‘Was that earlier species the Fallers?’

‘No. Like I said, I don’t understand them at all. I wish I’d taken time to study the Forest during my approach. It had a very unusual quantum signature.’

‘A what?’

‘Space was different there, somehow. Don’t worry. I’ll get to the bottom of it eventually. There was another abnormality, too, but that was here on Bienvenido.’

‘There’s a Forest on the planet?’ she asked in alarm.

‘No, no. As I was coming down, the Skylady detected something unusual, way to the east of here, a sensor return that didn’t make a lot of sense. I don’t suppose you know where the original ships came down?’

‘Captain Cornelius landed where Varlan now stands. His palace was built over his ship.’

Nigel raised an eyebrow. ‘Really? I wonder if another colony ship came down in the east. The sensor return showed processed metal and metalloceramics, a lot of it.’

‘I don’t know anything about it,’ she said, then paused. ‘There is the Desert of Bone.’

‘The what?’

‘The Desert of Bone; that’s nearly at the east coast. Nobody goes into it. It’s supposed to be haunted. The first explorers who tried to cross it came back mad.’ She shrugged. ‘Just a rumour.’

‘Curioser and curioser. And why would you give that name to a desert? Is there a map anywhere in the house? I’d like to see if my signal came from around there.’

‘There’s an atlas in the library. I think the Desert of Bone is about three thousand miles away.’

‘That’s not a problem. We can visit the anomaly once I’m established here. I can set up a trading business; that’ll be good cover to travel anywhere.’

As they approached the farmhouse, she realized the man-doll on the roof had nearly finished repairing all the shingles. ‘Don’t they ever stop?’

‘No.’

*

They were sitting at the dining-room table that evening, eating the fish pasta supper Nigel had cooked. At first Kysandra thought something was flashing. Nigel had brought several slim solid boxes the size of his hand into the farmhouse. Modules, he called them. They didn’t seem to do anything. A couple of them had tiny lights shining out of insect-eye lenses. But they weren’t the source of the light. It seemed to be coming from inside her eyes.

The flashing steadied to five hazy stars in a simple pentagon formation, then they started to change.

‘Nigel!’ she exclaimed. ‘What’s happening?’

Patterns were forming out of the stars, patterns that had nothing to do with what Kysandra’s eyes were seeing. Like ex-sight, they hovered in the centre of her perception; unlike ex-sight, they were precise and coloured. Concentric circles that slowly expanded and deepened as if she was looking down into a cylinder with ring walls. Green lines blossomed, outlining a pyramid. Spheres made up of spheres that kept multiplying, like the soap bubbles in the Hevlin’s bath.

‘The pathways I inserted have established themselves. They’re activating, that’s all. Don’t panic. It’s perfectly normal.’ He held her hand.

The touch was a comfort, but she was still startled. Then someone whispered into her brain – soft nonsense words. She yelped in panic.

‘It’s okay,’ he said instantly. ‘Pay attention to the voice. It will tell you what to do next.’

She bit her lip, but nodded. Tried to calm down and stop jerking breaths into her lungs.

‘Can you understand this?’ the foreign, soundless voice asked. ‘If you can, please say yes out loud.’

‘Yes.’

‘I am the basic operational memory package for macrocell cluster operation. Follow these instructions. There is a red diamond icon positioned at the top of the display in your exovision. Please locate it.’

‘I can see it.’

‘In order for this package to download into your cluster, you must visualize the diamond expanding. When it has done this, rotate it one hundred and eighty degrees clockwise. To cancel the download altogether, rotate it the other way. Do you understand?’

‘Yes.’

‘Please make your choice.’

Choice? You’re crudding joking. Like I’d choose not to!

The diamond expanded and turned clockwise as if Kysandra had shot a ’path order into it.

Something like a cross between the fastest ’path gifting ever and a jet of ice-cold water shot into her mind. The strange thoughts broke apart and snuggled down into her memories. It was as if the operating icons suddenly came into proper focus. Every function snapped into alignment. And she understood them all. How to connect to datanets, how to call someone, how to accept data, how to receive entertainment forms, how to construct her own address code, how to . . . how to . . . how to . . . ‘Crud on Uracus,’ she grunted. Most of her body’s Advancer functions were registering inert, but a medium-level medical analysis was available. She could read her blood toxin content, oxygenation, nerve reception, muscle efficiency, heart status, hormone levels, neural activity.

‘So much,’ she exclaimed, her hands waving around like a flightless bird’s wings. ‘How do Commonwealth people live knowing so much all of the time?’

On the other side of the table Nigel was sitting back in his chair, watching her in amusement. Exovision icons were superimposed across him, yet they didn’t interfere with his image. It was very strange. A call icon flipped up, with a code identifying it as Nigel Sheldon. She allowed a connection – not really having to think how to make that happen, just willing it. Icons rearranged themselves as she thought of them.

‘It can be overwhelming,’ Nigel told her. ‘You just need to learn how to filter. The secondary routines will help you.’

She grinned in delight. His lips hadn’t moved, and he hadn’t ’pathed, either. This was new, a direct datalink. ‘It’s fantastic,’ she sent back. ‘I want to learn more now. I want to learn all about everything.’

‘I think we’d better begin with some primary grade educational packages, and move on from there.’

She laughed in delight. ‘Let’s get started.’

2

‘I can zoom,’ Kysandra declared loudly as she came running down the stairs. Her ex-sight showed her Nigel was in the library, trying to instruct the farm’s oldest mod-dwarf how to turn the pages of a book one at a time. The poor old thing didn’t have much dexterity left in its thin hands and kept turning several pages at a time. A simple memory module had been rigged above the table on a wooden frame, where its camera could scan in the text.

She and Nigel had taken a trip into Adeone yesterday to get a cartload of general supplies, food and other essentials. ‘We can’t use the ship’s semiorganic synthesizers for everything, even if they stay glitch free,’ Nigel said. ‘And I can’t afford Blair Farm to have a reputation for being the place where some odd rich bloke hides out. I don’t want to attract attention. We have to be accepted as just another farm.’

Maybe the ship couldn’t extrude absolutely everything from its neumanetic systems, but Nigel had certainly got it to counterfeit Bienvenido’s coins perfectly. Kysandra carried a huge heavy purse round the stores, choosing a dozen dresses and more practical clothes (no shoes, though; ship-produced footwear couldn’t be beaten). Then she showed him which merchant to order coal from, a decent timber yard, ironmonger, stables, the town’s livestock market . . . None of them had any connection to Ma Ulvon. Nigel had spent a small fortune on the kind of things they’d need to return the farm to productivity. People were pleased to hear it. So he was right; a rich newcomer settling in was interesting but not suspicious. They were happy for her, too. Old schoolfriends had stopped to congratulate her.

When they were done with spending, they went to the library; Nigel registered himself and borrowed a dozen books on history and law.

‘Why law?’ she’d asked. The farm library didn’t have any legal books; her father hadn’t been interested in that subject at all.