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like the outcome of the Rodney ballot or, now, the details of her conscription task.
    The other andrew in the team stood by the skimmer. Its face was standard issue, but it wore a leather flying helmet with cracked green goggles. She had seen the type in flatties like
Wings
,
The Dawn Patrol
and
Von Richthofen and Brown
. That had been several wars ago; if the gear were genuine, it would be a valuable antique.
    Susan looked up at the unseasonably bluish sky, and saw the regular London/Eng-Richmond/CSA airship pass overhead, punching a doughnut hole in a cloud bank. She recognised the stars and bars of Dixieland Dirigibles Inc. on the trefoil.
    She had an urge to stick a music in her ear, and let the whole thing pass her by. Instead, she asked Juliet, ‘Will we be travelling far?’
    Juliet paused, judging how much to tell. ‘Not internationally, the skip won’t take more than thirty minutes.’
    ‘The West Country, then?’
    Juliet tried to look impassive. Susan knew she had scored some points, but couldn’t decide whether they were upsies or downsies. The skimmer’s belly opened, and the pilot andrew helped Susan climb into the rear cab. Its touch was surprisingly gentle. Its hands were upholstered over steel bones. If marshalled properly, the artificial fingers could save a life in surgery, or squeeze out Susan’s with a nerve pinch. Juliet and the bag-carrying andrew joined her in the cab, and the pilot hauled itself into its cockpit. Susan heard the swish as the andrew melshed with the skimmer. When the readiness tone came, Juliet palmed the andrew authorisation plate and the skimmer rose vertically. Susan looked down at her home, and said a silent goodbye to the fish.
    Gingerly, Juliet mentioned that she had just finished dreaming
The Parking Lottery
. ‘I hear you’re up for Rodney.’
    ‘Several.’
    ‘Think you’ll beat Orin Tredway?’
    They talked trivially, and Susan gathered Juliet was a Dreampuff. The woman seemed to have put her head through everything she had ever done. Even
The Light of the Bright World Dies.
Susan switched into her conventional politeness mode, and said all the things she usually said when people asked her the questions they usually asked. ‘How does it feel when you Dream?’ ‘Do you have to experience all those things you put in your Dreams?’ ‘Where do you get your concepts?’ ‘What about the sex; I mean, how do you make that up?’ ‘When did you realise you had the Talent?’ ‘Do you know John Yeovil?’ Juliet seemed less like Vanessa Vail now. She was almost unimaginative enough to qualify as an intervidier for the Breakfast Net.
    The conversation prevented her from wondering what her Public Service was going to entail. She wondered if Juliet had been ordered to distract her with chit-chat. The marshal seemed to relax a little, but Susan still nursed the underlying suspicion that even curled into the skimmer couch and asking googy Dreampuff questions, Juliet had calculated all seventeen ways of dealing a deathblow.
    The skimmer made good time from London to the West Sector. Mostly, they zipped over the Designated Green Areas, although Susan caught a good whiff – even through the filtrators – of the renowned Cellophane City smell. The andrew flew them low over the moorland to avoid clouds and airships. They even buzzed a cow or two. One tiny-headed animal was so startled it fell over, its mountain of meat pinning it down. A farmer strode across the fields in his twenty-foot agri-walker, scrabbling to rightside the beast before it choked itself. He raised an angry waldo grabber at the skimmer, and veed up two butcherblades. The countryside below got a little wilder.
    ‘This is Dartmoor, isn’t it?’ Susan asked.
    ‘Uh-huh.’
    ‘Aren’t there barrows here? And sarsen stones?’
    ‘I think so. That’s why it’s a preservation stronghold. Well, most of it. We’re nearly there now.’
    The skimmer slowed, and set down in front of a modern complex built