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  He didn't know how to respond. He felt confused, bewildered . . . and more than a little scared. Prudence was right—really—this discovery could make both of their reputations, secure them fellowships with the International Archaeological Society at an unprecedentedly young age . . . But if they went to the news media prematurely, their best career prospects would be drilling into asteroids for a neo-Zen mining combine. Charlie was not a natural risk-taker; Prudence knew no other way.

  "We can't trust intuition here, Prudence. There will be no press release." He was intending to add the word "yet," but he never got the chance.

  "You brainless, chicken-livered idiot!" He half expected her to go for his throat, the way her fingers were shaping themselves into claws . . .

  "Don't be childish. This is my project and my grant—"

  "And my discovery, which you are trying to take credit for—"

  "And you will do what I tell you. Don't forget what it says in your contract."

  Prudence froze—then glared at him. In a voice vibrant with the effort of control, she told him exactly what he could do with her contract.

  It is difficult to storm out of a tent, but she managed it with something to spare.

  Finally waking up to what he'd done, Charlie swore, briefly and scatologically; then slumped into a chair and stared morosely at the sandy floor. Smart. Really smart. He thought about rushing out after her. It wouldn't do any good; he knew what Prudence was like when she'd blown her fuses. Best to wait, give her a chance to cool off. . .

  He spent half an hour feeling miserable, and twice he nearly set off in pursuit, but reason prevailed. Finally, to try to break the foul mood, he carefully lifted a tablet from the box, at random, and peeled back the layers of bubblewrap. He didn't feel like accessing his 'node, so this would have to be an informal, preliminary scan.

  In the artificial light he ran his pocket lens along the wavering rows of symbols, trying to translate them on the fly.

  He was about six sentences into the text before he consciously realized what he was looking at.

  He felt the hairs rise on the nape of his neck—legacy of ten million years of ape ancestry, a primal signal straight from the limbic brain. With exaggerated care he set the tablet back amid its plastic wrappers before his shaking hands dropped it. "Bloody hell," he muttered. "Bloody hell, bloody hell, bloody hell." Inventiveness failed him.

  He rushed from the tent shouting for Prudence, to tell her what they had found. The noise woke up his collaborators from the Cairo Museum and the entire workforce of forty-eight local men and women. But Prudence was long gone. He tried calling her wristnode, but it was locked off. By the time he traced the taxi that had taken her to the airport, her plane was crossing the Italian Alps.

  2

  Hyamwezi Condominium, 2210

  Moses had disappeared. There was nothing unusual about that, but so had a week's supply of goat cheese. Charity Odingo knew what that meant. Cursing under her breath, she set off at a run for the cheetah pens. Dried yellow mud puffed about her bare feet as she scurried through the makeshift farmyard, bright skirts flying. Hens scattered, squawking their protests. A pig raised its snout in surprise, grunted, and went back to sleep.

  She ducked under the dead thorns of a stunted acacia and swung herself past the corner of the giraffe house by grabbing the rain gutter from the roof. Twenty yards away, a small brown figure stared at her, frozen by surprise. In its hand was the missing cheese.

  "Moses!"

  Silence.

  "Moses Odingo, you stay out of that cage, you hear?" She slowed down and swept the child into her arms. The cheese flew from his hands into the dirt.

  "Nice pussycat," said Moses, grinning.

  "Yes. But keep your hands out of the nice pussycat's cage. And stop stealing cheese from the refrigerator!"

  "But the pussycat likes sheese," said Moses, as if that setded the issue.

  "No, cheese. With a 'ch.'"

  "Sheese."

  "Not quite, but better. Chuh-chuh-chuh cheese."

  "Chuh-chuh-chuh sheese."

  "Have it your own way. Just don't steal it."

  "Sheese makes the pussycat go buzz," said Moses, as if to justify the theft. Charity set him back on his feet and knelt beside him. The cheetahs loved cheese, they purred their heads off whenever they got it. As a special treat, Moses was allowed to feed a small amount to the baby once a week. Charity didn't think it was good to indulge either of them more often than that.

  "Mo, you mustn't put your hand in the cheetahs' cage. I know they seem friendly—they are friendly—but you can never be sure with wild animals. They could bite or scratch." And Mhawa could take your arm off at the shoulder in an instant.

