Agata was unimpressed by his euphemism: ‘deviating from the plan’ was a phrase befitting a bold rebellion against pernickety bureaucracy, not a calculated act that amounted to mass murder. But she wasn’t in the mood to pick a fight. ‘Pio’s had his chance to be heard, so maybe that will get it out of his system.’

Medoro said, ‘Sure – but it’s not just Pio and the people who’ll vote with him who needed this. Every one of us knows that the outcome was always a foregone conclusion . . . but it still matters that it’s only a foregone conclusion because we’ll judge it to be the best choice on offer.’

‘Hmm.’

Medoro headed into the hall. Agata watched as the tally on the screen reached one third of the enrolled population. The ‘yes’ count now outnumbered the ‘no’ by more than a dozen to one. In principle the result remained undecided, but the truth was that her side was heading for an overwhelming victory.

Medoro emerged, and approached her with a guilty demeanour. ‘Don’t be angry with me,’ he pleaded. ‘But I thought it would only be fair to even things out a little—’

Agata took a swipe at him; he twisted away. She was almost certain that he was joking, but if he wasn’t she didn’t want to know.

‘Come and eat,’ Medoro said. ‘Assuming you’re not turning into a Starver.’

‘Hardly.’ Agata followed him down the corridor towards the food hall. ‘I’m not turning into a Shedder, either.’ The idea of giving birth terrified her – whether or not she had to live through the process – but beyond her own fears the last thing she’d wish on any child was to be raised by her idiot brother.

3

Greta turned to Ramiro. ‘Start the spin-down,’ she said.

Unaccountably, Ramiro hesitated. He’d been anxious for days that, at this very moment, some obscure detail that he’d failed to allow for would make itself known by undermining everything – but an unplanned hiatus wouldn’t so much forestall the risk of humiliation as turn his fears into a self-fulfilling prophecy.

Just as Greta’s expression of controlled anticipation was on the verge of faltering – and revealing to every onlooker that the delay was not just unexpected but incomprehensible – his paralysis ended and he threw the switch. A single tiny coherer in the panel in front of him sent its light into the maze of photonics below, and the system that Ramiro had spent the last six years building, testing and refining began, very slowly, to move the mountain.

The entire Council had crowded into the control room, and now they turned to watch the main navigation screen mounted high on the wall. At Greta’s insistence, Ramiro had programmed an elaborate animation that made it look as if the sensor readings confirming the successful firing of the counter-rotation engines were only arriving gradually, piece by piece. ‘Not so slowly that they start to get worried,’ she’d suggested, ‘but not so fast that it’s an anticlimax.’