The Neoander’s huge, highly expressive features reflected a bit of disappointment that his question hadn’t really been answered.

“Too close to the line, and we were at risk of being arrested by the Blues stationed there—or being cooked and eaten by Neoander raiding parties,” Ty cracked.

It was one of those jokes that was in such exceedingly poor taste that it could go either way: make Bard an enemy for life, or convince him that Ty really did understand. As a conversational gambit it was somewhat risky. But, on the other hand, Ty was cooped up on a glider with six strangers en route to a mission that hadn’t been explained yet. The cargo hold had been preloaded with unmarked cases, some of which obviously contained weapons. At least three of the Seven—Beled, Langobard, and Tyuratam—knew how to use them, and Kath Two’s Survey training had included a short course on how to use a kat in a pinch. It was not the time or the place for the sorts of elaborate conversational niceties and courtship dances that might be expected in, say, an old private club on Cradle. More important was to get things sorted in a hurry.

Bard laughed and shook his head. “Why not move farther east then?” he asked. “Get away from those threats altogether.”

“Because the early Sooner toeholds weren’t really sustainable and we had to trade with Blues for vitamins.”

“Under the table, I presume.”

“Of course.”

“What did you give them in return? Your women?”

It was fair payback for the “cooked and eaten” joke: Bard testing him in return. Ty took it in stride. “They were scared of our women.”

“Happy Dinahsday, by the way.”

“Is it Dinahsday? I’ve lost track.”

But it didn’t matter. Having made a crack about Dinan women, Bard had to pay respect to their Eve.

“No,” Ty continued, “to answer your question, it’s the same thing that led your ancestors to trade victuals across the line.”

“A craving for greater variety in the diet,” Bard said. “More powerful in the end than sex.”

“Yes. Early on we had nothing more to offer them than fresh vegetables.”

“Up there?!”

“Summer days are long—you can grow a lot in a crude plastic greenhouse. Later, as the ecosystem spun up, it was meat from small animals, berries, and a few luxury goods like furs.”

A thought occurred to Bard. “And how far would your people range in search for those things?”

He was referring, as Ty understood, to Kath Two’s story about the camouflaged Indigen in the trees. For she had by now shared this with the others.

“Not that far,” Ty said.

IN THE VAST AND ANCIENT UNDERTAKING CALLED THE TERREFORM, Survey was a small department, sometimes viewed as a receptacle for eccentric or troublesome personnel. Its outposts were small and, because they needed to be sited along rapidly changing frontiers, makeshift and temporary. TerReForm bases, by contrast, tended to be much larger and more permanent. As a rule they were sited on islands off the coasts of continents. There was a logical scientific reason for doing it thus, but as Doc himself freely admitted, the real reason was more aesthetic and symbolic. Most of the sophisticated genetic sequencing laboratories, and the staff needed to make them work, were up in the ring, where space was tight but brains were plentiful. TerReForm installations on the surface were of a more practical character, and they sprawled over territory in a way that looked extravagant and unruly to habitat dwellers. They combined the functions of botanical garden, experimental farm, arboretum, zoo, and microbiology lab. Small samples, cuttings, or populations of bugs, plants, or beasts that had been developed and nurtured on the ring were dropped in such places to be propagated and observed before being shipped in quantity to the biomes where they would be allowed to run wild. Placing the bases on islands was a simple method for limiting the spread of plants and animals that had escaped from their assigned habitats. It was very far from being foolproof, but it was simple, easy, and fairly effective: an easy fit, in other words, for the Get It Done school.

