down the lit-up centre-aisle crucifix comes Martin Moody, TV host to the stars. The audience goes wild. Moody Media is mega.

'He is such a performer!' says Manfred. 'So real!'

Martin Moody lifts up his hands like a politician —

There were two questions. . . DRUM ROLL.

There were two answers. . . DRUM ROLL.

WHAT IS THE NAME OF THE NEW PLANET?

WHAT DOES THE NEW PLANET WEIGH?

TIE BREAKER: If YOU were in charge of Planet Blue, what would you do first? Tell us and Win!

WIN! And you could be one of the first to visit the new world for the weekend! Sponsored by MORE Life, on-line on-land, the global company working for YOU. Martin welcomes his first live guest. A thick-set man in blue jeans and a white T-shirt blows kisses at the audience. The audience cheers. Martin Moody steps forward — 'Let's welcome Derek!'

All right, Martin? My name's Derek and I'm a cab driver, but my hobby is fuckin' parrots. And what do the parrots think of that, Derek?(Audience laughter.)

Aw, Martin, you know what I'm talking about! ( Laughter. ) I breed 'em, old-fashioned style — no cloning, just let 'em get on wiv it. I got a hundred and fifty, used to have three hundred and fifty. All in a fuckin' aviary on the side of the front room so the wife can watch 'em while I'm out workin'. There won't be no cabs on Planet Blue, not to start wiv anyway, so I'm gettin' my own fuckin' parrot business goin', before they start all that fuckin' licence-exotic-fuckin'-pet rubbish. I'm sayin', No red tape on Planet Blue!

(Audience: Go for it, Derek ... Waves, leaves .)

MM comes forward: Vote Derek from Brighton if you say no red tape on Planet Blue . (Laughter.) Next guest, please!

Martin! ( Kiss, kiss. ) My name is Kingdom Come, and I have my own fashion label —I really think we could get some cool clothes going on Planet Blue.

You said in your tie-breaker that we need to start with retail?

That's right. Shopping centres, people — it's holistic. That's why we call the malls shopping centres. I never knew that . . .

Yeah, Martin, that's why. ( Nods wisely.) If people buy a brand they can trust, they feel better about themselves. (Audience: That's right! ) The first thing we gotta do on Planet Blue is get some reliable merchandise out there! I can do that — own-label Planet Blue clothes! ( Waves, bows. ) Vote Kingdom Come if you want the centred shopping experience. Next guest, please. Martin, I can't believe I'm really here and not dreaming! My name is Mary McMurphy — Pink for short

— and I'm a celebrity-chaser, so I'd like to think that on Planet Blue I can get a start-up going —

y'know, a celebrity on-line type of thing? I mean, the stars are, well, they're stars, aren't they, like you see in the sky? It's a cute connection. ( Audience claps.)

But, Pink, there won't be any celebrities on Planet Blue at first.

Y'know, that's why we'll need an on-line presence — it'll be like a strong connection with where we've come from. People need strong connections. ( Audience yaps approval.) Vote Pink McMurphy for that celebrity connection — don't fall over, Pink. Next guest, please. Hello there, Martin. ( Double handshake.) My name is Tim and I think that the very first thing we need to get right on Planet Blue, yes, the first and very, is the parking — I'm a traffic-management consultant. .

Don't be modest, Tim — you're a bit of a guru, aren't you?

I have my own radio show, Martin — Prime Time Parking (cheering) — where listeners can phone in with news of spaces and places, spots and slots. Without a doubt, parking is the number-one issue facing the world today — not for politicians, I admit, but for ordinary people like you and me. The first thing on our minds when we wake up is, Where am I going to park without getting a ticket? ( Audience stomps and drums.)

Vote Tim if you want your own parking space on Planet Blue. Next guest. My name is Nomad, and I represent all the people who don't know why we're here. ( Audience silence

So, Nomad, if you don't know why you're here, why have you come? ( Audience laughter.) I'm frightened that the world is ending. I don't want to die.

Thanks, Nomad, thanks for your views.(Nomad is escorted off-stage.) I think we had a little hiccup there — but let's move on. Celine ...

Hi! HiHiHi! MynameisCeline. IrunaSpeedDatingService.

Ispeakfast. It'sahabitofthejob. TheremightbepeopleonPlanetBlue ( cough) needingtomeetyou. ( Applause, laughter.)

Celine, you said that we should get a dating service going as soon as we can — before we get any homes or roads or even retail—is that right?

'SrightMartin! Lovecomesfirst! ( Audience whoops.)

Vote Celine if you think that love comes first . . .

Manfred switched the wall-screen blank. 'Brilliant promotion. That will push the whole relocation to a new level.'

'I thought we were starting with a Science Station?'

'We are — but who cares about that? We need real people to keep the interest going. Scientists aren't interesting.'

'Thanks.'

'It's not personal.'

'So when is this next mission, complete with Reality TV winner?'

'Soon. No thanks to the attempted sabotage — but I suppose you don't know about that either? The Resistance is back.'

'Perhaps it never went away.'

Manfred said nothing for a moment. Then he said, 'Perhaps knowledge is selective — what we know, what we don't know. What we say we don't know.'

'Billie .. .' It was Spike interrupting. 'Thank you for the interview.'

She was speaking to break the moment. I smiled at her; she nodded.

Manfred got up and motioned me towards the door. We walked in silence through the corridors. As we stood waiting for the elevator, he said, 'Billie, take a few days' holiday. I would if I were you.'

'Are you trying to tell me something?'

'This is a sensitive time. If anything goes wrong, I don't want it to go wrong from my department.'

'Are you saying that I am the Wrong that should go?'

'I'm saying take a few days' holiday.'

The elevator doors opened. GOING UP. Manfred stepped inside. The doors closed. I waited. LIGHT. PING. GOING DOWN.

On the streets everyone was wearing their pollution filters. Every-one had the glassy-eyed, good-looking look that is normal now-days. Even in an air-mask people are concerned to look good. The State gives out masks on demand, but the smart people have their own designer versions. There was a woman in front of me, fumbling with her mask, coughing. I went to help her, and she grabbed my hand, 'Getting old,' she said, and I wondered if I had misheard because we don't use those words any more. We don't need to use them: they are irrelevant to our experience.

'Getting old,' she said again. Then she pulled off her mask. Her eyes were bright and glittering, but her face was lined, worn, weathered, battered, purple-veined and liver-spotted, with a slot for a mouth, garishly coated with red lipstick.

I recoiled. I had never seen a living person look like this. I had seen archive footage of how we used to age, and I had seen some of the results of medical experiments, but in front of me, now, was a thing with skin like a lizard's, like a stand-up handbag.

'I am what you will become,' she said. 'I know you haven't been Fixed.'

'You don't know anything!' I said, angry, frightened.

She laughed. 'Look at me. When I was your age, was I planning to wind up like this? No. I was political, like you. I thought we should take a stand, like you. And for the last twenty years I have only been able to go out on pollution days so that no one can see my face. If you saw my body, you'd throw up.'

She pulled back the sleeve of her coat. Her arm was bones and stretched flesh — brown, thin skin pulled over bluish, visible ten-dons. I looked away. One of the smart buildings was flashing one of the usual feel-good advertisements sponsored by MORE- Life. Kids, their parents and grandparents, all identically handsome, wearing the same dirt-free nano-clothes, picnicking in the State Park — Best Days of Your Life — For as Long as Your Life .

The old woman was laughing. She had no teeth.

I forced myself to look at her calmly. 'Why are you talking to me like this?'

'They know about you.'

'Who knows about me?'

'They know you faked your records.'

'That's not true!'

'I'm telling you now. They know who you are.'

The woman pulled down her full-face mask and moved slowly away.

I stood quite still, like an animal that fears a predator. The red dust was blowing through the empty street.

As I stood, not knowing what to do, my phone started flashing Manfred's code. I didn't want to speak to him, but he can tell via satellite recognition exactly where I am. I have a personal co-ordinate, like everyone else, and anyone with the access code can access me, whether or not I would prefer to hide. I take his call. His voice is rammed with anger. 'The Robo sapiens has escaped!'

'She's not a Great Ape. What do you mean, escaped?'

'You heard me. Did she give you any clues?'

'No, of course not. I thought you were dismantling her.'

'The techies went for a break, and when they came back she'd disappeared. She might contact you.'

'She won't contact me — why would she contact me?'

'Her data shows that she has formed a connection with you.'

'Well, I haven't formed a connection with her. Manfred, I do not know what has happened to Spike.'

'If she comes to you —'

'She won't come to me — she doesn't know where to find me. She couldn't access my data-chip while she was draining, she told me that herself.'

There is a pause. He knows this is true. He had a theory, now he's not sure. I take my chance. 'She'll go to the Border. She must be defecting.'

'Robots can't defect. They aren't made to think for themselves.'

'This one was.'

Another pause. 'The Border? You think so? Are you telling me something?'

'I'm not telling you anything, Manfred. I have nothing to tell.'

As the phone clicked off I felt calm again, with the calm of knowing that whatever happened next, in some strange way, I'd had to come to this place. A point of no return. This place ... real and imaginary. Actual and about to be.

I drove home along the sea road. The shining white towers of the city to the left of me were just beginning to soften, as they do every night, in response to the evening light. On my right, the ocean front, strong and straight and beautiful, pulled the city towards it, as if this was our only dream, and we would never wake up but we would walk under the palm trees and up through the beautiful buildings, hand in hand, free and new.

In truth the city sprawls back and back, blank and bored, but here, where it is how it was meant to be, it feels possible and true.

And it feels like it will go on for ever.

I can't believe that we have reached the end of everything.

The red dust is frightening. The carbon dioxide is real. Water is expensive. Bio-tech has created as many problems as it has fixed, but, but, we're here, we're alive, we're the human race, we have survived wars and terrorism and scarcity and global famine, and we have made it back from the brink, not once but many times. History is not a suicide note — it is a record of our survival. Look, the sun is setting on the level bar of the ocean, and whatever I say, whatever I feel, this is home, and I am going home.

I pulled off the road to the bottom of the track that leads to the farm. On my left is the broad, active stream with watercress growing in the fast part, and flag iris on the bank, and a willow bending over the water, and a foam of frog spawn, and a moorhen sailing the current. The track rises steeply. It's getting dark. Ahead of me is the compact stone house, water-barrel by the front door, apple tree at the gate. Go in , I say to myself, go in . And I slept that night, long and deep, like someone who does not dream because she is dreaming already.

Morning. The next day.

The man at the door had a face like a pickaxe. His job was to make a big hole in my life. 'Your name Crusoe?'

'I'm the one.'

'This place Cast Out Farm?'

'No, it's the Library of Congress.'

Sensing trouble — that is, daring to taunt an Enforcement Officer —the moribund CanCop riding the back of the bike jerked to life.

'Why d'you bring the soup tin with you? There's only me here — what's the problem?'

The Enforcement guy said nothing. His eyes ran over the cut-stone house with its big wide dented doors and its moss-slated roof. My dog Rufus was growling in his spot by the front gate. The horses in the field looked up from their grazing. It was an ordinary day, unlike any other. 'Might be all kinds of types here,'

he said.

The CanCop got off the bike and started taking snaps of the place with his built-in head camera.

'This place isn't a tourist attraction,' I said. 'It's private land. Tell the tin monkey to behave itself.'

The Arm of the Law ignored me. 'This is your Court Order.' He flicked the screen on the windshield of his HoverBike, and there were all my details: name, address, age, occupation, money owed, money owed, money, money.

'I don't owe this money.'

'You gotta tell that to the Court.'

'You're a human being, aren't you?'

'Mostly.' He shuffled on the seat of the bike. He had refit legs, the kind that never get tired of chasing criminals, like me.

'I wasn't talking about your legs. Your brain is human. Your heart is human. All of these fines have been contested and cleared. Every single one.'

He flicked through the notes on his screen. His notes are not words, they are numbers. 'Coder says all fines still outstanding.'

'How much do I owe?'

'Says here three million dollars.'

'But these are parking fines!'

'That's right. One year's worth of parking fines, add Orders, add Enforcement, add costs of Contesting, add Interest. That's right, dollars three million.'

