The door to his office was opened.

The renegade from — outside — hovered there in the air. He was almost horizontal from Milpitas’ point of view: as if he were defying the Planner to fit him into his orderly, gravity-structured Universe.

The renegade spread his empty hands. “I’m not going to hurt you.”

“I know you,” Milpitas said slowly.

“Perhaps you do.” The renegade was tall, quite well-muscled; he wore a practical coverall equipped with a dozen pockets which were crammed with unidentifiable tools. He wore his hair short, but not shaven-clean; his look was confident, even excited. Milpitas tried to imagine this man without the hair — and with a little less of that damnable confidence, too — in standard, drab Superet coveralls, and with a more appropriate posture: stooped shoulders, perhaps, hands folded before him…

“My name’s Morrow. You had a certain amount of — trouble — with me.” The renegade glanced around at the office, as if recalling some sour experience. “I was in here several times, as you tried to explain to me how wrong I was in my thinking…”

“Morrow. You disappeared.”

Morrow frowned. “No. No, I didn’t disappear. Milpitas, you sound like a child who believes that as soon as an object is out of sight, it no longer exists…”

Milpitas smiled. “What do you know of children?”

“Now, a lot,” Morrow said. He smiled, in turn, quite in control. “I didn’t disappear, Milpitas. I went somewhere else. I’ve done extraordinary things, Planner — seen wonderful sights.”

Milpitas folded his hands and settled back in his chair. “How did you get in?”

“Past your sentries?” Morrow smiled. “We came in from above. It took seconds, and we were quite silent. Your sentries were positioned to watch for an approach across the Deck; they didn’t imagine anyone would come in over their heads. They didn’t even know we were in the building, before we took them out.”

“Took them out’?”

“They’re unconscious,” Morrow said. “The forest people use a certain type of frog sweat, which… well, never mind. The sentries are unharmed.”

Milpitas tried to think of something to say — some words with which he could regain control of the situation. He felt a rising panic; suddenly, his orders had failed to be executed. He felt as if he were at the heart of some immense, dying machine, poking at buttons and levers which were no longer linked to anything.

Morrow’s voice was gentle. “It’s over. I know you believe what you’re doing is right, for the people. But this is for the best, Milpitas. More deaths would have been — inexcusable. You see that, don’t you?”

“And the mission?” Milpitas asked bitterly. “The goals of Superet? What of that?”

“That’s not over,” Morrow said. “Come back with me, Milpitas. There are remarkable things out there. The mission is still alive… I want you to help me — help us — achieve it.”

Milpitas closed his eyes again; suddenly he felt immensely old, as if the energy which had sustained him for the best part of a thousand years were suddenly drained away.

“I don’t know if I can,” he said honestly. Someone, in the depths of the Temple, stilled the klaxon at last; the final, chilling echoes of its wail rattled from the close, claustrophobic metal sky.

The pod slid, smooth and silent, down toward Titan.

Louise clutched at her seat. The hull was quite transparent, so that it felt as if she — swathed in her environment suit, with a catheter jammed awkwardly inside her — were suspended helplessly above the pale brown clouds of Titan.

Above her, the Xeelee nightfighter folded its huge wings.

Titan, Saturn’s largest satellite, was a world in itself: around three thousand miles across, larger than Earth’s Moon. As she descended, the cloudscape took on the appearance of an infinitely flat, textured plane. Huge low pressure systems in the photochemical smog spiraled around the world, and small, high clouds scudded across the stratosphere.

The first thin tendrils of air curled around the walls of the pod. Overhead, the stars were already misting out.

Suddenly the pod dropped, precipitously. She was jarred down into her seat. Then the little craft was yanked sideways, rocking alarmingly.

“Lethe,” Louise said ruefully, rubbing her spine.

Louise had left Spinner in the lounge, to follow the pod’s progress on the data desk. “Are you all right?” Spinner asked now.

“I’ve been better… I’m not hurt, Spinner-of-Rope.”

“You knew you had to expect this kind of treatment. Titan’s atmosphere is a hundred miles thick: plenty of scope for generating a lot of weather. And there are high winds, up there at the top of the atmosphere.”

It was quite dark in the cabin now; the opaque atmosphere had enfolded the pod completely, leaving only the cabin lights to gleam from the transparent walls.

Spinner went on, “And did you know Titan has seasons? It’s spring; you’ve got to expect a lot of turbulence.”

As the pod dropped further it shuddered against a new onslaught; this time Louise thought she actually heard its structure creak.

“Spring,” murmured Louise. “’Where are the songs of Spring? Ay, where are they?’”

“Louise?”

“John Keats, Spinner-of-Rope. Never mind.”

Now the buffeting of the little ship seemed to lessen; she must have passed through the high-wind stratosphere. She pulled out a little slack in the restraints which bound her to the seat. Beyond the hull, the cabin lights illuminated flakes of ammonia ice, and fine swirls of murky gas shot up past the pod and out of sight.

“It’s bloody dark,” she muttered.

“Louise, you’re dropping into a mush of methane, ethane and argon. It’s a smog of photochemical compounds, produced by the action of the Sun’s magnetosphere on the air — I can see a lot of hydrogen cyanide, and — ”

“I know all that,” Louise growled, gripping her seat as the pod lurched again. “Don’t read out the whole damn data desk to me. Photochemical compounds aren’t what I came down here to find.”

“What, then?”

“…People, Spinner.”

Once, this had been the most populous world outside the orbit of Jupiter: Titan had cradled mankind’s most remote cities. Surely — Louise had thought — if anywhere had survived the devastation that had struck the inner worlds it would be here.

She needed to see what was going on. Louise punched at the control pad before her. The walls of the pod faded to pearly opacity. She called for a Virtual image, an amalgam constructed of radar and other data.

Below her, in the pod’s Virtual windows, the landscape of Titan assembled itself, as if from elements of a dream.

She banked the pod and took it skimming over the crude Virtual representation, fifty miles above the surface.

Titan had a core of rock at its heart, clad by a thick mantle of frozen water ice. Beneath the obscuring blanket of atmosphere, eighty percent of the solid ice surface was covered by oceans of liquid methane and ethane, richly polluted by hydrocarbons. The remaining fraction of “dry” ice-land was too sparse to form into sizeable continents; instead, ridges of water-ice, protruding above the methane, formed strings of islands and long peninsulas.

Well, the oceans were still here. Louise let the ancient, familiar names roll through her head: there was the Kuiper Sea, Galilei Archipelago, the Ocean of Huygens, James Maxwell Bay…

But, of the humans who had once named this topography, there was no sign. In fact, it was as if they had never been.

Once, huge factory ships had sailed across these complex oceans, trailing high, oily wakes; enough food had been manufactured in those giant ships to feed all of Titan, and most of the other colony-moons in the Saturn system as well. There were no ships here now. Maybe, if she looked hard enough, she would find traces of huge metal carcasses, entombed in the ice floors of the chemical seas.