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lives of every other family member. Child'a'grace, still vertiginous from the birthing drugs, had understood that he feared others might suspect bad genes in the Engineer Domiety. Too close to the tokamaks. Uh huh. And there's a shallow grave, just off the McAuleyburg branch. Oh yes. Well, of course there's nothing left now, the condors get everything. But just you look at the collar bones, and count the vertebrae.
    â€œSo,” the Flying Midwife said as she printed out the consent forms and laid the little red squawling thing on the white table under the white lights, “who gets the kidney and who gets the ovary?”
    â€œShe gets the kidney.” Naon Engineer pointed. “And she gets the ovary.”
    â€œOkie dokie,” the Flying Midwife said, and called up the surgeon she worked with in Belladonna. He was on a marriage-repair weekend on the canals of New Merionedd, so the locum slipped his hand into the waldoglove and put on the cyberhat. In his windowless office on the fifth underdeep ofBelladonna he waggled his fingers. In an Alt Colorado impact crater, scalpel blades danced over the infants. The robot arms wove, the fingers flashed and at the end of it the one with the kidney lived and the one with the ovary died and in truth there was a shallow grave, by the side of the branchline, unmarked but much spattered by the soft, bloody faeces of condors.
    Child'a'grace, half-joyful, half-despairing, hung a mobile of mirrored birds over the survivor's cot and that night, Little Pretty One came into them and watched over her sibling, though the eyes of Sweetness Octave Glorious Honey-Bun Asiim Engineer 12th had yet to learn to focus.
    That was the story as told by Little Pretty One.
    â€œI just hope you like the smell of hot fat,” the twin ghost said in her bedroom mirror.
    Sweetness surged out of her bunk with as great a surge as her tiny couchette would allow.
    â€œGrandmother Taal…”
    â€œShe's got powers but she's not omnipotent. She got as good a deal as she could…”
    The night, the dust, the gentle rock of the rails beneath her, the warm presence of constant velocity, the background bass hum of the tokamaks, the cool of the ancient waters of Inatra, the reek of dungfires, the verdant perfume of the green man's booth; all drowned out by the rattle of pans and plates and the blatting of orders down the gosport. Sold. To a Stuard.
    â€œ Ninth Avata ?”
    â€œWho told you?”
    â€œMy uncle.”
    Little Pretty One pouted, put out. She disliked having an oracular rival in the family.
    â€œDid your uncle tell you his name?”
    â€œTell me.”
    â€œNarob Chi-Ora of the Southern Circle Stuards.”
    â€œIs he?”
    â€œCute enough. Black hair. Nice ass. Nice eyes too. He'd be kind. He's got ambitions. Catering director for the entire North West Quartersphere. He could get it too.”
    After eight years, Sweetness knew that Little Pretty One's coulds usually meant will . Somewhere in the Panarch's ninety-seven nested heavens, she suspected her ex-Siamese twin had met others .
    â€œWhen?” Heavy question.
    â€œNext corroboree.” Heavier answer. Twice a long year, on the spring and autumn equinoxes, the Trainpeople gathered on the great sidings of Woolongong flats, ten trains to a track, five hundred tracks. Five thousand noble locomotives, tenders and cabooses decked with bunting and flower garlands and hard-won iron rosettes for speed and endurance and bravery and heavy hauling. Here the Domiety heads boogied and the daughters were traded away. Economies of money and honour were exchanged out on the shimmering flats and, often as not, were that same day lost over card and snooker tables. Commodius vicus of recirculation of the commodifiable. Sweetness had seen the young women in their mothers’ dresses, bags in hands, nuptial kerchiefs on their heads. Seen, pitied, resolved never to join.
    â€œOh God!”
    The big ore-load was