‘Not my name.’

‘Then why are you called it?’

‘Some joker called me that when they woke me up, on Mars. It’s the name of an astronaut. Or a cosmonaut. The first one, I think.’

She shrugged. ‘Never heard of him. So what’s your real name?’

He looked away.

‘You’ve put aside your lousy past, is that it? What kind of accent is that, by the way, Aussie?’

‘North British. I grew up in Manchester, at the border with Angleterre, the Euro province.’

‘You sound Australian to me.’

‘You all sound sort of Hispanic to me.’

‘How long were you frozen, a hundred years?’

‘Nearer eighty.’

‘Were you one of the Heroic Generation? What did it feel like to be a Waster?’

‘We weren’t called those names then. I was too young anyhow.’

She grunted. ‘Surprised they didn’t call you as a witness in the trials. But you escaped it all, didn’t you? You in your freezer tray.’

He was reluctant to answer, but it was hard to turn away from her iron gaze. The whole conversation, suddenly thrust upon him, was bizarre, like his deepest past suddenly pushing up out of the Arduan ground. ‘It wasn’t my choice. It was an experiment. There were too many of us, my generation. So they tried freezing us in these big honeycomb banks, under the ground, in Antarctica. We’d have less of a footprint that way.’

‘Your parents got rid of you. That’s what happened. Whereas now they get rid of us from Earth to Mars. Or even further, right? I suppose it was cheaper to ship you out to Mars still frozen than to deal with you any other way. Well, on behalf of the future, I hope you enjoyed your stay on Mars, my friend. The butthole of the solar system.’

He glared at her, defiant. ‘If it’s so bad, why were you there?’

She shrugged. ‘We were there, the UN was there, because the Chinese were there. We can’t let them have Mars all to themselves, can we? And the UN has these big ships now, the hulks, big powerful engines. Nothing like the steam-engine put-puts they had in your day, I bet. Now they can afford to send people to Mars who don’t even want to go. Even to the stars! That’s progress for you.’ She laughed and spat. ‘Funny thing, life. You never know what it’s going to throw at you next.’

He didn’t like her dismissive tone. ‘So how did you survive here?’

‘See for yourself.’

They rounded the low hills, the view opened up, and Yuri saw a river, a ribbon of blue-black water flowing across the flat, arid landscape. It was an astonishing sight, after all these years stuck by the jilla lake. The bank was lined by the usual beds of stems in their marshes, but he saw no signs of builders or their works, at this first glance.

And there were people here. People and their stuff. Some kind of tepees, frames hung with cloth, smoke from fires rising reluctantly in the still air. What looked like a cut-down ColU, without the dome and manipulator arms. And the people: women and kids gathered around a hearth, a handful of men further away, clustered around another, smaller fire. Like Delga, they all wore what looked like cut-up ship’s-issue clothing, even the little kids. Yuri recognised none of the adults, at first glance.

When Yuri was spotted with Delga, some of the women got to their feet and reached for weapons. Yuri could see ISF-issue crossbows, what looked like home-made spears. Delga held up her good arm in a signifier that it was OK, Yuri was no threat. But the women watched and waited, intent. The men by their fire didn’t bother to rise; they just looked on apathetically.

They walked forward, Yuri wary.

‘Look north,’ Delga said. ‘That patch of green? Potatoes, our latest crop. Ready for harvesting soon and we’ll be out of here. And, further north, see?’

He saw more smoke, a dirty scar on the landscape, figures moving, dimly visible, another couple of ColUs perhaps. ‘More people?’

‘Yep. Our difficult neighbours. Klein.’

‘Gustave Klein? From the hulk? The big man?’

‘He survived. Well, you’d expect him to. We deal with him. No choice, Yuri. Planet’s big, but humanity’s small here.’

They were approaching the central group now, the women, the big fire. He counted quickly: six women together, a bunch of kids, five men in the other group. The women were being cautious of him, he saw, some of them shepherding the children out of the way, others drawing up in a loose line with their weapons. They were all tattooed, more or less as Delga was – even the older children, some of whom looked as old as ten years maybe, presumably conceived not long after the landings. Yuri made sure he kept his hands open and visible.

Delga noticed this. ‘I’m not going to tell them you’re no threat. For one thing I’m not a leader here, and they wouldn’t listen to me. Well, we don’t have a leader, haven’t felt we needed one since we put down Hugo Judd. For another I don’t trust you. I mean, you’re obviously lying, right? About your people, where they are. You’re not a good liar, ice boy. Maybe your facial muscles never thawed out from that cryo tank.’

‘Yuri?’ One of the armed women broke from the line, and walked forward cautiously.

‘Anna, right? Anna Vigil.’ He barely recognised her under the tattoo on her face, behind the spear she wielded easily, as if she’d done a lot of practice. Yet he was relieved to see her.

‘God, after all these years – I just assumed you were dead. For sure I never thought I’d see you again. Cole!’ She glanced over her shoulder. ‘Cole, come here . . .’ One of the children came forward reluctantly, a boy, skinny, wide-eyed, maybe fourteen years old, but already taller than his mother. ‘You’ll remember Cole from the ship.’

The boy stared suspiciously. Yuri realised how rare it must be for kids like this to meet strangers, how wary they must be. He and Mardina would have to manage Beth through this process, when the time came.

The boy soon backed away and ran off to join the other kids, who were engaged in some game of running and capturing that must have been broken off when Yuri came wandering in from the plain; now the game was proving more interesting than the stranger, and they returned to it. A couple of them, meanwhile, were throwing stones at a group of builders by the riverbank. Yuri guessed this group hadn’t taken the time to watch the builders that he had. The builders swivelled and scuttled to get away.

Anna said, ‘You and that buddy of yours, you used to help me – Lemmy?’

‘Lemmy Pink.’

‘Did he land with you?’

‘Yes.’ He shrugged. ‘He didn’t make it.’

She nodded, as if she was used to news like that. ‘It’s OK,’ Anna said now to the group. ‘I know this guy. He used to help me out on the ship. Got me supplies for the baby.’

The rest of the women, none of whom Yuri recognised, backed off, lowering their weapons, but they kept their eyes on him. The other group, the oddly excluded men around their own fire, huddled and muttered, glancing over at him.

‘This way, ice boy.’ Delga led Yuri towards the women’s fire. They had seats set out here in the open air, some of them remnants of ship’s supplies, others improvised from storage drums and crates. All the equipment here, the tents, the furniture and tools, looked mobile to Yuri, easily packed up. They were a people used to moving, as indeed he and Mardina and Beth had become.

‘Sit,’ snapped Delga. ‘Talk. Keep your hands where we can see them.’

Yuri obeyed. Anna, smiling, sat on one side of him, Delga on the other.

One of the other women, weaponless, approached Yuri. ‘Yuri, right? My name’s Dorothy Wynn. I’m on hearth duty today. You want something to eat, some tea?’ Aged about forty, her greying blonde hair pulled back from a handsome face tattooed like the rest, she had what Yuri, in his own time, would have labelled a brisk US east coast accent.

‘Tea?’

She filled a metal mug from a pan on the fire. ‘Brewed from nettles, Earth nettles I mean. They grow fast here, in compost. Surprisingly useful.’