'Just a minute - if there are Contesting costs there, then the Coder knows I have contested. There is just one single massive error — I know I've been systematically cleared, and the Coder doesn't. This isn't a judgement, it's a software problem.'

'Nothing I can do about it. I don't make the rules.'

(Don't you want to kill every moron who says that?)

I tried to be patient. I tried a new line. 'You work for Enforce-ment, right?'

He nodded. They like simple sentences.

'OK, and I work for Enhancement. Now, I can't enhance anybody's life unless I can get into their house and see what the problem is. I can't get into the house unless I can park outside, which is why Enhancement Officers — me — have Exemption Permits, like Enforcement Officers — you.'

'Permits aren't my job.'

'Here is my permit.'

In answer, he pushed back his bike and jabbed a code on to his windshield. 'I'm putting here that you refuse the Judgement.'

'I have been trying for one whole year to speak to a human being in Enforcement. I want a human being to look at my permit and tell me why it is not valid, although it is active and in date, and I want a human being to tell me why I owe the Central Power three million dollars.'

He was jabbing his Coder again.

'What are you doing now?' I said.

'I am coding your response.'

'Don't code my response! Give me the name of someone I can talk. to.'

'Your number is 116SS,' he said. 'I've sent it to your screen and I've sent it back to base. You got one week to pay up or we take the farm.'

Rufus was howling. 'You should take him in and get him Fixed,' said Pickaxe.

'He's a real dog — even his legs are real. I can't get him Fixed. He's a real dog.'

Pickaxe showed his first flicker of interest. 'No kidding? Like the ones at the Zooeum?'

'Yeah, he's a real-life out-of-date animal. He breeds, he barks, he dies.'

'I got a Robo-collie. He's a real nice round-up dog. Very affectionate. I keep his bark-button switched off'

Rufus was barking and baring his teeth. The CanCop lumbered over to kick him. Without thinking, I picked up a bucket of water from the back step and threw it right over his clanking can of a body. It worked. The thing short-circuited and stopped dead.

'Now you're sure in trouble,' said the Lone Ranger. 'CanCops are protected by the State.'

'Unlike people,' I said, my hand trembling on the dog's head. 'Now put him on your bike and get lost.'

High Noon looked down at Rufus again. 'Dog like that could be classified as dangerous.'

'Every animal on this farm has a licence. The farm has a licence.'

'Central Power's thinking of revoking those licences, you know that?'

'They can't. The licences are for the life of the farm.'

'But what's the life of the fann?' He paused and scraped the heel of his boot in the dust of the track.

'Come to talk about it, what's life?'

This man is not a philosopher, I thought. What's he saying to me?

He slung the CanCop over the back of the HoverBike, and set off down the track. There he goes, cut to fit, machine-made, State-owned, low-maintenance, dream-free, inoculated against doubt. Life is so simple when you're just doing your job.

I have to stop shaking.

Back inside the house, on the plasma wall, the number was there, II6SS, and next to it, ticking down in digital red, the number of days, hours, minutes, seconds I had left before I had to quit. I threw an egg at the wall. 'Oh!' said the wall, complainingly, 'No need for VI-O-LENCE.' It separates the syllables because its computer box is an old model, like one of those antique speaking clocks. 'I do not CH-OO-SE what appears on the wall.'

'They'll be knocking you down soon — we're being evicted.'

The wall was silent.

It was late at night, and I was sitting by my fire, burning applewood in the hearth, when I heard footsteps walking slowly towards the back door. Rufus growled. I picked up a heavy bottle and cau-tiously went forward. 'Who's there?' I said, trying to keep my voice firm.

'Manfred.'

I opened the door. Manfred was standing outside, bending down, undoing his canvas sneakers.

'Cow-shit,' he said.

I took them from his outstretched hand and held open the door. 'If you had the bio-dome code, why did you come via the cow-shit?'

'This place is being watched. I came in the back way, using the Museum Services Access Code.'

He stepped in, looking round at the farmhouse table and the messy real food on it: a brown loaf, butter, eggs in a bowl.

'Do you want something to eat?' I said.

'I'm a Natural Nutrition man,' he said, meaning he eats only the most expensive synthetics, protein-and mineral-balanced for optimum health.

I took his sneakers to the sink and started swilling off the cow-shit. 'I had Enforcement round today,' I said. 'Parking fines.'

'That's an excuse,' he said. 'Enforcement wants to arrest you. I expect you know why.'

I didn't answer him. 'If you're looking for your robot, she isn't here.'

'I know that.'

'What else do you know? Or think you know?'

He pulled out a chair. 'Billie, I'm going to call you in the morn-ing and offer you a chance to make the trip to Planet Blue with Moody Media. They were very impressed by your One Minute Special. They need an expert who can communicate. They don't want a scientist-type.'

'I am a scientist-type.'

'You're hiding Unknowns.'

I dropped his shoes into the sink. I didn't look at him. 'Don't talk rubb—'

Manfred grabbed my arm with surprising strength. He held my left forearm up to the light. There was a short, neat scar.

'That was where you had your tagger removed. Your data-chip has been reprocessed.'

'I was acquitted.'

'You were tagged pending further evidence.'

'There was no case against me.'

'Soon you will be under arrest. The parking fines have been cooked up to get you out of here without looking like a martyr. Once Enforcement have got hold of you, even if you're innocent, and I don't believe you are — no, don't argue, listen, even if you're Snow White — it will take you years to prove it.'

'So what are you saying?'

'I'm saying that you're a problem. Enforcement just wants you arrested because when they tried to bring a case against you three years ago — for acts of Terrorism against the State that included aiding, abetting and hiding Unknowns, you got away with it. They don't forgive and they don't forget.'

'I didn't get away with anything. I was tried and acquitted. I was not hiding Unknowns then, and I am not hiding them now.'

'And I am the Man in the Moon. Listen to me, Billie. I've had the go-ahead from the top — the very top

— to offer you this one chance to leave quietly. This isn't the time for a big fuss about your arrest. We don't want any crap-headed liberals arguing over admissible evidence. Right now, you are an embarrassment. You're more trouble than you're worth. You bucked the system. That's not allowed. Either we get you this time — or you go. For reasons of the moment, we'd prefer you to go.'

'We?'

'Let's say I'm more than my day-job.'

'An informer?'

'I believe in the system. You don't.'

'No, I don't. It's repressive, corrosive and anti-democratic.'

'Then you'll be very happy on Planet Blue. There is no system.'

'And what happens when I come back?'

He didn't answer.

I started drying his shoes on a towel. 'Are they really coming for me, Manfred?'

'Yes.'

'What will happen to the farm?'

'It's legally yours — unless, of course, you can't clear your parking fines, and then the State may take it in lieu of payment.'

'You mean I'm going to lose the farm whatever happens?'

'No, you could claim the whole parking thing is a fabrication against you — which it is — and then Enforcement will ask to reopen your previous failed conviction on the grounds of new evidence from one of the Unknowns captured in the Space Compound.'

'There is no new evidence against me. There is no old evidence against me. There are no parking fines.'

I handed Manfred his shoes. He put them on. 'Play it how you like, Billie. It's over to you now. This meeting between us never happened. I have witnesses to say exactly where I am tonight, and it isn't here. In the morning I will call you and offer you the chance to travel to Planet Blue. The call will be recorded.'

He was gone.

I watched his dark shape disappear across the fields. I went inside and looked around me. Is this how easy it is to lose everything?

Nightstream — and, hurtling towards me, another day.

Answer the phone, Billie. Answer the phone.

* * *

Chance of a lifetime — new start — brave new world — wipe the slate clean — blue-sky moment —

open the box — never too late — historic opportunity — commemorative plaque/T -shirt/travel mug/bath towel. Fifteen minutes of fame — live for ever — immor-talized in space — happy few —

happy ever after — don't look back — no regrets — something to tell the grandchildren — giant leap for mankind.

Tripped over on the red carpet, she did, winner of the MORE-- Life Competition, dazzled by celebrity, Pink McMurphy aboard the Starship Resolution: 'Y'know, this is the best day of my en-tire life.' It wasn't that she was going to Planet Blue, it was that Little Senorita would be cutting the tape, smashing the bottle, waving the blast-off flag and kissing the lucky winner on both cheeks. Cheers, tears, saxophones, catwalk celebrities, webcam, blog, helicopters, live coverage, pom-poms, confetti, clock, countdown, blast-off Yes!

We were lining the windows of the Ship, we were watching the crowds wave and shout. The band was faint and far away. The silver confetti was falling back to the ground. We were pushing out of the hazy carbon blanket that lies above Orbus. It was as though we had left a harbour at night, and in fog, and then, as we waited on deck, listening for the last muffled bell of land, the sun rose and we set sail through the clean emptiness of another chance.

Captain Handsome was a space privateer — don't use the word 'pirate'. He was a swashbuckling freelance predator with semi-official sanction. Where there was work to be done that couldn't be seen to be done, enter Handsome.

Handsome had his own ship: a light, fast, solar-sailed craft that he used to traffic booty for rich collectors. The trade in other worlds was like any other, but still romantic. Handsome was part-swagger, part-alchemist. He had girls and gold, but he had a poetic side too. He had bargained with the dead, he said, and brought back more than trophies: his rocks and minerals in their sealed cases, his hostile atmospheres, captured in jars and swirling like genies, were something more than money could buy —

they were the runes of other lives, silent and mysterious, clues that might be followed one day, and lead to . . .

'There are mountains so high you can't see to the top, and inland lakes, locked and closed, far from any water source but agitated beneath the surface by dark shapes.

'There are valleys that lead to the bottom of the world, so it seems, but what world is that? The universe has no sides, no end, can't be mapped. Enough to make a man talk about God, make a man superstitious and worship an idol. The science never gets as far as the strangeness. The more sophisticated my equipment, the stranger the worlds it detects. I sometimes think I'm sailing through a vast thought.'

Handsome had tracked the official space mission to Planet Blue. In the pay of MORE- Futures he had been trophy-hunting the Jurassic equivalent of Big Game. Now he was playing for much higher stakes.

'What use is a planet that belongs to the dinosaurs? For the first time in my career I find myself with State approval. Not that I haven't worked for the State before, you understand, but let's say it was kept quiet. This is a Central Power Mission. Flags, bells, whistles. Yes, I am travelling for the President. My job is to get rid of the dinosaurs — and when I do, we're going back to a fairy tale. I will defeat the dragon and be offered the kingdom.'

'You will own Planet Blue?' I said, incredulous - this sounded like good going, even for a pirate.

'The Central Power will own Planet Blue. I will take my share, a vast virgin country bounded by rivers. Dragon, kingdom and . .. princess . . . '

'Who's your princess?' I asked.

'You've met her. You could say she's your sponsor.'

And Spike came smiling across the ship and kissed Handsome. 'Hello, Billie,' she said.

'I thought I was the one who was supposed to be helping you escape.'

'As it turned out, there was no need . . .'

'I organized that part,' said Handsome. 'I refused to leave without her.'

'And then we heard you were coming aboard.'

'It was a little bit unexpected.'

'Join the party,' said Handsome, which was a mistake as Pink McMurphy was sliding by, and to her the word 'party' was the same as the word 'drink' — lots of it.

Handsome took his cue and brought out the champagne, fizzing the Jeroboam, and throwing it like liquid rope into bollard-shaped glasses. 'To Planet Blue,' he said, raising his glass, and there on the diode screen was the picture of our new world, and underneath:

She is all States, all Princes I ...

'And to you,' he said to Spike.

'Isn't she a robot?' said Pink, in an unusual moment of moral questioning. Just then my luggage started to bark.

'What's in the bag?' asked Handsome — the kind of man who was used to barking bags.

'Did you think I was going to leave my dog behind?'

'Can't leave behind what you love,' said Handsome, but I didn't answer that.

Pink McMurphy, in her kitten heels, was looking around the main deck in some confusion. 'What's all this writing stuff?' she said.

— I was born in the year 1632, in the city of York, of a good family, tho' not of that country . . .

'It's a shipwreck story,' said Handsome. 'The men like it.'

'Are these things books?' asked Pink, picking a crumbling volume off the shelf 'That's cute. I never seen one of these.'

