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buildings were dotted among them. I could see plenty of open-top jeeps driving around, and hundreds of bicycles.
    The way the landscape rose up like two green tidal waves heading for imminent collision was incredibly disorientating. Unnerving too. Fortunately the axial light-tube blocked the apex, a captured sunbeam threaded between the endcap hubs. Lord knows what seeing people walking around directly above me would have done to my already reeling sense of balance. I was still desperately trying to work out a viable visual reference frame.
    Gravity was eighty per cent standard when we reached the foot of the endcap, the funicular car sliding down into a plaza. A welcoming committee was waiting for us on the platform: three people and five servitor chimps.
    Michael Zimmels, the man I was replacing, stepped forward and shook my hand. ‘Glad to meet you, Harvey. I’ve scheduled a two-hour briefing to bring you up to date. Sorry to rush you, but I’m leaving on the Ithilien as soon as it’s been loaded with He 3 . The tug crews here, they don’t waste time.’ He turned to Jocelyn and the twins. ‘Mrs Parfitt, hope you don’t mind me stealing your husband away like this, but I’ve arranged for Officer Coogan to show you to your quarters. It’s a nice little house. Sally Ann should have finished packing our stuff by now, so you can move in straight away. She’ll show you where everything is and how it works.’ He beckoned one of the officers standing behind him.
    Officer Coogan was in his late twenties, wearing another of those immaculate green uniforms. ‘Mrs Parfitt, if you’d like to give your flight bags to the chimps, they’ll carry them for you.’
    Nicolette and Nathaniel were giggling as they handed their flight bags over. The servitor chimps were obviously genetically adapted; they stood nearly one metre fifty, without any of the rubber sack paunchiness of the pure genotype primates cowering in what was left of Earth’s rain forests. And the quiet, attentive way they stood waiting made it seem almost as though they had achieved sentience.
    Jocelyn clutched her flight bag closer to her as one of the chimps extended an arm. Coogan gave her a slightly condescending smile. ‘It’s quite all right, Mrs Parfitt, they’re completely under control.’
    ‘Come on, Mum,’ Nathaniel said. ‘They look dead cute.’ He was stroking the one which had taken his flight bag, even though it never showed the slightest awareness of his touch.
    ‘I’ll carry my own bag, thank you,’ Jocelyn said.
    Coogan gathered himself, obviously ready to launch into a reassurance speech, then decided chiding his new boss’s wife the minute she arrived wasn’t good policy. ‘Of course. Er, the house is this way.’ He started off across the plaza, the twins plying him with questions. After a moment Jocelyn followed.
    ‘Not used to servitors, your wife?’ Michael Zimmels asked pleasantly.
    ‘I’m afraid she took the Pope’s decree about affinity to heart,’ I told him.
    ‘I thought that just referred to humans who had the affinity gene splice?’
    I shrugged.
    *
    The Chief of Police’s office occupied a corner of the two-storey station building. For all that it was a government-issue room with government-issue furniture, it gave me an excellent view down the habitat.
    ‘You got lucky with this assignment,’ Michael Zimmels told me as soon as the door closed behind us. ‘It’s every policeman’s dream posting. There’s virtually nothing to do.’
    Strictly speaking I’m corporate security these days, not a policeman. But the Delph Company is one of the major partners in the Jovian Sky Power Corporation which founded Eden. Basically the habitat is a dormitory town for the He 3 mining operation and its associated manufacturing support stations. But even JSKP workers are entitled to a degree of civilian government; so Eden is legally a UN protectorate state, with an elected town council and independent judiciary. On