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  “Back to the shuttle, deviant!” yelped the PA. “At once!”

  A single jolt from the nerve cruncher convinced Shan that she was in neither position nor shape to seek immediate restitution. Somewhat cowed, she limped back to the shuttle and allowed Freda to strap her in to an acceleration couch.

  The trip down to the surface was done under power, a monstrous buffeting racket that lasted ten minutes or ten hours and more or less precluded conversation, plotting, thinking about sheep or indeed any activity more demanding than being dead.

  Hitting dirt in a shuttle is like having a golf club slam your spine, though this simile would not have occurred to Hsia Shan-yun. Golf was outlawed under the All Islamic-Christian Decency Interregnum as morale-sapping, and never regained its popularity owing to the brief but concentrated use of major greens for disciplinary rallies.

  Shan did wonder, though, how many uses the authorities got from a shuttle before the bloody thing fell into small pieces from sheer mechanical fatigue.

  Nauseated, the six women and one man in the convict landing detail, assuming I have the penological-cum-military terminology correct, stumbled from their landing couches and lurched down a creaking plastic ramp for their first look at the place of exile.

  The planet was hideous.

  “Hubbard’s E-meter!” Freda was appalled. Her fists tightened at her sides, and Shan-yun could hear the knuckles cracking. “It’s . . . it’s –”

  Hardened subversive that she was, covertly trained in the lore of the history of human people on and off planetary bodies, Freda could not bring herself to express such an indecency.

  Shan gritted her teeth and forced out the words Freda Odell was looking for.

  “Open. It’s open!”

  She could hardly breathe. The blue, white-splotched, hazy ceiling infinitely high above them was, she decided through her viscera-clutching panic, what the people of Earth used to call “sky”.

  Just thinking the word was enough to throw her into a tizzy.

  The insane visual distances on every side put her already blurry eyes completely out of kilter. She simply could not conceive of so much open, unroofed, unused space.

  Browns and greens and yellows and other blotches of visual stimuli lay here and there with no sense to them.

  Hsia Shan-yun was experiencing the exact opposite of the Ontological Pre-eminence of Symbol. Here and now, brute empirical reality was crashing over her sensory input systems, bypassing the usual interpretative codes and grids.

  She saw stuff she couldn’t name. In fact, she saw stuff she couldn’t, strictly speaking, even see.

  “Give it time,” she murmured desperately, trying to hold Freda vertical as the larger woman toppled toward her in a faint. “Our ancestors dealt with this. We’re just as tough. Freda, there are some people coming toward us. Freda, I think we’re going to have to be on our toes, kiddo.”

  The human people walking in their direction across the uneven dirty floor had come, Shan finally appreciated by dint of a bout of sheer intellectual effort, from the squarish slope-topped boxes a few hundred paces distant.

  Buildings, those things were. Dwellings constructed outside from dried organic tissues. Wood, that was it.

  Most of the advancing party of human people were males, and each of them looked approximately the way Hsia Shan-yun had looked before the surgeons had got to her. True, they were not two-metre-tall Valkyries, but their limbs were visibly swollen with muscle. Compared with the shuttle wimps, they could have been a different species.

  A tremendous screaming thunderous racket burst through the air.

  Shan spun on her heel, which hurt rather a lot, and what she saw took the last bit of gristle from her backbone.

  The shuttle – the sole decent, human, metal, manufactured object visible on the entire planet – was blasting off from the surface.

  Freda shrieked. The man in their group keeled over and lay face down in the dirt.

  The flame-cupped shuttle soared like an ancient god, diminished from mere human ken until it was a bright dot immensely high in the blue.

  Freda too quietly slumped to the ground and curled up like a fetus.

  “Hey, come on, snap yourselves together!”

  The strangers, by one of those incomprehensible tricks of perspective, were abruptly in their midst, pushing through the group, pulling and slapping and roughly punching the newcomers to their senses. Shan-yun stared.

  Cracked faces, seamed from exposure to the open environment. Eyes like archival holograms of animal eyes, startlingly bright in the raw sunlight.

