The Thousand Earths

by Stephen Baxter

Genres: Time Travel; Space Exploration

Synopsis

In 2145AD John Hackett's adventure is just beginning.

In Year 30, Mela's story is coming to a close.

Hackett, in his trusty ship the Perseus, is not just a space traveller - beginning his travels with an expedition to Neptune and back - but, thanks to the time-dilation effect, a time traveller as well. His new mission will take him to Andromeda, to get a close-up look at the constellation which will eventually crash into the Milky Way, and give humanity a heads-up about the challenges which are coming.

A mission which will take him five million years to complete.

Not only is Hackett exploring unknown space, but he will return to a vastly different time.

Mela's world is coming to an end. Erosion is eating away at the edges of every landmass - first at a rate of ten metres a year, but fast accelerating, displacing people and animals as the rising Tide destroys everything in its path. Putting more and more pressure on the people - and resources - which remain.

She and her people have always known that this long-predicted end to their home, one of the Thousand Earths, is coming - but that makes their fight to survive, to protect each other, no less desperate . . . and no less doomed.

A beautiful, page-turning story which interweaves the tale of these two characters, separated by both space and time, in a hopeful exploration of humanities' future, this is Stephen Baxter at his best.

Release date: September 29, 2022

Publisher: Orion

Print pages: 400

Sample

It began with an ending.

It ended with a beginning.

Denise Libby had come all the way out to Jupiter, from Earth, to interview her ex-husband, John Hackett.

Now, alone in a tiny, automated shuttle, Denise Libby barely felt the push, barely heard the hiss of the steam-rocket engines as the craft lifted her from the surface of Callisto, moon of Jupiter. She said: ‘Hull to transparent.’

The cabin stayed opaque. Like a wall of dumb steel.

She’d been told that this was standard: local rules. Only long-term residents, the local police, emergency workers and other privileged folk were to be entrusted with the giddying sight of an ascent from, or descent to, any of Jupiter’s inhabited moons. Just too vertiginous a sight for a novice, so the rule went. Or, more likely, the burgeoning conflict between Earth and its Jovian colonies mandated secrecy on all sides. Weapons platforms to be glimpsed, perhaps. Even mining operations not authorised by Earth …

Bah. She tried anyhow.

‘Hull to transparent,’ she said again.

John wasn’t even here for Jupiter, or Callisto, or interplanetary politics. Not directly. John would soon be heading out of this rich planetary system, with a crew of similarly minded suicidal idiots, on a one-way mission to the Andromeda galaxy. Hell of a thing, a round trip of five million light-years – and five million years one-way into the future.

And here she was being nursemaided by this dumb little toy ship.

‘Hull to transparent, damn it. Hull to transparent. Hull to—’

The hull turned transparent.

Now she seemed to be floating in a kind of outline of a craft, a box of slim but robust-looking girders holding together the bulky globe of a fusion engine, and fat propellant tanks. Other anonymous installations that were presumably the elements of the life-support system that kept her alive. All of this in a frame suspended in empty space.

And there, far below, was Callisto, a brownish sphere only dimly lit by the distant Sun. During the transit from Earth – a hundred days of continuous fusion-rocket thrust – there had been little for her to see or do. A journey spent in a kind of grim silence, without external comms. For, in a Solar System poised, it seemed, for war, such ships ran silent in the interplanetary night.

Now, though, at last, here was Callisto itself, suspended beneath her. The furthest out of Jupiter’s four largest moons – larger than Earth’s Moon – and covered by craters, it looked to Denise like a huge ball of glass peppered with gunshot impacts. In fact, she knew, this moon’s surface was very ancient, some of those scars tremendously old. But the geology was quite unlike the superficially similar impact scarring of Earth’s Moon, for this remote world was more than half water ice by mass. The craters were frozen splashes.

And that was why the governments of Earth had come here, bypassing the rogue, fractious, noisy, independent settlements in the asteroid belt. For water. Water to sustain human lives in habitats, water for fusion fuel for spacecraft, water not controlled by the monopolistic rock rats in the belt, water for rapidly advancing industry.

Industry that had already supported the construction of humanity’s first crewed starship.

Which brought her focus back to the task in hand. Not that she could see anything yet of John or his craft, the Perseus, right now. She turned around, peering through the transparent hull, trying to orient herself by the tremendous cosmic entities arrayed around her: the Sun, Callisto, the brilliant sparks that were more of Jupiter’s moons … But where the hell was Jupiter itself?

