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with a load of rubble. That would be where they were preparing to install the new turbines. Upstream was the tangle of steel pipes and tanks that was the cryoplant. He turned away from the river and looked up the valley wall. Among partly cleared timber above the little estate where his building was, there was a cluster of lights that meant more housing. And upstream of that, a white thread of moonlit water came down from the upper slopes. It vanished into the woods, glittered here and there among the trees, and evidently joined the river somewhere beyond the landing field.
    He found himself wondering what the little stream would look like from above, from beyond the upper row of buildings. He tried to picture the fall of the valley from that perspective, the dark forest on the slopes below, down to the sharp division made by one of the larger roads. . . .
    A siren sounded on the worksite. The icy wind was forcing itself through his coat. He fumbled to close the top button and caught another glimpse of his scarred wrist as the siren sounded again and fell quiet.
    Something jarred in his mind.
    Up there—or on a slope like that—he seemed to see a large isolated building, and lights spilling across the snow. In this valley, it would be up near the source of the stream. If he were there, looking down that slope, standing where that imagined building had been, the—memory—might return.
    He would have to climb the slope as far as he could.
    But not yet. Later, when this darkness felt more like evening.
    Obscurely satisfied, he started to turn away. And the rage he had carried from his room sprang up again. He seized a rock the size of his skull, swung it over his head in both hands and heaved it out into the river. Before it splashed he had snatched up cobbles and begun hurling them—throwing furiously with either hand, stone after stone, until his arms ached and his breath sobbed in his ears. And then, as suddenly as the fury had come, he was calm again. He breathed heavily and stared at the water.

    In the cafeteria he ate something that was called a cheese sandwich, paid for with a plastic card he found in his shirt pocket, then remembered his appointment at the Administration building. That turned out to be a low prefabricated structure, like a half-cylinder on its side. He wondered if it was part of a shuttle fuel tank. He followed a handwritten sign to the labour coordination office. The door was ajar and inside were a man and a woman working at small computer keyboards. Grebbel rapped on the open door and introduced himself.
    “Good afternoon,” said the woman, brushing back a lock of brown hair with one hand and feeling for a pencil among the pile of papers with the other. “Come on in. Mr. Grebbel, you said?” She copied something from the computer screen onto the corner of a yellow sheet of paper that had seemed to have no useable space left on it. “Just give me another moment and I’ll be right with you.” Her hands were rough and reddened, with grime under the nails. We’ve only got another hour and a half, Mike and I”—she nodded towards the balding moonfaced man, bent over his computer as though mesmerised by it—“then we’ve got to help with the potato harvest. Things do get a bit hectic at times.”
    “I’m sure.”
    “I’ve got your work detail here,” she said, still concentrating on the screen, “somewhere. Fourteen,” she muttered, “in Zone Three, and they wanted . . .” She groped with her left hand among a stack of folders, pulled one out and handed it to him, without apparently turning her eyes from the computer. “You can save time by looking over that profile and filling in where it asks for information. We’ve been short one body for three weeks now, and no replacement in sight. Not even you, though I bet you’d love to work here, wouldn’t you?” She paused briefly. “They’ll have to take eleven and like it.”
    Grebbel found a pen on the corner of her desk and