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regarded the darkening sky with fascination. "See – the Supra-sapiens."
    These beings – Abbie had never actually seen one before, merely heard stories – were one step beyond the Omegas. They had divested themselves of their physical forms and assumed identities of pure energy. They were sparkling points of light as capricious as the wind, beholden to no one and to no state or planet.
    "Tonight they dance for the Omegas," the fish-boy breathed. "Aren't they... aren't they beautiful ?"
    They choreographed intricate manoeuvres against the indigo heavens. Never still, they trailed images of themselves through the night like comet's tails. Abbie understood that the performance was more than just a display of calculated aesthetics, which at first was all she had assumed it to be. According to one commentator, the trajectories of the dozen Supra-sapiens were, taken in total, the representational math of universal quantum verities.
    Then the lights disappeared along every point of the compass, streaking away around the curves of the planet, and their exit presaged the fall of night and the appearance of the Core stars overhead like the brilliant spread of a chandelier.
    ~
    Wellard arrived one hour later.
    He approached in his launch from his private island, one of the chain that curved away into the distance like the individual vertebrae of some great fossilised saurian. He moored his vessel at the end of the jetty, then walked towards the boulevard and paused halfway, hands on hips, a sturdy and intimidating silhouette against the starfield. Or was it Abbie alone who divined the threat in his posture as he gazed down at the assembled artists? His arrival had occasioned a murmur of comment.
    "From the sublime," the fish-boy said, "to the ridiculous."
    Abbie stood. "I must go."
    "If you do decide that you need anything..." He held up a communicator on his wrist and gave his code.
    Abbie made her way to the jetty. She was aware, as she approached Wellard over the creaking boards of the pier, that she was the centre of attention. It had the effect of making her meeting with the artist all the more fraught.
    He glared at her. "Are you the Pilot?" It was almost a roar.
    She nodded, unable to look him in the eye. He was squat and powerful, and seemed to emanate a raw animal emotion – in this case animosity – unchecked by the sophistication of alteration or augmentation.
    "I requested a male Pilot."
    "I was allotted the job-" Which was a lie; she had bribed her superior to give her the commission. "I assure you that I can do what you want just as well as-"
    "I've no doubt," he said. His misogyny, according to rumour, had increased during his self-imposed exile on the planet.
    He nodded grudgingly. "Very well..."
    As she followed him back to the launch and climbed in beside him, Abbie wondered whether her physical revulsion of Wellard was merely because he was a primitive.
    The engine fired, lifted the launch and shot them away from the jetty on a long curve paralleling the diminishing islands of the archipelago. Wellard sat at the tiller, staring ahead. In marked contrast to the artists on the boulevard, he was dishevelled and shabbily dressed. It was as if he affected the bohemian persona of an artist from myth to score some personal point against those he regarded as no more than artisans and technicians. His forearms scintillated with crystal dust, like gauntlets, and his square, ruddy face was streaked with belligerent dabs of war-paint. Abbie knew that he was almost sixty, though he appeared older.
    Wellard's studio and living quarters comprised three domes suspended over the ocean on a series of cantilevers. He ran the launch aground on a beach beneath the projecting hemisphere of the first dome, and led the way to a spiral staircase which accessed the flat underside.
    Abbie was not prepared for the sight of the work of art which rose from the deck to the apex of the studio. The hologram stood perhaps five metres high, a