The TerReForm base for the Central American isthmus was Magdalena. This was a large island in about the same place as the former Islas Marías. Pre-Zero, this had been an archipelago off the west coast of Mexico, somewhat south of the tip of Baja California. The Hard Rain had reforged it into a single island with a few rocks and reefs scattered around, useful for propagating life that was designed to occupy shallow water and tidal zones. The lack of a moon meant that New Earth’s tides were caused entirely by the gravity of the sun, which made them weaker and more closely synchronized with the cycle of night and day. Because tidal zones were thought to have disproportionate importance to the ecosystems of land and sea alike, much TerReForm brainpower had been focused on them, and the low-lying banks of wave-washed rubble around Magdalena had become spawning grounds, not just for fish and birds and crustaceans, but for researchers with advanced degrees. Doc himself had spent ten years of his life here, sloshing through tide pools with buckets and shovels.

Ty would not have thought it possible, but Kath Two got them there with a little bit of daylight to spare, in a single day’s flying. Around midday she mumbled something about a noteworthy jet stream perturbation, and the possibility (which to her was apparently quite enticing) of catching a stratospheric wave. To Ty it might as well have been “eye of newt, and toe of frog, wool of bat, and tongue of dog.” Her next words, though, had been admirably clear: “Hang on.” Drinks were spilled and barf bags reached for all around the cabin. Oxygen masks dropped from the ceiling as the glider shot up through the tropopause, and the fuselage creaked and keened as Kath Two trimmed it to peel energy from some kind of fascinating upper-atmosphere anomaly. Several hours later, when, after another understated warning, she banked it nearly upside down and let it dive toward the faintly wrinkled blue water of the Pacific, they had covered many hundreds of kilometers beyond their original flight plan, and their only real problem was dumping energy so that they could make a landing, as opposed to a crater, on Magdalena. The place had a flynk barn, but the loop wasn’t operating at the moment, and anyway there was no reason to attempt a midair rendezvous with a flying chain when a simple airstrip was available nearby. An impressive whine sounded through the airframe as Kath Two turned on a pair of turbines in its belly that took in air through scoops and converted its energy to electrical power that was then stored. The next time the glider took off, the whole system could be run backward, driving the turbines as jets to provide some initial energy boost. It wasn’t necessary, but it was a way to slow the glider down, and it was a courtesy for the next pilot. Owing to some low banks of clouds, not much about the last phase of the flight made sense to its passengers, but at length the glider shot out the bottom of that weather system and suddenly Magdalena was below them, lit up on its west side by the last of the setting sun. On the purple skin of the sea, thin arcs of foam materialized as incoming wave fronts sensed the bottom or wrapped around submerged reefs. Doc had moved to a window seat so that he could peer down at his old stomping grounds, and in the suddenly quiet cabin Ty was able to hear him remarking on various installations along the shore. Most of these just looked to Ty like picket lines of pilings and ragged shanties of fishnet and plastic. But as Ty had been explaining to Langobard earlier, his Sooner ancestors had made a living from meaner tech than that, and so he did not think less of the scientists who had built them. The wildlife habitats, arboretums, and gardens tiling Magdalena’s western slopes looked a little closer to what a member of the general public might expect from a major TerReForm base, and the buildings clustered at the end of the airstrip were as respectable a town as it was possible to find anywhere on the surface. Ramps, stairs, and a long zigzagging road connected it to a harbor a couple of hundred meters below, where, at a glance, perhaps eight significant vessels, a giant flying boat called an ark, and many smaller boats were moored. They enjoyed a brief panorama of the waterfront before the final bank-around and approach took them out of view behind some hills. After the excitements of the flight, the landing was dull, and Ty suspected that Kath Two had just turned it over to an algorithm. The glider touched down on the single wheel that peeked out from the underside of its fuselage. Before it had slowed to the point where it might teeter sideways, a couple of specialized high-speed grabbs had caught up with it, moving in the somewhat disturbing prancing/scuttling gait that they used at such times, and caught hold of the wingtips. They escorted it to a field of tie-downs off to the side of the airstrip. Kath Two, relieved of responsibility, rolled over onto her back, stretched, and rubbed her eyes. Ty was eager to disembark, but he knew that Doc would be the first out the door. He knew this because he could see a considerable welcoming party walk-jogging toward them.