  "Can I feed the pussycat some sheese now you're here?" asked Moses hopefully. "Please?" he added after a moment's thought. That often tilted the balance in his favor.

  "Not today." The boy's mouth turned down in a half sulk. Charity looked at the dirt-covered slab as it lay on the ground. Already the ants had discovered it. "Well, maybe later, okay?"

  "Okay," said Moses, but he still looked downcast.

  "Look, tell you what: I'm going to need some help with Zemba. You can help me take her over to the house if you want."

  A huge grin split his face. "Can I carry Zemby, Ma?"

  "Yes. Now you just wait outside while I go and get her." Charity sat him on a tree stump, unlocked the door to the service accessway, and ducked inside. The air was hot and heavy, sharp with the pungency of dried blood and stale urine.

  She loved it.

  Her wristnode's hardware link was a bit temperamental, but eventually she persuaded it to activate a movable partition and separate mother from cub. Predictably, Mbawa didn't like this much, and when Charity opened up a small trapdoor and pulled the cub out, the big cat made her dislike known half a mile away.

  "Calm down, you great furry lump—she'll be right back." The adult cheetah just snarled at her—as Charity would have done had their positions been reversed. The baby wriggled in her hands and mewed piteously "Only a moment, Zemba," she said, juggling it uncomfortably with one arm while shutting the door behind her with the other. With the cub clutching at her shoulder for balance. Charity carried the baby cheetah out into the sunlight.

  Moses was jumping up and down with excitement. "Can I carry Zemby? Please? She likes it when I carry her."

  "Yes, you can carry Zemby." With care, Charity lifted the cub from her shoulder and placed her into Moses' arms. Lacking proper claws, Zemba clung to him as if her life depended on it. It looked like a very top-heavy arrangement as the four-year-old staggered along under the weight of the fast-growing cub, like some kind of giant mobile spotted mushroom. Only six weeks earlier, Zemba had been a fuzzy ball that an adult could carry in one hand; now she was the size of a decent dog. But Moses didn't seem bothered; he cooed at the cat and stroked the long smoky fur that ran down her back.

  Charity picked up the cheese, now liberally coated with sand and ants. She could salvage a lot of it, and Moses could feed the rest to Zemba. As they walked toward the house, she shook the ants off and brushed away most of the dirt.

  Tucked between two ancient acacias, it was a simple house, corrugated recycled plastic nailed to a timber framework, roofed with slate-colored solar cell arrays. A faded sign nailed to the door said, gooma zoodiversity facility. The furniture was sparse, and all of it was old—some bought in the local market, some trucked in from Dar es Salaam. From the front window she could just see Lake Eyasi; from the back, the teeming plains of the Serengeti and the distant crater of Ngorongoro. Not far away was the Olduvai Gorge, one of the best-known sources of fossil hominids. Charity felt as if she was at the center of the universe.

  Naturally, she thought. The horizon is equally Jar in every direction. Charity considered herself a realest. But it was a dramatic location. A hundred and fifty miles northwest was Lake Victoria, and a hundred and twenty-five miles to the north, a short hop across what used to be
the border into Kenya, was Nairobi. The Swahili name for the land was still Jamhuri ya Muungano wa Tanzania—but its English version, the United Republic of Tanzania, was no longer in use. In 2270, what used to be Tanzania and Kenya had become the Nyamwezi Condominium.

  "Okay, Mo, put Zemby down on the table." With difficulty the boy separated himself from the fur-covered jumble of what appeared to be rubber springs, and sat the cub down. She looked nervous, but relaxed when Moses scratched her head. He had an instinctive rapport with animals—always had, even before he could crawl or talk. Sometimes Charity found his empathy with the animal kingdom uncanny. Mosquitoes never bit him, bees never stung him . . . and normally shy birds would sit and sing to him if no one else was nearby.

  A pity that he was so hopeless when it came to people. He could become moody and withdrawn for no apparent reason. He was a strange child, and she loved him desperately His father had died before he was born—she never talked about it, tried never to think about it. . . Moses and her sister were all the family she had.

  Charity cut off the outside of the cheese and handed it over to her son. "Give her this to keep her happy. No, that's too big, Mo: one little piece at a time, okay? That's better." Zemba began to purr. Moses grinned and fed the cat another bit of sandy goat cheese.

