With a complicated manipulation of the airfoils, he put the aircab into a spiralling glide. The three passengers gazed down at the long, partially artificial island below them. Around the much larger central geodesic dome of the Polity base clustered many smaller ones - as if the island had been blowing bubbles in the sea. There were also a few smaller ones at the centre of the island’s widest stretch: transparent spheres dropped into the deep dingle that grew there. Erlin could just make out the groves of peartrunk trees speared with the occasional tall yanwood, and she reflexively rubbed at the scar on her forearm. A leech dropping from a peartrunk tree had been her first close encounter with the appetite of Spatterjay life forms. Later, Ambel had saved her from the persistent attentions of a creature innocuously called a frog whelk. Without his intervention, it would have taken her hand off. She gazed across the wide sea, remembering that other island where, if she could believe Ambel, the body of something which had once been a man was living an independent existence. It would apparently live well enough, but would have no intelligence. Ambel kept the Skinner’s head in a box.

‘The gating facility was closed, down here,’ said Keech.

‘Heat pollution,’ Erlin told him. ‘The Warden had it moved to Coram after an explosion in the hammer-whelk population around the deepwater heat sinks.’ She also remembered that Coram, the moon they had so recently quit, by shuttle, had been named by the runcible AI - an artificial intelligence which was also the planetary Warden. ‘Coram’ was actually short for ‘coram judice’, which, it turned out, meant ‘in the presence of the judge’ in some ancient Earth language. It was a name she supposed indicative of Warden’s opinion of itself.

‘They had a gate here, then?’ said Janer distractedly.

‘It was established on-planet when the Polity arrived here. They had it here for about fifty solstan years before moving it. That was two hundred solstan years ago,’ she replied.

In the roof of one of the largest dome, a hatch irised open and the Hooper brought his cab down through it. Earth light illuminated the inside, stark in contrast to the soft green light of Spatterjay. Forests and crops grew in neat patterns around a small city of processing plants and a single sprawling arcology like a giant plascrete fungus seemingly nailed to the ground by gleaming hotel towers. ‘Dome-grown food’ the Hoopers called what was produced in the fields here. It was what, if they did not have access to Intertox, stopped them becoming more like the Skinner.

With a cycling down drone of thrusters, the Hooper landed his aircab on a neatly mown lawn, near the edge of the arcology, and the three disembarked.

‘How much?’ Erlin asked, leaning into the open window.