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face.”
    “If you ask me he is better off than we are,” Six said bluntly. “I don’t know about you, but I’m not sure I can stand this for very long.” He pulled a long face. “I might just be able to put up with all the academic stuff, and the sports, but that dancing on those fiddly musical squares brings me out in hives!”
    “I don’t mind the musical squares and the sports so much, but all this academic stuff is agonizing.”
    “Do you know why we are here yet?”
    She shook her head. “Not really, no. I know it’s a donor program, but not who or what donates. And Atheron spoke about prospective ‘investors’.”
    “Atheron?” He was surprised. “Do you have the same teacher as me? Didn’t you have classes today?”
    “Didn’t I just. All day, seemed like. Especially with the school work. He kept telling me how badly I was doing.”
    “Same here. So how does he manage to be in two places at once? I had him all day too, only he was telling me how badly I was doing during the musical square dance bit and not the schoolwork bit.” He thought for a moment. “Is it the same specimen? Scrappy white halo of hair hanging down from a bald pate? Pretends to be your best friend and then tells you off with the same sickly smile?”
    “Unmistakable.”
    Six raised an eyebrow. “First mystery here, then. Is Atheron really Atherclone? Or is he an artificial intelligence they had duplicated so that we got one each?”
    Diva frowned. “It is strange,” she agreed, then looked around the bubble. “Do you think we are being watched now?”
    “Wouldn’t surprise me.”
    She glanced around. “It makes me feel uncomfortable.”
    “Well, at last something we have in common, Lady Divina,” he said.
    Her eyebrows came together ferociously. “There is nothing,” she said, “nothing that we have in common, Kwaidian! . . . As if!”
    He grinned. “You might rail against it Diva,” he said, “but the truth of the matter is that I am going to be the only person you speak to in the next two years. You might want to change your attitude a bit.”
    “My attitude!” She gave a little stamp with one foot, a gesture which was spoilt because the orthogel absorbed any sound it might have made. “There isn’t a thing wrong with my attitude. It is you who will have to change, nomus!”
    He just looked at her, and then raised both eyebrows together and made a face.
    She stamped her foot again. “Don’t look at me like that!”
    “I’ll look at you however I like. You’re not on Coriolis now. You can’t have me beaten.” Six glowered.
    “I won’t talk to you.”
    “Then it’s going to be a long two years.”
    She gave him a haughty glare and looked deliberately away.
    “Fine.” He shrugged his shoulders. “Up to you, your mulchiness. I’m not going anywhere. Not for a while.” He indicated the bubble with one hand. “I would try to escape, but if I did my sisters would die. So I’m sure to be available, if you should feel the urge for a chat.”
    Diva looked quickly back at him. “What do you mean, your sisters would die?”
    “I thought you weren’t speaking to me?”
    “Tell me!”
    “Well, you don’t think I came here willingly, do you?” Six raised his eyes skywards. “Trust a girl to think that!”
    “ I came willingly!”
    “I know.” He gave a short laugh. “And you thought Kwaide was a backward planet!”
    “It is a great honour!” Then Diva stopped. Just recently it didn’t feel so much of a great honour. Especially for the boy who died, unmourned, in space. It had occurred to her recently that Six might be right. But she wasn’t about to tell him that.
    “Two years of some mouldy old Sellite stuffing our heads with a lot of useless information we don’t want to know?” Six said. “A real honour I don’t think!”
    Diva found herself so much in agreement with him that she was glad she didn’t have to answer because the two doors reappeared in the bubble, each one