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been the property of someone shorter and more buxom. It was flimsy and musty-smelling, and she linked the mustiness with all the women she had known who had been habituated to such dresses. Her mother, musty aunts and neighbor ladies sporting hats adorned with plastic berries, looking as if they had dropped in from the 1930s. The skirt ended above her knees, the bodice hung slack, and the worn, silky material irritated her nipples.

'I must look awful,' she said, coming out of the back room, embarrassed by Donnell's stare.

He cleared his throat. 'No,' he said. 'It's fine.'

To cover her embarrassment, she pretended interest in the camellia pattern. Striations of blue showed through the white of the petals; misprintings. But they had the effect of veins showing through pale, lustrous skin. The blossoms had been rendered with exaggerated voluptuousness, each curve and convolution implying the depth and softness of flesh, as if she were gazing at the throat of a seductively beautiful animal.

* * * *

Throughout the morning and into the afternoon, they puzzled over the ledger. According to Magnusson, if the Ezawa bacterium existed in the southern hemisphere it would tend to be south-seeking, following the direction of the geomagnetic field in those regions; but it would -like its northern counterpart - migrate downward. However, if a south-seeking bacterium could be transported to the north, then it would migrate upward. It seemed evident to her that a north-seeking bacterium could be induced to become south-seeking by exposure to brief, intense pulses of a magnetic field directed opposite to the ambient field, thereby reversing the magnetic dipolar movement of the magnetosome chain. If necessary the bacterium's north-seeking orientation could be restored by a second pulse delivered anti-parallel to the first. Thus the colony could be steered back and forth between areas of stimulus and deprivation in the brain and its size controlled. Of course the engineering would be a problem, but given the accuracy of Magnusson's data, the basic scenario made sense.

The rain sprinkled intermittently, but by midafternoon the sun was beginning to break through. They walked down to the tributary in back of the cabin, a narrow serpent of lily-pad-choked water that wriggled off into the swamp. Droplets showered from the palmetto fronds when they brushed against them. The sun made everything steamy, and to escape the heat they went into the boathouse, a skeletal old ruin with half its roof missing. Spiders scuttling, beetles, empty wasp nests. The grain of the gray boards was as sharply etched as printed circuits. A single oar lay along one wall, its blade sheathed in spiderweb, and Mr Brisbeau's pirogue drifted among the lily pads at the end of a rotting rope. They sat on the edge of the planking and dangled their feet, talking idly, skirting sensitive topics. He had rarely been so open with her; he seemed happy, swinging his legs, telling her about dreams he'd had, about the new story he had begun before leaving Shadows.

'It had the same setting as the first. Purple sun, brooding forest. But I needed a castle so I invented this immense bramble, sort of a briar patch thousands of feet high growing from the side of a mountain, with the tips of the highest branches carved into turrets.' He flipped up a lily pad with the end of his cane; long green tendrils trailed from the underside, thickening into white tubules. 'I never had a chance to work out the plot.'

A tin-colored heron landed with a slosh in the lily pads about thirty feet away, took a stately step forward and stopped, one foot poised above the surface.

'You should finish it,' said Jocundra; she smiled. 'You're going to have to do something for a living.'

'Do you really think I can?' he asked. 'Survive?'

'Yes.' She flicked a chip of rotten wood onto the lily pads and watched a water strider scuttle away from the ripples. 'You were right to leave Shadows. Here there won't be so much pressure, and it'll be easier to work things out. And they can be worked out.' She hesitated.

'But what?'

'Given the ledger, everything you're seeing, everything you can do, I'm convinced a solution is possible. In fact, I'm surprised one of these geniuses at Tulane hasn't stumbled on it. If you have the data at hand, it's hardly more than a matter of common sense and engineering. But equipment and materials will be expensive. And the only way I can see of getting the money is to find a bargaining