  Charity opened her instrument case and pulled out a small bulbous unit with a stocky handle. Moses recognized it as a razor. Ma was going to shave off a tiny piece of Zemby's fur, so that she could be tattooed. It wouldn't hurt.

  "You've seen this before, Moses. Can you remember why I'm doing it?"

  Moses nodded, looking very serious now. "So's we can find out where she goes when we set her free."

  I may just he a foolish proud mother. Charity thought, hut Moses is very quick to rememher the things that interest him. "That's right!" she said, in the overenthusiastic manner that parents of small children use for positive reinforcement. "That's very clever of you, Moses!" The buzz from the razor merged with the purr from the cheetah cub. Expertly Charity bared a rectangular patch of skin an inch or so across.

  At that moment her wristnode indicated an urgent incoming call. She put the razor down. "Hello?"

  There was a split second's hesitation. Then, voice-only: "Chatty? That you? It's your big sister. Hope I'm not interrupting anything, but I've only got a few minutes to make this call."

  "Pru?" Big sister, indeed. It was a family joke, though one that had long ago worn thin. Prudence Odingo outranked her twin by all of two minutes.

  Charity rummaged in a cupboard. "I'm in the middle of getting a new cheetah cub registered, Pru."

  "Carry on, I can talk while you work. Reason I called is, I'll be landing shortly at Kisangani and I thought I'd drop by and see you. How's young Moses? I can't wait to see him at last. How old is he now?"

  "Four. He's fine, feeding cheese to Zemba. Oh, you won't know, that's the new baby cheetah, she's absolutely adorable, and a total pest as you'd expect. Like Moses. Mo, it's your auntie Pru." Moses perked up. He had never seen Prudence, but some of his friends had aunties, and when they visited, they always brought presents. "Kisangani? You can get a shuttle to Nairobi and Moses and I'll pick you up from the airport. Pru, I can't believe this, it's been absolutely ages. Where are you right now?"

  "Can't you tell?"

  "How could I— Oh, wait a moment. I noticed you were a bit slow responding, but I thought you were just tired, or maybe one of the relay nodes was slow." Charity clipped the handle onto the tattoo unit, placed it on the shaven patch on Zemba's side to be sure it would fit. "It's communication lag, isn't it?"

  "Zero point four seconds and falling even as we speak. Tiglath-Pileser is one hundred and twenty kilomiles from orbital insertion, and my crew are preparing an OWL for touchdown at the Kisangani spaceport in the early hours of tomorrow morning."

  Prudence was a businesswoman; she owned an old but very well equipped deep-space cruiser. Charity had always wondered how her impulsive sister had acquired anything so expensive. A night landing? That was unusual . . . Belatedly Charity remembered her sister's line of business. "Did you have a successful trip?" she said carefully.

  "Mmm, so-so."

  How to say this? It's an open channel. "Any—er—problems? Need any help when you land? Specialist independent advice?"

  Prudence laughed. "No need to call the lawyers, sis—the police aren't hot on my tail this time. I'm a legitimate entrepre-neuse, if that's the word. Speaking of which, this call is costing a small fortune. Pick me up at Nairobi National, not Intercontinental, at"—the carrier wave hummed on its own for a few seconds while Prudence diverted to the travelpage—"twelve-forty local time tomorrow. Love to Moses, see ya. Bye."

  "Bye, Pru." Charity looked down at her wrist. "Phone off." The subminiature computer/com.municator's neural net searched for a few picoseconds, recognized the command, looked it up in its master table, and put its eXtraNet link into standby mode.

  "Is Auntie Pru coming to stay with us, Ma?"

  "For a little while, Mo. Tomorrow." Charity thought she was looking forward to it. Well, she knew she was; that is, she knew she was mostly looking forward to seeing Prudence. Her only reservation was that Prudence was synonymous with trouble— take the last time she'd turned up. But to be fair, the police had been overzealous, it hadn't actually been Prudence's fault. And the lawyers did straighten it all out, and Tiglath-Pileser hadn't been forfeited after all. But it had cost Prudence most of the profi—

  "Is she going to bring a present?"

