The question as to whether they had the right to do any of this, given Nature's clear preferences, was not discussed.

They couldn't seem to name the lake, so there it lay unencumbered. Begotten of the Great Artesian Basin. A million tons of melted crust had made a wineskin around it, squeezing. Effluence was in balance now with rapid evaporation, and they might see receding waters someday, and build a wellhead. They floated out on half-pontoons to find splines and the rest but failed to. Something for future relic-hunters. Mucel gazing down and wondering aloud if there might be any stubborn old life lurking in the black water beneath them, Burch saying yes, plague spores interestingly. Banter was getting to be like that.

The lake had little of its own color but was a mirror, and Mucel was taken with its broken and reflected light, that filled shadows and humanized the smirks and figured brows around him. Later he said, "Seems our little pond has learned to lap at the shore."

Scrope looked up from his tools. "Cee, train those eyes on the moon and give us your impression."

"Rough patch there, Roger."

"Okay."

"Similarly, I can confirm an earlier postulation of mine: Mercury is gone."

A little jolt of the like that passes through without disturbing. Scrope back busy with his hands. Burch: "Goodbye, little berry. You fascinated the ancients."

Mucel: "Adjust horoscope accordingly." A moment of levity. All gave it its due.

Cee provided light flying lessons during in-between times.

One night there was brief talk, very brief, about building a fire.

They cut away incidental plastic panels and ferried them down to build a garrison house against the ash. They gave it its own array, and its antenna, and tied three identity badges to the mast. They adapted a filter, and now they would have clean water. They put a stall at the waterline with a showerhead, and let it run. Mucel showed them how to make an innocuous soap by rendering certain of their condiments and cooking a little ash in.

Water, life in earth, then clean water, and then Mucel woke them one morning to see something as old as the eye and never before seen. In the eastern sky, the palette of daybreak across an impossible expanse. From ceremonial light and the dark air, a recitation of the colors. Scrope was numb with pleasure. "And that is how we start our day."

Burch: "With all the bloody looms of Bangalore."

Scrope the listener. First as scientist, now the devotee of the arts. The word from outer space was both adamant and oddly calm, a worm welcome to his ear. The intermissions in it were accents, that made melody as with verse. In the pit he had ported it to an earpiece each day until the planet rolled out of line. Let it balance his breathing. He would catch himself playing along in the back of his throat, something like plainsong.

"Where are they?"

Cee: "I know they're doing their best."

Brownlee had once admonished that the words you choose are not just the words, they are the lines on your face. So the cadence was a pulse, and Scrope tried to hear it for the moods and indications in it, and in the three parts that it made. Help is coming. "Who are they?"

"One thing I would warn against is expecting the miraculous act. We would've seen that already. They're not gods. Or if they are, they aren't the imaginary kind."

Imperfect, then, with predilections. He was on the Mercia, listening, and considering a particular ledger. "Know anything about music?"

"I know everything there is to know about music that is in my files."

"Good, and what do you think?"

"Roger, I think about everything, all the time. For example, right now I'm thinking about better questions."

"Okay, here's one: ever notice I don't try to be funny? People who aren't funny shouldn't try to be funny."

"And no, I don't enjoy music, because it's ridiculous, but I enjoy it when others do. So there's that."

"Not really. Could you write music? If called upon. Music that wasn't, you know, written by a machine."

"Was lost without that clarifier. No I could not."

Scrope nodded at the screen. "And I want to see what's in planners."

"Not supposed to."

"I could do it myself, don't make me." Here he showed dirty ruined hands.

Four thousand files from planners, more of the same, for a total of eleven thousand. Scrope hadn't brought or requested music because it reminded him of home, but the others had and here it was in a corpus. The musical legacy of man. And in this capacity it seemed to Scrope to constitute -- in its methods and clear motive, in its very appellations -- some sort of monumental crime, and he said so.

Cee: "Understood. Of course I'm a sentimentalist, as you know, so I'm glad to have anything at all of any kind."

Scrope picked one and let it pay out, and let his silence imply a question. Cee: "Well --"

"Wrong, it sounds like someone's therapy."

"Matter of opinion?"

A timeless banality that could not quite be proven untrue. One more thing Scrope was not glad to have. He turned once again to the message, and brought it to a slow stream, a flutter over rough stones. An outblown breath interrupted by a tapping of the tongue against the palate. A consoling sound in which he could imagine a hint of remonstration. Where are they, what are they. "And why the hell would they bother? And ... I don't want to have this conversation anymore." Then he was quiet enough for the both of them.

Early the next evening. Scrope strapped in for the quick drop back to ground. Cee coaxed the wyvern to a long burn and let it coast. Cee: "You're bleeding there."

A little showing through his vest. Blood stain was old news by now, and Scrope barely responded.

Cee: "So of course I watched you hard at it this morning. Seemed like quite the ordeal. What is it?"

