‘I’ve got to have something to put up. They’ve sent out the invites, made me sound like an A-grade dick. An artist who has succeeded, much more than any other, in finding a fitting visual language for the New Province landscape.’ He said the party was being hosted by the Co-Sec embassy. ‘Tell me you’ll come to the opening. And I want you to come round and see what you think of this newer stuff I’ve been doing. I’ve been staring at it so long I don’t know if it’s good or what. They’re from these magnified slides of extremophiles.’

Sebastian couldn’t think about paintings right now, couldn’t go to the studio and stroke Dino’s ego. He couldn’t stomach the idea of the opening, either. The champagne flutes on trays, the speeches and grandstanding, the vapers huddling on a terrace like the last of a dying tribe. And he hated Day Zero, the way people carried on. They would talk of the beauty of the place, the spirit of exploration. No one would mention the outer districts or the long, slow-burning conflict. Day Zero commemorated the settlement’s founding. The planting of the flag, the pegging out of the first biodome, the splashing of pictures over the internet to show other hopeful nations that they had been too slow.

‘Sounds amazing, Dino.’ He squeezed his way off the bus. ‘Hey, I’m just heading into a meeting. Call you later, yeah?’

This was stretching the truth. His meeting was really an appointment. Seb entered a low-rise glass building, checked the directory in the lobby, and went up to the second-floor waiting room, which struck him as depressing, a wasteland of humanity. Its seats were occupied by the infirm and the diseased, a blotchy-skinned people with lashless, staring eyes. Sebastian took a seat next to a skeletal-looking man with a protuberance on his cheek.

After studying him for a moment, the man asked, ‘What got you, a solar flare?’ He leaned close, as if to let Sebastian in on a secret. ‘Have you tried the fox’s breath diet? I’ve got the cold-pressed juice on order.’

Sebastian hadn’t tried any diets, fox’s breath or otherwise. He had heard of fox’s breath, of course, a rare flower used to make a medicine of sorts. A delicate amber-coloured blossom that still grew in a small number of surviving habitats on Earth, it was said to give off a rank odour, like the smell of rotting flesh. Doctors maintained the plant was a dangerous toxin, but an army of devotees sang its praises on web forums.

The man leaned even closer. ‘I have a source, a guy who knows a guy, you get me?’