"A lot of people on the dole right now are ex-apparatchiks. And the New Conservative Inquisitors have got their hands full purging the administration staff of any that got left behind after the PSP fell. The government is nervy about them; what with inflation and the housing shortage, a few well-placed PSP leftovers could cause serious grief. So the last thing the council wants is to take them back, especially not on a project as important as this one."

"Why don't you apply to join the Inquisitors?" she teased. "That'd be a regular job."

Greg grinned. "They couldn't afford me." He pointed ahead. This is the turn. We'll park in Bretton and walk the rest of the way."

She took a left through the old Milton Park golf club entrance. The Duo powered along the rough cinder tracks lined by hemispherical apartment blocks that'd sprung up to replace the greens, tees, and bunkers. The three-storey buildings were self-contained Finnish prefabs, a burnished pewter for easy thermal control. Fast-growing maeosopsis trees dominated the estate, their long branches curved over the tracks, affording a decent amount of shade. There were small allotments ringing each of the silvery hemispheres, laid out with uniform precision.

"Tidy," she remarked, approvingly. "They've got a different attitude here."

"You're not being fair. Think what this'll be like in twenty years' time. Just the same as Berrybut."

"It might, then again it might not. These people are more in tune with the future, they believe in it."

They drove by a clump of mango trees in full fruit. She saw children playing around the trunks, seemingly immune to the ripe temptation dangling above their heads. "Whatever happened to scrumping?"

"Do you want to move?" Greg asked.

"No." She grinned. "You couldn't live here."

They left the rustic eloquence of the Milton estate behind and slowed, slotting into the chain of vans and rickcarts trundling through the grid maze of the Park Farm industrial precinct. It was made up of bleakly functional sugar-cube factory units with coal-black solar-collector roofs. Nearly half of them sported the Event Horizon triangle and flying V emblem, she saw, most of the rest were overseas companies, some kombinate Logos. The foreign factories were anathema to the PSP, economic imperialism, but they had to let them in to pay off the massive investment loans which the Tokyo and Zurich finance cartels had made in Peterborough's new housing.

"Do you mean you would move if it wasn't for me?" Greg asked.

"Don't be silly." She was still grinning. He looked like he had bitten something sickly.

"You don't have to come with me to see Royan, you know," he said. "It isn't exactly a picnic at the best of times. It'll only take me an hour or so."