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She told him about her occupation of hunting for biomechanisms, and her political activity in the abolitionist movement. Apart from pressing her for details of the banking system and the abolitionists’ actual forms of organisation, and their social objectives, he was not a bad listener. Then he lay back in the prow of the boat and flicked through Eon Talgarth’s notes about Jonathan Wilde. Sometimes he scowled, more often he laughed out loud. Ethan and Tamara urged him to tell them what was funny, and he now and again did. After a time he fell silent, and sat and looked at the early pages of the file, and at the end, and then the beginning again. At last he stowed it in Tamara’s pack, and sat looking away from the others, out over the damp desert, which in the sunset lay ruddy like a field of blood.

Ship City is in the tropics of New Mars. Darkness came within minutes of the sun’s disappearance behind the horizon. Wilde smiled at Tamara and Ethan, and lit a cigarette.

‘It’s strange,’ he said, ‘being able to see in the dark.’ He looked around again. ‘Shit! I can’t!’

‘Shield the cigarette,’ Ethan told him. ‘It’s blinding you.’

‘Damn’ near blinding me,’ Tamara said. ‘No, no, just cup your hands around it, that’s OK.’

Wilde did as he was asked, and shortly threw the butt into the water and gazed up at the stars. With the lights of the human quarter behind them and the less ordered lighting and unpredictable random flares of the Fifth Quarter not far ahead, they were less overpowering than on his first sight of them the previous night, but impressive nonetheless. He gasped at a bolide’s whispering flight, blinked at the flash it made behind the western horizon.

‘The robot called something like that a “waterfall”,’ he said to Ethan. ‘What does that mean?’

‘Cometary ice,’ Ethan explained laconically. ‘Feeds the canals.’

‘It’s a kinda slow terraforming,’ Tamara added. ‘Planet’s habitable, sure, but we want more water and a thicker atmosphere. Take us a couple more centuries, like, but by then it’ll be as green as Earth ever was.’ She paused, as though she’d got a little carried away. ‘Least, that’s what Reid says.’

‘I wonder,’ Wilde murmured, ‘how green Earth is now. Whatever “now” means.’

‘Ah,’ said Ethan promptly. ‘I can tell you that.’ He made a show of looking at his watch. Tamara and Wilde laughed, so loudly that heads turned in the single file of boats strung out behind them in the narrow waterway.

‘Nah, nah,’ Ethan went on. ‘Serious. “Now” is two times. Absolute, if there is such a thing: fuck knows. This way: if’n you got a signal from the Solar system, it would’ve been a long time on the way. Thousands a years, millions, fuck knows. But if you went back through the Malley Mile, that’s the daughter-wormhole gate, right, you’d be right back at 2094 anno domini plus Ship-time. Six point four gigasecs, lemme see…uh, twenty-three-nineties, early twenty-four hundreds, maybe. So now is the twenty-fifth century, outside.’

‘The twenty-fifth century!’ Wilde laughed. ‘Yes, Earth might be Green all right! Or even Red!’

They didn’t get it, and he didn’t explain. He frowned at Ethan Miller.

‘Why “daughter wormhole”?’ he said.

Ethan shrugged. ‘It’s what me old man calls it. He went through, and not as a fucking robot upload, either. He was crew, not crim.’ He pounded his chest. ‘Human all the way back, that’s me.’

‘Carbon chauvinist,’ Tamara chided.

Wilde leaned forward, thoughtlessly lighting another cigarette. ‘Go on.’

‘Well,’ Ethan said, waving a hand at the sky, ‘the wormhole we came through was a spin-off.’ He planed his hand sideways. ‘The main probe, the one the fast folk built before their minds burned out, it went right on. Draggin’ its end of the wormhole to…wherever. Must’ve got there by now.’ He laughed harshly. ‘Whatever “now” means, like you said.’

Wilde sat back, drawing on his cigarette so hard that his cupped hands couldn’t hide the glare.

‘The end of time,’ he said.

He thought for a few moments longer.

‘Oh, hell,’ he said.

‘What’s the problem?