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'What were you thinking about?' asked the Doctor.

'When?'

'Just now.'

'My first case.'

'Is it relevant?'

'No,' said Roz. Strange that she could still feel so bitter after all these years. 'Not relevant at all.' She drained the last of her coffee, suddenly anxious to be out of the villa. 'I think I should tell feLixi that I accept his invitation.'

'Well,' said the Doctor, 'don't do anything I wouldn't do.'

'Doctor,' said Roz, 'I said I was rusty, not dead from the waist down.'

'I just had a horrible thought,' said Bernice, as she and saRa!qava rode in a travel capsule to Whynot. 'What if the Doctor did it?'

'I thought he was with you that evening,' said saRa!qava. 'Watching the storm and eating popcorn.'

'What if he wasn't?' asked Bernice. 'What if he was somewhere else and what I thought was the Doctor was really one of those texturized holograms?'

'Benny,' said saRa!qava gently, 'what possible motive could the Doctor have for killing vi!Cari?

He didn't even know the drone.'

'I know, I know,' said Bernice, 'I was just having an attack of paranoia.' She turned to look out of the travel capsule. Whynot was dead ahead. Through the swirls of cloud she could make out the Grinning Archipelago on the equator and in the northern hemisphere the two round continents of Lefteye and Righteye, both, she estimated, roughly the size of Madagascar.

God, she thought, has all the subtlety of a five-year-old in a sweet shop.

And the Doctor has a very plausible motive for killing vi!Cari, assuming that the machine knew about Kadiatu. The drone at the party, the one dressed as an airliner, had said as much and the Doctor had gone to great lengths to keep the woman secret from God. Bernice was appalled at her thoughts: did she really believe that the Doctor was capable of killing someone to keep that secret?

Yes, she thought, if the secret was important enough, if he added up the totals and the positive outweighed the negative. He wouldn't want to, he'd try to avoid it but in the end if he had to, he would do it.

Feeling suddenly cold Bernice hugged herself as the travel capsule fell silently towards the smiling face of Whynot.

The travel capsule touched down on the continental island of Lefteye. They caught a lift to the surface from the travel station and caught an open-topped maglev train across the coastal plains to what saRa!qava said was the second largest city in the sphere: me!Xu!xi-si!cisisa – The Mote in God's Left Eye.

The maglev wound its way through a landscape of meadows and broadleaf forests. To the north the land rose to become a rolling plain. In the distance she could just see the snow-covered tops of a mountain range. Apparently God had built them the year before and was still trying to get people to ski on them. Whynot was God's personal domain; here it was allowed to rearrange the scenery to suit itself and people lived on the planet at their own risk.

It was good to have a horizon again. SaRa!qava said that millions of people lived on Whynot despite the fact that they were subject to the inconvenience of having God periodically shifting the continents around, not to mention that the planet's weird orbit meant that the hours of daylight were so variable as to be essentially random. Bernice understood. The limitless vistas of the sphere were just too big to comprehend and faced with a real horizon for the first time in days Bernice realized that those vast distances engendered a feeling of oppression. Especially in someone who was born and raised on a planet. Getting away from that would be worth the aggravation of waking up to find your home had shifted sixty thousand kilometres overnight.

Or knee-deep in water. One bright morning the citizens of me!Xu!xi-si!cisisa had got out of bed to find that their entire city was suddenly in the middle of a lake the size of Arizona. Which was why Bernice and saRa!qava had to catch a hydrofoil from a terminus on the lake shore. It took another hour to reach the city.

'God disconnected all the travel