"How many books have you actually seen?" Fethan asked her. Eldene began to count them up, but before she could answer Fethan continued, "If you can even count them, then you haven't seen enough. The Theocracy doesn't allow many anyway, and the only ones you will have seen will be copies of the few brought here by the first settlers, or else the subversive versions smuggled in by the Polity. I'm surprised you've seen any at all."

"They had some at the orphanage," Eldene said.

"Then they are probably a well-kept secret which, if revealed, would get someone into a lot of trouble," Fethan replied. Then, as if this had only just occurred to him: "Were these paper books?"

Eldene stared at him in confusion. "Paper books? They were memory fabric, just like any other book."

Fethan shook his head. "Damn, I'm getting old."

Soon they were high enough to look back across the sweep of grasslands, and the settlement areas beyond. Through the mist of distance, Eldene could just make out the city and, still further, something glinting in the sunlight as it rose from the spaceport. She gazed up at the stations silhouetted against the face of Calypse, and supposed that what she had witnessed was either a trader's ship taking essence of squerm to some faraway port, or a Theocracy transport taking the same luxury protein, in its unrefined form, to the tables of the Theocracy. Much, she knew, was grown up there, in crop cylinders, but the religious hierarchy that ruled their lives had a special taste for such products resulting from the killing labour of the surface dwellers.

"I've often wondered what kind of lives they lead up there," Eldene said.

"Oh, they do very nicely. They wear the trappings of theism and they violently debate the tenets of their faith, but meanwhile they live like primitive kings." Fethan turned to her. "Do you believe in this god your Theocracy has you worship?"

Eldene nearly gave the automatic: "I believe in the one true God whose prophet is Zelda Smythe. I believe in the Creation and the truth of Human Ascendance. I believe…" The entire list usually took fifteen minutes to recite, and Eldene remembered how on only one or two occasions had she been made to go right the way through it. Anyway, a proctor usually demanded such recitations as a prelude to some punishment, and would usually find a mistake within the first twenty lines as an excuse to inflict a beating. For the first time Eldene actually stopped to consider her own belief. All it had ever been to her was the memorizing of religious texts, morning and evening prayers recited below the Theocracy cameras, beatings for infringements she did not understand: all a framework that tied her to the grinding toil and misery of her life.

"Yes, I do," she replied, because she could think of no other answer.

"Of course you do — it's been ground into you since you were born. But do you then believe in the god-given right of the Theocracy to rule your life?"

After a pause Eldene replied, "No, I do not. There has to be something better."

"Yeah, there is," said Fethan, turning to continue climbing the slope.

"Do you believe?" Eldene asked, following him.

"I believe only in those things that can be proven empirically. There has never been any proof that a god exists, and if such proof was found why the hell should we worship him? Organized religions are just elaborate con-tricks. Take the Christian religion from which yours is an offshoot: 'Obey me throughout your life, give me the product of your labour, and you will go to Paradise when you die. Disobey me and you will go to Hell and burn forever. Of course I cannot prove that this is what will actually happen — you just have to have faith. That was a good one, and it worked well enough in a society that still believed the Earth was flat."

"But… what happened here?"

"An isolated group of fanatics, with sophisticated psychological programming techniques… This place would never have survived in the Polity, and it is breaking down even now as the Polity gets closer and information filters through."

"But the universe… how do you explain it? When did it begin? What existed before it? Where does it end, and what lies beyond it?"

Fethan glanced at her. "Questions that might similarly be asked about this god of yours?"

Eldene considered that. Of course: what was before God and what lies beyond God?

Fethan continued, "The greatest admission a human can make is that perhaps he does not have the intelligence, the vision, the grasp to fully understand the universe, and that perhaps no human ever will. To put it all down to some omnipotent deity is a cop-out. Factor in fairy tales of an afterlife and it becomes a comforting cop-out."

Eldene had always been clever — it had been her ability to memorize and understand things that had enabled her to avoid many of the punishments her fellow workers had received, except when that punishment came from a proctor or orphanage administrator who had taken exception to her very cleverness. Now she sank into deep contemplation of the issues raised. Fethan had quite bluntly just stated things that she had never before heard stated. Surface dwellers hated the Theocracy and the yoke they laboured under with vehemence, but belief in God or the necessity of worship never came into question. With discomfort she realized that since their escape she had not prayed once, nor thought about God, and that discomfort increased when it struck her she had never felt happier. She was deep in thought when Fethan gripped her arm.

"Believe what you want, girl," said the old man, "but don't let it master your life. Do you think that if there is a god who created the universe he would be the petty vindictive god of your Theocracy? They're just people like you or me. Life's precious and short, girl. Just enjoy it."

Eldene looked around at the weird plants, the molluscs clinging to the rocks. She thought about the heroyne and gabbleduck she had seen in the night. Halting, she pointed at a hemispherical shell patterned with beautiful green, yellow, and white geometric shapes.

"Life," she said, "it's so complex — someone must have made it?"

"Ah, Creationism," said Fethan. "Let me tell you about evolution and a blind watchmaker…"

Eldene listened and grew angry. It seemed that everything Fethan said was empirically true, yet that all that had been beaten into her was also true — if you had faith. She grew angry because at her core she did have faith, and she was coming to realize just how that crippled her, and she envied Fethan's freedom of thought.

For a moment the grav in Medical went off, then it came back on and climbed to what felt to Cormac about one and a half gees, before dropping back down to about half a gee.

"What the hell?" he asked of the air. "Tomalon?"

He looked around at the others and saw that both Aiden and Cento had collapsed, and were showing no sign of getting up. Stepping over to Aiden, he looked down and saw that something had charred the syntheflesh of the Golem's forehead, burning and blistering it away to expose heat-tarnished metal. Gant quickly joined him in a crouch and helped him turn Cento over onto his back — the same was found there.

Gant gazed at him in bewilderment. "They just went out. I felt them go out."

"Tomalon!" Cormac bellowed.

In answer, Tomalon's hologram appeared in the middle of the room, cut in half by a surgical table, faint images of complex systems etching the air all around it. "This is recorded, so attempt no communication," said the Captain's voice.

Cormac buttoned down the question he had been about to ask.

The Captain went on, "Skellor is subverting the Occam Razor with Jain technology. It is an old ship and, in the event of attempted AI takeover, has the system facility for complete AI burn, which I initiated. This burn has not been wholly successful and he now has control of twenty-two ship's Golem, as well as life-support and the U-space engines."