"I'm taking ecological management."

"Right." It wasn't what he expected. "Doesn't that mean you'll wind up working for a company?"

"There are companies, and there are companies. And then mere are government agencies, at least by name. In practice they're another branch of corporate reclamation and revitalization divisions. But I won't take a job with any of them. There are still some private landowners who use the land in the traditional fashion. They farm, or log timber or run stables. That's what I want to help keep alive."

"Farming?" he said skeptically. "I thought that's what damaged the land in the first place?"

"Industrial farming did, yes. Pesticides and nitrates were poured over the soil in the quest for higher yields and to hell with the consequences. Agricultural machinery actually got so big and so heavy that it compacted the subsoil. By the end, in the developed nations, topsoil was little more than a matrix that suspended chemicals and water so the crop roots could absorb them. Then the companies developed protein cell technology and killed farming altogether."

"And stopped us raising and slaughtering animals for food. I mean, can you imagine how barbaric that was? Eating living things. It's disgusting."

"It's perfectly natural. Not that people think that way today. And I didn't say protein cells are a bad thing. After all, it means no one on Earth starves. But, as always, they went to extremes and eliminated every valid alternative. All I'm asking for is to keep a few pockets of independence alive."

"You mean like working museums?"

"No! These are havens for people who reject your corporate uniculture existence. There are more of them than governments and corporations like to admit. More of us."

"Ah, right, communes of back-to-the-earthers. So will you also be refusing the kind of medical technology that comes out of our wicked corporations?"

She gave him an exasperated stare. "That's so typical, denigrate something you know nothing about. I never said I was rejecting technology. It's the current global society that I refuse to obey. Technology doesn't have to come only from corporate labs, to be exploited for profit and policy implementation. It could come from universities where it would be made freely available to benefit everyone. Even small independent communities could support researchers. If we all had free access to data we could build a culture of distributed specialization."

"The old global village idea. Nice, but you still need factories and urban centers. You should know that culture always flourishes at the heart of society."

"The datapool is the heart of our society. You're still thinking in physical terms when you talk about cohesion. You can live in a cottage in the middle of a forest with every need taken care of, and still be totally in tune with the rest of the world."

"But why live there, when you can also live in a city, and interact with people, and go down to a bar in the evening and have a laugh and a drink? We don't all want to be hermits."

"I know. But your companies don't want anyone to be a hermit or anything else. According to them, we all have to fit into this uniculture they're trying to establish like neat little blocks on a circuit board. I don't want to be a part of that I want my freedom."

"I think you're exaggerating."

She pointed to a badge on her coat lapel. It had a single eye at the center. "Open your eyes."

He managed to steer the conversation off politics and got her talking about music, which was always a relatively safe topic. You could disagree about bands, performers and composers without storming out or throwing things. She enjoyed orchestral symphonies from several classical and modern composers; from postelectronic music she listened to what he thought of as ballads and street poetry. Although she had thousands of hours of tracks loaded into her multimedia player card, she became animated about live concerts, telling him about all the venues she'd visited, the bands and orchestras she'd heard. As far as entertainment went, she was scornful of the i's, although she admitted to watching several current soaps. The i's, she claimed, were something she grew out of. And she really hated AS-generated dramas, preferring to visit theaters. Amsterdam had a host of small nonmainstream theaters where her student status got her reduced rates, she said, and the city had hundreds of performance groups eager to put on their works.

Lawrence almost pointed out that having so many groups evolve in a city proved his argument about culture. But he still wasn't sure how she'd respond to that kind of teasing.

Even after lunch in the buffet car, when she drank over half a bottle of wine, she was still tense.

That afternoon she asked what he enjoyed, and he was foolish enough to admit accessing Flight: Horizon. It was the first time he'd ever seen her truly laugh.

"I can't believe we export that kind of crap to other worlds," she chortled. "No wonder you have such a screwed-up vision of starflight. My God, and that ending."

"Ending?"

"The last episode. Unbelievable! Pretty hot, though."

"You saw that?"

"Yeah. Told you I was into i's when I was a kid. Why?" Her eyes narrowed, giving him a curious gaze. "Didn't you see it?"

"No," he said lamely, unwilling to admit the associations the show had for him. Even though he knew he was totally and completely over Roselyn, he'd somehow never quite got round to accessing those last few episodes. "We only ever got a couple of series on Amethi."

"Oh wow. You've got to access it now you're here. You missed a treat."

"That part of my life is over. I can do without revisiting it, thank you."

Her eyebrows rose at the finality in his voice. "Okay."

Fortunately she didn't pursue it, or even try to tease him. Their conversation rambled on. The one thing that they never mentioned was sex. He found that strange. It was as if last night simply hadn't happened. At least for her. They talked around just about everything else. As he was taking his cues from her, he didn't try to bring it up.

He wanted to. Joona was good company. Not necessarily pleasant company. If their opinions clashed she would argue until he gave up. That made her interesting, as much as her diametrically opposed worldview. When he thought about some of his barracks conversations he couldn't believe how dumb they were in comparison. It was that quality he'd first noticed in her, the fierce intelligence, that's what attracted him. So he wanted to know where they stood, which basically meant was she coming to bed with him tonight, and every other night of this jaunt? At one point he decided she was saying nothing in order to tantalize him, an intellectual's idea of foreplay. Though there were always doubts about that theory. She was too highly strung to avoid talking about anything important in her life. Which made her silence on the subject slightly puzzling.