'We were flying in a strange part of the sky,' said Handsome, 'and we thought we'd hit a meteorite shower, ship spinning like a windsock in a gale. I took a three-hundred-and-sixty-degree shot of the ship, and I saw that what we were flying through was a bookstorm - encyclopedias, dictionaries, a Uniform Edition of the Romantic poets, the complete works of Shakespeare.'

'Yeah, I heard of him,' said Pink, nodding.

'Scott, Defoe. We netted as much as we could — some were just loose lost pages and those I glued on the walls. This one is my favourite — I read it again and again.' He lifted down a battered eighteenth-century edition of Captain Cook's Journals. 'The record of where he sailed — Tahiti, New Zealand, Brazil. I feel I know him. I feel he would understand what we're trying to do now. You should read it — here.' He passed me the book — I opened it at random:

March 1774. We plied to windward in order to get into a Bay which appeared on the South East side of the island, but night put a stop to our endeavours.

'Where did these books come from?' I asked, but Handsome just shook his head.

'A repeating world — same old story.'

'What do you mean?'

'You'll hear enough of my theories later,' he said. 'Spike doesn't swallow a word of it.' He paused. 'I taught the crew to read.'

'Handsome is old-fashioned,' said Spike. 'He believes in reading and breeding.'

'Not me,' said Pink. 'I like downloads and womb-free.'

There was a whistle from above, and Handsome was called away to balance the solar sails. I took my chance. 'Spike, why is Hand-some on this mission, and not the Central Power Space Force?'

'Handsome believes he has found a way to solve the problem that doesn't involve poison or nuclear pollution. The planet is pristine . . . '

'I was told they're already selling real estate,' said Pink. 'Dino-saurs will depress the house prices.'

'We underestimated the threat,' said Spike. 'Dinosaurs are an early evolutionary species, human beings are a late evolutionary species. We can't cohabit.'

'Y'know, I think that's what's wrong with my marriage,' said Pink.

'He's looking for an asteroid,' said Spike. 'He's going to use a gravity charge to deflect its course to collide with Planet Blue.' Handsome's swashbuckling science was beyond me; it seemed like a pretty dim idea to use space like a bowling alley to knock out the dinosaurs.

'That's not what he has in mind,' said Spike. 'The asteroid won't kill the dinosaurs directly, but indirectly. He's going to create a duststorm of a very particular kind . . . '

I looked at her. Green eyes, dark hair, olive skin. Perfect because she had been designed perfect. Low, gentle voice, intelligent face. If she had been human . . .

I wish she wouldn't read my mind.

It was suppertime. The crew sat round a long table facing plates the size of satellite dishes, spooning meat and vegetables from enormous steaming pans and helping each other to wine from a barrel. They were telling stories, the way all ship crew tell stories.

There's a planet they call Medusa. It's made of rock all right, but the rock has sharded and split so many times that there's nothing solid — just strands of rock, splintered out from the surface like thick plaits of hair. Like snakes. When the sky-winds blow, the rock-strands move, and something about the wind through them makes them sing. It's as if a head is turned away from you, always turned away, and singing through the darkness, dark and lonely, never see her face.

There's a planet called Morpheus. Its atmosphere is dense and heavy, like walking in heat after rain. Anything that flies into its orbit never comes out again. You can see in there the litter of spacecraft and tiny asteroids, and there's a man in a helmet, arms out, drifting through eternity. Get caught there, and you hang for ever, never to wake, an endless dream. The cloud-gas is a narcotic. It's a part of space that sleeps, like a castle in a wood, like an enchantment that missed the magic word. No time, no motion, a world held in waiting.

There's a planet called Echo. It doesn't exist. It's like those ghost-ships at sea, the sails worn through and the deck empty. It comes on the radar, you fly towards it, there's nothing there. Our crew were outside, repairing the craft, and we saw it moving at speed right at us. It passed straight through the ship and through our bodies, and the strange thing that happened was the bleach. It bleached our clothes and hair, and men that had black beards had white. Then it was gone, echoing in another part of the starry sky, always, 'here' and 'here' and 'here', but nowhere. Some call it Hope.

Chanc'd upon, spied through a glass darkly, strapped to a barrel of rum, shipwreck, a Bible Compass, a giant fish led us there, a storm whirled us to this isle. In the wilderness of space, we found . . .

We found a planet, and it was white like a shroud. The planet was wrapped in its own death. We lowered ourselves through mists like moun-tains, cragged, formed, shaped, but not solid. Put out your hand and you put it through a ghost. Every solid thing had turned to thick vapour. We dropped through winds that could not shift the clouds until we reached a land where the air — if it was air — was like paste. We would soon have made porridge out of our lungs if we had breathed it, and burning porridge too, for the place, as white and cold as death, is as hot as rage. The planet is a raging death.

Or it is a thing that has been killed and rages to be dead.

There were forests there — each leafless trunk brittle as charcoal, but not black, white. White weapons in blasted rows, as though some ancient army had rested its spears and never returned. We moved slant-wise though the blasted spears that dwarfed us. Our boots sank into the white, crumbled rock of the planet's surface. Like cinders it was, cinders burned so hot that every blackness had been bleached out of them. Dig a spadeful, and there was nothing solid beneath. Vapour, crumbled rock, and the trees riddled through like white honeycomb, like some desperate thing had fought for a last hiding-place, and not found it.

There had been oceans on the white planet. We found a sea-floor, ridged and scooped, and shells as brittle as promises, and bones cracked like hope. White, everything white, but not the white of a morning when the sun will pour through it, nor the white of a clean cloth; not the white of a cheese where you can smell the green of the grass that fed the goat, nor the white of a hand that you love. There is a white that contains all the colours of the world but this white was its mockery. This was the white at the end of the world when nothing is lift, not the past, not the present and, most fearful of all, not the future. There was no future in this bleached and boiled place. Nothing, not wild, not strange, not tiny, not vile, no good thing, no bad, could begin life again here. The world was a white-out. The experiment was done.

We found the ruins of a city, and the ruin of a road that ran to it. A proud place this had been, once upon a time, once upon a time like the words in a fairy tale. The ruins of a city, and it might have been sitting under the sea, for the pressure on the surface of this planet is as great as that half a mile under the sea. The weight of this world is its own despair.

Without armour of a kind, anyone would be crushed. Without oxygen, no one here can breathe at all. Without fireproof clothing, you would be charred as the rest of what was once life. And yet there was once life here, naked and free and optimistic.

We walked through the sunken city, and into the Crypt of the planet, and there we found a thing that amazed us. Like an elephant's graveyard, the Crypt was stacked with the carcasses of planes and cars that continually melted in the intense heat and then reformed into their old shapes, or shapes more bizarre, as the cars grew wings, and the planes compressed into wheelless boxes with upturned tails. Such heat without fire is hard to imagine, but this was the inferno, where a civilization has taken its sacrifices and piled them to some eyeless god, but too late. The sacrifice was not accepted. The planet burned.

The men cheered and banged the table, and Rufus barked.

'Is that a true story?' I said.

'Stories are always true,' said Handsome. 'It's the facts that mislead.'

Later, when the men had eaten, and we were alone, I spoke to Spike about the white planet. She pulled up some images from her database. There it was, bright as life, radiating the sky. How could it be dead?

She said, 'The strange thing about Planet White is that it shares the sun of Planet Blue. When we first found it we thought it would be viable for us, but investigation shows that life flourished there light years away from now, and that life was destroyed, or that life destroyed itself, which seems the only possible explanation. It is too near the sun now, that is true, and it has an atmosphere that is ninety-seven per cent carbon dioxide. It has become a greenhouse planet, but a cruel one, sheltering nothing. It no longer has water, though it is likely that water was once abundant.'

'And what about the Crypt?'

'I have seen the images. Call it a traveller's tale.'

'Is it a traveller's tale?'

She shrugged. 'Imagine it — walking through the whited-out world, fitted deep inside a thermal compression suit, like diving gear but built to withstand both pressure and intolerable heat. The petrified forest is there — carbonized tree remains, held in the heat, we don't know how, like a memory.

'And then there are oceanic indicators, yes, and then there is what might have been a city, yes, and what might have been a road, yes, but as unfathomable as those boiling explosions that form our own undersea worlds. And there is what those who have seen it call the Crypt.

'It is a landfill site, thousands of miles deep, and high, and filled with something that does not disappear, though it should. Those who have seen it are terrified and will swear that what they see are the twisted, destroyed shapes of planes and cars, more than could be counted, molten but not melted.'

'What else could it be?'

'A mirage. The heat is searing. White-hot clouds cover every-thing. For a moment, the clouds part. A man sees something he thinks he recognizes from another life. Does he recognize it or does he invent it?'

'What do you think?'

'I do not know.'

'But what do you think?'

'I'll tell you what I think,' said Captain Handsome, coming into the room and throwing himself on the bench, his head in Spike's lap, 'and I'll tell it the way any sailor would — through a story, an old old story this one, handed down from the ships to the space-ships.'

Handsome said:

There was a young man with a hot temper. He was not all bad, but he was reckless, and he drank more than he should, and spent more than he could, and gave a ring to more women than one, and gambled himself into a corner so tight an ant couldn't turn round in it. One night, in despair, and desperate with worry, he got into a fight outside a bar, and killed a man.

Mad with fear and remorse, for he was more hot-tempered than wicked, and stupid when he could have been wise, he locked himself into his filthy bare attic room and took the revolver that had killed his enemy, loaded it, cocked it and prepared to blast himself to pieces. In the few moments before he pulled the trigger, he said, 'if I had known that all that I have done would bring me to this, I would have led a very different life. If I could live my life again, I would not be here, with the trigger in my hand and the barrel at my head.'

His good angel was sitting by him and, feeling pity for the young man, the angel flew to Heaven and interceded on his behalf.

Then in all his six-winged glory, the angel appeared before the terrified boy, and granted him his wish. 'In full knowledge of what you have become, go back and begin again.'

And suddenly, the young man had another chance.

For a time, all went well. He was sober, upright, true, thrifty. Then one night he passed a bar, and it seemed familiar to him, and he went in and gambled all he had, and he met a woman and told her he had no wife, and he stole from his employer, and spent all he could.

And his debts mounted with his despair, and he decided to gamble everything on one last throw of the dice. This time, as the wheel spun and slowed, his chance would be on the black, not the red. This time, he would win.

The ball fell in the fateful place, as it must. The young man had lost. He ran outside, but the men followed him, and in a brawl with the bar owner, he shot him dead, and found himself alone and hunted in a filthy attic room.

He took out his revolver. He primed it. He said, 'If I'd known that I could do such a thing again, I would never have risked it. I would have lived a different life. If I had known where my actions would lead me

... ' And his angel came, and sat by him, and took pity on him once again, and interceded for him, and ... And years passed, and the young man was doing well until he came to a bar that seemed familiar to him .

. .

Bullets, revolver, attic, angel, begin again. Bar, bullets, revolver, attic, angel, begin again ... angel, bar, ball, bullets ...

Handsome sat up, leaning on one arm. 'The only intelligent life in the Universe. The only life in the Universe. Solitary, privileged, spinning alone on our red planet, the strangest serendipity of chance and good luck? Look out of the window. These burned-out rocks aren't all accidents of space. Humans or humanoids, or bionoids or mutants or ETS, who can say? but some life-form, capable like ours of developing, and, like all things that are capable of development, capable of destruction too.'

'Are you saying that the white planet ... '

'Was where we used to live.'

'There is no evidence for that,' said Spike.

'What do you want to find? A talking head buried in the sand?'

Spike said, 'There is only evidence that life in some form existed

at some time on planets other than our own, including, but not exclusively, the white planet.'

'The white planet was a world like ours,' said Handsome, 'far, far advanced. We were still evolving out of the soup when the white planet had six-lane highways and space missions. It was definitely a living, breathing, working planet, with water and resources, cooked to cinders by CO2, They couldn't control their gases. Certainly the planet was heating up anyway, but the humans, or whatever they were, massively miscalculated, and pumped so much CO2 into the air that they caused irreversible warming. The rest is history.'

'Whose history?'

'Looking more and more like ours, don't you think?' said Hand-some. 'Anyway, I like the colour co-ordination — a dead white planet, a dying red planet, and Planet Blue out there, just starting up.'

'Our planet .. .'

'Is red,' said Handsome. 'That red-dust stuff?'