  One of the men shook her shoulder. In disgust, she threw off his hand. He wore garments made from dried animal skins and woven vegetable fibres. Shan felt tiny creatures, real or imaginary, scuttle out of the clothes and crawl all over her own bruised skin.

  “Right, you motley crew.” The oldest of them, a man whose face was half covered by an appalling wild growth of pubic hair and whose sunburnt scalp was covered by an equally appalling huge patch of baldness, stationed himself in front of them, fists braced on hips.

  The male convict, awakened and tottering, took his first close-range look at the kind of creature he was now doomed to become, and spontaneously vomited into the dirt.

  “Clean the bastard up and get him to the med shed,” the leader snarled to a subordinate. “Now listen up, you people. I know what you’re going through, so I won’t be too hard on you straight off. We’ve all been through it. You’ll live – unless, that is, you die, which isn’t impossible.” He smirked. “We haven’t got the spare personnel or the resources to coddle you. Everything you eat, your housing, your antibiotics, your drugs, your entertainment – you’ll make them yourselves.”

  “I don’t know anything about any drugs,” one of the convicts wailed pitifully.

  “ ‘Housing’? What’s ‘housing’?” asked another, with a sob.

  “You’ll specialize, naturally,” the old man said. “What you don’t know now you’ll learn – or you’ll die.” He seemed to relish this prospect, smacking his lips. “There’s no place in this outfit for crybabies and lily-livered liberals. You’ll have to be tough – tough, and determined to survive.”

  He stared from one convict to the next, squinting in the bright light. Hsia Shan-yun felt as much like vomiting as I do. But she met his gaze when his eyes reached hers.

  He locked on to her, tried to stare her down. Shan’s pupils shrank and her whites boiled with blood. He grinned with satisfaction and pointed at her.

  “You. Round them all up and bring them across to the Great Hall when they’re ready. We have to get back to the harvesting. The Big Wet’s due any day now.”

  With a gesture to his companions he turned and started back toward the wooden buildings.

  “Just a moment,” Shan-yun said loudly. To her ears, her voice seemed attenuated, an auditory shadow of its former power. Was it the atmosphere of this world, she wondered, or yet another atrocity wrought by her doctors?

  The man paused elaborately, glanced over his muscular shoulder, narrowed his sun-dazzled eyes.

  “I take it you’re addressing me”

  “I want to know your name,” Shan yelled.

  “My name’s Anson. You can call me ‘Boss.’ We’ll talk later.” He turned away again.

  “Hold it, damn you.” Shan-yun tried to stride like a tiger toward him and managed a dwarfish totter. Even so, he stiffened, and his men moved in on either side of him. “What’s the escape plan?”

  Anson grinned sardonically, then slapped her painfully on the arm.

  “I like your style, sweetheart, even if you do lack a little something in the looks department. I think you’re going to do all right here on Paradise – if you learn some manners.”

  “The escape plan, Anson.”

  “No escape, lady. The shuttle comes here once a year. Remote control from orbit, Bug driver, nerve crunchers from New Year’s to Christmas. There’s no escape. What was that name again?”


  “Hsia Shan-yun, snotsucker.”

  He grinned, and she recoiled at the sight of his thin hard yellow gums, his missing teeth. No cosmetic dentistry on Paradise.

  “Unless you just happen to know how to plait a Striped Hole, my dear foulmouthed ex-citizen Hsia, you’re here until you die. Until you rot and we put you in the ground.”

  Shan-yun ran her tongue around the inside of her mouth. By an odd oversight the surgeons had left her all her own teeth. She bared them happily at Anson, and strolled away to round up her companions from the shuttle.

  Seasoned long-distance travellers know there is only one thing worse than waiting at the carousel for your luggage.

  This is giving up waiting at the carousel because the swine have lost it all between Djakarta and Cairo and you know you’ll never see it again.

  Hsia Shan-yun, Freda Odell and the rest of the criminals from the shuttle trudged across the vile, open face of the planet Paradise without their luggage, indeed with no possessions whatever except the tatty gowns they wore.

