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entice him to speak. He folded his limbs around his large frame and put his face to the wall. Jac watched him. He knew this for what it was: a retreat into a profound misery, the
prison of melancholy that had memory written on its door. Soon enough the others grew tired of taunting him, and with food in their bellies they disposed their bodies as best they could, floating
in proximity to make the most of mutual body heat, and fell asleep.
    Jac remained awake for a long time. He was thinking of glass.
    It took them a great many more days – or what passed for days in that clockless place – to get a proper rhythm of ghunk growing right. First of all, individual
crops grew out of sync. They had groups of days when there was too much of the slop to eat, and groups of days when none of it was green at all and they had to go hungry. But trial and error meant
that they eventually arrived at a situation where there was food every day, even if not necessarily enough to completely satisfy everyone’s hunger. Familiarity did nothing to endear them to
the stuff. It was the texture of it, as much as the taste. Glop.
    They decided to expand their growing space. It took Jac and Gordius a couple of hours to dig out a trench, and adjust the position of the lightpole a little so as to shine into it. A soaked rag
was pinned to the bottom of this with stone-chips, a smear of spores scratched up by fingernails from underneath the edible green bloom, and the marginally more sheltered growing environment meant
that the ghunk grew not only quicker but seemed – everybody agreed – even to taste a little less noisome. But it was hardly food. It never fully satisfied hunger. It lay slimily
in the stomach; it emerged unsatisfactorily from the other end of the digestive tract. This was also a problem, of course, in that enclosed space. They debated what to do with their bodily waste.
Urine, soaked into rags, helped the ghunk grow even better; but they could find no useful function for faeces. Although everybody assumed that it would be somehow useful when it came to growing the
food, in fact the ghunk was perfectly indifferent to it: as happy to grow on bare rock as on a frozen turd. So over two days E-d-C and Jac between them dug a cul-de-sac shaft, into which such waste
could be disposed.
    Otherwise the main activity of any given day was digging. As the cavity space expanded, they used the fusion cell to break oxygen out of the ice – indeed this, rather than heating, was the
reason the Gongsi had gone to the expense of providing it. The scrubber was fine at refreshing air; but new space needed new atmosphere to fill it. The cell worked efficiently enough, and the seam
of ice seemed big enough to supply both drinking water and new air. Their voices slipped up the register, a semitone higher, a tone. Some of them spoke more squeakily hilariously than others
– the hydrogen, of course. Lwon grew worried about fire: should any of the diggers strike a spark from some nugget of meteorite iron, or something. His worry was contagious, but day followed
day and the level of hydrogen in the air stabilised. It seemed that the scrubber, for all that it was an antique model, was as well suited to the task of processing the hydrogen out of the air and
into carbon. From time to time they discussed, more or less idly, how it was doing this. Methane was one possibility – just as flammable, of course. Nobody could tell if the air smelt any
worse than it had before. ‘It smells absolutely bad already,’ was Davide’s opinion. ‘It could hardly smell any worse.’ Maybe the gas was being processed into some more
complex hydrocarbon chain. The scrubber’s filters did need scraping out from time to time. They took it turns to clear its tube of blackened powdery residue, making sure to do so near the
digger so that the clogging stuff could be passed through the exhaust hoses. ‘All our lives depend on this machine,’ said Gordius,