‘Our ColU didn’t bring along any nettles. I mean—’

She shrugged and sat down. ‘They seem to have had variant programming. I guess they were trying out different possibilities, the mission designers, to see what worked and what didn’t.’

Delga grinned blackly. ‘And see who died and who didn’t.’

Dorothy Wynn said, ‘Yuri, Delga is one of our more morbid personalities.’

Delga said, mimicking her badly, ‘While Dorothy is one of our more sane personalities. Or she thinks she is. Surprising you ended up down in the Bowl with the rest of us, in that case, isn’t it?’

Wynn seemed unfazed. ‘Oh, ignore her. Yuri, I was a corporate accountant, working for one of the big reclamation companies in New New York. My first crime was to siphon off a little of my employer’s wealth for – well, let’s call it an indulgence. My second crime was to get caught. Unforgivably clumsy. And so I ended up here. You know, Yuri, I never expected to meet you. But I remember the chatter about you on the Ad Astra. The man from the past. How fascinating. More tea?’

‘No, I’m fine.’ Yuri, stuck alone with Mardina for all these years, felt bewildered, almost shy. He was unused to this kind of complicated interplay between personalities. And he became aware of scrutiny from the men, sitting a way apart. One of them was muttering, staring, pointing. ‘Fantôme . . . il est un fantôme . . .’

‘What’s he saying?’

‘That you’re a ghost,’ Anna said. ‘His name’s Roland. French Canadian, and he reverts to French when he gets scared.’

‘Why a ghost? You have met other groups before, right? Like Klein’s over there.’

‘Yes,’ Delga said. ‘But you just came wandering out of nowhere, alone, ice boy. Look at what you’re wearing.’ She fingered his leggings, his tunic of woven stem bark. ‘Like you’ve risen up out of the Bowl dirt.’

‘There are stories about ghosts,’ Anna said. ‘Well, one ghost. Of Dexter Cole, you know? The first pioneer who came out here alone . . .’

‘Who you named your kid for.’

‘They say he haunts this world. Maybe he lives on, in the unending night of the far side. That kind of thing.’

Strange, Yuri thought, that his own group had come up with much the same story.

Dorothy snorted. ‘What a crock. If you ask me Gustave Klein just made it all up to keep his boys in check.’

Yuri looked around at their faces: Anna puzzled but friendly, Delga cynical, Dorothy competent but cautious, the French guy Roland wide-eyed.

Anna asked, ‘Yuri? Are you OK?’

‘To be honest I’m feeling kind of bewildered. Turned around.’

‘Maybe we should put him with the men,’ Dorothy said, and they all laughed.

Anna patted his arm. ‘Look, Yuri. We had some trouble. We were dropped down here, just as you were, I guess. The shuttle landed some way to the north. And after it took off again, after all those speeches by the astronauts —’

‘What kind of trouble?’

‘With the men,’ Dorothy said with some disgust. ‘Some of them tried to take charge. Others tried to lay claim to us.’ She eyed him. ‘I’m betting it was the same with your group.’

‘It got a bit rough,’ he admitted neutrally.

‘We had to put one of them down,’ Dorothy said. ‘Two more killed each other, but one of us got caught in the crossfire, so to speak. And so – here we are, the survivors.’

Delga was watching Yuri’s reaction. ‘What are you making of all this, ice boy? Us and them. We make the decisions here, the women. The men – well, we need them to make babies. Other than that they do what we tell them.’

Dorothy laughed. ‘That’s pretty much true. Yuri, you might know something about this – I think we’ve got a social structure here like the elephants in the wild. Those old animals, you know? I once took a virtual safari, a corporate team-building thing. I remember the guide saying how a core of females used to be at the heart of elephant society. And the males formed bachelor herds, where they fought the whole time, competing for a chance to mate. In the same way, the men are on the periphery, really.’

Yuri shrugged, irritated. He thought he’d left all this stuff behind, years ago, people making dumb guesses about the age he’d come from. ‘The only elephant I ever saw was a gen-enged resurrected mammoth in a zoo.’

Delga was watching him, having fun in her manipulative, intrusive way, he realised. ‘Poor little mammoth, eh? Just like you, out of his time. Poor little ice boy.’

The children broke out of their circle of play and ran, laughing, down to the river. The water was flowing north, Yuri noticed now, away from the substellar zone to the south, towards the terminator to the north.

‘So you had kids,’ he said. ‘Just as Major McGregor ordered you to.’

Delga laughed. ‘You mean, all that Heinrich Himmler Adam-and-Eve crap? We didn’t take any notice of that bullshit. We just had kids. Even me, Earthman. See if you can spot my little Freddie. We keep our men like stud bulls. Want to join them, Yuri? Your last-century genes would enrich the pool—’

‘Leave him alone,’ Anna snapped. ‘It’s not like that, Yuri, she’s exaggerating.’

‘Your camp – you’re pretty mobile, right?’

Dorothy said, ‘Well, we stick around long enough to raise a crop of potatoes, grow a field of grass. Raw material for the iron cows – it must be the same for you. Maybe a year in each place. But then, yes, we move on.’

‘We’re following the river south,’ Anna said. ‘Upstream.’

‘Why that way?’

Dorothy said, ‘We like the idea of maybe reaching the source one day.’

‘Maybe that will be at the substellar,’ Delga said. ‘You remember that place, the storm system, the clump of forest, we all saw it from orbit? The navel of this world. What’s there, do you think?’

That had never occurred to Yuri, the significance of the substellar point. Maybe because he had never imagined he’d find a way to reach it.

‘But it’s not just that,’ Anna said. ‘We need to head south anyhow. Seems to some of us that the weather’s getting colder, bit by bit. You must have noticed the sunspot swarms on Proxima.’

‘Yeah. And then there’s the volcanism.’

Dorothy frowned. ‘What volcanism?’

‘To the north of here.’ He meant the slow uplift that seemed to have triggered the builders to move the jilla lake.

She pressed, ‘How do you know about that?’

Delga asked, ‘Is that why you’re on the move, Yuri? You and your people?’

He said nothing.

Anna touched his arm again, a surprisingly gentle, friendly gesture. ‘Leave him alone. We went through it all with Klein, remember, when we met him and his gang of thugs. Let Yuri tell us whatever he wants, in his own time.’

He asked now, ‘How did you find the river? We were dumped in the middle of a dry landscape, almost a desert, at a sort of oasis.’

Delga snapped, ‘If that’s so how did you get out?’

‘Hush,’ Anna said. ‘Yuri, it was hard. A trek. But we knew which way to go. We had a map.’

‘A map?’

‘A map of this whole quadrant of the planet,’ Dorothy said. ‘I’ll show you.’ She stood, and ducked into one of the tents.

Yuri said sheepishly, ‘We have a map too. Kind of. I always carry it.’ He produced Lemmy’s battered map from his pocket, unfolded it. ‘It doesn’t look much, but Lemmy Pink took weeks over this after the astronauts left . . .’

Dorothy returned with a map of her own, a single piece of paper. She folded it out on the ground by Yuri’s. Dorothy’s map covered just the north-east quadrant of the starlit face of Per Ardua – or ‘the Bowl’ – but it was a professional piece of work, properly printed, showing coastlines, seas, rivers, mountain ranges, the features even assigned tentative names. And there were little shuttle symbols, scattered across the quadrant, which Yuri guessed signified landing sites. He looked up at Dorothy. ‘Where did you get this?’