Given that I had already compared Christine to Lilith, and that we were still expecting an Adam, I expected a stream of Eden jokes, but she was nothing if not unpredictable. She didn’t inquire after the Tree of Knowledge or the serpent, and never mentioned the possibility of a fall.

She wasn’t impressed by the garden’s aesthetic quality either.

“It’s much too garish,” she complained. “It’s not quite as awful as the food, but it’s more than awful enough.” Davida was not with us in the flesh, but we both presumed that she was listening to every word. Christine obviously felt no obligation to be diplomatic — but I could sympathize with that.

The animals in the garden were as prolific as the plants. There were brightly colored fish and amphibians swarming in every pond, while svelte reptiles, delicate birds, and athletic mammals peeped out of the foliage of every bush and every tree. There were insects too, but I wasn’t convinced, even for a moment, that they were busy pollinating the flowers. I suspected that the plants and animals alike might be as sexless as their keepers. I also deduced that the apparent predators — which seemed perfectly at ease with the conspicuously unintimidated individuals that would have provided them with food in a natural ecosystem — ate exactly the same nectar that microworlders ate: a carefully balanced cocktail of synthetic nutrients. It was, of course, a nectar that Christine and I couldn’t share, because it wouldn’t be appropriate to our complex nutritional requirements. In a sense, therefore, we were the only “real” animals in the garden: the only creatures forged by nature rather than by artifice.

All my suspicions and deductions turned out to be true. Under the crystal sky of Excelsior, even the blades of grass were sculptures, safe from grazing. They didn’t even feel right. Everything I touched proclaimed its artificiality to my fingers. The knowledge that my fingers were wrapped in some ultramodern fabric that had probably reconditioned my own sense of touch only added to the confusion.

“I get the impression that they haven’t quite fathomed the idea of gardening,” was Christine’s final judgment. I wasn’t so sure. We had brought a different notion over a gulf of a thousand years, but who was to say that ours was right? If they’d taken a vote on Excelsior, the motion would have been carried unanimously, because we wouldn’t have been entitled to express an opinion.

The ungrazable grass and the unpollinatable flowers weren’t the models for every vegetable form. The fruits that grew on the trees were designed — and by no means reserved — for posthuman consumption. When I asked, I was told that it was perfectly safe, and permissible, for me to eat the fruit, but that it wouldn’t be adequate to my dietary needs. Having heard that, I didn’t even bother to experiment. I could live with the disappointment of lousy golden rice, but insipid and essentially unsatisfying apples were a different matter.

In any case, the fruits were too caricaturish. They were far less tempting — to me, at least — than their designers had probably intended.

“Take a look at the Gaean Restoration through one of their cobweb hoods when you get the chance,” I suggested to my companion. “It’s less obvious and less profuse, and a great deal more varied, but it has exactly the same quality of artifice. I couldn’t find any authentic wilderness, even on Earth.”

“Wilderness is overrated,” Christine assured me. “I don’t mind in the least that all this is fake — I just wish it had been better done.”

“They like their kind of food,” I reminded her. “They must like their kind of garden too. Their aesthetic standards aren’t ours. They experience things differently. Imagine what they must think of us.”

“I try,” she assured me.

Given that I didn’t know what to think of her, and couldn’t imagine what she might think of me, I had to suppose that her attempts — and mine too — stood little chance of success. But there had to be a reason why the people of Excelsior had brought us back. I had to hope that it might be comprehensible even if I dared not hope, as yet, that I might be able to deem it good.

“The ship from Earth will be docking in a couple of hours,” I told Christine, in case she hadn’t been informed. “We’ll have a chance to talk to Gray and Lowenthal before the Outer System ship arrives and the main event gets under way. Have you given any thought to their offers of employment?”

“I’m not going back to Earth, she said, with a firmness that took me by surprise.

“Why not?” I asked.

“Been there, done that, took the rap. You should take a look at Titan. Makes the Snow Queen’s magic palace look like an igloo. You don’t have to come with me if you don’t want to.”

“I haven’t even begun to make up my mind,” I told her.

“That’s because you want to play the game,” she said. “You want to get in with Adam, in case he’s going places. I don’t.”

“I can see why you’d want a new start,” I admitted.

“No you can’t,” she told me, sharply. “I told you before — you don’t know shit about me.”

“So tell me,” I retorted. “Why did you kill all those people? Your parents I could probably understand, but what about the others? If my memory serves me rightly, you didn’t have any connection with them at all, let alone a plausible motive.”

She looked at me, and then she looked away, at the garden where lions lay down with lambs and the butterflies lived forever.

“Don’t you believe that VE tape you told me about?” she asked. “I couldn’t stand myself, so I hid in false personalities disguised as ancestral memories, acting out the underlying trauma again and again.”

“No, I don’t believe it,” I said. “The writer claimed that it was taken from your own testimony — but that was only one of the stories you told. I don’t remember exactly, but I think there was at least one epic of harrowing child abuse, and at least one item of bad science fiction in which your foster parents had all been replaced by aliens, and a couple more besides. If you’d stuck to the first one, you might have got off, although you’d have needed an extra wrinkle to accommodate the three strays. There were a lot of bad parents around. They were the first generation who had to get used to a new system of parenthood that was radically different from the biological model, and they incorporated all the badness with which the whole damn world was still infected.”

“My foster parents weren’t bad,” she said. “The marriage broke up — smashed to smithereens — but they tried as hard as they could to protect me from all that.” She sounded as though she hadn’t the faintest idea why she’d done what she’d done.

“So why tell the abuse story?” I asked. “Why tell any of the stories, if they weren’t true?”

“I had to tell the stories,” she said, as if it were as simple as that. “They kept coming back for more, and the one thing they couldn’t abide was silence. They probably told themselves that they were wearing me down, waiting for the truth to emerge when I ran out of lies, but they weren’t. They liked the stories. They always wanted more. So do you. You just want a story — and if I give you one you’ll want another, and another. That’s all I am to you: a story.”

“According to Bad Karma,” I pointed out, “that’s all you were to yourself. Did you ever have the slightest idea why you did it? Or were you making up story after story by way of exploration — or distraction?”

“I got out in the end, didn’t I?” she said, softly. “I’m here. I’m free. I’m never going back. I’m a winner. Maybe I did it in order to be put away, to make sure that I’d be the one to wake up in Wonderland. Maybe Adam Zimmerman is the one who did it the hard way.”

I didn’t believe that, but I could see that she wasn’t going to tell me anything I could believe.

“The woman from the Confederation might not make us an offer,” I said, although I didn’t believe it. “She might think that we belong on Earth, and good riddance to us. We may not have the option of going elsewhere.”