‘Yes. Is that so strange?’ Agata tried to judge his mood, and decided to take a chance. ‘Isn’t that what you and Tarquinia are doing? Making the most of your friendship?’ Ever since Azelio had confided his own suspicions about the pair’s activities to her, Agata had suffered bouts of curiosity, but she’d never had the courage to ask the participants themselves about the experience.

Ramiro didn’t seem angered by the question, or embarrassed. ‘In a way,’ he said. ‘If I was back on the mountain, I’d be worried that I was doing the opposite: taking the drive to raise children and wasting it on something trivial. Here, I can tell myself that I have no chance of becoming a father, so it’s not a waste at all.’

Agata said, ‘Everyone but the Starvers accepts that it makes sense to have children without fission – so why not refine the process even further and select precisely the effects we want from it?’

‘Why not?’ Ramiro agreed. ‘As an abstract proposition, it sounds as sensible as separating out the parts of a plant instead of blindly eating the whole thing. We don’t have to swallow the poisonous roots when it’s the stem that actually tastes good.’

‘But why as an abstract proposition?’ Agata pressed him.

Ramiro hesitated. ‘The trouble is, even when the body can’t put things back together, it never forgets how they used to be joined.’

‘What do you mean?’

‘It makes me want children more than ever,’ he said. ‘It takes that ache that might have faded with time, and reminds me, over and over again, that it’s never going to be fulfilled.’

While they were in free fall the Surveyor could be oriented any way they liked, and Tarquinia had chosen to set the window facing the rim of the hemisphere of home-cluster star trails. As Agata’s vigil stretched on, she left Ramiro in peace, ignored the clock on her console, and just stared out through the window, waiting for the first sign that something solid and invisible had moved between her and the ordinary stars.

Despite the lights of the cabin, after a few lapses her eyes began picking out a faint grey disc against the deeper blackness of the dark hemisphere. Esilio’s sun scattered ordinary starlight, so she could have checked its progress through the telescope without even switching to the time-reversed camera, but she was content to let the image remain elusive, coming and going as her concentration faltered, or as Ramiro shifted in his harness and drew her focus back to the reflected interior.