«Your pardon, but the less you know of me, the less involved in my affairs you will be.»

«Sure,» she said in disgust.

Lenny returned with his bag. He started to stick small sensor disks on Fakhud's legs.

«Stay and help Lenny,» Amanda told Blake. «Then come and tell me when he's ready to leave.» She and Jane walked out into the heat of the farmyard. «I'm sorry,» she said it so fiercely it was almost a hiss.

Jane sighed. «Not your fault.»

«I can't believe Blake was so thoughtless. To put you and your friends in this position, it's . . . it's . . .»

«In a way it's rather admirable, actually. He's only interested in the farm, getting your fruit picked and the trees pruned and fertilized. Politics, race, and religion aren't part of the equation for him. That was the whole point of Nyvan, wasn't it? Our parents came here to escape their past; they wanted a land where they could put all their energies into their farms and their businesses. And your Blake, he's still living there.»

«He's a fool. Times change.»

«No, time doesn't change, it just goes backwards. That's the thing to be sorry for.»

«I'll have Fakhud out of here by this evening, whether he's on his feet or not.»

Jane gave her a sad smile. «I'm sure you will.»

«Will Lenny be able to patch those wounds up? Some of them looked ugly to me.»

«Don't worry about that. Lenny completed three years at medical school before we all decided to leave Harrisburg. He's as good as qualified. And he's had a lot of experience with the kind of injuries you get from clashing with the authorities.»

«I can't believe you were forced out.»

«Nobody can, until it happens to them. Oh, it's not that bad, not yet. But we Jews have a long history of persecution we can reference, in fact it is our history. We can see the way Harrisburg is going. Best we leave before it does spiral downwards.»

«Where will you go?»

«Tasmal, most likely. A lot of our people have drifted there over the last decade, and to hell with the Settlement Ministry quotas. We're almost a majority there, the newest of the New Jerusalems.»

«But that's on the Dayall continent; it has to be six thousand kilometres away at least.»

Jane laughed. «The promised land is never over the next hill. Also our history.»

«I'm sorry.»

«Don't be. Me and the rest will be OK. We were smart enough to start the journey early. The stubborn ones, those that stay, they'll be the ones who suffer.»

Amanda glanced round the familiarity of the farmyard. The burroughs trees that waved slowly in the warm breeze were an easy five metres taller than they had been when she was a girl. Over in the eastern corner, the well pump was making its usual clatter as it topped up the cisterns. The red clay tile roof of the long barn was sagging deeper as this year's growth of purple-flowering joycevine added another heavy layer of branches.