Still, her parents raised her to be nice to the hired help.

‘You’re a welcome diversion, Greg. Have you sent down the borers yet?’

‘Just about to, ma’am.’

So what wasn’t he telling her?

‘Er, I did try a first probe,’ he went on. ‘Just inside the western boundary.’

‘And the result was?’

‘It’s secreting symteria just fine.’

For anyone who wanted a designer ecosystem that combined organisms native to two worlds, symteria seeding was a necessary early step, allowing hybrids access to microlife that combined both biochemistries. From the tension and release in Ranulph’s voice, this wasn’t where the problem lay.

‘What about the borer-probe itself?’

‘It, er, made its own mind up about where to go. But it settled eventually, eight metres down.’

The borers were an expensive model - and their control systems were designed and grown by a company Rashella had inherited from her father, its ownership buried so deep in layers of corporate aggregation and trading proxies that Ranulph could not know it.

‘I’ll be right there.’

‘You mean in person?’ There was unconscious joy and surprise in the widening of his eyes. ‘Physically?’

‘That’s what I mean.’

Although if she’d anticipated this response, she might have worked in Skein. Could he really find her attractive as well as overwhelming?

Never mind. He could never be more than an employee, for her passion and cognitive powers would burn someone like him: think snowflake, dropped inside a nova.

She cut the comm channel, ran a fingertip along the nine golden studs that arced across her brow, then spread her hands.

Floating forward, she rode the mag-field toward huge golden petals that furled back on themselves, revealing the corridor beyond. There, as her feet touched the patterned carpet, it began to flow, carrying her along. In alcoves stood disparate works of art - bronze sculptures from every Molsin sky-city, a living sand-picture shipped from Sereflex, song-motes from Nulapeiron - forming nested subtle themes. Wanting the exertion, she began to walk, while allowing the carpet to continue flowing, adding to her speed.

A linear gradient of exotic fragrance was replaced by an interwoven series of blossom scents and animal musks from seven worlds, far beyond a professional parfumier to appreciate, not without upraise to Luculentus capabilities.

Entering a vast white-and-glass atrium, she commanded the flow to stop. Then she gestured, and a helix of carpet and quickglass grew upwards, spiralling toward the transparent roof. Just for a moment, she went deep inside herself, accessing low-level interface services the way an élite meditation-trained athlete might deconstruct the minute muscle activations involved in striking a ball or flipping a somersault.

<<cmdIF::Carbud.Manufactory.getInstance(here.alt+33)>>

Then she was standing on the quickglass helix and it was bearing her upward, spiralling toward the great ceiling that was already softening and pulling apart to allow her exit. At the spiral’s tip, some thirty-three metres above ground, a bud was swelling, morphing into her favoured car design, open-topped with room for only one. She glided up the spiral stalk and allowed the quickglass to deposit her inside the carbud, then relaxed as the seat reconfigured, holding her perfectly.

Other ways of travelling were faster; few were as stylish.

Sailing high over blue lawns and purple topiary where whistling songmoths tended drooping scarlet flowers, the carbud carried her smoothly, finally curving down, past a grove of orange novabeeches, and touched the soft ground. The carbud shivered then melted as she walked clear.

Ranulph was standing at the edge of a long drop, almost a cliff. In one hand, he held a stubby silver trident, a symterial manufactory used to inject mutant colonies into the borers. His attention was on a drone, hovering some way below.

‘It’s about level with the rogue borer,’ he said. ‘The others are inserting fine.’

His tu-ring generated a real-image holo of surprising crispness in the sunlight. It was a simple 3-D diagram, topped with a miniature translucent sward representing the ground they stood on, while below shone jagged yellow streaks like lightning, showing the paths the borers had taken. Their descent depended on soil structure, as they sought to optimize the upward growth patterns of symteria colonies, forming the controlled foundation of a new hybrid ecosystem throughout the mansion’s grounds.

There was something half-hearted about Ranulph’s attempt to direct her attention toward the borers that were working successfully. Perhaps it was because he knew that his subterfuge could not work against a Luculenta. At any rate, he was not worth psychophysiological probing - being nice to the hired help had limits.

‘I’m glad the equipment mostly works. Here, let me take that.’ The holo now shone above her outstretched hand, generated by the house system and magnified by an invisible smartmiasma. ‘Thank you.’

This was rude, snatching data from his tu-ring and causing it to power down, but she no longer cared. The borer in question had followed a strange trajectory because it was trying to avoid some obstacle whose nature did not register in the normal parameters. The device had detected something, without being able to tell what it was.

Now given the capabilities of the borer’s control system, whose design Rashella had total access to, this obstacle was an interesting mystery in what had been a normal day. Whatever she was about to find, she did not need her gardener’s help to unearth it.

‘Minor errors aside,’ she said, ‘your work is mostly impressive, and I’m awarding you a bonus.’

‘Really? Well, um, thank you.’

At her summons, a bronze aircar lifted from the south wing and headed this way.

‘And while you’re at home, you can think about planning the eastern expansion. I might shift my attention to the rainbow fungus maze for a while.’

‘Home? Er . . . Sure.’ He looked down at the trident in his hand. ‘Thanks.’

The maze would be vulnerable to shifts in the soil’s microbial population. It would give Ranulph the kind of problem he liked to work on, with no need for him to be here while he worked the calculations.

Can it be what I think?

A host of voices in her head provided answers while rainbow-hued phase spaces and equations danced in her mind’s eye. The borer’s inbuilt scan system was wide-ranging, and the one thing that might disturb its perceptions was a transparency toward scanning, a failure of resonance.

A null-gel capsule, buried on my property?

No one made or used them nowadays - for one thing, the legal penalties were severe - but occasional historical relics turned up, wrapped in gel designed to hide the contents from scan technology. And the thing was, about one hundred standard years before, this area had been witness to some very strange events.

Could there really be an artefact from that period, right here in her mansion’s grounds?

Like giant horizontal saucers dangling from a quickglass tree, circular balconies overhung a plaza near the centre of campus. Roger leaned against a balustrade, staring down. He had dealt with his acrophobic fear at an early age, but there was still an edge of vertigo, and a part of his mind that wondered how it would feel if he jumped.

Whatever the sensation, it would last about two seconds, his last perception ever, unless the flagstones below could soften themselves in time. He wondered how alert the embedded systems were.

‘Are you Roger Blackstone?’

‘Uh-huh.’

‘I’m Rick Mbuli.’ Dark skin, wide smile. ‘We’re the group, then?’

‘So far.’