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Bernice looked at saRa!qava who shrugged. FeLixi frowned and absently rotated his glass between his palms.

Roz sighed. 'There has to be some motive.'

'What I want to know –' said the Doctor suddenly. Everybody turned to look at him. 'What I want to know is why it has to look like an apple tree.'

'Hello,' called Chris, 'is anyone at home?'

'Hello, Chris,' said a small boy he didn't recognize. 'Dep's upstairs.'

'Thanks,' said Chris.

'Don't mention it,' said the boy.

Chris smiled and stepped over the threshold into saRa!qava's house. It was just like the corridor he'd grown up in. On your first visit you were formally invited in and given tea, on the second visit they remembered how much sweetener you liked and after the third, you were expected to help yourself.

The small boy was sitting on the middle third level of the open plan 'living area'. He was building a complex lattice out of pastel-coloured nodes and rods. Chris paused and asked him what it was.

'It's a hyperspace intrusion,' said the small boy. 'See – that's the boundary layer and the real world interface and that's the extension into the subdomain bubble.'

'That's very clever,' said Chris. 'Who taught you that?'

'Me,' said the boy, 'but my mama helped me with the maths.' The boy gave Chris a sly look.

'Shouldn't you be going to see my sister? She'll be waiting and she's got a bad temper.'

Chris wondered why he suddenly felt so nervous. What if Dep didn't want to see him? What if he'd just been a bit of fun? Just because a girl went to bed with you, it didn't mean she really liked you – did it? He remembered some of the domestic cases he'd reviewed at the academy –

people did some horrible things to their partners. He remembered his father had come into his room when he was fourteen and given him some advice on the subject. It was good advice, Chris was sure of it, he just wished he could remember what it had been.

He found what he thought might be the stairs up to Dep's room – a series of flat boards that hung in an unsupported spiral. To be on the safe side he called her name from the bottom. Just to make sure she really wanted him there. After a moment he saw her face appear in the doorway at the top of the stairs. She was dressed in an oil-stained sleeveless boiler suit. There were dirty smudges on her cheeks and her hair had coiled itself tightly into a stack at the top of her head.

She grinned when she saw him. 'Don't just stand there,' she yelled down. 'Get your barbarian backside up here. I've got something to show you.' Chris ran up the stairs towards her, wondering what on earth he'd been worrying about.

As Chris came level with her, Dep took his face in her hands and brushed her nose against his.

Then, more cautiously because it was a new thing to her, she kissed him. She smelt faintly of oil and the static charge of hair. Taking him by the hand she drew him into her room.

Dep's room occupied almost the entirety of the house's top floor and was completely filled with flying machines. At first Chris thought they were models, upscaled versions of the spaceships he'd built in his adolescence, but they were much too large. A full-size glider hung in front of the door, its wingspan stretching from wall to wall, bundles of optical cable spilling out of its open nose. An angular wing, matt black and sharply canted, was propped up against the wall. As Dep led him deeper Chris almost tripped over a transparent bubble canopy that had been left casually on the floor and avoiding that banged his head on the tail fin of the glider. He noticed the symbiote dress Dep had worn to the party draped over the naked spars of a cannibalized microlight. Other items of clothing were scattered over fuselages, comm aerials, control surfaces and reinforcement struts. Power cables snaked around old-fashioned-looking impeller units and disassembled combustion engines. Information screens hung like pennants at random intervals, most of them displaying technical specifications, although Chris did see one showing a drama – one about aeroplanes of course.