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By Root 751 0

behind the academy she had vivid fantasies of wading into the local shopping centre, waving her credit card like a magic wand. Later, when she was bumming around humanspace, dodging the draft and eking out a living from dig to dig as an itinerant archaeologist, it had become a matter of survival. Scraping together enough to pay for a layover bed or the next starship out, lack of money had become a constant anxiety, an erosion of her self-worth. There was nothing like real poverty to teach you the true meaning of the word 'cash'.

If you'd asked the younger Bernice what her likely response to a free bazaar would be the likely answer would have been: move in with a standard freighter cargo module and have the stuff away before the buggers changed their minds.

Years of travelling light with the Doctor, and the Doctor's capacious pockets, must have freed her from that particular anxiety because she found herself curiously indifferent to the concept of possessions.

Instead she took her cue from saRa!qava and picked presents for other people. The exception was a sheath dress, grown from the same symbiote material as the one Dep had worn at the party, that saRa!qava talked her into. The stallholder assured her that the symbiote keyed itself to the personality of the person wearing it and wouldn't be nearly so 'active' as Dep's. All the same, Bernice wasn't at all sure she'd wear a dress that might, on a whim, head south at an embarrassing social moment. It was pretty though.

The food at the restaurant was hand-made as well, a thick soup in earthenware bowls served with freshly baked rolls. SaRa!qava broke one open and sniffed it with a professional air. 'Not too awful,' she said.

'Perfectionist,' said Bernice. They had a table by the parapet with a good view over the leaning towers of the city. Hydrofoils and steam skiffs chugged slowly along the drowned streets, disturbing the amphibians and crocodiles of white crane-like waterbirds. Bernice decided that if she had to stay in the sphere, God forbid, this would be where she would live.

'I have a confession to make,' said saRa!qava.

'Gosh,' said Bernice, 'I wish I did.' SaRa!qava looked pensive and Bernice realized she was serious. 'Sorry,' she said.

'I think I may be one of the Doctor's suspects,' said saRa!qava. 'For the murder.'

'What makes you say that?'

'I had a really good motive for wanting vi!Cari dead.'

'Why tell me?' asked Bernice. 'I don't think you did it.'

'The Doctor's bound to find out sooner or later,' said saRa!qava. 'I thought I'd better tell you first. Vi!Cari knew about something I did when I was young. I don't know how, but it did and I was scared that it would tell someone else.'

Bernice was shocked to see that saRa!qava was crying. Automatically, she reached out and squeezed her friend's hand. 'Why would that be a motive?'

'You don't understand, how could you? If people found out what I did, no one would talk to me for ever.'

'I understand,' said Bernice. 'Social isolation is a common enough sanction amongst –' Bernice hesitated; she was about to say primitive cultures. 'Many, many cultures. Look, if this is too painful we can talk about something else.' Bernice, you coward!

SaRa!qava squeezed her hand back. 'No,' she said, 'it's better that you know. There was this man –'

'Isn't there always,' said Bernice. SaRa!qava smiled wanly.

'Who I was in love with,' said saRa!qava. 'But he wasn't in love with me, at least not enough to start a family. So one night I lured him up to the Windmills and we had sex.'

'You're right, I don't understand,' said Bernice. 'What's so criminal about that?'

'I had sex with him that night, deliberately, just so I could conceive,' said saRa!qava. 'I stole Dep from him and he doesn't know.'

Dep watched Chris as he eased the reciprocating arm out of the central drive assembly. Grease was smeared on his cheeks and forehead where he'd wiped the sweat away. He looked like one of the players in the combat games organized by the Barbarian Emulation Interest Group.

Dep had woken up that morning with a sudden fear in