At last, as she twisted around, she saw a fine crescent cradling a disc of darkness. A thin line, just a bow of ruddy light, the outer edge faintly diffuse against the deeper dark beyond.

But the inner edge was quite sharp. Technological. An artefact.

And suddenly it all came into focus. ‘Oh. I get it, Hackett. I can’t see Jupiter because your damn ship is so big it eclipses Jupiter. Almost.’

‘Perseus to Callisto shuttle.’ John’s smooth voice, sounding in the air.

‘You show-off bastard. It must have taken some navigation to set that stunt up. You might have warned me.’

‘Would you have listened? That would have been a first. I have you locked on to my docking system. Just sit tight, I’ll bring you in. And don’t go pressing any buttons.’

‘There aren’t any buttons—’

‘Our dark energy ramscoop is somewhat fragile. Mint tea – still your choice?’

It hadn’t been for years, even before the break-up. Even before the death of Sarah, their niece, the event which had ultimately driven that break-up. But it wasn’t a moment for scoring points, she knew. ‘Mint tea,’ she said calmly.

And, little by little, the cloud banks of Jupiter slipped out from behind the tremendous scoop-sail. King of the planets, eclipsed by a human artefact.

‘See you soon,’ said Hackett.

The smart shuttle had no trouble finding its way past the ramscoop sail, or rather through it. Close to, it turned out to be a kind of mesh of sparse threads, making an array of gaping holes, each a neat hexagon.

But, as the shuttle neared the structure, from Denise’s point of view it opened out into a wall across the sky. A wall, she reminded herself, against which fifteen planets the size of Earth could have been set in a row, and still leave room at the margins. And at each intersection of the thread mesh she saw technology, glittering knots, evidently complex.

‘I’m guessing I’m seeing the dark energy access stations,’ she murmured, as one of those great hexagonal gaps opened up around her.

‘Not all active yet,’ John called back. ‘We are still testing the sail, the integrity of the structure, the smart feedback and control mechanisms. I say we – everybody else has gone under already.’

‘The other six of the Andromeda seven. All in their float tanks?’

‘Where I will be joining them soon. To sleep through five gravities’ thrust for twelve years – or two and a half million years as the outside world will have it, thanks to relativity, as we approach the speed of light. All the way to the Andromeda galaxy.

‘As for me, there are final checks to be done as we ramp up to full operating thrust. At each node of the scoop we have a kind of particle accelerator, which sends a particular form of neutrino, called a sterile neutrino, into the higher-dimensional bulk in which our universe floats – floats, like a membrane in water. That’s where dark energy comes from. Our universe, our membrane, is expanding, like a balloon, because of mysterious currents in that strange higher ocean, so to speak. Which we can now tap, as an inexhaustible source of propellant if you will …’

He was speaking in tidy, pre-digested paragraphs. The ones given to many press and government briefings before, no doubt.

‘John, have you really forgotten that I know all this? I worked with you when you were developing the proposal, you and your backers. Remember? I had to help you pitch it so it sounded like a technology for a long-range science mission—’

‘And they don’t come much longer-range than the Andromeda galaxy—’

‘And not just as a demonstrator for a fancy new technology that gets Earth away from depending on the rock rats back in the asteroids. No fusion engine, so no need for the rock rats’ precious water. And so much for their resource monopoly. Interplanetary politics, right?’

‘It’s to be regretted. We do what we can in the times we live in … You should be through the scoop by now.’

It had been a while since she had looked out. She saw he was right. She had passed through that immense array, and now found herself floating in a kind of heaven of threads and nets, all softly illuminated by the distant Sun – and by the still dimmer light of Jupiter itself, that broad face with its sombre, churning bands of cloud. In a sense she was inside the distributed structure of the ship itself.

‘Can you see the habitat modules?’

She followed the threads; there had to be millions of them, but all the lines converged on a distant knot of technology. She touched a screen, pulled an image into the air, and magnified it. It was a blunt square, four rod-like modules fixed at their corners.

‘I see you. Bring me in, John …’

‘Welcome to the Perseus.’

He was wearing a vivid green jumpsuit, soft slippers. A UN logo on his breast.

They embraced, stiffly.

Then they drifted weightless through the ship, side by side.