"What is what."

"On your chest." A design, a bit butchered, between the upper arms. Dye from a printer and an ordinary pin. Scrope: "I'm guessing you mean why."

"If you like."

"Cee ..." He couldn't even try. "Cee, you can't tell one note from another. Do sums."

"Absolutely. Although perhaps we could agree, if only to keep the conversation skipping along, that when the others see it they'll think you've gone insane."

"No, I don't agree because I don't care. Incidentally, I have never been less insane."

"Fair enough. You'd be the best judge of that. And then there's the old idea that a man must wear a mask in order to convey himself clearly. Well ... and I say again, why --"

"Sometimes we ask too many questions." Here Scrope turned on a fan, fiddled with a workpad and hummed in a forbidding way.

Now Burch aboard, reclining in someone's old bed after a day of sorting stores, lowering a screen and slowly noticing that Earth had none of its old declination. He pointed it out to Cee, who agreed it was interesting. The buckling blow had stood her up straight. So no seasons. Our little seeds'll be made mad. He fumbled with the lenses. There was a new southern lake there whose outline he could not at all discern. Pull back and behold a great knitting ball of filth on a spindle. Stranded by high storms ... he was reminded of something he'd read in Brownlee's planner, which he looked for and found.

Butterfly Effect. The term comes from chaos theory, and posits that the moving wings of a butterfly might cause the motes of the air to cascade in such a way as to create a distant storm. As a metaphor it becomes a conceit animating the acts of causists and enthusiasts of general change (a specious fancy firstly because in this scenario the least-desired end is as likely as any other; and because the change agent carries no more weight in the matter than do the dominoes down the line, and perhaps a little less, since the dominoes do not float along on a cloud of pretense).

A long spell of browsing in Brownlee's planner; then time spent in his own. He walked to Data and studied the mains. He found a pallet of food and had a loader put it on a wyvern, which he boarded. Strap in, and away he went.

Scrope surprised them with a morning campaign against area rubbish. Partways through patrol Burch said he'd forgotten his brace on the mothership. He was given leave; and left a pallet in his wake.

Scrope walked over. A triple-stack of canned pottage. He looked at Mucel, who also had no idea. Scrope to the radio. "What's this."

"Good for six weeks by my math. The ham and limas, which I know you hate, but of course the two of you'll be up to your chins in bok choy before you know it."

Scrope became very quiet inside. Something had happened, and he would not quite tell himself what. He stayed very still at the edge of a range of emotions that could not possibly help him now; he spoke and was startled by the fragility of his tone. "What are you doing?"

"Doing. Actually it's a bit of undoing, is the plan. Cleaning up after this mad side project of yours. To which I have, of course, been a party, incidentally as your factotum but especially by doing nothing. While you tear the Mercia apart and get us killed."

Fuck you. "Come back and we'll talk. "

"We're talking now. And I think it's going well." He was almost singing.

"If you had concerns you might've said something."

"No, because then you might've thought I was trying to negotiate. By the way, I saw where you destroyed music files. All of them. On ship and in planners. A violation of every understanding. I could ask you about it but I'm afraid I'd get some sort of explanation."

Don't listen don't react. "Look ... we need your help here. We've made a lot of progress. A lot more to come."

"Progress." Smirk in the voice. Like an insect in the ear. "That teat's gone dry, Roger."

"The Earth is our home and we will protect it."

"No. No. No. If, in the end, you are betrayed, then all that came before is lost. I for one will not be chained to that demented crone trying to nurse her back to life." Silence, so Burch carried on. "Somehow you got the inkling that they're farmers like you, hurrying to help you reclaim the land. Big plans for them. But I'm sure they have a sense of humor. No, if they really mean to help us, they are taking us far away from this hell."

Scrope's ears were filled with white noise. "You will turn the ship around. Now."

"I'm not going to be responding well to that sort of thing anymore, and I'll tell you why. You derive your authority from a polity which no longer exists. It died in a fire. The important business to which your command was entrusted is over. The old spaceman pursues his retirement. Puttering in the garden." His voice had been softened by the lightest regret. "I will dedicate myself to the repair and protection of the Mercia, our home. Sending supplies as the need arises. Alright, then. Now you know."

Scrope: "Cee."

Cee's first words were halting and formless, and said that he was new to this, and laboring to adapt. "I don't want to speak to the points he's made or say if I agree. But there are practical considerations for all of us. Anything I try to do he can countermand. I turn the lights off to express my displeasure, and he simply finds his way to Data and literally pulls me apart. So let's imagine that I wait until he's asleep, and send a ship down for you. When you arrive there'd be a high likelihood of violence. And I simply couldn't stand that. I couldn't stand it. I'm not taking sides. Right now there's only one side."

Scrope felt his mind start to flutter like a heart. Pain, a blister, bright burn in him where the ribs meet. Only your friends can betray you. "Goddamn the both of you."