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‘Look,’ he said.

Janis stared at the multiple patches of flitting pictures and sliding subtitles. After some silence she said, ‘Oh, Gaia.’

Hundreds of system crashes, all around the world. None, in themselves, terribly serious, but together they amounted to the software equivalent of a minor earth tremor set off by a nuclear detonation, ringing the globe like a bell. Detecting the source involved microsecond discriminations. Wherever anyone had bothered to do that, all the arrows pointed to London.

The Carbon Life Alliance had denied responsibility, but said they’d like to contact anyone who could plausibly claim it.

‘Think we should take them up on it?’ Janis teased.

Kohn flicked the screen back to clear.

‘No doubt they’ll be in touch,’ he said. He turned to her. ‘Still think it was all in my head?’

‘No, but that doesn’t mean your experience was what you think it was.’ She felt that she had to be stubborn on this point. ‘And remember, there really are AIS on the nets. Nothing conscious, I’m convinced of that, but perfectly capable of fooling you. Some of them designed by highly mischievous mind-fuckers.’

‘I know that,’ Kohn said. He sounded tired again. ‘Gopher-golems and such. Try to get you into arguments. I keep telling you, I done all that. You want me to show you my kill-files?’

‘OK, Kohn, OK.’ She smiled uncertainly. ‘I’m only saying you should keep an open mind…’

Kohn laughed so loud and long that she had to join in.

‘“Keep an open mind.”’

‘You know what I meant.’

The car passed under a great concrete arch alive with lights.

‘Welcome to space,’ Kohn said.

‘Oh. Yeah, I’ve heard of that. Extraterrestriality.’

‘A concept of dubious provenance, but it puts this place on the map.’

She laughed. ‘A five-colour map!’

‘Damn’ right. We live in the fifth-colour country, the one that has no borders. The next America.’

‘I thought it was the present America that really ran things up there.’

‘“You – you are only the present”,’ Kohn said obscurely. ‘In theory their writ runs down here too: Stasis can’t get in, but Space Defense can zap us any time they want. America, huh. The US/UN ain’t America. More like the England that tried to own the New World. More like bloody Portugal for all the chance it’s got of succeeding. Look at these: I’ll bet on them against any battlesats ever built.’

She followed his pointing finger and saw a sight she seldom bothered to notice, a flight of re-entry gliders descending from the south, black arrowheads against the sky.

‘“Pilots of the purple twilight, dropping down with costly bales.”’ This time she knew he was quoting. ‘Costly bales, Janis, costly bales. That’s where it’s at. That’s where I’ll put my money.’

‘Hi, mum!’

No answer. Jordan let the door close behind him and bounded cheerfully up the stairs. The house’s familiar smells of cooking and cleaning, furniture polish, soap, stew in the pot, obscurely reassured. Sometimes they made him feel as if he were suffocating, and he had to stick his head out of the skylight window, get a good breath of industrial rather than domestic air. As his two elder brothers and his sister had left home he’d inherited more and more space, and now had the entire attic to himself.

As he ascended the stair-ladder to the attic he heard low murmuring voices. Adrenaline jolted his heart. When his head came above floor-level he saw straight through the open door of his bedroom. His mother and father were sitting side by side on his bed, heads lifted from an open book in their laps. At their feet lay a scatter of antique paperbacks and older hard-backs. They were books he wasn’t really supposed to have, ones he’d picked up here and there from bookleggers, hard to control even in the Christian community: old rationalist works in the beautiful brown bindings of the Thinker’s Library – Bradlaugh and Darwin and Haeckel, Huxley and Llewellyn Powys, Ingersoll and Paine – and battered paperbacks by Asimov and Sagan and Gould, Joachim Kahl, Russell, Rand, Lofmark, Lamont, Paul Kurtz, Richard Dawkins. The dread heresiarchs of secular