WOULDN’T IT BE GOOD, Skiddle, to be up there?

There was a sunflash in the white sky as John walked out from the church, a hint of blue. At last the bushes were dripping and the ground was softening. Soon, no matter what the machines did, the whole of Hemhill would be a quagmire. But it was to be welcomed, even if this thaw was too frail and early to be called spring.

Annie had come to the funeral with her husband and baby Harry, who mewed and chuckled all the way through the service, trying to squirm from her arms. Coming out afterward into the churchyard, she took Harry over to John’s father. The baby laughed at the old man’s face and grabbed his knobbly, arthritic fingers. John smiled, watching them and the other people who milled by. Their silver eyes averted, they muttered thanks for the words he’d said at the service. His address had been short and unrehearsed. Even now he couldn’t remember exactly what he’d said—just that Hal had been his brother, that he’d loved him, and that the time had come, not to give up but to let go.

Letting go…There was, it seemed to him now, as he looked up at the clearing, shifting air, a difference. And the moment of prayer he’d entered into as he sat at the back of the church; that had been unplanned too, unthinking. With his head bowed and the smell of the old beams and the flowers, with the waiting silence of the people in their best clothes and slush-sodden shoes surrounding him, he’d just prayed that there would be no more death for a while. And for once, now that he had almost given up hoping, the whiteness and the silence seemed to brighten, and a warmth gathered at his back. It might have been only his scar, but it felt like something more.

Letting go…

“I thought you’d like to see this,” Eliot Farrar said, calling him at home on the net a few days later. “Come around to Southlands this afternoon and take a look. I have a bigger screen.”

So John drove out in his father’s car, seeing the patches of brownish green, which were starting to appear around the village and above the valley, reflected in the flooded fields with the pale blue sky. At Southlands, Farrar took him into an office that was like Laurie’s in the Zone: one entire wall filled with screen.

“Any news,” John asked, “about the—foreign analgesic?”

“Relax, sit down.”

Farrar paged through the Halcycon logo. The room blackened, until suddenly they were looking down at the tumbling streets of the Endless City agleam with grayish snow, patched with fires, smudged with smoke. John searched for the broad stripe of Gran Vía, for Santa Cristina’s stubby tower, and sniffed for the kelpbeds on the wind, but the view was already shifting as the veetol they were in rose and turned and the heat from the fanjets made everything shimmer. The rooftops shrank and blurred, turning to scatters and a few jagged stretches of brown, then to ice-dusted desert and the fuzzy lights of the phosphate mines.

The Northern Mountains began to loom, white and truly majestic at this time of year, and before the veetol entered the wide upward sweep of a valley, John glimpsed a walled settlement that could only be Tiir. The village of Lall soon lay below amid the snow, caught in a spiderweb of trails and footpaths. Figures came running out as the veetol turned in to land. When the engines stilled, the roar of the wind strengthened, and with it came a bitter chill, the tinkling of bells as sheep stirred in their winter pens, the barking of dogs, the smell of burning dung, and humanity.

Even through the net, and although the villagers were wrapped in furs against the cold, John recognized the faces of many. They were smiling at the veetol’s arrival as they had smiled at him, speaking a softly accented gunahana. They watched as the machines the Europeans had brought with them scurried in and out of the drifts beyond the village, clearing ice and snow, erecting the domed and tunneled buildings where these gloved and hooded Outers would stay for the next few seasons. John listened to the explanations and negotiations that night in the main hut’s dingy firelight, and struggled, even as these Halcycon specialists with their barking translats struggled, to make sense of what was said. But there was no hostility, and no real surprise—word must have gone ahead. These villagers knew the prospect of aid and money when they saw it.

So, John reflected, Laurie had been right: this had all ended with veetols landing in Lall, even if they’d come to study rather than destroy. But the hills would be penned with shockwire to keep out the wild animals and sheep, and little of the koiyl crop would find its way down to the markets for Kassi Moss or anyone else to buy. And the veetols would be back next year to put right the things that they were bound to get wrong in this initial study. Perhaps they might even have the sense to bring a human interpreter with them. The people of Lall would become used to the cassan and the screens and new jelt roofs and generators, and they would be envied and ostracized by the other growers and traders. Within a few years, there would be nothing left of Lall but the machine-guarded stump of some Halcycon project beside the abandoned village, a place to be stumbled on and puzzled over in the future, just as John had puzzled over Kushiel. But the Borderers who lived in the village would at least have time to make new lives, to change and readjust. Borderers always changed and readjusted.

Driving back through the darkness from Southlands to Hemhill, John wondered how much of this had been inevitable since that day he arrived at Lall with Laurie and Hettie. Was there any way he could have made contact with these people without destroying their lives? He hadn’t thought that the Halcycon-financed study would settle on Lall as a base—Lall was, after all, inaccessible and radioactively polluted—but the specialists had been too wrapped up in clinical questions to consider whether there might not be a better site. John knew Lall would be changed and eventually destroyed when someone in a meeting joked about how convenient it was that the foreign analgesic came ready-tagged with an isotope for tracking its progress through the bodies of the experimental subjects.

When John got home, he found his father sitting in the lounge smoking a tube, smiling, and close to tears as he listened to one of his favorite slow movements. That was almost always the case now. Nor was it unusual for the old man to have a screen on his lap, but this evening he wasn’t using it to change some aspect of the music. He seemed oddly relaxed, his shoulders less hunched. He seemed almost jolly.

“Will you look at this?” he said, holding up the screen and prodding it. John leaned over. He heard the screech of gulls, smelled salt, and saw sunlight and bobbing boats: the harbor-front dwellings of Ley. “You know that cottage with the yellow windows that we always walked past on our way to the harbor? There was a stepped alley…”

John nodded, remembering the sway in his hands of the buckets and spades, the warm breeze sweeping up from the glittering bay. The sound of Hal’s voice as they walked together. Did you know, Skiddle? Just think…The sense of the whole day and nothing but sea and sunlight and laughter ahead.

“Well, it’s come up for sale.” John’s father looked up at him, his face happy, uncertain, eager. “And I was thinking. I was thinking that…”