«But it's a foreign gene, not one God gave us, not part of our divine heritage.»

«You support the Church's view?» Her voice hardened.

«No.»

«God gave us the gene for cystic fibrosis, He gave us haemophilia, and He gave us Down's syndrome. They're all curable with gene therapy. Genes the person didn't have to begin with, genes we have to vector in. Does that make those we treat holy violations?»

I made a mental note never to introduce Corrine to Jocelyn. «You're fighting an old battle with the wrong person.»

«Yeah. Maybe. Sorry, but that kind of medieval attitude infuriates me.»

«Good. Can we get on with the implant now, please?»

«Oh, that?»

The chair started to rotate back to the vertical. Corrine was flicking off the equipment.

«I finished a couple of minutes ago,» she said with a contented chuckle. «I've been waiting for you to stop chattering.»

«You . . .»

The smiling nurse began to unstrap me.

Corrine pulled off a pair of surgical gloves. «I want you to go home and relax for the rest of the afternoon. No more work today, I don't want you stressed; the symbiont neurons don't need to be drenched in toxins at this stage. And no alcohol, either.»

«Am I going to have a headache?»

«A hypochondriac like you, I wouldn't be at all surprised.» She winked playfully. «But it's all in your mind.»

• • •

I walked home. The first chance I'd had to actually appreciate the real benefit of the habitat. I walked under an open sky, feeling zephyrs ripple my uniform, smelling a mélange of flower perfumes. A strange experience. I'm just old enough to remember venturing out under open skies, taking backpack walks through what was left of the countryside for pleasure. That was before the armada storms started bombarding the continents for weeks at a time. Nowadays, of course, the planet's climate is in a state of what they call Perpetual Chaos Transition. You'd have to be certifiable to wander off into the wilderness regions by yourself. Even small squalls can have winds gusting up to sixty or seventy kilometres an hour.

It was the heat which did it. The heat from bringing the benefits of an industrial economy to eighteen billion people. Environmentalists used to warn us about the danger of burning hydrocarbons, saying the increased carbon dioxide would trigger the greenhouse effect. They were wrong about that. Fusion came on-line fairly early into the new century; deuterium tritium reactions at first, inefficient and generating a depressing quantity of radioactive waste for what was heralded as the ultimate everlasting clean energy source. Then He3 started arriving from Jupiter and even those problems vanished. No more carbon dioxide from chemical combustion. Instead people developed expectations. A lot of expectations. Unlimited cheap energy was no longer the province of the Western nations alone, it belonged to everybody. And they used it; in homes, in factories, to build more factories which churned out more products which used still more energy. All over the planetary surface, residual machine heat was radiated off into the atmosphere at a tremendous rate.