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to survive. They hadn’t been through Petit Galop.
    America was getting old, he thought. Like the rest of Earth. Absorbing fashions brought down from space, ways of life—condecologies, ideologies—that were imitations of the way people lived in a vacuum. Steward’s olive skin was fashionable because olive skin had a more interesting texture to those who lived in cultures that never saw sunlight, and heavy makeup was fashionable for the same reason. Earth had shot its bolt. Space was where things mattered now, like it or not.
    He bought a scansheet and walked into one of the wilderness parks that cut the city and sat on a grassy slope. In the bright cloudless sky he could see a pattern of fixed stars, orbital factories, and habitats. One of them, he knew, was the orbital complex where Natalie lived now. He wondered which star was hers, what she looked like now, after fifteen years had passed, years that he hadn’t known. He felt the brightening pain in his throat and nose, and lowered his eyes to the street. Sadness fell on him like rain.
    *
    “So how did you end up in Canard Chronique?” Ardala asked later.
    “Canards Chronique,” he corrected. They were stretched out in bed, Ardala on her stomach, propped up on her elbows while reading this week’s copy of Guys and taking notes. He was reading some of the study material she’d brought with her. “It has a double meaning, either Chronic Ducks or Chronic Hoaxes. Which had a lot to do with their ethic.”
    “You didn’t answer my question.”
    “How I got in? It’s all the fault of my African grandmother.”
    “Don’t keep me in suspense, Steward,” Ardala said.
    He put a marker in the book and put it down. “Okay. My African grandmother got educated in Canada and fell in love with cold climates, so she became an arctic geologist. Then she fell in love with this Scotsman she met in Novaya Zemlya, who was also in love with the arctic, et cetera. Their second son hated snow and permafrost, which was all he ever saw when he was a kid, so he moved to the Mediterranean, where he married my mother, who was from Marseilles. He had himself a good job in Nice, working as an indentured economist for Far Jewel while my mother was going to school.” Steward frowned at the opposite wall. He was trying to decide what attitude to take, which personality to use for this. “He got killed during Petit Galop,” he said.
    “I’ve heard of that.”
    Heard of it, Steward thought. Europe’s collapse into anarchy following a failed attempt to remodel its sociology along the lines suggested by a space-dwelling policorp. Earth had larger populations than the policorps and less fragile ecological systems; sometimes the policorps ran programs down the gravity well to see if they’d work, before going to the trouble of restructuring themselves along similar patterns. The possibilities inherent in such tampering were one of the reasons the policorps bothered with Earth at all.
    But the thing had gone wrong, Europe being more fragile than anyone knew, and people—policorp people, and citizens, and a lot of presumable innocents—all had paid the penalty.
    How, Steward wondered, to tell Ardala about it? A Canard would just shrug. Everybody in Marseilles had it bad; everybody had a father or mother who was dead, or a sister or brother or at least an uncle or aunt. That attitude might seem callous to an American, though. Stewart decided just to tell it straight out. “It was bad, particularly down south. Some of the rioters were up on the tall policorp ecodromes, dropping big plate-glass windows on the people below. They explode like grenades, you know? That’s how my father died, he and a couple thousand others, all in one afternoon. Not that it’s likely he would have survived anyway—he had biological implants, a hand modified for microcircuitry work and head sockets to take a DNA-computer interface. He hadn’t had his skull capacity increased or the extra brain tissue, but