  Moses jerked her attention back to reality. "Uh, yes, I'm sure Auntie Pru will bring you something nice." Nuts. It'll he something totally unsuitable, if I know my sister.

  Zemba wriggled, but Charity got a good grip on her neck while Moses popped the final lump of cheese into the animal's mouth. Making sure she was holding the tattoo unit in the right position for the wristnode's infrared beam, she spoke more commands. "New database entry. Name: Zemba. Sex: female. ERO code: g-z-f-slash-chee-slash-f-slash whatever the next free number is. Parentage: merge from Mbawa's file, you know which. Statistics and health record: merge from zemba-slash-stats. Moses, you do know what I was doing, don't you?"

  The boy nodded solemnly; he'd observed the procedure before. The most recent time had been the piglets, but before that there had been a goat, a zebra, some young giraffes . . .oh, yes, and the snakes. Hundreds of snakes; that had been real fun. Of course, you don't shave snakes. "Uploading Zemby's stats. Ma."

  Charity nodded in encouragement. "And why are we doing that?"

  The child pursed his lips in thought. " 'Cos then Zemby goes into the register." Charity smiled her encouragement, but he could see she wanted more. "And then she gets set alight protection."

  "Satellite."

  "Uh— sat alight."

  It'll do. "Good boy!" Charity pressed the bulb of the tattoo unit to the cub's shaven flank and squeezed the handle. In an instant the device made a tiny slit in a fold of skin, impressed a transponder circuit into the animal's flesh using indelible metallic ink, implanted fine wires to pick up tiny but adequate electrical power from the cub's own electrolytes, and glued the sht together again. Zemba, her tiny horizons more than occupied by Moses and goat cheese, didn't even notice.

  "Tested and working," said the wristnode. From now on, the satellite network of the Ecotopian Register of Organisms would monitor Zemba's health and track her every move via its interface with an extensive but still incomplete network of dedicated ground-based nodes. On this occasion, mother and baby would be released back into the wild immediately. Through the Xnet, and the survsats that the Ecotopian authorities had finally started launching, the Diversity Police would do their best to guard them against illegal poachers, hunters, souvenir manufacturers, and purveyors of folk remedies.

  Not that there were many of those anymore—but the few that still operated were tough, mean, and very well organized.

  In the old university town of Coventry, on a medium-sized island just off the e
dge of continental Europe, it was getting ready to rain. You could tell, because slatted covers made from recycled plastic were unrolling to protect the unstable material of the ancient brickwork. Nursing a glass of brandy, Bailey Bar-num lounged on a couch watching reruns of his hrst vidivid series, Rose Red Cities. He hadn't been born a Barnum, it was a professional pseudonym: "Ironbottom" hadn't been vidivisual enough. Jonas Kempe and Cashew Tintoretto, the other two members of his production team, conversed quietly in a corner.

  "Call for you, Mr. Barnum," said a sexy female voice. His wristnode had woken up.

  "If it's a fan, promise the usual package and disconnect. I'm busy."

  "The caller is Ruth Bowser, your agent."

  Bailey rolled lazily upright. "Accept. Oh, Ruthie, hi. Wonderful to hear—" He fell silent. "Hmmm. Yeah, sure, I get the picture. Okay, so you come up with a new idea you're the— Do I whatl Did I really sign thatl Why didn't you protect— Oh, you mean it's in my agreement with you. Okay, okay, you don't need to rub it in. I'll get the team on to it straightaway. Call you back." He canceled the connection.

  Jonas and Cashew had stopped talking and were staring at him.

  "Okay, no need to look like a flatworm's swallowed your socks. The Lumleys on Ends of the Earth are down a little. Nothing to worry about." Without warning he hurled the glass against the nearest wall. It bounced and dropped to the floor intact. But there was a dent in the wall and the wallpaper was splashed. "Shitr Tears welled into his eyes.

  Cashew sat down beside him and took his hand. "They're down more than a little, then."

  "Falling like a barometer in a frigging hurricane. Not even in the top hundred. My god, six years I've been in this business and never been out of the top fifty." He didn't have to point out that there was more to it than just a few figures. Production costs for Ends of the Earth had been astronomical, and their cash flow was very sensitive to the Lumley ratings. "Nobody's interested in this planet's unexplored regions anymore."