“Do you know who did it?” Matthew demanded.

“Not for certain.” It was another calculated provocation, although he didn’t go so far as to favor anyone with a meaningful look. Matthew began to feel just as uncomfortable as his two companions.

“Where?” Matthew asked, anxious to have done with the conversation.

“Outside. I’ll take you.”

Matthew knew that Solari had been at the crime scene for most of the morning. He couldn’t imagine that there would be any useful forensic evidence left after a week of imperfect weather, but Solari obviously thought that he had found something significant—something that he wanted to talk over with the only person on the Base who couldn’t possibly have committed the murder.

“Okay,” Matthew said, brusquely. “Give me twenty minutes. Are you eating?”

Solari shook his head. “I took a packed lunch with me,” he said. “Thought I might be gone all day—didn’t expect to find anything so soon.”

Matthew turned to the doctor and said: “How’s Maryanne?”

“Better,” Kriefmann told him. “She won’t be running, skipping or jumping for a couple of days, but she’ll be able to sit up in bed, read, even answer stupid questions….” The final remark was obviously slanted toward Solari.

“I met one of the monsters just now,” Matthew reported. “Just a little one. Lurking in the vegetation—odd, that, for a creature able to fix solar energy, with no apparent natural enemies in the vicinity.”

“Its instincts probably can’t figure out that it’s in a safe area,” Kriefmann pointed out, grateful for the distraction. “Maybe it won’t be safe for long—if the critters really are becoming more common, the predators will begin to move in soon enough.”

“I’ve only seen pictures of the predators,” Matthew said. “Things like big rats with crocodile snouts and things like frilly lizards. Have you ever seen anything like that in the flesh?”

“Nothing particularly scary,” Kriefmann told him. “There are lizards up here, but they mostly stick to the treetops. Mammal-equivalents too, but mostly herbivores and moppers-up of little worms. The serious hunters only come out at night, though, so there might be more around than we suppose. By day, the ruins seem unusually peaceful by comparison with Earthly subtropics. According to the evidence gathered by the flying eyes things are busier downriver—but that may be an illusion. It may be our presence that’s scaring the wildlife away. A pity, if so. There are lots of worms, of every size imaginable, but worms don’t hum like flies or sing like birds. It’s noisier as well as more crowded downriver, so I’m told. More species down there use sound signals.”

While Matthew collected his meal, Lynn Gwyer asked Solari where he had worked back on Earth. Having already heard the story, Matthew felt free to concentrate on his food. This was a prepackaged meal sent down with him in the shuttle, so it didn’t have the slightly offensive taste and texture of the locally extracted manna substrate, but it was as bland and unappetizing as the meals he’d had on Hope. The colonists had food technology that would allow them to do better in time, but they were obviously still thinking in stern utilitarian terms. Matthew didn’t doubt that the wheat-manna pancakes and thinly sliced synthetic vegetables would serve his nutritional needs, but he couldn’t help wondering whether the humans on the surface might have felt slightly more welcome here if they’d paid more attention to matters of aestheticization.

While Matthew ate, Kriefmann quizzed him about his condition, and advised him to try not to overtax himself during his first few days on the surface. The chance, Matthew thought, would be a fine thing. As soon as he had dumped the remains of his meal and its packaging in the recycler, Vince Solari stood up, obviously expecting him to follow. He signaled his apologies to Lynn.

Once they were outside the bubble Solari led the way downhill, in a direction almost exactly opposite to the one Matthew had taken on his earlier expedition. They made more rapid progress, though, partly because flamethrowers had been plied with such reckless abandon that the way was clearer and partly because Vince Solari’s mind was focused on more practical matters than Lynn Gwyer’s had been. Matthew noticed, however, that he was already moving a little more freely and comfortably than the policeman, who reacted to his own clumsiness with casual impatience.

Come nightfall, Matthew thought, Solari’s surface-suit and IT would be working overtime on the bruises generated by his purposeful hurrying.

“Have you reported your find to anyone else?” Matthew asked him, interested to know how fully Solari intended to cooperate with Konstantin Milyukov.

“I dare say they’ll know as soon as you do,” Solari told him, not bothering to specify who he meant by they. He was assuming, of course, that their surface-suits might have been bugged in some unobtrusive manner. Matthew had not been convinced that Shen’s anxieties regarding the temporary smartsuit he had been given on Hopewere anything more than paranoia, but he knew that it would be foolish to take anything for granted. So sophisticated had surveillance methods become in the years before he left Earth that every wall in the world had been collecting eyes and ears by the dozen, many of them undetectable by human observers. For all he knew, his new suit might even be rigged for visual transmission—in which case, “they” might not have to wait for Solari to spell anything out in conversation; “they” might already have seen whatever he had seen, and interpreted it with equal intelligence.

From the top of the mound that he and Lynn had climbed Matthew had seen the city’s fields laid out like a vast purple-blanketed maze, with their vaguely outlined protective walls seeming no more impressive than lines doodled on a page. From within, though, the fragmentary network of partly fallen walls seemed positively oppressive. They loomed up haphazardly, curving this way and that, almost as enigmatically as the corridors of Hope. Those closest to the bubble-complex were mostly between one and three meters tall, but the further Matthew and Solari went the taller the fragments became.

The route Solari took involved little actual climbing, but the penalty they paid for that convenience was that it was by no means straight. At these close quarters it was easy to see that the wall-builders had made their own provision for laborers to pass from field to field, equipping their citadel-fields with gateways whose gates had long since decomposed, but they had not taken the trouble to make arterial roads that radiated from the city proper like the spokes of a wheel. Perhaps that was because they were anxious that such highways might be too convenient for traffic coming the other way, Matthew thought—or perhaps it was merely because the endeavor had spread out in an untidily improvised manner.

Some of the fields had obviously had blockhouses in the corners, perhaps to provide temporary accommodation, or to house sentries, or to store tools, or for any combination of those reasons. Others had had stone shelves built into the angles where walls intersected, but any staircases that had led up to the tops of the walls must have been made of perishable materials; there was not the least trace of any such structure now.

The walk was a long one—more than twice as long as the one Matthew had taken with Lynn Gwyer—and it took a proportionate toll of their unready bodies. At first, Matthew told himself that it was bound to be easier because their route was mostly downhill, but it was a false assumption. When he remembered that Solari had already made the uphill climb once he began to understand the effort that the policeman had put in, and the strength of the motive that had led him to insist on making a second trip almost immediately, with Matthew in tow.