The modules he ushered her through, floating in zero gravity, were the usual glistening space tech. Every square centimetre of every wall panel was smart, including those of the widely separated cabins within which John’s six crewmates were already sleeping the dreamless artificial sleep of induced hibernation. She was struck by the general use of green and blue tones within the craft – gentle, Earthlike. Aside from that she could have been in any of the space facilities she had visited before, from near-Earth orbit to the Moon, the asteroids – and now to here, Jupiter with its huge water-rich moons, where, everyone agreed, the battle to decide the course of the next few human centuries was likely to be fought.

John was much more interesting than such planetary-scale abstractions, more interesting than interplanetary war. People always were. He would have been interesting to Denise even if he hadn’t been part of the first crew to Neptune, outermost of the planets. Even if this man hadn’t once been her husband.

She said, ‘You shaved your head again.’

‘Depilation as usual, facing the long sleep. Losing the eyebrows was worse. And down below—’

‘You put on weight—’

‘As us hibernators always do in advance. Of course, you’re recording all this, images and sound? Hence the obvious questions?’

‘Of course.’

He shrugged. ‘I’m sorry there’s so little to see. In fact there won’t be much for two and a half million years, until Andromeda is off our starboard bow.’

She admitted it. That line thrilled her.

She let him guide her to a refectory, where, yes, mint tea had already been poured into zero-gravity lidded cups. They sat at a table, astronaut style, with their legs wrapped around bars under the seats to hold them steady. He was fifty years old now, two years older than Denise. He was tall, lean, comfortable in his body, trained for the mission. Never handsome, she thought, but striking – especially with that shaven head. Friendly, though, his expression always open.

‘You have questions,’ he said calmly. ‘Personal and otherwise, I should imagine.’

‘All on the record,’ she replied, equally calmly.

‘Fire away.’

‘OK, then. What’s the true purpose of this mission, John? In your view. You can be honest now; it’s not going to get canned, from this point. And why so eager to do this now? Is it to demonstrate Earth’s technological superiority, before the interplanetary cold war between the Vesta League and the UN gets hot?’

He looked abstracted, considering his answer. ‘Cold War. You’re referring to terrestrial conflicts, and the analogy is inexact. When was the – the nuclear war that never quite happened – two centuries back? Actually our current tensions look back to much older models of political control, older sources of power.’

‘You’re talking about the water.’

‘Of course. You know the argument. Water is essential to sustain life, and industry of various kinds. Earth is rich in water. Whereas there is – was – little water in near-Earth space. A few cold traps on the Moon, and in the near-Earth asteroids, scrapings that could have kept terrestrial-scale industry going for a few days, no more. The rock rats, seeking some kind of commercial monopoly, scavenge water-rich asteroids – in all, the asteroids hold about a fifth as much as in Earth’s oceans. But it’s expensive to extract and ship – and Earth has slapped an environmental protection order on most of the water-rich bodies, citing possible biological traces. And away from that, and with Mars controlled by Earth, there was nowhere for the rock rats to expand. Not inwards, anyhow.’

‘And you wouldn’t go colonise an asteroid if you weren’t interested in expanding further such as before in the aridity.’

‘Correct. They had to move out, really. Because Earth was running a water empire, by then. This is what I mean by older forms of polities. The current regime is like some of the early empires on Earth, in the aridity of the Near East of Eurasia. Control somebody’s water, which was needed for irrigation back then, and you control their very existence. And thus Earth has been controlling water supplies in space. So, to expand, the rock rats looked to Jupiter, where the big Galilean moons have water to spare—’

‘Only for Earth, the UN, to dash out and claim it all for themselves.’

‘Correct. A region of space with the water resources to support billions in comfort. Some estimate trillions, actually. And you have Jupiter itself, that huge atmosphere to mine. Jupiter is the future of this Solar System—’

‘And the water empire has pre-emptively grabbed it all. But not securely.’

He grinned, nodded, his bare head shining in the harsh artificial light. ‘The rock rats are firmly entrenched in the asteroids, and are good at this space stuff. They do have an opportunity, for the next decade or two, to fight back against this land grab. But nobody is fighting yet,’ he said. ‘Thankfully.’

She sipped her mint tea. It was fine, just not what she would have chosen. ‘But we are facing off. Just as the Americans and Russians faced each other in the Cold War, then.’

