«I knew Ross would never think to bring anything like this for you,» she said as she began placing the dishes and cups on a shelf above the sink. «He doesn't even know how to wash up. I can bring some coffee beans over later. We still dry our own. They taste nice. Oh, you'll need a kettle, won't you. Is the electricity on here?»

He reached out and touched her long bare arm. «Leave that. Why don't you show me round the island?»

«Yes,» she stammered. «All right.»

Charmaine's central lagoon was a circle seven hundred metres across, with a broad beach of fine pink sand running the whole way round. Eason counted five tiny islands, each crowned with a clump of trees festooned in vines. The water was clear and warm, and firedrakes glided between the islands and the main jungle.

It was breathtaking, he had to admit, a secret paradise.

«The sand is dead coral,» Althaea said as they walked along the beach. Her sandals dangled from her hand, she'd taken them off to paddle. «There's a grinder machine which turns it to powder. Mother says they used to process a whole batch of dead chunks every year when Father was alive. It took decades for the family to make this beach.»

«It was worth it.»

She gave him a cautious smile. «The lagoon's chock full of lobsters. It fills up through a vent hole, but there's a tidal turbine at the far end to give us all our power. They can't get past it so they just sit in there and breed. I dive to catch them, it's so easy.»

«You must have been very young when your father died.»

«It happened before I was born.» Her lower lip curled anxiously under her teeth. «I'm seventeen.»

«Yes, I'd worked that out. Seventeen and beautiful, you must knock the boys dead when you visit Kariwak.»

Althaea turned scarlet.

«And you've lived here all your life?»

«Yes. Mother says the family used to have a plantation on Earth, somewhere in the Caribbean. We've always grown exotic crops.» She skipped up on an outcrop of smooth yellow coral and gazed out across the lagoon. «I know Charmaine must look terribly ramshackle to you. But I'm going to wake it up. I'm going to have a husband, and ten children, and we'll have teams of pickers in the groves again, and boats will call every day to be loaded with fruit and coffee beans, and we'll have our own fishing smacks, and a new village to house everyone, and big dances under the stars.» She stopped, drastically self-conscious again, hunching up her shoulders. «You must think I'm so stupid talking like that.»

«No, not at all. I wish I had dreams like yours.»

«What do you dream of?»

«I don't know. Somewhere small and quiet I can settle down. Definitely not an asteroid, though.»

«But it could be an island?» She sounded hopeful.

«Yes. Could be.»

• • •

Starship fusion drives twinkled brighter than stars in the night sky as Eason walked across the garden to the house. Only one of Tropicana's pair of small moons was visible, a yellow-orange globe low above the treetops and visibly sinking.