The kids all leaned over the side of the box she indicated, their interest suddenly regained with the prospect of creatures that could poo out fungus and stuff. A glistening mass of oyster-gray fatworms covered the bottom of the box, squirming slowly: they were about fifteen centimeters long, a couple wide. Everyone oohed and yucked as they pulled rictus grimaces at the slimy minimonsters.

"Is that why they're called slowlife?" someone asked. "Coz they don't move fast?"

"Partly," Mrs. Segan said. "The temperature they encounter outside means they don't have a particularly fast metabolism, which makes their physical motion correspondingly slow. Their blood is based on glycerol so they can keep moving through the coldest ground without freezing solid."

Lawrence sighed impatiently as she droned out long statistics, then started to explain about other slowlife forms. Some were like fish, swimming in the snow-slush runoff rivers round Barclay's glacier; others were distant relatives of caterpillars, munching their way across the huge dunes of carbon granules left behind by Amethi's original forests. He glanced down into the big box again. It was a bunch of worms wriggling around sluggishly. So what? Who in Fate cared what grubbed around under the soil? Why didn't they come up with birds or something interesting? Dinosaurs maybe.

Mrs. Segan moved on, the group buzzing along behind her. Lawrence trailed at the rear. He craned his neck back, looking through the farm's grimy glass roof to see if the cloud had returned. The next thing he knew, he'd tripped on some ridge in the walkway, and went flailing onto his back. One scrabbling hand caught a shallow plastic bin, and when he landed painfully a whole bunch of fully grown fatworms were dropping on top of him.

He rolled away from them quickly, disgust overriding the pain along his jarred spine. These adults were some forty centimeters long, seven or eight in diameter. Their tips waved about blindly. Lawrence clambered to his feet, automatically checking the position of the teachers. Nobody had actually seen him fall. He looked down at the fatworms, the only evidence. Gingerly, telling himself they weren't in the slightest bit dangerous, he groped down and tried to pick one up. It was revoltingly cold and slimy, with a texture like sodden carpet, but he managed to grip it tight. As he lifted it up, the slight wavering motion began to speed up. Instead of putting it back in the bin, he held on and watched. After a while the fatworm was almost thrashing. He dropped it back down onto the floor, and it slithered off along the walkway. There was a claret-colored patch around its midsection where his hand had been. "All right," he murmured. "Not so slow after all." Which was logical. They were slow in the cold; therefore they'd be fast in the warmth.

He scuttled after the group. "Alan," he hissed. "Hey, Alan. Come and look at this."

Alan Cramley stopped munching on his Toby bar, curious about the furtive tone. "What?"

Lawrence took him back to the adult fatworms and showed him. They quickly turned the discovery into a challenge. Pick up the fatworms in tandem and hold them for thirty seconds, then drop them on the walkway and see which reaches the end of the grid first. In the end they were holding on to two each, turning it into a real race.

"What exactly is going on here?" Mr. Kaufman demanded.

Lawrence and Alan hadn't seen him approach from a walkway intersection. He was staring down at the four fat-worms twisting their way across the metal. Several of the other kids were behind him, and Mrs. Segan was scurrying up, anxious to see what the fuss was about.

"I knocked a bin over, sir, and we were trying to pick them up," Lawrence said, holding out his icy hands as proof. Slime dripped from white, cold-crinkled fingertips. "I'm really sorry."

Mr. Kaufman was frowning, not fully convinced.

"Don't touch them," Mrs. Segan called urgently. She slipped past Mr. Kaufman, pulling on a pair of thick gauntlets. "Remember what I told you about them being adapted to the cold."

Lawrence and Alan traded a look.

Mrs. Segan picked up the first fatworm. Her eyes narrowed as she took in the big red mark around its middle. She took it over to the nearest bin. "What have you done?" she yelled. All the fatworms inside had the same red mark. None of them were moving. She hurried to the next bin, and gasped. In the third bin there were some fatworms left undulating slowly; Lawrence and Alan hadn't raced all of them yet. She whirled around. Lawrence took a step back, afraid she'd strike him. Her face was rigid with fury. "You burned them all, you little..." She turned to Mr. Kaufman. "Tour's over. Get these brats out of here."

Lawrence had taken over the robot garage several years ago. The compact tracked machines that originally tended to the elaborate gardens of his family's domes had been replaced by newer, more efficient models when they upgraded their AS groundskeeper program. He'd found the old concrete ramp in the middle of a clump of copper-flowering bushes that had been allowed to expand and merge into a shaggy wall now the entrance was no longer needed. At the base of the ramp was a swing-up door with stiff old lever arms. It took a commendable amount of effort and persistence for a nine-year-old to prize it open, but Lawrence did it, to be rewarded with a musty concrete cave stretching out ahead of him for a good ten meters. Its roof was less than two meters from the ground, and it had strange metal tracks bolted to the floor, walls and ceiling where waldo arms had once run. But there was still power, and a data node.

Since then it had become his den. He'd moved in life's essentials, cluttering it with a dilapidated magenta-colored leather settee, piles of cushions, a couple of tables, an old-model desktop pearl, a sound system with a decibel level that most hard-rock bands would envy, two active memory towers his father had salvaged from the office for him, an eclectic array of tools and boxes of toys he never played with. He'd tacked sheet screens over the walls and even part of the ceiling. A mosaic of images played as soon as the door was opened, some from the memory towers while others broadcast live camera feeds from the datapool.

It was a grand refuge from his family and the rest of Amethi. Even his four younger siblings knew to stay out unless he explicitly invited them in.

He'd gone there as soon as he got back after the ecology field trip. The sheet screens were showing several images of Templeton from cameras mounted on the apex of various domes. One of them showed Nizana's bright crescent, relayed from a near-side school's astronomy department telescope. Another was a telescope tracking Barric, the third-largest moon.

Lawrence told the desktop pearl to find a spaceport feed and switch it to the biggest sheet screen, the one hanging opposite the sofa, which took up half the wall. The camera must have been sited on the control tower: it showed the thick gray runway stabbing out across the bleak rusty-colored tundra. Nothing was landing or taking off.