And the clothes. Oh, the clothes! She could have emptied every trunk of their silly expedition equipment and filled them with fashionable gorgeous clothes to take home.

However, there was a price to pay. Nigel insisted they take a look at the government institutes and offices. ‘To get a feel of their abilities.’ It turned out that half of Varlan’s central district was a government building of some kind.

They started by strolling up Walton Boulevard to the granite statue of Captain Cornelius that stood outside the palace gates. There they joined the schoolkids and curious tourists lining up outside the four-metre high iron railings that surrounded the broad cobbled ground in front of the palace. Several Palace Guards patrolled the perimeter in fours, marching along like heavily ordered mods, humourless, perfectly shelled, the silver buttons on their yellow and blue tunics shining in the morning sunlight, rifles shouldered.

Nigel ignored them, staring at the six-storey façade on the other side of the open ground. This section of the palace was over three hundred metres long, built from a stone that had an odd blue hue. Tall Italianate arched windows surrounded a grand archway in the centre which led into the first of many courtyards. There were several ornate turrets and domes rising amid the steep roofs.

‘I wonder what it’s like living there?’ Kysandra mused wistfully.

‘Pretty awful. I’ve lived in mansions this size myself. Ninety-five per cent of it is given over to staff and offices. You spend so much time mediating their internal politics, you get distracted from the real job. And it’s no place for a family. I wound up with some pretty screwed-up kids at one point. Five of them still aren’t talking to me.’

‘You lived . . .’ Kysandra’s hand gave the palace a limp wave.

‘Oh, yeah. Won’t make that mistake again. This Sun King monstrosity tells me all I need to know about how wealth and power is consolidated on this planet. My guess is that the court here will exercise absolute power. And to do that you have to have a political system that doesn’t permit dissent. Give the people the illusion of democracy, with a few elected councils that’ve been given power over local trivia, while you control anything that really matters directly through the economy. He who pays the piper calls the tune; then, now, and forever. The Treasury will be the true seat of power on this world, trust me. And somewhere in the Captain’s multitude of honourable titles will be something like: Chancellor of the Exchequer, or Lord of the Treasury, or Governor of the National Bank or Chief Revenue Officer. That’s how it’s done.’

She looked from Nigel to the palace and back again. ‘You know all that by how big and gaudy the palace is?’

‘Yeah. Pretty much. I’ve seen it enough times to know what I’m facing.’

‘But we have elections.’

‘I wasn’t criticizing. Given the Faller threat, you’ve got a pretty good arrangement here. Government is always a balance between liberty and restriction. Back in the outside universe, political systems evolved as technology and understanding grew, and that generally brought a liberalizing democracy with it. The problem here is a near-perfect status quo – though perfect isn’t quite the right word for it – and all the Shanties are a new development that can’t be helping the economy or the crime rates. The Fallers aren’t ever going to stop Falling. If anything, they have the advantage. Your society is probably stagnating in a lot of subtle ways that’ll start to mount up, and with that comes decadence and corruption. The Fallers only have to wait until your vigilance falters.’ He pursed his lips thoughtfully. ‘Then again, fear keeps you on your toes, and you have kept society going for three thousand years.’

‘You think the Fallers will win in the end?’

‘Time and human nature is on their side. But only because the Void restricts us. If we could get up there to the Forest and deploy some decent Commonwealth technology, it would be a very different story.’

‘Us?’ she taunted. ‘So you do consider yourself human, then? I was wondering.’

Nigel grinned back. ‘Occasionally.’

‘Anything else you’ve decided just from looking?’

‘Not really.’ He turned back to stare at the palace, sending his ex-sight to examine it closely. As expected, the whole structure was fuzzed. ‘You said this is where the ship landed?’

‘Yes. They built the palace around it.’

Nigel studied the façade closely, then turned three hundred and sixty degrees. ‘Around and over, I’d guess. Especially if they came down anything like the way I did. You see this landscape? The palace is two thirds of the way up an incline; those big gardens at the back slope up. And this last mile of Walton Boulevard itself is actually a shallow valley, see, running up a slope? Unlikely in nature. No, I’d say the ship hit somewhere down where our hotel is and kept on going, ploughing a groove through the earth until it came to rest here. So once it was down, the ship would be Cornelius’s headquarters. It also contained all the resources; those ships carried everything you needed to start a new society on a fresh world. A lot of it wouldn’t work here, but there was enough, clearly, and the metal from the superstructure would have been valuable back in the early days. And Cornelius had control over it. The start of the Captain’s economic authority. He wouldn’t have moved away from that. No. He secured it. Built walls around it, buried it, closed it off to everyone else.’ Nigel licked his lips and frowned. ‘I wonder what happened to everything they didn’t use. Is it still here? I mean, why move it?’

‘You think bits of the ship are still here?’

‘Could be. We need to get inside to see for sure. But not today.’

‘Shame. I’d like to go inside.’

‘Come on. Let’s go check out something else.’

‘Okay. What?’

‘I thought the courts; I’d like to observe a trial. Then the Treasury. I’d say the security sheriffs, too, but I don’t think any public sheriff station is going to be the kind I need to know about.’

‘I don’t get it.’

‘Government always has its own special police. The kind who really don’t like people sniffing round in places they shouldn’t. The kind who make sure that anyone complaining about life and saying, Something should be done, are quietly dealt with.’

‘The Captain has his own police squad separate from the sheriffs,’ Kysandra said, trying to remember details from Mrs Brewster’s history lessons. ‘They’re mostly ceremonial bodyguards.’

‘Ceremony my ass. They’ll be the ones.’

It was a ten-minute walk to the central justice courts, back down Walton Boulevard to the junction with Struzaburg Avenue. Nigel stood admiring the Landing Plane statue for a while. ‘I remember those brutes; they made them on Oaktier. Cargo capacity about two hundred and fifty tonnes. Aerodynamic flight only, no ingrav propulsion. The Brandts were lucky to have them in the Void. If they had any sense, they’d have ferried their people down in them before they tried to land the big colony ships themselves.’

Kysandra walked on, shaking her head in bemusement. Nigel claimed to know about or be connected to absolutely everything. It was a weird quirk.

*

The courts were another grandiose government block, with narrow windows running up the whole six storeys. The front was classical architecture with heavily stylized columns running along the front. A green copper dome dominated the roofs of its various wings, the apex supporting a fluted pillar where gold scales stood on the top. ‘Pretty standard,’ Nigel proclaimed.

The trials listed beside the main entrance were all fairly minor ones. They sat in the public gallery of a dispute between a merchant and a rail freight company over the price of grain. The merchant claimed the grain was low quality, the rail company lawyer said the quality wasn’t their responsibility. But it was the rail company’s agent who had secured the load, the merchant’s lawyer protested.