“Look at this.” He pulled up results from a cosmic ray detector, tracks left in bubble chambers, accompanying analysis. “We’ve found some strange products from the Venus event. Some exotic beasties, escaping from that particular zoo. Have you seen this result?”

A spider-web of tracks, of splits and decay events and spirals and tiny explosions.

She whistled. “No. I’d remember.”

“Well, the results haven’t made it onto the nets yet. The authors are still checking.”

“I don’t blame them,” she said. “If this is right—”

“You’re looking at a particle with a charge a fraction of an electron’s. Which is something we’ve never seen before.”

“And this mass—” She looked at him. “Alfred, this is the signature of an elementary particle with a fractional charge, and the mass of a bacterium. Now, what processes do we know of which could produce such a thing?”

“We don’t know of anything since the Big Bang.” He studied her. “We’re measuring the symptoms here. Guessing at a cause isn’t so easy.”

“A cause?”

“A purpose, then. Something has taken Venus apart. It seems to have transformed the planet’s own mass-energy to use against it.” He grinned, uneasily. “We’re speculating. Maybe there is something out there that doesn’t like planets, deep gravity wells. Something that prefers thin matter clouds. Like the primordial cloud from which the Solar System formed in the first place.”

“Something? You make it sound as if this was somehow deliberate.”

He didn’t reply to that.

“Listen,” he said. “We’re on Hawaii. We should have ice cream. You want some ice cream?”

She shrugged, indifferent, and he went anyway.

After the Venus event Alfred had come here to the islands to work at the observatory on the summit of Mauna Kea, fourteen thousand feet above sea level. Up there, the air was so rarefied it was as clear a sky as anywhere on Earth, but human lungs only received forty per cent of their normal intake of oxygen. Nobody slept at the summit; the astronomers came down four thousand feet every dawn to sleep over at Hale Pohaku.

Alfred had come down to meet her. Monica knew there was no way she would be able to tolerate the summit conditions.

Thus, death was already closing in on her, already cutting the options available to her, the circles closing in. She would never see another mountain top.

Bullshit, she thought.

She tried to focus on Hawaii.

This island, Oahu, was dying too, though a little more slowly than she was. It had bloomed out of the sea in a fiery birth, amid gouts of lava and steam. But every year erosion dragged it down towards the water, and there was nothing, no process, to restore it.