‘I haven’t decided yet,’ she said curtly. ‘We only just got here … I like it here, even if it isn’t what I quite remember. I like the day side anyhow. I don’t know if I want to go into endless night, so cold I’ll need to wear a spacesuit.’

‘But,’ he said gently, ‘you also aren’t sure if you want to be alone.’

‘Do you want me to come? After all it was you who brought me through the Hatch with you.’

‘I didn’t force you.’

‘Do you really think of us as family, Earthshine? I know my father’s father is only one of you, one of the nine minds … Do you think of him as your son?’

‘Of course I do. I always did the best I could for him – myself and his mother.’

‘Which included shoving him into a cryo freezer for a century, and ultimately killing him?’

He sighed. ‘We were working at the margins of the law. We were trying to save him. We thought that perhaps in a century he at least would be able to live his life out of our shadow. We underestimated the vindictiveness of mankind. Their retrospective tribunals. Their visiting of punishments on the children of the perpetrators. They never forgave us.’

‘Did you love him? Do you love us now?’

He smiled. ‘A part of me does. That’s the best answer I can give you. I’m sorry. Humans aren’t meant to be like this, you see. Like me. Identity, consciousness, isn’t meant to be something you can pour from one container to another, and meld with others as if mixing a cocktail. So you’ll find my reactions are always going to be – off. But at least I’m here, with you, today. Which is all, in the end, you can ask of anyone.’

She smiled back. ‘That’s true. I feel an atavistic urge to hug you, Grandad.’

‘I urge you not to try. I think the rain is stopping. I will go and check on the progress of my support unit.’

‘And I,’ she said, stretching and yawning, ‘think I’ll take a nap. Don’t wake me when you come in.’

‘I’ll try not to.’

In the warm, moist air of the Arduan substellar, she slept as well as she had for years. And for an unknown time too, under the unmoving face of Proxima. Whatever the unanswered questions, whatever the reservations she might have, she was home, she could feel it. Alone or not.

Even if she missed her daughter Mardina with a savage ache, as if a steel cable were attached to her belly, dragging her back to Mars.

When she glanced out of the shelter, she saw Earthshine standing over his support unit as it slowly reassembled itself for the journey.

CHAPTER 44

The Romans were brought to a wide, flat clearing cut into the rainforest.

Here they were to farm, they were told.

They would grow maize, wheat, rice, coca, and the ubiquitous potato, which the Incas called papas. There were no animals to raise, no sheep, goats, cattle – no llamas – though, they were told, some animals ran wild in the hacha hacha, the jungle. But they were expected to raise some more exotic and unfamiliar crops, gaudy flowers, strange fungi and lichen, that the ColU speculated were the source of mind-altering potions – psychoactive drugs, he told Mardina, evidently a feature of Inca culture in any timeline.

So the work began.

The land had to be kept open by regular burnings at the perimeter of the clearing. And the labour of keeping the land drained would always be considerable. It was poor, the soil thin, but not so bad that it was unworkable. The ColU was able to advise. The Romans fertilised their patch, mostly with ash from the burned rainforest perimeter, or the dung and bones of the animals that ran wild in the rainforest, notably rodents that could be the size of a sheep. The work was hard but bearable.

There were people here already, of course.

They had joined an ayllu, a kind of clan, a loosely bound group of families, some of whom had some kind of relationship with each other, some of whom didn’t. The people were friendly enough, however, Mardina found. It seemed to be the Inca way to move people around their box of an empire, from place to place, from near to far – sometimes across the toroid of an ocean from one ‘continent’ to the other, from the puna and river deltas of the west, the cuntisuyu, to the rainforest-choked eastern half of the habitat, the antisuyu. All this was no doubt intended to ensure continued control, of the kind that quipucamayoc Inguill had talked about on the Romans’ first arrival here. If you didn’t stay long in a place, you couldn’t set down roots, couldn’t establish loyalties – your only long-term relationship was with the Sapa Inca, the Only Emperor, and his officials, not with the strangers around you.

But a consequence of the system was that people were used to strangers moving in – strangers they called mitmaqcuna, colonists. So while everybody had their property, and a plot of land to work, and, more important, they all had some kind of status in their society, they weren’t so territorial that they excluded the Romans and their companions.

The Romans, however, did not own this land, that was made clear from the start – and nor did anybody of the ayllu, and none of them ever would. The Sapa Inca owned everything. The people were not slaves – as was proven by the fact that there were actual slaves, called yanakuna, to be seen throughout this place. The Romans were to be mitimacs, which meant something like ‘taxpayers’. They were entitled to keep the produce they raised, save for a proportion that they had to hand over to be stored in the big tambos, the state-owned storehouses that studded the countryside. This was part of the mit’a, the tax obligations of every citizen.

Also as part of their mit’a they were expected to contribute a proportion of their labour directly to the services of the state. This might mean creating or maintaining military equipment such as quilted armour, boots, blankets – never any weapons – or field rations of dried potatoes or maize, all to be stored in specialised warehouses called colcas, for the use of the army. It might mean labouring to support the big pukaras, fortresses of stone with spiral terraces winding around their inner cores of buildings: a design that reminded Mardina of huge snails squatting in the countryside. It might mean working on projects for the common good such as the regular forest clearance, or scraping clear the dust and algae that gathered with time on the habitat’s huge Inti windows, or maintaining the capac nans, the long, straight roads and rail tracks that threaded through the forest, and the chucllas, the waystations that studded their length.

And the mit’a obligation might even mean serving in the military, although it was clear that the beefy, tough-looking, well-disciplined Romans weren’t trusted enough for that, not yet.

All of this was organised on a global scale by a hierarchy of officials, beginning with the ayllu’s local leader, the curaca – an imposing, reasonable-looking man called Pascac, who was the leader of ten families, and reminded Mardina a little of Quintus Fabius – and up through the deputy prefect Ruminavi, the tocrico apu, who in turn reported to one of two apus, the prefects each of whom ran one of the two great ‘continents’ of the habitat, west or east. And then the command chain reached up to the court of the Sapa Inca in the two hub Cuzcos, including the quipucamayocs like Inguill, and the colcacamayocs, keepers of records and stores respectively.

The legionaries grumbled at the lack of freedom. And about the lack of money, the lack of shops and stores where you could buy things, from beer and wine to fine clothes and other luxuries, and not least prostitutes. But then, this wasn’t an economy that ran on money. And there was some tension in the very beginning, when the local curaca decreed that the Romans could not use permanently any of the small wooden houses that made up the core of the small township inhabited by the people of the ayllu, but must construct their own. But legionaries always grumbled, whatever you tried to get them to do.