The Commonwealth Foundation appeared to be part charity, part Irregular University and part political party. It seemed to have taken over most of First Cut’s largely deserted lower warren, and this young man, Girmeyn, gave every appearance of being its leader, even though nobody ever quite addressed him as such.

“Girmeyn will see you now, Ms Demri,” the white-uniformed guard said.

She had been watching screen, sitting in the draughtily warm cave of a waiting-room with about two hundred other people who were petitioning to see the man.

She looked up, surprised. She’d given up any hope of seeing Girmeyn when she’d seen the crowd. All she wanted now was to retrieve the HandCannon.

“He will?” she said. People sitting nearby stared at her.

“Please follow me,” the guard said.

She followed the white-uniformed guard as he led her to the end of the waiting-room and into a corridor. The corridor ended in a long, comfortably furnished chamber looking down into a huge cavern.

The cavern was walled in naked black rock. Its smooth floor was covered with ancient, glittering machinery which towered twenty metres into the space, almost level with the windows of the gallery. The complicated, indecipherable machines-so ambiguous in their convoluted design they could have been turbines, generators, nuclear or chemical reactors or agents of a hundred other processes-glittered under bright overhead lights. Huge pale stalactites fluted pendulously from the roof of the cavern in moist folds of deposited rock, counterpointed by stalagmites on the cavern floor beneath. Where the machinery got in the way, the deposits had merged, the never less than metre-thick columns conjoined to and mingling intimately with the silent machines.

She stared at the scene for a few seconds, made dizzy by the sheer weight of time implicit in the slumped topology of the palely gleaming, technology-enfolding pillars.

“Ms Demri?” an elderly white-uniformed man said.

She looked round. “Yes?”

“This way.” He held out his hand. Girmeyn sat behind a large desk at the far end of the room, surrounded by a variety of people with yolk-screens, hand-screens, brow projectors, patch-screens and, judging by the one-eyed aspect of a couple of them, lid-screens. She was shown into a large seat to one side of the desk, across a smaller table from a similar seat and just by the windows looking out into the cavern.

She sat still for a few minutes, watching what looked remark-ably like a prince conducting the affairs of state, before the young man stood up behind his desk, bowed to the people and walked over to join her. The men and women surrounding the desk mostly stood where they were; some sat down on seats and some on the floor. Sharrow stood up to shake his hand. His grip was strong and warm.

“Ms Demri,” he said. His voice was deeper than she’d expected. He bowed to her and sat in the other seat. He was dressed as he had been in the lecture theatre half an hour earlier, in a conservative black academic gown. He was even younger than she’d thought; early rather than mid-twenties. His exquisitely tangled medium-length hair was blue-black, his pale brown, depilated skin was smooth and unblemished. His lips were full and expressive beneath a long, delicate nose. His jaw was strong and he had a dimple on his chin. He sat relaxed but formal in the seat, his dark eyes inspecting her.

“It’s very kind of you to see me,” she said, “but I really only want access to some fifteen-year-old hospital records.” She glanced behind her. “There are so many people waiting out there, I feel positively unworthy.”

“Are you a student of the Five Per Cent War, Ms Demri?” he asked. There was a practised ease about his voice that belonged in somebody of immense experience and authority three times his age. His voice poured over her.

“Yes,” she said. “I am.”

“May I ask where?”

“Well, I did attend Yadayeypon some time ago. But I’m independent now; it’s almost more of a hobby…”

He smiled, revealing perfect teeth. “I must have led an even more sheltered life than I thought, Ms Demri, if students have to carry such large pieces of ordnance around with them.” He glanced round to the desk and made a motion with one hand. The elderly guard who’d first greeted her brought the HandCannon over.

“It is safe to handle, sir,” he said, presenting the gun to Girmeyn, who inspected it.

From the way he held it, she knew he had probably never held a gun in his life.

The elderly guard stooped towards her; he held the gun’s magazine in one hand, and in the other, between two fingers, a General Purpose HandCannon round. She looked up at it and then him.

“You shouldn’t keep a round in the breech like that, ma’am,” he told her. “It’s dangerous.”

“So I’m told,” she said, sighing. The guard went back to the desk. Girmeyn passed the HandCannon to her just as the elderly guard had to him. She put it in her pocket.

“Thank you,” she said. He seemed to be expecting something more. She shrugged. “The competition for research grants is unusually fierce this year.”

He smiled. “You think these old hospital records will help you in your studies?”

She was starting to wonder. She had a feeling-somehow quite distinct but utterly vague at the same time-that there was something important going on here, but she had no clue whatsoever what it might be. “They might,” she said. “I can’t help thinking this is all getting out of proportion. It’s not an especially important request, I’d have thought, and you’re obviously so busy…” She waved one hand.

“Details matter, though, don’t you think?” he said. “Sometimes what appear to be utterly inconsequential actions have the most enormous results. Chance makes the casual momentous. It is the fulcrum upon which the levers of action rest.”

She chanced a small laugh. “Do you always speak in epigrams, Mister Girmeyn?”

He smiled broadly, dazzlingly. “Occupational hazard,” he said, spreading his hands. “Allow me to attenuate my portentousness for you.”

She grinned, looked down. “I heard the latter half of your lecture,” she said. “It was very impressive.”

“In content or delivery?” he asked, slinging an arm over the back of his chair.

“In delivery, absolutely,” she told him. “In content…” she shrugged. “To employ a phrase you might take issue with; the jury’s still out on that.”

“Hmm,” he said, frowning and smiling at the same time. “The usual answer to that question is ‘both’.”

She glanced round at the people round the desk, most of whom were pretending not to look at Girmeyn and her. “I’m sure it is,” she told him.

“My arguments didn’t touch you, then?” He looked sad. She had a brief, vertiginous, revelatory feeling that she could very easily fall in love with this man, and that not only had hundreds, perhaps thousands of people already done so, but that many more might yet.

She cleared her throat. “They worry me. They sound so much like what so many people want to hear; what they believe they would say if they were sufficiently articulate.”

“Using your chosen terminology,” he said quietly, “I would have to plead guilty: And enter a special defence of being right, and the current law wrong.” He smiled.

“I think,” she said carefully, “that perhaps too many people want things to be simple when they are not and cannot be. Encouraging that desire is seductive and rewarding, but also dangerous.”

He looked away a little, as if inspecting something far in the distance over her left shoulder. He nodded slowly for a few moments. “I think power has always been like that,” he said, his voice low.

“I have a… relation,” she said, “who I think has become, largely because of her environment, quite thoroughly deranged over the last few years.” She met Girmeyn’s gaze and looked into the darkness there. “I have the disquieting feeling that she wouldn’t have disagreed with a single word you said today.”