Zaretsky didn’t share their problem. Santa Clara had a medium-sized VTOL spaceplane in its hangar, his contract didn’t call for any contact with the human settlements. Whatever rebellion the Ivets were staging, it didn’t affect him.

When he opened a channel to the Tyrathca farmers on the planet they reported a few skirmishes with humans who were “acting oddly;” but they had prepared their rygar crop, and were waiting for the equipment and new farmers the Santa Clara was bringing. He acknowledged the call, and continued the slow powered fall into orbit, the Santa Clara ’s fusion exhaust drawing a slender thread of incandescence across the stars.

Jay Hilton sat on the rock outcrop fifty metres from the savannah homestead cabin, her legs crossed, head tipped back to watch the starship decelerating into orbit, and mournful curiosity pooling in her eyes. The weeks of living with Father Horst had brought about a considerable change in her appearance. For a start her lush silver-white hair had been cropped into a frizz barely a centimetre long, making it easier to keep clean. She had cried bucketfuls the day Father Horst took the scissors to it. Her mother had always looked after it so well, washing it with special shampoo brought from Earth, brushing it to a shine each night. Her hair was her last link with the way things used to be, her last hope that they might be that way again. When Father Horst had finished his snipping she knew in her heart that her most precious dream, that one day she’d wake up to find everything had returned to normal, was just a stupid child’s imagination. She had to be tough now, had to be adult. But it was so hard.

I just want Mummy back, that’s all.

The other children looked up to her. She was the oldest and strongest of the group. Father Horst relied on her a great deal to keep the younger ones in order. A lot of them still cried at night. She heard them in the darkness, crying for their lost parents or siblings, crying because they wanted to go back to their arcology where none of this horrid confusion and upset happened.

Dawn’s rosy crown gave way to a tide of blue which swept across the sky, erasing the stars. Rennison faded to a pale crescent, and the starship’s exhaust became more difficult to see. Jay unfolded her legs and clambered down off the rocks.

The homestead on the edge of the savannah was a simple wooden structure, its solar-cell roof sheets glinting in the strong morning light. Two of the dogs, a Labrador and an Alsatian, were out and about. She patted them as she went up the creaking wooden stairs to the porch. The cows in the paddock were making plaintive calls, their udders heavy with milk.

Jay went in through the front door. The big lounge whiffed strongly—of food, and cooking, and too many people. She sniffed the air suspiciously. Someone had wet their bedding again, probably more than one.

The floor was a solid patchwork of sleeping-bags and blankets, their occupants only just beginning to stir. Grass stuffing from the makeshift mattresses of canvas sacks had leaked out again.

“Come on! Come on!” Jay clapped her hands together as she pulled the reed blinds open. Streamers of gold-tinged sunlight poured in, revealing children blinking sleep from their eyes, wincing at the brightness. Twenty-seven of them were crammed together on the mayope floorboards, ranging from a toddler about two years old up to Danny, who was nearly the same age as Jay. All of them with short haircuts and rough-tailored adult clothes which never quite fitted. “Up you get! Danny, it’s your gang’s turn to do the milking. Andria, you’re in charge of cooking this morning: I want tea, oatmeal, and boiled eggs for breakfast.” A groan went up, which Jay ignored; she was just as fed up with the changeless diet as they were. “Shona, take three girls with you and collect the eggs, please.”

Shona gave a timid smile as well as she could, grateful for being included in the work assignments and not being treated any differently to the others. Jay had drilled herself not to flinch from looking at the poor girl. The six-year-old’s face was covered in a bandage mask of glossy translucent epithelium membrane, with holes cut out for her eyes and mouth and nose. Her burn marks were still a livid pink below the overlapping membrane strips, and her hair was only just beginning to grow back. Father Horst said she ought to heal without any permanent scarring, but he was forever grieving over the lack of medical nanonic packages.

Coughs and grumbles and high-pitched chattering filled the room as the children struggled out of bed and into their clothes. Jay saw little Robert sitting brokenly on the side of his sleeping-bag, head in his hands, not bothering to get dressed. “Eustice, you’re to get this room tidied up, and I want all the blankets aired properly today.”

“Yes, Jay,” she answered sullenly.

The outside door was flung open as five or six children rushed out laughing, and ran for the lean-to, which they used as a toilet.

Jay picked her way over the rectangles of bedding to Robert. He was only seven, a black-skinned boy with fluffy blond hair. Sure enough, the navy blue pants he wore were damp.

“Pop down to the stream,” she said kindly. “There will be plenty of time to wash before breakfast.”

His head was lowered even further. “I didn’t mean to,” he whispered, on the verge of tears.

“I know. Remember to wash out your sleeping-bag as well.” She caught the sound of someone giggling. “Bo, you help him take the bag down to the stream.”

“Oh, Jay!”

“It’s all right,” Robert said. “I can manage.”

“No, you won’t, not if you want to be back in time for breakfast.” The big table was already being pulled out from the kitchen corner by three of the boys, scraping loudly across the floor. They were shouting for people to get out of the way.

“Don’t see why I should have to help him,” Bo said intransigently. She was an eight-year-old, meaty for her age, with chubby red cheeks. Her size was often deployed to help boss the smaller children around.

“Chocolate,” Jay said in warning.

Bo blushed, then stalked over to Robert. “Come on then, you.”

Jay knocked once on Father Horst’s door and walked in. The room had been the homestead’s main bedroom when they moved in; it still had a double bed in it, but most of the floor space was taken up with packets, jars, and pots of food they’d taken from the other deserted homestead cabins. Clothes and cloth and powered tools, anything small or light enough to be carried, filled the second bedroom in piles that were taller than Jay.

Horst was getting up as the girl came in. He’d already got his trousers on, thick denim jeans with leather patches, a working man’s garment, requisitioned from one of the other savannah homesteads. She picked up the faded red sweatshirt from the foot of the bed and handed it to him. He had lost a lot of weight—a lot of fat—over the last weeks; slack bands of flesh hung loosely from his torso. But even the folds were shrinking, and the muscles they covered were harder than they had ever been, though at night they felt like bands of ignescent metal. Horst spent most of every day working, hard manual work; keeping the cabin in shape, repairing and strengthening the paddock fence, building a chicken run, digging the latrines; then in the evening there would be prayers and reading lessons. At night he dropped into bed as if a giant had felled him with its fist. He had never known a human body could perform such feats of stamina, least of all one as old and decrepit as his.

Yet he never wavered, never complained. There was a fire in his eyes that had been ignited by his predicament. He was embarked on a crusade to survive, to deliver his charges to safety. The bishop would be hard pressed to recognize that dreamy well-meaning Horst Elwes who had left Earth last year. Even thinking about his earlier self with its disgusting self-pity and weaknesses repelled him.