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“I think any allusion to that matter is best . . . postponed, until we can put it before the Electorate—in the first instance, the Defense Committee of the Senate.”
    Volkov smiled. “That’s how it was done on Earth. The consequences were not good.”
    “Oh,” said Esias, looking over his shoulder again, “you won’t find any of that paranoia here. You’ll see.”
    But Volkov was only half listening; he was gazing away to the shade of the quadrangle, from which a dozen or so black-gowned figures had emerged blinking into the sunlight and were making their way over.

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Hardy Man
    LEMURIA BEACH WAS the worst place in the world, and Elizabeth Harkness was happy to be there. She trudged along the shingle shore, her head down and her left shoulder hunched against the knife-edge wind off the sea. Hooded parka, quilted trousers, fur-lined gloves and boots weren’t quite enough, especially when she had to push her hood back or take her gloves off. Big smooth pebbles ground against each other, and dried wrack crackled under her soles. Seabats screamed as they wheeled overhead. Behind all the sounds, the white noise of the white water filled her ears. The abandoned whaling station where she and Gregor Cairns had parked the skiff was a couple of kilometers behind her, its rusted boilers tiny at this distance, like some wrecked laboratory apparatus. Gregor had chosen to spend the morning hacking fossils from the foot of the cliffs, the same hundred-meter-high rockface that rose to her right. Elizabeth was intent on finding more recent signs of life. Although the season was what passed for spring in these latitudes, there wasn’t much: Seabat roosts whitened the cliffs, and the occasional wind-dried corpse of a failed fledgling would be caught on the windward side of a boulder; on the lee side of boulders, lichens spread out their wrinkled mats of grey and orange; on the lichens, tiny red arthropods scurried like the dots before a bloodshot eye; and here and there a drift of soil sustained a small tough flowering plant, white as the sea’s froth.
    The sea itself, choppy in the wind off the ice-capped polar ocean a thousand kilometers southward, was a more hospitable abode of life than anything the island could offer. Every seaward glance couldn’t but take in, somewhere between the horizon and the shore, the plume of hot breath from a spouting whale. Seabats of several species, from the tiny watershears skimming the wavetops to the three-meter-spanning alcatrazi gliding high above, patrolled and plunged to pillage the inexhaustible shoals that thronged the waters below. Every so often, about five hundred meters out from the shore, the black bullet heads of seals or sea-lions or some such seagoing mammal would pop up, peer around in a disconcertingly human manner, then disappear again in a humping curve of back.
    Elizabeth worked her way steadily along, scraping rocks, making notes, taking samples and placing them in airtight plastic cases or small, stoppered jars. Even the minute insect or arachnid specimens found their way there, via an arrangement of L-shaped glass tube and long rubber suction tube and rubber bung with holes through it for both, which, in all its centuries of scientific use, had never been given a more scientific name than “put-er.” The biota of Mingulay, like that of all the other Earthlike planets of the Second Sphere, shared a common terrestrial ancestry but had, over megayears, diverged in unique and interesting ways. Not that the ancient arthropod or other invertebrate lineages showed much sign of it—she could identify most of the ones she picked up, right down to the species level, from memory of the standard manuals reprinted from originals published millennia ago on Earth. Mingulay’s own geology and biology had been left for several centuries in something of a mess. The planet’s earliest human settlers had barely sorted out a few recognizably successive epochs—Pelagic, Noachic, Nevisian,