The Coolant clan was mainly concerned with maintenance, and the only contact necessary for them was with Miranda, the AI that ran the station and its runcible. To this AI they put their requests for equipment, chemicals for their floating gardens and crop cylinders, and for information, gossip, news… It was a fallacy, which Apis and his kind allowed to go unchallenged, that they were stupid or socially crippled. They were just perfectly happy where they were: looking at the galaxy voyeuristically and taking what they wanted from it with eclectic reserve.

Apis's tasks were educative rather than necessary, as he was too inexperienced to have qualifications to put him in a position to challenge the station drones. Yet, at fourteen solstan years old, he was a fast learner and knew he would soon be graduating from stress data collation to direct testing and re-crystallization. But today this was not his greatest concern and, as he hauled himself between the D-section struts of Skin Heights, he contemplated his technical future with a lack of excitement that was uncharacteristic.

Apis had just discovered sex.

In the Coolant clan, polyandry was the rule; most of the women took three or more husbands, and there was not a great deal of civility in the taking. The women were bigger and stronger, and the selection process they used was one of attrition. First husbands were normally those with the greatest stamina, and therefore the ability to take punishment. Second and third husbands were usually the casualties of this selection process. Apis, only just into puberty, was completely new to it all and had countless bruises. He was feeling a little shell-shocked, hence his confusion and long-delayed reaction to what he now saw beyond one of the flickering shimmer-shields.

At least a couple of minutes passed before Apis realized that what he was seeing should not be there. There was something unusual on one of the obsolete communication pylons. He pushed himself away from a strut and floated across the face of the shield to catch at another strut on the further side. He still could not quite fathom what was out there. The pylon itself contained a chaotic collection of tubes and dishes, but he was familiar with its every angle and curve — it was his business to know them. He saw that there was something caught in it that had no right to be there. Something amorphous? A product of life?

Silently damning the fact that he was too young yet to be allowed an aug, he spoke into his wristcom. "Apis Coolant M-tech number forty-seven. Anomaly on com pylon three six eight six bee. Respond."

"This array is disconnected and not available to ship systems," Miranda told him. "Ah yes, I have it on visual now. A sampling drone is on its way."

"Not necessary. I will investigate," Apis told the AI, feeling an excitement he had not felt since… his last intended sleep period. He plunged his arm into the shimmer-shield and stepped through into vacuum.

Not only did Apis look very different from the rest of humanity, he was very different. Four centuries in the past, his ancestors on the Sol-system bases had been eager users of adaptogenic drugs, and recombinant and the later nanochanger technology. Apis did not have pores; his bright yellow skin was impermeable and, if stretched enough from its filament ties to his bones, it became rigid. He had sphincters to shut his nostrils and ears, and on his eyes nictitating membranes like glass cusps. He could live without breathing for fifty minutes. He could survive vacuum.

Once on the other side of the shimmer-shield, the air jetted from Apis's lungs, and when it was mostly gone, the saliva on his lips turned to resin, sealing them. His body bloated and stabilized, and, using an old handrail attached to the hull, he moved ponderously towards the pylon. Five minutes later he was below it. A few seconds after that he was studying the anomaly at close quarters.

Between the metal struts it clung like a slime-mould, only it had the colour of green metal, and the texture — as Apis discovered when he touched it — of wood. Apis was first intrigued, then worried, when he noticed the fibres etched into some of the nearby struts. With trained precision, he took a sample of the substance with a small field-shear, then went on to press his M-tester against the strut itself. The strut snapped off. Apis returned the tester to his belt and pushed against another strut. This one also broke and a piece of it floated away. A third strut shattered — frangible as burned bone — and a receiving dish made a slow departure from the pylon. Apis pulled himself down from the pylon, some struts breaking in his hands, others holding. As he hurried back to the shimmer-shield, he felt panic — another new experience for the precocious fourteen-year-old.

With the small blond child balanced on her knee the woman managed the awkward task of one-handedly turning a page of the picture book, and ran her finger down the border between text and picture, to set the superb illustration moving — the long legs striding through the reeds, and the sharp beak snapping in silhouette against a bruised sky.

She continued, "For the brother who had built his house out of flute grass there came misfortune indeed; that very night a heroyne came to stand over his house… and what did it do?"

The child reached and stabbed down with one stubby finger, leaving a jammy imprint on something that bore only a passing resemblance to a wading bird. "Heroyne," he said, blue eyes wide at his own cleverness.

"Yes, but what did it do?"

"It huffed and it puffed, and it puffed and it huffed," said the boy.

"And it blew his house down," the woman completed. Then, "Now, do you remember what the brother said when his house was gone?"

The boy frowned in concentration, but after a moment grinned with delight, knowing the best bit was coming. "Don't eat me!" he said.

"And what did the heroyne do?"

"It gobbled him up! It gobbled him up!" the boy replied, bouncing up and down with the excitement of it all

"Once more: tell me of your death."

Gazing at the weird view of pink striated sky and twisted shapes, and seeing more with his new eyes than ever before, he clearly recalled the words. Because memory to him could be only as fallible as he wished it, he knew every intonation, every nuance — just as he remembered every vivid second of his own demise:

"I was leading the way down, when it came up the shaft and hit me…"

And thus it had gone: words spoken while his senses came online, sounds impinging, light illuminating the map of artificial veins in his eyelids, gravity holding him down on a warm but hard slab. He never heard the beat of his heart, never would again. His speech finished; he'd paused before saying, "Value judgements."

"You are no longer in virtual mode. The reality you will now experience is really real."

Oh, he was a joker that one. Gant remembered the feel of human bones breaking in his hands, the screams, the blood — the sheer terror of movement, past now.

"There's a difference then," he'd asked with some sarcasm.

"Virtual mode is fine for physical training — in it you have been made aware of your capabilities, but too long in it can affect value judgements. In virtual mode you have learnt that you can kill a human being in an eye-blink, and you have learnt how to control your new body. You learnt nothing of consequences though."

"You think I don't already know?" he'd asked, then thinking: human being. The AI had been way ahead of him though.

"Yes, in VR you have killed twenty people, many of them by accident, and there have been no consequences. All the time you have been aware that these people are not real. It would have been possible to quell this awareness, but the disorientation can sometimes drive a mind into paranoid schizophrenia."