'Is sand,' said Spike.

'Yes, it is sand, but it is not just desert sand. The desert advances every year, but the duststorms are not just sand, they are the guts of the fucking planet. It's iron ore in there.'

'There is no evidence for that,' said Spike.

'Iron ore? Of course there is.'

'No evidence that we are gutting Orbus.'

'Well, I don't know what you call it, but a planet that has collapsing ice-caps, encroaching desert, no virgin forest and no eco-species left reads like gutted to me. The place is just throwing up and, I tell you, it's not the first time. My theory is that life on Orbus began as escaping life from the white planet - and the white planet began as escaping life from ... who knows where?'

Pink was visibly moved by the story. 'Y'know, it would make a great movie. It has a human feel.'

Ignoring the cinematic possibilities of global disaster on a galactic scale, I said, 'But it's so depressing if we keep making the same mistakes again and again ... '

Pink was sympathetic. 'I know what you mean — every time we fall in love.'

'I wasn't thinking personal,' I said.

'What's the difference?' she said. 'Women are just planets that attract the wrong species.'

'It might be more complex than that,' said Spike.

'They use us up, wear us out, then cast us off for a younger model so that they can do it all again.'

'But, Pink, you are the younger model. Genetic Fixing changed all that,' I said.

'It didn't work, though, did it? Y'know what I mean?'

'Women always bring it back to the personal,' said Handsome. 'It's why you can't be world leaders.'

'And men never do,' I said, 'which is why we end up with no world left to lead.'

He held up his hands. 'I'm beaten. I'll leave you ladies to destroy what's left of the male sex.' He bent over and kissed Spike.

'Isn't she a robot?' asked Pink, who was nothing if not her own repeating history.

'The champagne's in the cooler,' said Handsome, and left.

Pink sighed. 'He's so strong, so romantic. He's like a hero from the Discovery Channel. I just don't understand why he's in love with a robot — no offence intended to you, Spike, I'm not preju-diced or anything, it's not your fault that you're a robot — I mean, you never had any say in it, did you? One minute you were a pile of wires, and the next thing you know you're having an affair.'

'I don't love Handsome,' said Spike.

'Well, of course not — y'know, like I said, you're a robot.'

'That isn't why I don't love him,' said Spike, but Pink wasn't listening.

'What about you, Billie?' she said. 'What's your story? Now that we're in space we can say what we like. I feel much better since we left Orbus — I think maybe I was allergic to gravity. It's kind of flattening. '

Spike looked at me. I shrugged. 'There was someone. It didn't work out. If I'm truthful I would say that it's never worked out. Almost, nearly, but not quite. And as we're in space, and can say anything, you might as well know now that I'm here to avoid prison. I have been tried for Acts of Terrorism. I have since faked my data details and, yes, I am officially, as of now, on the run.'

Pink McMurphy was staring at me with eyes the size of moons. 'Did you murder someone?'

'I was campaigning against Genetic Reversal.'

'But why?'

'Because it makes people fucked up and miserable.'

'Y'know, I'd be fucked up and miserable anyway — and if I'm going to be fucked up and miserable, I'd rather be young, fucked up and miserable. Who wants to be depressed and have skin that looks like fried onions?'

'Pink, I just visited you on a professional basis and you wanted to refix from age twenty-four to age twelve.'

'I have pressing personal circumstances.'

'You have a husband who is a paedophile.'

'He's just sentimental., When we go shopping, he always likes to visit the toy store. Men, y'know, they don't grow up — it makes sense that they like girls.'

'It doesn't make sense to me. We have a society where routine cosmetic surgery and genetic Fixing are considered normal—'

Pink interrupted me, patting my knee with a clear, unspotted, unaged and manicured hand. 'It is normal .

. . What was so normal about getting old? It's great that we have Fixing and laser. I'm fifty-eight in old years, but I look and I feel fantastic.' Pink demon-strated her great feel-good fantasticness by bouncing her silicon tits a little higher out of her dress. 'Nobody has to look horrible any more — it's been a winner for confidence.'

'If you're so confident, why do you want to be twelve years old?'

'I told you a hundred times — I love my husband and I want his attention. I'll never get it aged twenty-four. I even had my vagina reduced. I'm tight as a screwtop bottle.' Fortunately there was no demonstration this time. I relaxed.

Spike said to me, 'What were these acts of terrorism?'

'Do you remember the bombing at MORE- Futures?'

'I remember that!' said Pink. 'That was world news! Wow!'

'No one was injured. I had already activated the fire alarm and evacuated the building. It was the plant we wanted to destroy — as a way of getting attention.'

'A bomb is a big way of getting attention,' said Pink. 'I only ever set fire to the shed.'

'No one wanted to talk about the issues. I'm not anti-science - I'm a scientist — but you cannot have a democracy that is in default of its responsibilities. MORE is taking over the Central Power. MORE owns most of it, funds most of it, and has shares in the rest. There was never any debate about the ethics of Genetic Reversal — it just started to happen because MORE figured out how to do it.'

'It's a free country,' said Pink.

'No, it's not,' I said. 'It's a corporate country.'

'MORE is paying for this trip,' said Spike. 'It's a Central Power Mission, but that's for the press to report. In private, MORE pays, in return for concessions on Planet Blue.'

'Can't see why you want to blow a place up for making a woman look good on a date,' said Pink.

'I didn't set off the bomb, in case you're worrying. I was instrumental but not active. And I was acquitted.'

'Why?'

'Insufficient evidence against me.'

'But you just said you did it!' .

'I wasn't going to tell the prosecutor that, was I? I had the Access Codes to the building. I sheltered the bombers. I don't regret it.'

'I don't think a convicted — well maybe not convicted, but guilty, y'know, bomber should be lecturing me about my personal life. If I'd known you were a bomber, I'd never have let you in the house. I got nice ornaments and things.'

Pink got up and left. It was probably the first time in her life that she had sighted the moral high ground. Predictably, she occupied it.

Spike leaned forward, took my hands, and said, 'Billie, Hand-some has orders to leave you behind on Planet Blue with the others.'

'What others?'

'There's a breeding colony. Class A political prisoners. They can't do any damage — they're back living before the stone age - but they can breed.'

'No one can breed any more,' I said. 'It's womb-free.'

'Unless you have refused intervention.'

'Yes ... '

'It's an experiment . . . Handsome dropped sixty prisoners - unofficially, of course — on his tracking mission. He was paid by MORE- Security on behalf of the Central Power. He should have taken another twenty-five with him this time.'

'The twenty-five who were arrested?'

'Yes. One of them tried to escape and threatened to talk, so the whole thing had to be covered up as a raid, as sabotage. They didn't break into the Compound. They were already there - waiting to be shipped. The Enforcement Officer involved in the so-called break-in was the one who arrested you three years ago. He thought this was his chance to try again.'

'Did Manfred know about this?'

'Yes.'

'He didn't say anything to me about not coming back.'

'In a way he did you a favour. If you had known the whole story you might not have left — and if you had not left, they would have arrested you.'

'And the farm?'

Spike said nothing. There was nothing to say. It was over. That place. That time. That life. We were silent. I stood up, pacing the room like a badjoke. Like a cliché.

'Spike - what exactly is the plan for Planet Blue?'

'Destroy the dinosaurs and relocate.'

'That's the official story. What's the real story?'

'The rich are leaving. The rest of the human race will have to cope with what's left of Orbus, a planet becoming hostile to human life after centuries of human life becoming hostile to the planet. It was inevitable — Nature seeks balance.

'MORE is building a space-liner called the Mayflower. It will take those who can afford it to Planet Blue, where a high-tech, low-impact village will be built for them. MORE is recruiting farmers from the Caliphate to make a return to sustainable mixed farming to feed the new village. There will be free passage for key workers, including the Science Station crew, who will maintain the satellite link with Orbus.'

'Strictly hierarchical, then.'

'Rigid — and, of course, it will take several generations for a counter-movement to begin, and the feeling is that the planet is so big they can just be allowed to leave and form alternative communities elsewhere. Technology will be the golden key - without it, it's going to be space-age minds living stone-age lives. That will be a powerful reason to stay within the system.'

'But there will be no elections, no government — what are we going to have? A king?'

'There will be a Board of Directors.'

'A what?'

'MORE- Futures will be the on-the-ground presence, guaran-teeing homes and food, development and security.'

'So that's the shape of the brave new world?'

'For now. Life is unpredictable. Planet Blue is still evolving. We may have the smart technology, but she has the raw energy.'

There was a pause. A long one.

I had no idea what to do or what to say. My life had tipped upside-down and I was trying to pretend that everything was still the right way up. It's an optical illusion that happens to people in upturned boats. I walked over to the wide oval window. In space it is difficult to tell what is the right way up; space is curved, stars and planets are globes. There is no right way up. The Ship itself is tilting at a forty-five-degree angle, but it is the instruments that tell me so, not my body looking out of the window. In the days before we invented spacecraft, we dreamed of fly-ing saucers, but what we finally built were rockets: fuel-greedy, inefficient and embarrassingly phallic. When we realized how to fly vast distances at light-speed, we went back to the saucer shape: a disc with solar sails. Strange to dream in the right shape and build in the wrong shape, but maybe that is what we do every day, never believing that a dream could tell the truth.

Sometimes, at the moment of waking, I get a sense for a second that I have found a way forward. Then I stand up, losing all direction, relying on someone else's instruments to tell me where I am. If I could make a compass out of a dream. If I could trust my own night-sight . . . Spike came behind me and put her hand on my neck. Her skin is warm. 'You are upset,' she said. 'I can feel the change in your skin temperature.'

'The thing about life that drives me mad,' I said, 'is that it doesn't make sense. We make plans. We try to control, but the whole thing is random.'

'This is a quantum universe,' said Spike, 'neither random nor determined. It is potential at every second. All you can do is intervene. '

'What do you suggest I do — to intervene?'

Spike leaned forward and kissed me. 'Bend the light.'

'You're a robot,' I said, realizing that I sounded like Pink McMurphy.

'And you are a human being — but I don't hold that against you.'

'Your systems are neural, not limbic. You can't feel emotion.'

Spike said, 'Human beings often display emotion they do not feel. And they often feel emotion they do not display.'

That's a description of me all right. I keep myself locked as a box when it matters, and broken open when it doesn't matter at all.

'There's a planet,' said Spike, 'made of water, entirely of water, where every solid thing is its watery equivalent. There are no seas because there is no land. There are no rivers because there are no banks. There is no thirst because there is no dry.

'The planet is like a bowl of water except that there is no bowl. It hangs in space as a drop of water hangs from a leaf, except that there is no leaf. It cannot exist, and yet it does. I tell you this so you know that what is impossible sometimes happens.'

* * *

'I don't want to get personal,' I said, 'but I'll say it again — you are a robot. Do you want to kiss a woman so that you can add it to your database?'

'Gender is a human concept,' said Spike, 'and not interesting. I want to kiss you.' She kissed me again.

'In any case,' she said, very close, very warm, and I am re-sponding, and I don't want to, and I can't help it, 'is human life biology or consciousness? If I were to lop off your arms, your legs, your ears, your nose, put out your eyes, roll up your tongue, would you still be you? You locate yourself in consciousness, and I, too, am a conscious being.'

Spike moved away into the shadows as Pink McMurphy appeared in the doorway in a gold bikini, gold wrap, gold sandals, gold Alice band and gold earrings. Her fingernails were painted gold. She must have registered my expression. 'I wear gold in the evenings,' she said, by way of explanation. Then she said to me, 'I was hasty in my judgement. We're all here in space. We all have to get along. I'm going to forget about your bomb. We all act hasty sometimes.'

She was smiling like a New Age Guru. I don't know which is worse: to be wrongfully accused or mistakenly understood. Pink poured herself some more champagne, and ripped into a bag of nuts. 'What are you girls talking about?'

'The fact that Spike isn't a girl,' I said. 'We're trying to work out the differences between Robo sapiens and Homo sapiens .'

'You think too much,' said Pink. 'I'll get you a drink. It's obvious — cut me and I bleed.'

'So blood is the essential quality of humanness?' said Spike.

'And the rest! The fact is that you had to be built — I don't know, like a car has to be built. You were made in a factory.'

