Decades earlier, Lawrence did some work on Bloodroot as a survey pilot. He expected to map the limits of the inhabitable region of the planet. At the time he thought he wanted to join a fleet, but it was not to be; Bloodroot toned down its space programme. That didn’t mean there wasn’t work to be done planetside, however.

“You’re going to it alone,” his CO had said.

That was back when Bloodroot was more dependent on Lagos. Old tech propulsion, it took three hundred days to reach Bloodroot from the space station, and Lawrence took a twin-engine plane, parts printed and assembled, and flew free, beaming images and environmental information back.

Long lonely flights. Lots of ice in the poles. Weather checks. Rations. More flights. Cold nights. Conflicts with pack canines and biting insects and dermatophytoses. Hyperkinetic creeper vines reaching for his plane along the equator. Unfamiliar indigenous species mixed with carelessly introduced terrestrial ones. Failed, abandoned outposts. An ancient meteor crater that took him four hours to fly around. Reading. Refuelling. The unending desolation of deserts and tundra alike. Waterlogged islands on which he could not land. Alone on plateau regions of mountain ranges. Scratching his name on a rockface using a diamond-tipped tool from Lagos. Because the arrival of humans interrupted local evolution in the Greater Arboreal Sea, he encountered resentful hominids who hurled shit at him. He forgave them. Losing track of time. Watching earthquakes and orogeny, landscape changing as fast as waves on the sea. He saw the bones of the first explorers and the preserved, frozen bodies of waves of rescue teams. Once his path crossed that of another surveyor and they spent a slow night together and exchanged tips, body fluids and narcochemistry.

Bloodroot forgot him, and perhaps Lawrence forgot himself, because when he got back to civilisation looking to find a replacement component for his plane, there were no longer any survey trips being sponsored. Nobody missed him, nobody fought for his return. Hal was already dead. He had people somewhere, but he had no contact even before he went off-station. Nobody cared. Lawrence thought he was stuck on Bloodroot until the end of time. Or the end of his new mission.

He flew some desultory missions after that, but all he really wanted to do was lie down and die. No, what he wanted was for Hal to be alive. Since that was never going to happen, he laid roots on Lagos.

And here he was, with Hal’s daughter. Perhaps, as they say, Hal lives on in her.

Chapter Eleven

Ragtime: Fin

Fin discards the helmet and pulls himself with grab rails into the cupola. The spin has stabilised along with his nausea. Salvo and Uncle Larry must have done it. He tries to find a channel to Bloodroot to give a report, but all he gets in his visual field is a “busy” bar.