"Money, again."

"Yes. But that's not the only factor. The town's population is down almost twenty-five percent since the twentieth century."

"I thought the rural population has been declining ever since the start of the Industrial Revolution."

"It has. But I don't mean that. The total population is down, and still falling. That's why you can have bigger houses and gardens these days without putting pressure on the environment."

"Not having farmland helps, too, I'd imagine."

"Yes. It all fits together neatly, don't you think?"

The way she said it betrayed how scornful she was. He didn't reply.

Joona led him into a quiet cafe on the main street. The young waitress behind the counter greeted her warmly, and the two of them had a few quiet words. Lawrence found a free table near the window. Their hot chocolate arrived a minute later, along with some fresh-baked muffins. A small paper bag was passed to Joona, who vanished it into her coat pocket She put three EZ tens on the table. There was no change.

Lawrence blew across the top of his mug. "Does Jackie know how much of that stuff you use?"

"You mean, does she care? Half of this is for her, Lawrence. Our kind of lifestyle has always included narcs of one kind or another."

"I still think you should ease off a bit."

Her blank face clicked on, as if she'd already inhaled a microsol tube. "Thank you for the interest. It's not necessary."

That night they did talk about what they would do in bed. It wasn't as bad as he was anticipating. Actually, it was quite arousing, almost as if he was her tutor, a reasonable enough male fantasy. At least it put their relationship back on what he considered a more even footing.

The next few days were spent in and around Fort William. They visited the theater: twice to watch live plays, once to see a cinema screening of Cameron's Titanic. Lawrence helped Jackie out around the garden, which had suffered the usual winter's worth of neglect and damage. A few broken branches needed sawing off. Fenceposts had snapped. He spent an entire morning stripping down and cleaning her ancient gardening robot, trying to get the rusty mechanical components to run smoothly again. The blades on the mower attachment's cylinder had to be taken to one of the shops in town for sharpening. Another morning was spent helping out with the knitting machines. They were housed in a barn at the end of the garden, a stone building as old as the cottage, with an open truss roof that was elegant in its simplicity, sturdy beams of thick untreated oak holding up the thin lathing that the slates were nailed to. But it was dry inside, if not terribly warm. The three machines clattered away enthusiastically, slinging out their finished sweaters every few minutes. They changed over the bales and refilled the dye chambers, then packed the finished sweaters into boxes ready for collection.

At the start of his second week, they climbed the Ben as Joona had promised. It was a short bike ride from the cottage to the visitor center perched on the banks of the River Nevis, which meant they were among the first to arrive that morning. They locked the bikes into the rack, then pulled on their walking boots.

The trek was a lot easier than he was expecting, just as she said it would be. Once they crossed the small bridge by the visitor's center, they picked up a simple track running along the side of the hill, heading steadily upward. It was paved with rough stone, with neat steps cut in on the steepest parts, which seemed slightly incongruous for a supposed wilderness walk. Joona told him that the Scottish Environment Agency had to maintain it at this standard to prevent erosion. It had to cope with thousands of walkers during the course of the year.

As they climbed he could see more and more of the glen with its astonishingly green vegetation stretching away below him. The path had already started to lead through the huge swath of bright, fresh bracken that had sprung up along this section of the hill. Small wooden bridges took them over narrow fissures.

It wasn't long before the path curved around into a deep, grassy cleft with a stream at its head, white water coursing noisily through the rocky gully it'd cut into the slope. They walked toward the water, then suddenly switched back to climb the steepening slope at a reasonable angle. Another turn brought them out to a marshy saddle with its own lochan of dead, peaty water. Lawrence took a look at the vast scree-smothered slopes looming above them and sighed in mild dismay. He still couldn't see the actual top of the mountain yet. They stopped for a while above the lochan to drink some tea from their flasks and put on another layer of clothing. It was getting colder with every meter they ascended. The air below the cleft had been perfectly clear, giving them grand views across the beautiful Highland peaks. Here the mountain was accosted by thin strands of mist pushed along by the constant wind, reducing visibility.

For the next stage the path zigzagged up a steepening scree-covered slope. The tufts of grass and heather became less and less frequent until it was just stone and raw soil under their feet. Each sharp turn in the path was marked out by a cairn. Slush began to build up on Lawrence's boots as he trudged onward. Patches of snow appeared more frequently on either side of the path. The mist was thickening. He couldn't see the bottom of the glen anymore.

"It's so clean up here," he said as they stopped for another rest. "I love it."

Joona eased herself onto a boulder and pulled the flask out of her backpack. "I thought your whole planet was clean."

"It is. But that's a different sort of clean. I was expecting Scotland to be different. You had so much heavy industry around here, I thought there'd be more... I don't know, remnants. Streams that are half rust from all the old machines dumped in the lochs, mounds of slurry out of abandoned coal mines, that sort of thing."

"Scotland's heavy industry was mostly down south. Besides, you saw the reclamation plants outside town; they're busy little bees."

"Yeah." He'd noticed them on the first morning when they cycled into town, gently disturbing the landscape on the other side of the River Lochy from Benavie: underground factories strangely reminiscent of the chemical plant on Floyd, long flat-topped mounds covered in lush grass. This time there were no heat exchange pillars on top, only rows of black vents that could have easily been overlooked. The real giveaway to how much industry was hidden below the earth were the pipes running down the rugged side of Creag Chail above them: twenty wide concrete tubes that emerged from the mountainside a couple of hundred meters up only to vanish into the ground behind the mounds. They carried enough water down from the Highlands to power the whole reclamation site.

Joona told him the site had grown up from a single aluminum plant that had been built there in the twentieth century to take advantage of the hydro power. As the Brussels parliament of that time slowly started to introduce stricter legislation governing recycling, the plant had expanded, with subsidiaries springing up to reclaim other types of materials.