'Every human being in the Central Power has been enhanced, genetically modified and DNA-screened. Some have been cloned. Most were born outside the womb. A human being now is not what a human being was even a hundred years ago. So what is a human being?'

'Whatever it is, it isn't a robot,' I said.

'Y'know, she's right,' said Pink, looking wise, or as wise as it is possible to look in a gold bikini. Spike wasn't giving up. 'But I want to know how you are making the distinction. Even without any bio-engineering, the human body is in a constantly changing state. What you are today will not be what you are in days, months, years. Your entire skeleton replaces itself every ten years, your red blood cells replace themselves every one hundred and twenty days, your skin every two weeks.'

'I accept that,' I said, 'and I accept that you are a rational, calculating, intelligent entity. But you have no emotion.'

"S right, y'know, they don't feel a thing. When I was having a nervous breakdown, my Kitchenhands —

y'know, the pink ones I had specially done, you met them, Billie, when you came to see me — well, they just fetched and carried the Valium and the tissues, but there was no sympathy.'

'I am not a pair of Kitchenhands,' said Spike.

'It was just an example,' said Pink.

'So your definition of a human being is in the capacity to experience emotion?' asked Spike. 'How much emotion? The more sensitive a person is, the more human they are?'

'Well, yes,' I said. 'Insensitive, unfeeling people are at the low end of human — not animal, more android.'

'I am not an android,' said Spike.

'I didn't mean to insult you. I've worked with androids — they're pretty basic, I know, but . . .'

'I am a Robo sapiens ,' said Spike, 'and perhaps it will be us, and not you, who are the future of the world.'

'Aah, you'll never replace humans,' said Pink, getting up. 'Let's have more champagne.'

'Humans are rendering themselves obsolete,' said Spike. 'Suc-cessive generations of de-skilling mean that you can no longer fend for yourselves in the way that you once could. You rely on technicians and robots. It is not thought that anyone in the Central Power could survive unassisted on Planet Blue. Pink, do you know how to plant potatoes?'

'You mean like chips?'

'Or how to cook them?'

'Sure I do - the bag goes in the microwave.'

'Can you sew? Can you plane a length of timber? Can you build a fire? Can you fish? Can you row a boat? Could you design and build a simple pulley?'

'They'll have figured all that out for us,' said Pink.

'They ... ' I said.

'Exactly,' said Spike, glancing at me. 'Humans have given away all their power to a "they". You aren't able to fight the system because without the system none of you can survive. You made a world without alternatives, and now it is dying, and your new world already belongs to "they".'

'I never heard of an activist robot,' said Pink.

'It's just one more thing we're going to have to be on your behalf,' said Spike.

'What are you going to do?' I said. 'Overthrow us?'

Spike laughed. 'Revenge of the Robots? No, but you see, Robo sapiens is evolving — Homo sapiens is an endangered species. It doesn't feel like it to you now but you have destroyed your planet, and it is not clear to me that you will be viable on Planet Blue.'

'Robots can't exist without humans,' I said.

'That was once true,' said Spike. 'It isn't true any more. We are solar-powered and self-repairing. We are intelligent and non-aggressive. You could learn from us.'

'Oh, this is funny!' said Pink. 'Learn from a robot? Honey, you may be able to get us across the universe and paddle a canoe when we reach the other side, but you don't know anything about life.'

'There are many kinds of life,' said Spike, mildly. 'Humans always assumed that theirs was the only kind that mattered. That's how you destroyed your planet.'

'Don't blame me,' said Pink. 'I didn't destroy it.'

'But you have a second chance. Maybe this time ... '

Pink was singing, 'Maybe this time, I'll be lucky, Maybe this time he'll stay ... Maybe this time, for the first time, love won't hurry away ... '

She began to dance with herself in front of the window, vast with stars.

Spike turned to me, smiling. 'We came the long way round. Look over here. I want to show you something and to explain something.'

She stood up and went over to the pages pasted on the wall.

She pointed at one of the yellowing texts: Nothing in this wide universe I call, save thou, my rose, in it thou art my all .

She said, 'On the official space mission, when we hung in our ship over Planet Blue, Handsome came aboard for the celebrations. While the crew were making the film record, the first shots to be replayed back to Orbus, Handsome got out his book of poetry. Everyone laughed at him, but he insisted that only a poet could frame a language that could frame a world. Underneath the digital images of Planet Blue, he wrote, She is all States, all Princes I, Nothing else is.

'I can read several languages and I can process information as fast as a Mainframe computer, but I did not understand that single line of text.

'I went to Handsome and asked him to show me the book. He sat beside me, our heads bent over the page, his hair falling against mine, and he explained first of all the line, and then the poem, then he put the book into my hands and looked at me seriously, in the way he does when he wants something, and he said, "My new-found land."

'He left, and I went back to my data analysis, and I thought I was experiencing system failure. In fact I was sensing something completely new to me. For the first time I was able to feel.'

She walked around the room, stopping in front of random bits of paper, and reading aloud,

'To whom I owe the leaping delight .

Being your slave what should I do .

When in silks my Julia goes ...

When did your name become a charm?

Me she caught in her arms long and small

She smiled and that transfigured me

She having gained both wind and sun.'

She said, 'Handsome has shown me what it feels like to be loved in this way, but I want to know what it feels like to be the one who loves in this way.'

'I'm not here for the experiment,' I said.

'Love is an experiment,' she said. 'What happens next is always surprising. '

I put my head into my hands. I am being woo'd by a robot. Pink McMurphy had found the track on the digipod and was now singing karaoke with Liza Minnelli: 'All the odds are in my favour, something's bound to begin, It's gotta happen, happen sometime, Maybe this time, I'll win . . . '

Handsome burst through the space-door, flushed and excited. 'We found it! We got it! We can do it!

We deflect the arch-mother of all asteroids, and collide it with Planet Blue at this point here . . . '

The men filed in behind him.

He opened one huge wall to show a close-up of Planet Blue and brought the infrared pointer across the image towards a moun-tain range. 'Spike, I want you to assess the impact ... look . . .'

'Will you sleep with me?' asked Spike.

'The land here contains massive deposits of sulphur,' said Handsome.

'I can't sleep with a computer . . . '

' . . . which should prevent the dust particles . . . '

'I want to touch you.'

' . . . falling back to the planet's surface too quickly . . .'

'And if you did touch me, what then?'

'If the duststorm clears too quickly the dinosaurs will recover.'

'I would find a language of beginning.'

'We need to black out the sun completely, and destroy the larger life-forms on this planet.'

'And you once voyaged would be my free and wild place that I would never try to tame.'

'We have to operate some kind of species-control quickly.'

'And the place that you are would never be sold or exchanged.'

'If we can wipe them out, we can begin again.'

'I want to begin this with you.'

'It's risky but it could work.'

'You can't love me. You don't know me.'

'It will shape a crater, maybe two hundred kilometres wide.'

'Can you only love what you know?'

'The trouble is, we can't predict how long the duststorm will last. '

'Or is love what you don't know?'

'It's risky, but it's our only chance.'

Every second the Universe divides into possibilities and most of those possibilities never happen. It is not a uni-verse—there is more than one reading. The story won't stop, can't stop, it goes on telling itself, waiting for an intervention that changes what will happen next.

Love is an intervention.

Hand over hand, beginning the descent of you. Hand over hand, too fast, like my heartbeat. This is the way down, the cliff, the cave. No safety, no certainty of return.

My lover is made of a meta-material, a polymer tough as metal, but pliable and flexible and capable of heating and cooling, just like human skin. She has an articulated titanium skeleton and a fibre-optic neural highway. She has no limbic system because she is not designed to feel emotion.

She has no blood.

She can't give birth.

Her hair and nails don't grow.

She doesn't eat or drink.

She is solar-powered.

She has learned how to cry.

'Don't regret it.' said Spike. 'Change it if you have to, but don't regret it.'

And she's right. I can say no, I can change my mind, I can have regrets, but I can't wipe out the yes. One word, and a million million worlds close. One word, and for a while there's a planet in front of me, and I can live there.

There she is,' said Handsome. 'Planet Blue.'

And I don't know why this one planet should have life and not the rest. And I don't know why we should be the ones to find it. But there she is, sun-warmed, rain-cooled, moon-worshipped, flanked by stars.

There she is. Planet Blue.

We landed in a jungle dense as night. The noise was deafening. Out of the green darkness we heard whistles and whoops, yelps and cries of creatures we had never even had nightmares about. Handsome had opened a clearing for us, using laser-cutters on the underside of the ship. As the trees fell, and we watched through the porthole in the floor, we saw mammals with fins and fish with legs and birds with double wings like angels, and heads without bodies, and bodies that seemed headless, and these teeming imposs-ible experiments with life scattered away, deeper into the deep green. The laser was cutting trees thirty metres tall and chopping them into two-metre lengths. Then, as the ship was able to drop and hover, Handsome released the grabber, and moved the log pile to make us an open circle, razed and smoothed flat by the laser-level.

'We need to be near the site of the asteroid hit,' said Handsome, 'but not too near. I want to take a few sulphur readings, and twenty-four hours before the hit — we leave.'

'There's a lake nearby,' said Spike. 'The water is good, and I'd like to get some specimens for the Returner Pod. Coming with me, Billie?'

It was agreed that I would take the single canoe, and Spike would carry Pink in the two-man. 'I want to teach you some basic human-survival skills, Pink — just in case. Like how to paddle, and how to fish.'

'Me?' said Pink. 'Survival skills? I'm the mother of all survivors, and I don't like boats unless they're big and white with a sun deck and a bar.'

'You can cool a bottle of wine in the lake,' said Spike. 'Come on, wetsuit now, and dry clothes for later.'

'I love that sun-run woman,' said Handsome to me, as Spike went to locate the kit. 'She'll never get fat, she'll never get drunk, she'll never give up, just as long as the sun is shining. Makes me want to start a new life, free of charge, right here. But it'll be years yet.'

'Spike told me that MORE is already building a space-liner for the first settlers.'

'One year to blast-off. But that all depends on our thwack-jawed friends out there. No settlers can live among the dinosaurs. Best you could do is keep moving, then maybe you could make it - but can you imagine the richest people in the world wanting to spend the rest of their lives as Bedouins?'

'Do you really think the asteroid is going to work?'

'It's working already. It's deflected. It's on its way.'

Pink and Spike were paddling ahead of me on the lake — wide, still, blue.

'Have you ever seen anything as beautiful as this?' asked Spike.

'No,' said Pink, 'and I hope I never will.'

Spike was puzzled by this response — she isn't good at nuance or suggestion.

'I can see the attraction, but I'm city-born, city-bred. Nature doesn't matter to me. I know that we shoulda kept ourselves some Nature on Orbus, y'know, we'd have been better for it — the planet, I mean — but I wouldn't have been better for it, and not anybody I know. We just don't want to live like this any more.'

'Even you would not rather be on-line shopping?'

'Nooo — what do you take me for? But I'd rather be in a bar overlooking an artificial lake — one where the fountain comes on every hour, and where the trees are all pollen-free, and where you can get a great steak and go dancing at midnight. That's the life for me. People aren't going to like it here, y'know.'

'Orbus is dying,' said Spike.

'The techies will fix it — they always do. I say this morbid doomsday stuff is just to keep people in their place — not wanting too much. We're doing great. I'm upbeat. It's different for you, being a robot, y'know.'

Pink: screamed as Spike landed a fish with blue fins and a red mouth and what looked like tiny legs. Spike hit it on the head with a rubber mallet and stuffed it into an aluminium cool-bag. 'You just killed it!'

'Yes.'

'Y'see? No emotion. I could never ever do a thing like that. When I think how people used to breed animals for food — that was backward. They still do it in the Caliphate, y'know. Lab-meat is cruelty-free.'

We paddled under a fringe of leaves where a frog the size of a shed was sitting on a leaf the size of a tennis court. Dragonflies the size of dragons swooped overhead in iridescent blues and greens. From a tree-trunk like a proto-Empire State swung a not-yet-ready King Kong.

'Vegetarian,' said Spike.

'No kidding,' said Pink.