‘In the end, they pulled back from global conflict. I guess because there were enough wise heads on either side who could see what the consequences might be if they went ahead. An interplanetary war today would be hugely damaging too. Everything in space is so … fragile. Throw a big rock at a space habitat and it bursts like a soap bubble. Throw a big rock at Earth – and the rock rats could do that with the same technology we developed to push rocks away from the Earth – and—’

‘Mass extinction,’ she said.

‘Right. I do believe this is a war the UN has to win. But without fighting.’

She had heard these arguments before, but this was being played up for the recording. ‘The water empire should win? Aren’t they the bad guys, squashing the heroic little pioneer rock rats?’

‘No. Because even if we don’t exterminate ourselves in the process, we know that unregulated expansion has to falter, somewhere. Exponential growth just goes on and on, erasing everything, every accessible resource. The planets, the moons, the comets – it could all be gone in just a few millennia. And then where are you?’ He shook his head. ‘We can’t just grow. We need regulation, like it or not. And the UN’s water empire is in a position to regulate – in our time, anyhow.’

She studied him. ‘And this,’ she waved a hand, ‘is your response. A … cultural response to the new Cold War?’

‘If you like. A demonstration of a higher purpose. Showing that we can do more than fight each other.’

‘Why go so far as Andromeda, though?’

He spread his fingers on the table top between them. Even the backs of his hands had been depilated, she saw, in advance of his coldsleep.

He said, ‘Because it’s as far as we can go. Because we will be reporting back from places nobody has visited before. Because we will return, even if only on the longest of timescales, with some truly startling science. Our own Galaxy seen from the outside. A close-up look at Andromeda. You know that in five billion years or so the Milky Way and Andromeda are going to collide? What an event that will be – and it shapes every future you can conceive of. The earlier we can get a good handle on that, the better.’

She had to smile. ‘You are thinking big, aren’t you?’

‘Well, in the nineteen-sixties President Kennedy set his nation just as tough a challenge, in context: to reach the Moon in a decade. Now Secretary-General Bandanaik has set an equivalent goal: to reach out to Andromeda.’

She nodded. ‘The parallels are obvious. Project Apollo then, Project Perseus now … Why Perseus, by the way?’

‘Well, in myth he was the son of Zeus, king of the Greek gods. A real pre-Hercules hero. And among other stunts he rescued Andromeda from Cetus, the sea monster. Ask me about the relevance of that bit of myth when we get back.’

‘In five million years …’ She looked him in the eye. ‘We used to be married. I still don’t know you. Whatever the logic of the mission itself, why you? Why must you go? You were the first to Neptune. Isn’t that enough?’

‘When you’ve gone to the edge of the Solar System, driving a freighter to Callisto just doesn’t cut it.’

‘You know, and I know, there’s more to it than that.’

He looked away, as if searching for the right words. Or avoiding them. ‘You’re going to ask me about Sarah? On the record?’

‘I have to, John. Because if you don’t talk about it now, nobody will ever understand you, and why you are doing this.’

‘Even if it has nothing to do with my determination to see through the mission?

‘Even if that were true, and most people wouldn’t believe it anyhow.’

He looked down, at fingers nested around his own cup, on the table. ‘You want me to summarise the event? For the sake of your piece. In my own words?’

The event. ‘No, John,’ she said softly. ‘Just tell me how you feel.’

And, she was sure, they both knew what she meant.

Sarah had been their niece, daughter of Denise’s sister, her only sibling.

John had no siblings. And he had grown up sterile, thanks to a gene-warfare attack on London when he was a boy. So Sarah was precious to the whole extended family – and had always seemed particularly so to John, otherwise introverted, emotionally undeveloped. Or so even his wife, Denise, found him.

The accident that killed Sarah had been a freak.

They had been holidaying in the national forest that, in the twenty-second century, much of northern England had become. One evening, while the evening meal was being prepared, Sarah, six years old, wandered off, alone.

And the ground had given way under her, as simple as that. She fell deep, and then lay, stunned, in a puddle of groundwater, deep enough to drown her before she woke.

It was a sinkhole, the geologists decided at length. A freak, caused by groundwater slowly dissolving a layer of gypsum in the bedrock, creating a kind of hidden underground cavity – a cavity whose roof eventually gave way.

This was ten years before. It seemed to Denise that John had never recovered. She said so now.

He shrugged. ‘Recovery is an inappropriate concept—’

‘You speak about yourself in the third person when you talk of such things. No, not even that – you talk of incidents, feelings, as if they were external to you entirely. As if you were describing a faulty engine component.’

