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and hose gantries, aimed true and proper at Sweetness. Fear and wonder transfixed her. The spotlight from heaven dashed across the sidings, over the cardboard roofs of the poor, swept over Sweetness. And stopped. She was embedded in light. The air about her seemed to sing. Dust rose from the ground. The night smelled electric. Sweetness held out her hand. The three centavos in her palm shone like burning platinum. But she was not afraid. She shaded her eyes with her hand and squinted up the beam to the orbital mirror at its source. The light squeezed tears from her eyes.
    â€œThanks, but I got to go now!”
    She stepped out of the enchanted circle. The spotlight followed her.
    Sweetness giggled nervously.
    Be aware that the marvellous is always around you.
    She stowed the three centavos in her hip-bag and walked home shrouded in light.

S hortly after four a.m. Catherine of Tharsis completed its climb up the Inatra Ascent and dragged the last of its hundred ore-cars over the escarpment lip on to the down-grade into Leidenland. At twenty to five Sweetness Asiim Engineer 12th was woken in her narrow bed-box back of the aux-com by a burning tingle along her left flank, hip to floating rib. By the time she was fully awake, Little Pretty One was crouching in the mirror on the cabinette door. As ever, she was dressed in the clothes Sweetness had been wearing the previous day.
    â€œThey've done the dirt,” she said without preamble, as was her way.
    â€œWhat time is it?” Sweetness asked.
    â€œâ€™Bout three hours from Juniper. Look, if you're not interested…”
    â€œYou'll tell me anyway.”
    Eight and a half years teaches you the moods and toyings of your imaginary friend. But not as much as being joined flesh to flesh, bone to bone, organ to organ, hip to floating rib.
    Twins were a blessing among trackpeople: two firm rails on which to run a common life. So when the mountainously pregnant Child'a'grace had felt something stir in her waters and Naon Engineer (then speaking words of love to her) had rushed full-throttle up to the floating Midwife at Dehydration, and the midwife had run her foetoscope over Child'a'grace's belly and pronounced definitely, “twins,” there had been rejoicing. Even if they were girls. So no one had really listened when the midwife added, “They seem close. Very close.”
    How close became apparent five months later, in the Obstetrarium of the Flying (as opposed to Floating) Midwife's dirigible, docked like an egg in a cup in an old impact crater just south of the high, lonely Alt Colorado line.
    â€œA girl!” No surprise. “And another girl!” So quickly? Naon Engineerhad peered at the tangle of limbs and blood and tubes. Suddenly it all made visual sense, and he let out a cry of pure superstitious dread.
    Siamese twins.
    â€œSeen worse,” said the Flying Midwife, a great, ugly-lovely woman called Moon'o'May as she ran her scanner over the squawling, raisin-faced humans. “See?” Naon Engineer could make nothing of the false-colour images of bones and organs and pulsing things. “Shared kidney—could be a problem with that, later. Same with the ovary. But no neural interconnection. The spinal columns are clear, and the hips are anatomically ideal.”
    â€œSo you can separate them,” Naon Engineer said, even as his wife was sweating and smiling and trying to make sense out of the unexpected complexity that had unfolded from her uterus.
    â€œIt should be straightforward.”
    â€œThen do it.”
    â€œI'll come back in a year, when they've grown stronger and the organs have settled.”
    â€œNo, do it now.”
    Afterward Naon Engineer would always justify it by arguing that you could not have twin-trunked creatures obstructing Catherine of Tharsis 's narrow corridors and gangways. If there were a pressure leak, or, please God, a plasma breach, the creature would not only endanger itself but the