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ever needed it.
    Now the long journey was ahead of them. It was impossible to hurry. Though they could reach speeds of fifty kilometers per hour in their travels, they had to stop to feed each day. It would take them nearly a year to reach Lilo.
    “Well, every trip starts with one push,” Solstice said. “Let’s go.”

4
     
    I’m not a frequent visitor to any of the disneylands. To me, a desire to work in the dirt with your bare hands and eat dirt-grown food is harmless, but silly. It makes us yearn for something we can never have, something that’s always up there in the Lunar sky. It leads to lunatic fantasies like the one that had obsessed Tweed for so long: the retaking of Earth, the liberation of our home planet from the Invaders.
    I grew up surrounded by metal, and have never felt deprived because of it. Stories of Old Earth glories leave me unmoved. Our frontiers will be found not by trying to recapture the past, but by looking within ourselves. I had tried to do that, and ended up in jail.
    Tweed must have set the thermostat on his private paradise at around forty degrees. I was sweltering. Maybe the plants needed a summer, but I definitely didn’t. And some unspeakable little vermin had found their way into my leg hair.
Nature.
I stripped off the bulky robe and tried to cool myself while Tweed pondered my fate.
    Lilo saw Tweed make a signal to the man on the edge of the woods. She tensed. Was this it? He could decide she wasn’t worth the trouble—she
still
didn’t knowwhat he had in mind for her—and things could start to happen fast. She watched Vaffa carefully. If they came at her, she vowed to do some damage on the way out.
    But Tweed was hurrying through the thick grass. Vaffa relaxed a little when Tweed had gone out of sight. She sat in the grass and stroked the snake. This female Vaffa was two and a half meters tall, had no breasts and very little fat anywhere, and was completely hairless. She was bone-white all over. A death’s-head: spare, economical of movement, powerful and lethal.
    Someone came running through the field toward them. Lilo wondered why anyone would run in this heat. Was she in trouble? But it was sheer high spirits. She saw the tattoo first, then the face.
    “Hello, Mari.”
    “Hi,” she gasped. “Isn’t it
wonderful
? Being here, I mean.”
    “Uh-huh.” Lilo slapped at something that buzzed; her hand came away red. Bloodsucker!
    “Hi, Vaffa.” The woman nodded to Mari. The medico was covered in sweat, and seemed to love it. She stood for a moment, getting her breath back. “You’re supposed to come with me,” she said.
    “What for?”
    “I have to make a recording of you. Boss’s orders. Come on, it won’t take a minute.”
    Lilo knew it took a bit longer than that, but followed her along a path leading into the woods. Turning, she saw that Vaffa was following, giving more attention to the snake than to Lilo. It wasn’t very flattering. It would have been nice to think of herself as dangerous, but Vafa did not seem impressed. Well, that was probably best. Maybe she’d get a surprise one day.
    She had thought she would be taken back to the more conventional part of Tweed’s residence. Instead they went to a glade in the middle of a dense forest. There was a waterfall nearby. Mari had carried her bag with her; now she set it on the ground and gestured to Lilo. A thin plastic sheet had been spread on the ground.
    “Right here?” Lilo said. “Don’t you need…” But Mari was opening what looked like a tree stump. Inside was metal.
    “Why not? Don’t worry, you’ll love it.”
    Lilo had to admit the setting was more restful than the standard medico’s operating room. Maybe it would help her over her nervousness.
    Lilo’s fear of memory recording was a common one. She could tell herself as often as she wished that what she feared simply could
not
happen; she could not be awakened after the recording process to be told she had died and it was now several