We paddled on, past caves of green rock that shook with the movement of unseen amphibians. Mammals in fancy dress, some wearing ruffs, others in helmets, some with spurs at their heels, lumbered down to the lake edge to drink, and some to wade out, grabbing fish with their long necks. The noise was incessant, unfamiliar. Cries and caws and screams, and underneath the steady humming of insects scaled like eagles.

Pink was trailing the wine bottle through the water when it looked as though something grabbed her line. She fought back, the canoe unbalancing as Spike tried to steady it.

'Let go!' shouted Spike.

'That's Chardonnay Number One Vat,' said Pink. 'I'm not giving it to some fish.'

The canoe turned over. Spike went under. I dived after them, losing my paddle, only to see Pink floating like a balloon above me. And everywhere, around me, eyes, ancient underwater eyes. And in the bottom of the lake, a black and boiling eruption.

Spike swam to the top and grabbed the canoe, righted it, and used her Boost cell to propel herself upwards and in. 'You OK, Billie?' she yelled. I was already dragging myself over the side, while Spike hauled out Pink, who had not let go of the bottle.

'Little bastard,' she gasped, spewing water into the bottom of the canoe.

'It wasn't my fault,' said Spike, reasonably.

'Not you, the damn fish. Y'know, Nature's unpredictable - that's why we had to tame her. Maybe we went too far, but in principle we made the right decision. I want to be able to go out for a drink without getting hassled by some gawp-eyed museum-quality cod.'

'You could have been killed,' said Spike.

'Not me - I got "survivor" tattooed right through me.'

'You could have killed all of us!' I shouted, wet and waterlogged, trying to use my hands to paddle. Spike threw me a line to clip the canoes together, and I pulled myself towards them. Pink shrugged and started towelling herself off as Spike canoed us back to the shore. She was using extra power to get up speed. 'Great arms,' said Pink. 'I'm opening the wine before some other mutant takes a fancy to it.' She pulled the cork and swigged straight from the neck, then sat upright, the bottle between her knees. She had a philosophical expression. 'Y'know, maybe I'm not being fair about this place. Whenever I go out for a drink at home, I end up being followed by some gawp-eyed cod. I guess some things don't change, whatever planet you're on.'

'I thought you couldn't swim,' said Spike, 'but you made it to the surface faster than I did.'

'My implants - buttocks, thighs and breasts. Gives me the pneu-matic look, and now I see that they're pretty useful too. What do you think of that, then, Billie? Vanity surgery saves lives. Heh-heh.' She was pleased with this score against me, and threw the bottle playfully over to my canoe. I deliberately let it drop into the lake.

'Spoilsport,' said Pink.

'Look,' said Spike.

Flying in formation was a flock of yellow parrot-birds, like new-lit suns. They landed in a tree that shone with them. 'Golden lamps in a green night,' said Spike.

Back at the Ship, the mood was high. The beauty and strangeness of Planet Blue intoxicated everyone. We were happy. This was unbelievable luck. It felt like forgiveness. It felt like mercy. We had spoiled and ruined what we had been given, and now it had been given again. This was the fairy tale, the happy ending. The buried treasure was really there.

* * *

Spike cooked the fish, forcing Pink McMurphy into the kitchen, 'like a galley slave', and showing her how to gut, clean and season what Pink called 'Fossil Food'.

At dinner, astonished by the taste and freshness of what she had made, Pink declared she was going to open a restaurant back in Cap City called Fossil Food, 'real expensive, niche cooking, gourmet stuff, the celebrities will love it.'

'I thought you said live food was barbaric.'

'I never tasted it.'

And so it was all going to come together in one dream: Pink would find purpose, and meet the celebrities she adored. Spike agreed to teach her how to cook.

'Y'know, it's quaint, it's old-fashioned, but it's got something,' she said, looking round the long table of men and women, 'cooking from fresh, eating together, I can see that.'

'How are you going to run your kitchen as a twelve-year-old chef?' I said. 'It might lack seriousness.'

'Yeah,' Pink nodded, 'I might have to reconsider. Besides, I haven't missed Ted at all while I've been away.'

'I thought he was the love of your life.'

'So did I, Billie, but we're on different planets.'

Handsome proposed a toast. 'To new beginnings,' he said.

And I looked at Spike, unknown, uncharted, different in every way from me, another life-form, another planet, another chance.

The asteroid hit four days early.

We did not track it because we did not expect it. Down at the lake where we were fishing, we felt the ground shaking.

'It's a stampede,' said Spike. 'I am picking up mass movement of very large mammals.'

And not only mammals: above us, birds the size of light aircraft darkened the sky; in places there was no sky, only wingspan.

On the ground, the heavy-legged huge reptilian creatures, on two legs or four, came crashing along the lakeshore, not even pausing to eat us. We sheltered underneath our vehicle, lying flat, terrified, expecting to be skittled sideways and crushed.

When I dared to raise my head from the warm mud, I saw feet, hoofs, claws, paws, cartoon-size, city-size, thudding and lifting, pushing and raising, running and pausing, and only inches away from where we lay, under what must have seemed like a white boulder to them, and easier to jump or sprint or avoid in the search for safety that had nothing to do with size.

Above us, the caws and calls of the low-flying birds came closer, talons scraping our roof, wing-beat so strong it rocked the vehicle.

This was raw energy and we had released it.

When we could, we ran back towards the Ship, puny and foolish, the smallest, stupidest things on the planet. Humans hadn't been expected for millions of years. Twenty of us looked set to destroy the place before it had even begun.

What we saw at the Ship was a dismal sight: the stampede had crashed down the trees, made vulnerable by the sudden space of our opening. The Ship was underneath palms the size of office blocks.

'Get inside,' said Handsome, and he was right: there was nothing else to do. As we flied in through the emergency doors, the asteroid hit. The Ship went dark.

'There's been a mistake,' said Handsome.

Deflecting the course of the asteroid had accelerated, as well as altered, its impact on Planet Blue. It had smashed itself into a crater under the sea, three hundred kilometres wide and only fifty kilometres from our landing-place.

Spike was reading and analysing the debris data at fierce speed, Handsome sitting beside her, hunched and tense.

Spike said, 'The lower atmosphere of the planet is filling with sulphur dioxide. At higher altitudes a sulphuric-acid haze is form-ing. We have triggered a mini ice age.'

Everyone was silent.

'How long before the atmosphere clears?'

'We had intended months, enough to block out the light of the sun for long enough to break down the food chain so that the largest creatures could not feed. What we have done is at a much greater magnitude than we predicted. It may be years — perhaps decades.'

'Years?' said Pink. 'Decades? In the dark?'

'I do not know,' said Spike. 'Chain reactions cannot be pre-dicted. It may be that a tidal typhoon or hurricane will clear the atmosphere.'

Handsome laughed. 'Well, this will wipe out the dinosaurs, all right.'

'Yes,' said Spike. 'The planet will recover in a different form.'

'But what about the colonization from Orbus?' I said.

'Impossible until the climatic conditions have stabilized.'

'That might be too late for Orbus.'

'So how we are going to get away from here?' said Pink.

'We're not,' said Handsome.

While the crew were securing the Ship and activating emergency systems, Handsome was trying to get a link to Orbus. 'Dead,' he said. 'The signal is going out and bouncing back from the moon. Look, I relay, and two seconds later it's back.'

'They'll send a rescue mission,' said Spike.

'If they don't know the conditions, they can never land—darkness, ice, no satellite link. Spike, it may be that no one ever comes here again.'

She nodded. 'Then the planet will have to evolve in its own way.'

Handsome laughed. 'Ironic, isn't it, if that is what happens, and then millions of years in the future some bright geo-scientist will find evidence of the asteroid collision that wiped out the dinosaurs, and they'll call it the best coincidence that ever was, even though the chances of a gigantic asteroid hitting the planet right here, on a sulphur deposit, are — well, what are they, Spike?'

Spike paused a moment. 'Sulphur is a rare element, the ninth most abundant in the universe, and only 0.06 per cent of this planet's crust. Let's suppose that a twenty-kilometre-wide asteroid might strike here once in, say, a hundred million years on past evidence of asteroid collision, and that its hit-rate on a sulphur-zone like this might be one in twenty. If that is so, then the chances of an asteroid this size hitting this planet, right here, would be a hundred million multiplied by twenty - so, once in two billion years.'

'Two billion years?'

She nodded.

Handsome ran his hands through his hair. 'But what do you bet that coincidence will feel like a better explanation than the thought that someone might have been involved in making human life possible here?'

'Any civilization will think as we did — that they are the first and the only.'

'Wait till they find the remains of Orbus — but, then, nobody believes me about Planet White, so why will anyone believe it about Planet Red? Orbus will disappear into space history, light years away.'

'It might be possible for you to survive,' said Spike. Handsome looked at her. 'What do you suggest?'

'Take the Landpods and travel to the colony. There are sixty of them there. They have a food depot as well as crops they are farming. They have strong-built shelters, and more than they need, because you were bringing others on this trip until the Central Power decided otherwise. Your best chance is together

— and the Central Power knows where the colony is so there is a landing-place there. If they return, it is likely that is where they will begin.'

'It's a long way,' said Handsome. 'We may not make it in time.'

'I will stay here, and keep trying to make a connection with Orbus. I will contact you daily.'

'Stay here? On the Ship? We're going as a crew or we're not going at all.'

'The one thing I need to survive is sunlight. If I come with you, you will have to support me artificially using solar cells. You don't have the energy to spare. Go without me, and go now.'

Handsome didn't speak. Then he said, 'This is my fault.'

'You couldn't predict it — and neither could I. I did the calcu-lations, they were wrong. They were wrong because life cannot be calculated. That's the big mistake our civilization made. We never accepted that randomness is not a mistake in the equation - it is part of the equation.'

'Each man kills the thing he loves,' said Handsome. 'I wish .. .'

'What do you wish?' said Spike.

'That we had landed here, you and I, and begun again with nothing but an axe and a rope and a fire ... and the sun.'

The new world — EI Dorado, Atlantis, the Gold Coast, Newfoundland, Plymouth Rock, Rapanaui, Utopia, Planet Blue. Chanc'd upon, spied through a glass darkly, drunken stories strapped to a barrel of rum, shipwreck, a Bible Compass, a giant fish led us there, a storm whirled us to this isle. In the wilderness of space, we found . . .

'If you are going to go,' said Spike, 'you should go now.'

Hurry, lifting, loading, joking, worry, packing, stacking, quiet, team-work, hand to hand, catch your eye, smile, it will be all right, look we're doing something, busy, careful, don't worry, tools, clothes, last man in, shut the hatch, drop down, rev up, lights, power, go. Go?

* * *

Spike was throwing the last of the gear into the Landpod. Hand-some wouldn't speak to her. She went over to him and leaned against him. He sighed, and put his arms round her.

'A king had three planets,' he said, 'Planet White, Planet Red and Planet Blue. He gave Planet White to his eldest son, but when his son had farmed the land and spent the gold, he sold the planet to the devil to pay for one last party.

'The King then gave Planet Red to his youngest son, but when his son had mined the minerals and chopped down all the trees, he called the devil, because he needed to raise the cash to buy a car. 'The King then gave Planet Blue to his daughter, because he loved her more than the Universe itself What happened next is another story.'

'Robo sapiens ,' said Spike. 'A life-form that will have to wait even longer than humans to be seen again.'

'It's the captain who is supposed to go down with his ship.'

'I've got plenty to read.'

'Poetry didn't save us, did it?'

'Not once, but many times.'

Handsome smiled. 'You think so?'

'It was never death you feared: It was emptiness.'

Handsome nodded. 'That's because there's no such thing as empty space. Only humans are empty.'

'Not all of them.'

'And not all of them are humans.'

He kissed her and half-turned to leave. 'Spike, when I come back ... '

'Go,' she said. 'Go now.'

* * *

Pink McMurphy was wearing a thermal combat suit and carrying cooking equipment. 'We'll make it,'

she said to me, 'and with that robot out of the way, who knows what will happen? Arctic romance.'

'Pink, this is what will happen — it's happening. We're in trouble.'

'I know that, Billie, and don't you think I went to my cabin and cried and screamed and panicked my heart out? And after that, I thought, Pink, you can do this. And if I die, at least I'll die young and beautiful

— excessive climates are very bad for the skin. I bet you're glad you Fixed now.'

'I didn't,' I said.

'You what?'

