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to property prices…
    The
soldiers skirted the edge of the great lake, moving through the dark landscape
to where, in the distance, the little town’s lights sparkled in welcome.
     
     
     

Chapter 3
     
     
    Gunnar
strolled on at a gentle pace through the landscape. The grass, wet from a
recent downpour, soaked the bottoms of his trousers unheeded. The pack on his
back had long since stopped chafing his shoulders and he felt a sense of
buoyancy which had been welling up in him for days. The feeling was indeed so
unfamiliar that it had taken him a while to realise that the strange fluttering
in his chest wasn’t an incipient heart condition. Gunnar realised with
astonishment that he was, in fact, happy.
    Dwellers
in asteroid colonies were kept on a very tight leash of mood suppressing drugs.
Among other humans they gained in consequence the reputation of being laconic
and low-key. They in turn tended to find visitors rather unstable and even
borderline hysterical. Here on this alien world, far from the shafts, tunnels
and caverns of his birth, Gunnar was feeling so free that he expected at any
moment that his feet would lose their connection with the ground and that he
would simply float away into the cavernous blue shot with fluffs of white so
far above him.
    Once
he had experienced a lightshow in the main cavern of the asteroid he had been
born in, he must have been about five years old and had been taken to a special
evening’s entertainment by one of his mothers and two of his fathers. The rest
of the communal family had elected to stay away, and looking up at the
reactions of his fathers to the show he had wondered why they had come
themselves. In fact, when he had looked around at the rest of the sparse
audience, it had been clear that most people had found something else to do
with their off shift, and the few who were there looked bored, uncomfortable,
or actually irritated.
    Quite
simply, the show had been a projection onto the high smooth rock ceiling of a
series of planetary skyscapes: scudding clouds of various hues from the
different inhabited planets throughout the human diaspora. All the strange and
beautiful sunsets and moonrises that three centuries of spacefaring had brought
to mankind’s wondering eyes, right back to dust spectres on Mars and sulphuric
monsoons on Venus. There was even a special section on the blue sky of old
Earth with its billowing clouds of water vapour. Gunnar had been utterly
spellbound.
    Looking
up at the ceiling he had glanced at his mother’s face, and had been transfixed;
she was by far his prettiest mother, though that wasn’t supposed to matter, and
she was his favourite, though you weren’t supposed to have favourites. Now as
she stood there, the blue light caused her to look ethereal, like a tunnel
fairy. She had a rapt expression on her face, and then he noticed droplets of
water running down her cheeks and even down her neck and over her delicate
collar bones and into her clothing. He wondered if the droplets came in some
way from the images of the clouds of water vapour, not having ever seen a human
being cry before.
    The
two fathers broke the spell by an exchange of bored looks and some impatient,
dismissive joke. But before she turned a bright mask to them, his mother had
turned her face to his and they had shared a look of deep profundity. It was
the only time they were ever to be so close. Back in their quarters she
affected to agree with the fathers that the show had been a waste of time.
Gunnar had never forgiven her the betrayal. In fact, the moment in the cavern
was to be the only time during his whole life in the asteroids when he had felt
truly touched by another human. As he grew older, he joined various clusters,
but they never worked out for him, and he had always moved on, spending
increasingly long periods on his own. Throughout it all, he had never doubted
even for a moment that he would end up under a sky like the one he had seen in
the show. Yet