  “Essential supplies we can’t grow or make for ourselves are dropped in from orbit,” a bearded man told Shan, currying favor. Everyone looked at her with a whole lot more respect after her tiff with Anson. “Comes in on ’chutes, no human contact, not even an onboard monitor Bug. Absolutely no machines permitted down here on the surface.”

  Shan grunted, looking gloomily at the hairy green stuff on the ground and wishing her toes were slurping instead through the foul muck of the dear little brutal cell she’d shared with her close friend Turdington Jimbo.

  She felt like crying, but once you’ve earned a rep as the tough kid on the block you forfeit your right to a recuperative howl.

  The moment of pleasure that had burned through her veins was well behind her. Knowing how to plait a Striped Hole is one thing. Having the raw materials and the opportunity to tangle the threads one over another through ten dimensions in Kaluza-Klein spacetime is another.

  “I’m stuck here,” she muttered pitifully to herself. “I’ll never escape. I’ll be a flat-chested dwarf to the end of my days.”

  In fact, it wasn’t until another nine and a half years had dragged by, as measured on Paradise, without any further shuttle-delivered prisoners due to temporary suspension of the programme, years of power struggles and attempted rape, of chilly, snow-buried mornings and debilitating forty-five-degree centigrade summer noons, of raising high roof-beams and seeing them crushed by gales of soot, of laughter, somehow, deep and true in the face of adversity, and tears at the loss of loved companions, of getting and spending, remembering and forgetting, taking up the fight and laying down the law, that a passing galactic holiday cruise sponsored by the ladies’ auxiliary of the Gamma Globulin combined football leagues landed at the east pole of the convict world Paradise and liberated the pitiful remnants of the prison colony.

  The lady lizards’ cruise ship, half a million tonnes of squishy lanoline-soaked urdat and runny glass, lingered for an entire month at the delightful east pole, the ladies taking the waters and admiring the views. The brontomegasaurs of Gamma Globulin, being a race of excess longevity, never rush their tours.

  A party of haggard, desperate human people finally swam, rappeled, white-watered, portaged, and orienteered its frantic way to the plateau where the cruise ship Snardly Blint lay crushing a square kilometre of delicious weevilwart blooms and a few thousand small vertebrates.

  Shan-yun, of course, was among the party’s number, though on this occasion the rough frontier democratic vote had declined to select her as band leader, which was okay with her. Instead, she was point scout.

  “Hey!” she yelled, sighting the cruise ship.

  Puffs of smoke were rising from the cruiser’s stacks.

  A fearful presentiment clutched at her heart.

  A weird, ear-hurting mechanical scream was rising from the cruiser’s off-side Hyperspatial lifters.

  Dazzling beams of multihued elementary particles splattered with motes of exploding photons were rising from the cruiser’s pleasure domes.

  “Hey! You snotsuckers!” screamed Hsia Shan-yun, running and tripping under the weight of her depleted supply gunnies and handmade fire-hardened machete and bow-and-arrow set.

  The cruiser Snardly Blint lifted lightly and musically into the frighteningly pellucid sky of Paradise, streamers flying and passengers snug in their acceleration couches.

  On board, the captain and her crew played cards and started in on the long drunk that always filled the tedious weeks in Hyperspace between ports of call. None of them – tendrilled, boll-eared, infrared sensitized, locally telepathic – attended to the remote skin microphones that picked up Shan’s cries for succor.

  This is the way of it with the Bargleplod, a sentient species that has plied the star lanes for upward of seven million years without either taking control of the Milky Way in an outburst of drum-beating imperialism or wiping themselves away in nuclear squabbles.

  You’d imagine the Bargleplod would be the envy of everyone, for their relaxed insouciance has guaranteed their survival well beyond the parameters given by the late Carl Sagan’s analysis of interstellar culture. In fact, they’re too sloppy and stolid and besotted and dull for anyone sane to envy or emulate.

  Hardly surprisingly, it was a Bargleplod who left behind the autonomic mousehunter on the green sweet world Alpha Grommett once was.

  Hsia Shan-yun watched incredulously, her enraged, wind-reddened eyes bulging like peeled hard-boiled eggs, as the Bargleplod cruise ship whiffled away into the sky and vanished with an ear-shattering clamor of brute force.