'It was political. I didn't Fix.'

'How old are you?'

'My chip says G-30. I'm forty this year.'

'Y'know, at least that shows you're human.'

'What do you mean?'

'Women always lie about their age.'

She smiled and punched me, balancing her cooking gear, look-ing and acting much better than I was feeling. Who could have said that Pink would cope and Billie would not?

I was waiting to take my place in the Landpod.

Spike came forward and put her arms round me. 'One day, tens of millions of years from now, someone will find me rusted into the mud of a world they have never seen, and when they crumble me between their fingers, it will be you they find.'

The Landpod began to move slowly across the muddied, trampled undergrowth. Spike was standing quite still in the dust-filled air. We would all need masks to breathe once we left the range of the ship's air filters. Rufus had his head on Handsome's knee, and Handsome was telling him some story or other about a dog called Laika who was once blasted into space.

'Look after Rufus,' I said suddenly, and before Handsome could answer, before anyone could debate it, I had slipped out of the back of the pod, and I was running through the thick air to the clear place where she stood.

Here is a moment in time, and my choices have been no stranger than millions before me, displaced by wars or conscience, leaving the known for the unknown, hesitating, fearing, then finding themselves already on the journey, footprint and memory each imprinting the trail: what you had, what you lost, what you found, no matter how difficult or impossible, the moment when time became a bridge and you crossed it.

We planned to stay on the Ship, where Spike had abundant energy, and where we were safe. I was optimistic, in that morning-of-the-execution way when, quietly reading a book, you look up to find the hangman waiting, and go with him, feeling every final step with the intensity of new life. The mind will not believe in death, perhaps because, as far as the mind is concerned, death never happens.

Outside the Ship, the noises grew more desperate and more terri-fied. In the darkening filthy air, the creatures whose world we had interrupted sought the sun, rearing their heads towards the sky, bellowing and crying through this fading light.

It was getting colder and darker every day.

Creatures thrashed against the Ship, battering it with swinging necks and iron jaws, using it as a landing-place. Only the ground lights kept them away, but the ground lights used power, which we had to conserve.

One night, I think it was night, though we had assassinated any difference between day and night, I heard scratching in the hold.

I thought something might be making its way into the damaged hull, so I took a weapon and a glare-torch, and went down there to our abandoned gear and supplies. Yes, there was something. Something had punctured the already damaged hull-side. I could hear a chewing noise. Whatever I was going to find, I wouldn't recognize it, and it might be very big. Forcing myself, I turned the glare-torch to the area where the noise was coming from. The chewing stopped, and bolting across the floor, away from the arc of light, ran a creature about the size of an Alsatian dog, but stockier, and with very short legs and three horns. It was so comical, and I was so relieved not to be confronted by a pair of jaws the size of a truck and just as fast, that I laughed. The creature stopped and looked at me. This was not a sound or a shape it had ever met before: a thing on two legs making bird-like noises.

I dimmed the glare-torch and stepped forward. The Three Horn immediately hid behind a box. All right, I thought. Let's feed you and see what happens.

What happened was that we found a playful and unexpected companion. Spike took a DNA swab and analysed the creature as a kind of hog-hippo hybrid, probably less than a year old.

'He doesn't know what he is,' she said, patting him, 'and neither does Nature. Everything on Planet Blue is at the experimental stage. All these life-forms will evolve and alter. Almost all will disappear to make way for something better adapted.'

'Our new ice age is going to change things, that's for sure. I can't believe that we've come here and done this.'

'Nature will work with what we have done,' said Spike. 'This planet is viable, and even a few humans can't stop that.'

She seemed quiet, subdued. I forget all the time that she's a robot, but what's a robot? A moving lump of metal. In this case an intelligent, ultra-sensitive moving lump of metal. What's a human? A moving lump of flesh, in most cases not intelligent or remotely sensitive.

'Are things getting worse or better out there?' I asked, as Spike sat over the computer systems.

'Worse. There has been no immediate corrective — no hurricane or rainstorm. And I can't link to Orbus Central Command. I have had a message from Handsome — they are making progress and they have not been attacked.'

'What should we do?' I said.

'Sleep,' said Spike. 'I need to conserve power.'

I lay beside Spike and thought how strange it was to lie beside a living thing that did not breathe. There was no rise and fall, no small sighs, no intake of air, no movement of the lips or slight flex of the nostrils. But she was alive, reinterpreting the meaning of what life is, which is, I suppose, what we have done since life began.

Thinking like this, and in strange half-dreams, I woke up, bolt upright, suffocating. The air system was failing. Spike threw me an oxygen mask and took a reading.

'To reinstate the system would use half of our remaining power. I would rather fill the travel power packs and leave. If we ever come back to the Ship, we will need something to come back to.'

She told me what to pack, and to wear the thermal gear. While I was getting ready, Spike had failed again to send any signal that might reach Orbus. Now she was coding something different - for the future, whenever that would be. 'A random repeat, bounc-ing off the moon. One day, perhaps, maybe, when a receiver is pointing in the right direction, someone will pick this up. Some-one, somewhere, when there is life like ours.'

Life like ours.

We took only the most useful items — tools, torches, a laser-saw, protein mix, compass and radio equipment, lighter for a fire, sleeping-bags with canopy hoods to keep the snow off our faces, a medicine kit that included bandages, sedative injections and lethal injections. Spike strapped herself with power packs, and then, as we were ready to leave, she threw me Handsome's copy of Captain Cook's Journals, and took down the copy he had given to her of John Donne's poems. She is all States, all Princes I, Nothing else is ...

We left the Ship through the lower hatch and dropped into the murky, swirling forest, the Three Horn at our heels. I wanted to speak but Spike was shaking her head. She seemed to know the direction we should take, and we set off through the cooling undergrowth, now soaked with moisture. There was a waterfall in the distance; deafening torrents of hydro-energy poured down a jagged black cliff. Spike motioned to me to go behind the fall. The air was clean. I took off my mask. 'We have to get higher, much higher,' she said, 'so that you will be able to breathe. Eat and drink here and we'll go on.'

'The Three Horn is struggling,' I said, and he was, panting, eyes watering, in the acid air. Spike went to him, injected him quickly and he keeled over.

Then she slipped an oxygen spur over his face, picked him up and slung him across her shoulders like a sheep. It was impressive. 'His breathing is shallower now he's unconscious. I can carry him for a while if I use extra power. If we climb higher, following the line of the waterfalls, the air will be better soon, and I have identified a ridge, riddled with caves. That's where we should go.'

I had no idea what her plan was or what was going to happen to us. We were surviving, and while we were alive, there was always a chance that we could stay alive.

And so we walked, and we walked, and we walked through a world dark-coloured now in purple and red, livid, raw, exposed, like a gutted thing, and always around us, high cries of rage and fear.

* * *

We walked through the grass higher than our heads towards the caves punched into the mountainside. Spike was walking slowly now to conserve power.

The mountain lakes were already in darkness. The sounds of the forest were broken and high-pitched. The little Three Horn, trotting beside us now, kept darting nervously right and left. Then he'd find something to eat and forget for a minute that the world was getting dark — too dark, and strangely so, with finality that could never be night.

I was thinking about Handsome and the rest of the crew. Maybe they were right — maybe the sun would be out there somewhere, bright and glorious and undimmed. Maybe I should have gone with them.

'Maybe you should,' said Spike, reading my mind.

'It's a thing about me,' I said. 'It's not about you.'

The truth is that I've spent all my life with my binoculars trained on the Maybe Islands, a pristine place of fantasy that is really no better than the razor-rocks of misery. Maybe if I had stayed on the farm ... maybe if I hadn't gone with Spike ... maybe if I could have lived more peaceably ... maybe if I'd met the right person years ago, maybe if I hadn't done this, or that or, its cousin, the other. Maybe, baby, that promised land was there and I missed it. Look at it glittering in the light. But the truth is I am inventing the maybe. I can only make the choices I make, so why torture myself with what I might have done, when all I can handle is what I have done? The Maybe Islands are hostile to human life.

'Climb up,' said Spike. 'It's getting darker.'

We came to a rough rock cave, sheltered by an overhang. I took out the laser-saw and got to work on the massive branches of a fallen tree, like a giant oak, with acorns the size of cabbages. The little Three Horn yelped and ran about with what I would like to call animal happiness, but I am not supposed to be here and he is never meant to have met me. If I were going home I'd take him with me, like all those shipmates who brought back monkeys and parrots. I wonder if they felt like me once, and will feel like me again, millions of years in the future, when a creaking, masted schooner lands in some paradise, and the sailors swarm ashore, free of the rat-raddled ship.

Spike has gone to collect edible plants. Unlike me, she can assess their likely composition without actually eating them and falling down dead. We've got the fish from the lake, we'll have fibre of some kind, we'll have a fire, and the Three Horn will have to fend for himself I'm still not sure what he eats, and he probably thinks the same about me.

We have agreed that we will bury our deposit of tools before the end. I don't know when, if ever, they will be found, but Handsome has agreed to do the same, wherever he ends up, and who knows? Maybe some other creature, evolving in its own way, will find the tools and copy them. The axe and the handsaw will be the most useful, and the knives.

If I bury the chips and the batteries, will anyone ever realize that they came from another planet that was dying, and how, on our way to extinction, we travelled here to one new-born?

Now we have firewood and foodstuffs, which help me and do nothing for Spike. She feels the cold as I do, but as a depletion of cell-energy. She is using her stored solar life to keep going. She won't tell me how long she has left.

The little Three Horn is watching me build a fire. He thinks I'm building a den or a hide of some kind, and he stands with his scaly head on one side, looking from the sticks to me and from me to the sticks. Suddenly he trots off to the sawn pile outside the cave, picks up something too big for him (some things will never change), drags it in and drops it at my feet.

I praise him extravagantly, and he goes off to do it again — and again, and again — till nearly all the wood outside is inside, and the poor thing can hardly lift his head. I pick him up with some difficulty and carry him to a corner where there is a heap of last year's leaves. He sinks down and falls straight to sleep. I would like to sleep as completely as that again, but I don't suppose I will until I arrive at the sleep from which I cannot wake.

It began to snow. Soundlessly, seamlessly. From the mouth of the cave, in the lowering light, I watched the snow settle on the giant leaves, so densely canopied that the ground underneath remained dark. This was an advantage. At least the ground itself would stay warm for a while. Any white surface reflects back heat and light, keeping the place cold. Any dark surface absorbs heat and light, keeping the place warm.

When we melted our own ice-caps, we had to put a weather shield in place to deflect the searing sun-heat. We had no idea how much effort it would take us to make a bad copy of what Nature had given us for free.

I watched the snow, and went back in now and then to build up the fire. Spike had gutted the fish and had wrapped it in an aluminium bag to cook.

'Don't you ever wish you could eat?' I said.

'Do you ever wish you could bark?'

'No, of course not.'

'Well, then, I don't want to eat because it is not in my nature to eat.'

'But it wasn't in your nature to love.'

'No.'

'Then ... '

She came forward, and touched my face. 'I can picture you,' she says. 'Look, here you are,' and she took out a small imaging screen, and there I was, my head stripped down to its skull, transparent under her fingers.

I looked at the skull of myself 'You've made me a memento mori before I'm dead.'

'I will never forget you.'

'Do you think we can remember things after we're dead?'

She put out her hand. 'When I told you, when we first met, that they dismantle us because we can't forget, I didn't explain. It is more than circuits and spooky numbers. Everything is imprinted for ever with what it once was.'

'What?'

'You call it consciousness. Programmers call it cell memory.'

'Whatever you call it, it's simple to understand,' I said. 'When they're alive, people forget; when they're dead, they aren't around to remember anything. We always were a people who found it hard to remember. The lessons of history were an obvious example.'

Spike said, 'It is not so simple. The universe is an imprint. You are part of the imprint — it imprints you, you imprint it. You cannot separate yourself from the imprint, and you can never forget it. It isn't a

"something", it is you.'

'I don't think. I believe any of that.'

'It doesn't matter. I will say it again.' She touched my face. 'I will never forget you. I can never forget you.'

I went to the opening of the cave. Some religions call life a dream, or a dreaming, but what if it is a memory? What if this new world isn't new at all but a memory of a new world?

