“Don’t you agree with me?” she asked.

“Sure,” he said, settling cravenly for the path of least resistance.

“I blame the Ahmeds,” she continued. “We would never have allowed things to go this far in myhome crèche. They’re too soft, too inexperienced—”

“Oh, I don’t know about that.”

“ Ido. I may not be an A, but I do know enough to see when things need to be put back on track. A little constructive criticism—”

“I hardly think it’s worth calling a group critique session over a few dirty dishes, Bella.”

“Well…no…of course not. But it’s the idea,you understand.”

Arkady gave the Motai B a sideways glance, wondering once more what it would do to a person to grow up under MotaiSyndicate’s harsh normalization regimes. He tried to count up the crèchemates from his own year—very few of them, it had to be said in Rostov’s defense—who had mysteriously vanished after fifth- and eighth-year norm testing. It wasn’t easy. The docents firmly discouraged any discussion of culled crèchemates. And as always when you tried to separate the individual from the geneline, names became cumbersome. But he remembered his feelings about culled crèchemates with painful clarity. Fear. Insecurity. Gratitude to the docents who had approved and promoted and protected him. The panicky need to believe that the vanished children were deviants, and that he could avoid their fate if he just worked a little harder at being normal and well-adjusted. And, worst of all, the first dark suspicion that while most people soon learned to hate the suffering that came with culls and critique sessions, others learned that enforcing “normality” could be a source of pleasure and power.

He thought he knew which kind of person he was. And he was starting to get a pretty good idea which kind Bella was.

Meanwhile she was watching him, her beautiful features alert and hungry-looking. “I’ve noticed that your sib and my sib seem to be pretty friendly with each other,” she said.

Arkady had noticed too. He hadn’t thought much of it. After all, he spent nearly all his free time with the two Aurelias. There was nothing strange about it. The opposite sex was refreshingly…well, opposite. And you could be friendly to them without worrying about the awkward misunderstandings or sexual tensions that complicated relationships between crèchemates.

“So how are you and Arkasha getting along?” Bella asked.

“I have nothing to complain about,” Arkady said evasively.

“That’s not exactly ringing praise.”

“Well what do you want me to say? He’s smart…hardworking…uh, clean…”

They stared at each other. Arkady could feel a furious blush spreading across his face.

“Are you sleeping together yet?”

“I…uh…”

“I thought not.”

“Not everyone jumps into bed with his pairmate the first week of an assignment,” Arkady protested—and then could have kicked himself for the implicit admission. “He’s not deviant, if that’s what you’re implying.”

Bella smiled like a cat who’d just made a kill. Why hadn’t Arkady noticed that sleek, predatory complacency before?

“Deviant!” she said in a voice that was patently insincere yet somehow impossible to challenge. “I only meant that his behavior seems a bit selfish. But you’re his pairmate after all. If you’ve started wondering…and now that you mention it, he did make that odd joke the first night. And, really, the way he looks at my sib sometimes…don’t tell me you haven’t seen it?”

Arkady hadn’t seen it. Arkady didn’t want to see it. Though of course now that Bella had put it into his head, he wouldsee it. That was the problem with this kind of talk. Once someone had put the revolting idea in your mind, nothing could get it out. And you could never look at the person again without that little niggling blister of doubt rubbing at you.

In fact, Arkady did manage to put Bella’s insinuations aside for a few days, not so much through force of will but because the mission itself hit a long-overdue patch of smooth running.

The new DVI numbers were low enough to make sense but still high enough to reassure the Ahmeds. And from the moment the landing was greenlighted, the mission seemed to be running on rails. Site selection and GPS seeding went as smoothly as the most elementary training sim. Even the choice of a landing site went off with only nominal conflict. Arkasha argued for the southern tip of the larger continent, which jutted conveniently toward the equator. The Ahmeds, on the other hand, wanted to land in the temperate zone along the eastern flank of the continent. Arkasha stated his case: higher rates of evapotranspiration would translate into higher species richness, making their field time more efficient; they had a far better baseline for tropical ecosystems than for temperate ones, and so forth. But as Arkady had predicted, Arkasha had resolutely avoided doing anything since the last consult either to patch things up with Bella and By-the-Book Ahmed or cement his alliances with the other science track A’s. So while Arkady and (to everyone’s surprise) Shy Bella supported Arkasha’s preferred site, the rest of the team rapidly reached a consensus for the Ahmeds’ chosen site. To Arkady’s surprise, Arkasha backed down without a confrontation—and they settled on a likely-looking base camp site in the coastal flatlands of the main continent.

Ahmed was the first to the door when they made planetfall. He stepped up to the porthole and peered through the viruglass, gauzy white with decades of impact scratches—and caught his breath sharply enough to send a stab of fear coursing through Arkady’s body.

“What is it?” someone asked.

“Come see.”

The team bunched together in the airlock, staring up at the distant sky like miners peering out of the depths of a pit shaft. The Ahmeds had set the lander down in a broad open area that Arkady would have called a pasture had Novalis possessed any grazing animals, or any mammals at all for that matter. There was a river not far off, and it might have been visible from the landing site during what passed as winter on Novalis. At the moment, however, the line of sight extended for about sixty meters downhill and ended abruptly in a tangled, spiky, completely solid wall of greenery.

Arkady and the rest of the survey team stood in staring amazement. These were not the straggling scrub oak and cottonwoods of the Periphery’s terraformed planets, including Gilead. The trees—if you could call such giants trees—towered overhead for fifteen, twenty, forty meters. Even on a first, casual inspection Arkady counted some two dozen different species. He couldn’t begin to imagine the intricate network of interlocking water, air, and chlorophyll cycles it must take to maintain this world-girdling symphony of greenery.

Shy Bella was the first one to get her breath back and summon up words when they saw what was waiting for them outside the airlock.

“What isthat?” she whispered.

Arkady craned his neck backwards, feeling like he was looking up out of a well, his ears full of a roaring like the sound of waves beating on a rocky shore.

“I think it’s a forest.”

The real problem with chess, in Cohen’s opinion, was that the options for any given world state were so limited. What fun was it, after all, to intuit your way through a game that you could beat into submission by brute processing power?

Not that chess lacked historical and aesthetic interest. In fact, he was currently running a simulation of the Deep Blue-Kasparov match—worthwhile if only for the opportunity to admire the angels-on-pinheads acrobatics of the old-time code jockeys. But Cohen had been built with a bigger game in mind.