  Freda, lithe as a lath, hardened by adversity, hardened indeed by a history more immediate than any she’d ever subversively programmed into the teaching machines back on Earth, pounded up, breath rasping, and fell against Shan’s side.

  “Oh, shit,” she whimpered. “They’ve gone. They’ve left us here. We’ll never get free now, never, never . . .”

  Hsia Shan-yun had been indulging exactly these sentiments, but getting it in the lughole from a friend she’d trusted to have more gristle got right up her nose.

  “Come on, Freda, it’s not the end of the world. It’s just a spaceship flying away. Where there’s one visiting alien spaceship there’s bound to be another, in a few years, a few decades. Hell, kiddo, we’ve pulled through this far, haven’t we? We’ve each got five fine kids, and the hospital’s almost finished, and if we can get the harvest in before the Big Dry we should see our way to autumn okay. I mean, it’s not as if the Sun is going out or something.”

  She slapped with by-now-automatic vigilance at her leg. The animals of Paradise are not always friendly. Anson, for example, had been badly mauled by a wet thing that dropped on his back from a tree and sucked out his brain with an awful slurping noise before anyone could get to it and bash it to death.

  Shan gave a cry then, looking down to check on what had tried to bite her.

  A small bright machine was casting back and forth, blindly through the grass.

  It was the first actual, real, metal machine they’d seen on Paradise since their prison shuttle roared away back to orbit.

  “Oh! The poor little thing’s lost.”

  “Can it be a –”

  “Hubbard’s E, Shan, I think it’s –”

  Shan-yun’s hard-boiled eyes bugged with gratitude and pleasure. She started after the cute little scuttling mechanism, brought it to the ground in one practiced pounce, and began to dismantle it.

  “An autonomic toaster!”

  Freda licked her lips. “If only we had some real sliced bread, the sort they had in the old days back on Earth, came in plastic bags, I can taste that wonderful mould now. If you don’t mind my saying, Boss, don’t you think it’d function more efficiently if you leave its legs on?”

  Shan-Yun sniggered happily.

  “Forget the bread, Freda. Don’t you see yet what this means?”

  Her quite intellectually gifted but less h
andy colleague’s jaw gaped. Blood drained from her cheeks and other places less visible.

  “You don’t mean . . .? Surely you can’t –”

  Shan beamed up at her.

  “Yup. With the quark powerpack in this lovely little guy, and a few tufts from its wiring, I’ll have a Striped Hole plaited in about three days.”

  She shot a worried look at the sky. The light was fading, but with any luck she’d have the job well started before dark.

  “Watcha got there? Hey, gang, lookit, a machine!”

  Freda held her finger to her lips, and the arriving party pushed and jostled a bit less noisily, watching the deft weaving fingers of the woman who was about to build them a Hyper-spatial wormhole pathway home to Earth and their long-delayed revenge.

  “You’re sure it won’t blow up on us?”

  “Of course I’m sure. Hold that light steady.”

  “It’d make a terrible mess.”

  Shan-yun said nothing, squinting through her scratched-out corneas at the wobbling skein of energy. She licked her lips and pushed another string into the blistered surface.

  “I mean, that’s what you were sent here for, isn’t it? Trying to blow everything up.”

  Shan blew up.

  “Listen, I’ve been working two centimetres from this singularity for five days now and my patience is just about worn right through, so if you want to walk home, you squawking, blathering, onion-breathed, interfering –”

  “All right, all right.” The felon backed away from the fire, muttering and scowling sullenly. “Just don’t blame me, tooter,” Shan-yun thought she heard him start to add, but there was nothing she could do about leaping up and boxing his ears for him because if she let go of the almost completed Striped Hole everything really might blow.

  Freda said quietly in her ear, “How long now?”

  “Dunno. Couple of minutes.”

  “I’ll get everyone formed up.”

  The children were pushed into line, thin and scrawny, in handwoven clothing that would certainly draw unfavourable attention when they suddenly materialized back inside some part of the State on Earth.