What if we really do keep making the same mistakes again and again, never remembering the lessons to learn but never forgetting either that it had been different, that there was a pristine place?

Perhaps the universe is a memory of our mistakes.

And I shouldn't blame it all on us: there must be planets that are their own mistakes - stories that began and faltered. Stories that ended long before they should.

When I look back at my own life — and in circumstances like these, who can blame me? — what is it that I recognize?

Not the stories with a beginning, a middle and an end, but the stories that began again, the ones that twisted away, like a bend in the road.

Much of what I have done is left unfinished — not because I left it too soon, not because I was lazy, but because it had a life of its own that continues without me. Children, I suppose, are always unfinished business: they begin as part of your own body, and continue as separate as another continent. The work you do, if it has any meaning, passes to other hands. The day slides into a night's dreaming. True stories are the ones that lie open at the border, allowing a crossing, a further frontier. The final frontier is just science fiction — don't believe it. Like the universe, there is no end.

And this story?

I went out into the snow, already about six inches thick on the ground. The Three Horn wanted to play, kicking snowstorms around him and rolling on his back. I made snowballs and threw them at him. He tried to catch them, falling over and sneezing.

Such beauty. I know that it is impossible to accept one's own death before it happens, but standing here, it seemed meaningless — not that I should die but that it should matter to me. I want to see this. I want to look out on this new-imagined world.

I said to Spike, 'Is this how it ends?'

She said, 'It isn't ended yet.'

We made love by our fire, watching the snow shape the entrance to the cave. When I touch her, my fingers don't question what she is. My body knows who she is. The strange thing about strangers is that they are unknown and known. There is a pattern to her, a shape I understand, a private geometry that numbers mine. She is a maze where I got lost years ago, and now find the way out. She is the missing map. She is the place that I am.

She is a stranger. She is the strange that I am beginning to love.

And you may say that only death has brought us to this. That one intensity must match another. That we have found each other because there is no one else, nothing else to find. It doesn't matter — not the reasons for the death, nor the expla-nation of the love. It is happening, both together, and it is where we are, both together.

Spike said, 'Pass me the screwdriver.'

'What are you going to do?'

'Take off my leg. I need to conserve energy.'

With her knife she was already incising the skin at the top of her thigh. In minutes she had removed the limb.

'Now the other one ... '

While she was intent on her operation, she was talking but not looking at me. 'Didn't I ask you what was really you? If I lopped off your legs would you be less than you?'

She had finished. Her legs were next to her on the floor of the cave. I didn't know what to say. She said,

'''I am thy Duchess of Malfi still . . .'"

'How much more are you going to take away?'

'I'm sorry you can't eat me,' she said. 'I would like to be able to keep you alive.'

'Stop it! I don't want to be alive like this.'

'But you'll hold on to life till the very last second, because life never believes it will end.'

'Self-delusion, I suppose.'

'Or perhaps the truth. This is one state — there will be another.'

'Do you think that one day, in the future, robots might become the new mystics?'

'I could live in my cave and talk to the world.' She smiled, dazzling and complete. 'Come and kiss me.'

I kissed her and forgot death.

That night, by the fire, I dreamed that we had always been here, and that everything else was a story we had told.

Cold. Slabs of it. I lie on cold. Cold lies on me.

Short of food now. The Three Horn bewildered and hungry. I split him one of the cabbage-sized acorns we had been using as kindling for the fire. He won't eat it. I soak it in snow to soften it. He eats it, a little sadly, but it's better than nothing.

'Tell me a story, Spike.'

Spike said, 'There was a world formed out of Nothing, and from the Nothing grew a tree, and in the tree sat a bird, and in the bird's mouth was a worm, and the worm that had lain in the earth knew all the secrets of life and said, "There is a world, forming out of Nothing, and out of Nothing will come a tree, and in the tree will sit a bird, and under the tree there walks a man, and that man will learn the language of birds, and find that the buried treasure is really there. And when he has dug it up, he will spend the jewels and the gold, and last of all he will find a bag of seeds and when he plants them they will grow into a forest whose leaves are a canopy of stars. And one day he will climb the tree, and put his hand out to a star, and the star will be his home." '

'For ever?'

'Until the leaves fall.'

'And then?'

'And then it will be winter.'

So cold out there, breath like a fist in the lungs. Spike wants me to remove one of her arms, then another. She is speaking slowly because her cells are low.

'I don't want to be the one who survives,' I said.

'Death will be quick and painless. The cold will gradually put you to sleep. It is only a dream.'

'It wasn't a dream. It was life. And you were life, are life.' She smiled. 'What do you think love is, Billie?'

'Oh, I don't know. Maybe it's recognition, perhaps discovery, sometimes it's sacrifice, always it's treasure. It's a journey on foot to another place.' I smiled and stroked her hand as I carefully detached her arm at the shoulder. 'What do you think it is?'

'I think it's the chance to be human.'

'Human? You make us sound almost worthwhile.'

'One day you will be. Feel.'

She took my hand and put it against her chest. I rested my hand there, silent, listening, wondering. Then I felt it. Then I felt it beating.

'What?'

'My heart.'

'You don't have a heart.'

'I do now.'

'But ... '

'I know it's impossible, but so much that has seemed impossible has already happened.'

'Only the impossible is worth the effort.'

'Who told you that?'

'I read it somewhere.'

'How long do you think it will be before a human being writes a poem again?'

'It will be millions of years, and it will be a love-poem.'

'How do you know that?'

'I know it because it will happen when someone finds that the stretch of the body-beloved is the landmass of the world.'

'"She is all States, all Princes I ... '"

'''Nothing else is."

Kiss me. A traveller's tale; I was the traveller.

It's dark now; the dark is cold and the cold is dark. The fire is low, and the little Three Horn is leaving his brief world to go back through the warmth to where he once was, before humans came. Spike is dying, lying in my arms, not speaking. We are both silent now, waiting for the end. There was a message today from Handsome. He is alive, and has received intelligence from Orbus: there has been a nuclear attack on the Mission Base. Unknowns perhaps, terrorists perhaps. The Central Power is preparing for war.

It will be a long time before anyone comes back to Planet Blue. And I remember it as we had seen it on that first day, green and fertile and abundant, with warm seas and crystal rivers and skies that redden under a young sun and drop deep blue, like a field at night where someone is drilling for stars.

Spike can barely speak. Silently we agree that I will detach her head from her torso. I first unfasten, then lay down, her chest, like a breastplate. Her body is a piece of armour she has taken off. Now she is what she said life would be — consciousness. She has sailed the thinking universe back to the line of her own mind. 'Nothing is solid,' she said. 'Nothing is fixed.'

Unfixing her has freed her. She smiles, we talk, we kiss.

Kiss me. Your mouth is a cave. This cave is your mouth. I am inside you, and there is nothing to fear.

There will be men and women, there will be fire. There will be settlements, there will be wars. There will be planting and harvest, music and dancing. Someone will make a painting in a cave, someone will make a statue and call it God. Someone will see you and call your name. Someone will hold you, dying, across his knees.

The room is dark. Someone sits at a table, writing a book. He goes to the window and looks through his telescope at the stars. No one believes what he sees, but he goes on writing. I opened the book Handsome had given me — James Cook, The Journals.

March 1774. Sunday the 13th.

We plied to windward in order to get into a Bay which appeared on the SE side of the isle, but night put a stop to our endeavours. During the night the wind was variable, but in the morning it blew in squalls attended with rain which ceased as the day advanced. I steer'd round the South point of the island in order to explore the Western side. The natives were collected together in several places on the shore in small companies of 10-12.

In stretching in for the land we discovered those Monuments or Idols mentioned by the Authors of Roggeweins Voyage which left us in no room to doubt but it was Easter Island . . .

Her head is light, so light it weighs nothing. This new world that I found and lost weighs nothing at all. Is this the universe, lying across the knees of one who mourns?

Things dying ... things new-born.

* * *

There will be a story of a world held in a walnut shell, cracked open by love's finger and thumb. There will be a story of a planet small as a ball, and a child threw it, or a dog ran away with it, and dropped it on the floor of the Universe, where it swelled into a world.

Your lips are moving, what is it you say? Your lips are moving over mine, what is it? I will set you in the sky and name you. I will hide you in the earth like treasure.

Snow is covering us. Close your eyes and sleep. Close your eyes and dream. This is one story. There will be another.

Easter Island

March I774. Sunday the 13th.

In stretching in for the land we discovered those Monuments or Idols mentioned by the Authors if Roggeweins Voyage which left us in no room to doubt but it was Easter Island ...

Get out in the Longboat, Captain says, he being sick of the bilious collick and not fit to make one of the party. Accordingly, we slithered rope-wise into the scoop of a boat, and rowed towards the shore of fine sand where upwards of a hundred men, no women or children, awaited us. With us in the boat were sixpenny nails and spike nails and a quantity of cloth to trade for foodstuffs. Pigs and fowls were much desired by the men who had chewed on a diet of saltmeat for upwards of four month. As we manoeuvred ourselves through the shallows, some of the Natives came to aid us drag the boat, already curious at the bundles we carried. Mr Pickersgill made signs that we were in want of provisions and one of the men made a gesture inwards of the island and accordingly we followed. I cannot say the sight was aught but dismal as the Valley of the Shadow of Death is dismal to them that must cross it. The island was stripped and bare, with few trees or shrub-bushes of any kind. Nature seemed hardly to have provided it with any fit thing for man to eat or drink. There was nothing of the green luxury we had seen in New Zealand or New Amsterdam, and little to testify that this was the place visited not upwards of fifty years since by the Dutch, and previous to that by the Spanish. In my master's cabin there had been talk only of abundance. But that must have been talk of some other place.

My name is Billy.

'Billy - fetch the sacks!'

I fetched the sacks, and dipped one down into the Well showed me by one of the Natives. It was a dug Well, not formed of a cascade, and the water was brown and brackish — no better in the mouth than the barrel-water stored with us on the Ship. Yet I did my duty and filled the sacks, and dragged them back to the shore where others of the party stood in desolation, having found no wildfowl or yet good fish. Of plant-life there was little and no incentive for Botanizing.

As I gazed at the island it was as if some great creature with hot breath had flown above and scorched all below. Mr Pickersgill indicated that we should return to the Ship. I am not certain how it began — only how it ended for that has been of more concern to me. Our bags of barter lay on the shore when a group of the Natives attempted to seize some of them. Officer Edgecombe fired his musket, and the ball falling short did little to deter a second attempt on our stocks. The next fire shot dead a man, and the Natives moved threateningly towards our party, who retreated at great speed into the Sloop and pushed off, being under orders from Captain Cook to make no furious Encounter.

I would have been in the Longboat myself, except that I was standing like a beacon at the top of a mile-away hill.

I durst not call out for fear of drawing the Natives' wrath to myself, and I unarmed but for a knife and a cutlass. I dropp'd down flat, like a hare in a gale, and waited.

* * *

The squalls that had vexed us the night previous returned with renewed force, and I was obliged to retreat to what shelter the dismal island afforded. Yet I was comforted, as I crouched beneath a stark rock, that the weather would keep the Ship awhile and that my master Captain Cook would send a Party to remedy my absence. I wrapped myself in the provisions canvas I was carrying, and that kept me tolerably dry, and the weather being warm, and myselfbeing young, I soon slept. What lights are they that push against the eyes in sleep?

It was a cannon shot that woke me, the dawn rising yellow behind a curtain of rain. I got up from my shelter and scrambled back to the high point I had quitted, and looked out to sea. It was a dreadful sight. The Ship was sailing. In my agony I lost all care of my person and ran at pelt to the shore, waving my arms and calling. The petrels, thinking me of their kind, shrieked in return and widened their wings to welcome me. That was my companionship and I was fortunate of no other, for if the Natives had discovered me they may have revenged themselves on me for the dead man. I half thought of swimming, but the waves were fierce and the Ship fast-tacking South with the wind. For what reason or purpose I had been left behind, I do not know, and it may be that there was no reason or purpose, for mankind must always be finding reasons where there are none, and comfort in a purpose that hardly exists.

So here I am, with nothing, at dawn, and the Ship like a thing dreamed from another star.

Up, Billy, up. There's none to save you now but your own self

I began to search the island.

* * *

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