Then the palpitations began to grow, becoming more frenzied. Long tears opened up, spilling out a precious golden haze. A ripping sound grew into thunder, and the ring quaked below my feet.

I knifed up on the bed. Clean sober awake. Heart racing, sweaty. And for some reason, expectant. I glanced round the darkened room. Jocelyn was stirring fitfully. But someone was watching me.

A faint mirage of a man sitting up in bed, staring round wildly.

«What is this?»

Please relax, Chief Parfitt, there is nothing to worry about. You are experiencing a mild bout of disorientation as your symbiont implants achieve synchronization with my neural strata. It is a common phenomenon.

It wasn't a spoken voice, the room was completely silent. The hairs along my spine prickled sharply as though someone was running an electric charge over my skin. It was the memory of a voice, but not my memory. And it was happening in real-time.

«Who?» I asked. But my throat just sort of gagged.

I am Eden.

«Oh, Christ.» I flopped back on the mattress, every muscle knotted solid. «Do you know what I'm thinking?» The first thing which leapt into my mind was that last row with Jocelyn. I felt my ears burning.

There is some random overspill from your mind, just as you perceived some of my autonomic thought routines. It is a situation similar to a slightly mistuned radio receiver. I apologize for any upset you are experiencing. The effect will swiftly fade as you grow accustomed to affinity.

Jupiter again; a bright vision of the kind which might have been granted to a prehistory prophet. Jupiter floated passively below me. And space was awash with pinpricks of microwaves, like emerald stars. Behind each one was the solid bulk of a spacecraft or industrial station.

«That's what you see?»

I register all the energy which falls upon my shell, yes.

I risked taking a breath, the first for what seemed like hours. «The inside. I want to see the inside. All of it.»

Very well. I suggest you close your eyes, it makes perception easier when your brain doesn't have two sets of images to interpret.

And abruptly the habitat parkland materialized around me. Dawn was coming, washing the rumpled green landscape with cold pink-gold radiance. I was seeing all of it, all at once. Feeling it stir as the light awoke the insects and birds, its rhythm quickening. I knew the axial light-tube, a slim cylindrical mesh of organic conductors, their magnetic field containing the fluorescent plasma. I sensed the energy surging into it, flowing directly from the induction pick-off cables spread wide outside. Water surged along the gentle valleys, a cool pleasing trickle across my skin. And always in the background was the mind-murmur of people waking, querying the habitat personality with thousands of mundane requests and simple greetings. Warmth. Unity. Satisfaction. They were organic to the visualization.

«My God.» I blinked in delighted confusion at the thin planes of light stealing round the sides of the curtains beyond the end of the bed. And Jocelyn was staring at me suspiciously.