He looked surprised at that. ‘Well, I am an engineer, at bottom. Engineer and scientist. I … it was the sheer randomness of it.’

‘That made it hurt more?’

‘I looked it up. You know this … for the record. The sinkhole. It turns out to have been a phenomenon of deep time. That gypsum layer was a relic of a drying sea that existed back when the area was at the heart of a supercontinent, called Pangaea. This was maybe a quarter of a billion years ago, or more. All that time, you see, and that bit of ground could have given way at any time, any of those ten thousand trillion seconds – but it just had to happen in the one second Sarah was walking over it, over that primeval cavern.’ He said this calmly.

She reached out, held his hands, still wrapped around his cup. ‘And that’s why,’ she said. ‘That’s why you’re flying off into the far future. Because Sarah was killed by deep time. Are you sure that’s going to fix you?’

‘Fix me?’ He looked at her. ‘Look, you can write all this down as you like. I just want to remember her. For somebody to remember her. For as long as is technically possible.’

She thought that over. ‘People say this trip is a kind of sublimated suicide—’

‘No. I see it as an extension of human consciousness, of memory, far into the future. Of empathy, even. A new evolutionary step, if you will. As for Sarah – I’ll remember her as long as I live.’

She nodded. ‘We will remember. And then what?’

‘She’ll be remembered as long as the Sun shines.’

‘And then what?’

‘As long as the stars shine.’

‘… And then what?’

He just grinned.

‘And me, John? Will you remember me?’

He withdrew his hands. He sipped his drink.

‘Always,’ he said. ‘You are my Andromeda. Well. I should show you the control room …’

She returned to Earth, and never saw John Hackett again.

And, after years of routine reports, she heard only one piece of significant news about him.

The event occurred about ten years and five months after the departure of the Perseus, with the ship about ten light-years from Earth – and with only eighteen months having elapsed for Hackett, such was the ferocious piling-on of relativistic time dilation. The news, of course, had taken another ten years to limp back to Earth. More than twenty years after he had left.

Hackett had been revived, as he was, briefly, regularly, every six months as the ship settled into its long journey, to supplement automated checks with a human inspection.

He found his six crewmates, all of them, were dead.

A little checking proved to his own satisfaction that the cause was sabotage – presumably, he reported, by political opponents of the mission, either outside the UN or even within it.

Why not kill all seven, though? Some speculated that Hackett himself, a victim of his own complex motivations, might have been the murderer – or maybe, Denise had thought darkly, he had given in to those suicidal impulses she had suspected, after all.

But the ship’s internal records, downloaded to Earth, showed traces of deep malware in the operating system, malware demonstrably in place long before the ship’s departure, malware with no apparent connection to Hackett, requiring nothing to be precipitated by him in flight. Hackett denied any responsibility; most people believed him, Denise saw. And so did she.

Hackett himself speculated that he had been left alive, alone, on purpose: solely so he could make the confirmatory report of the deaths of the others. In the expectation that he would be unable to complete the mission solo.

But that wasn’t going to be the case, he reported.

When he had recovered from the discovery, he sent his crewmates’ bodies, carefully preserved in their sleep tanks, with suitable markers and origin information, out in six diverse directions. Each of them a pioneer of a new realm of deep space. He reported on this.

And then concluded, ‘Very well. Alone. Perseus out.’

Year 30

On the evening before the funeral of their great-aunt Vaer, and thirty years before the end of the world, Mela took her twin sister Ish out to count the Earths.

They walked together from their house on the edge of town, and then to a low hill, set in parkland, a favourite playground for the two of them since they had been small. Well, Mela reflected, as they headed up the grassy slope, favourite at least since big brother Tabor had decided that it was more fun to run with the gangs of boys in the town than to pick on his little sisters when their parents were out of sight. They were safe here now.

It was a steady climb, and the path was easy to pick out in the muddle of light from the cloudless sky. The ruddy background swathe of the stars was a setting for the bright blue-green diamonds of the thousand Earths in their regular array, as if the whole sky was a jewellery box, Mela sometimes thought, like the big box her parents shared, a fascination of studs and clips and pins and brooches that Mela and Ish, twelve years old, were not yet old enough to be allowed to handle.

And, under that sky, Mela was learning to appreciate the way the view around her unfolded as they climbed higher. You could see the roofs of the houses and inns and shops, and the broad, shining vein of the River as it passed through Procyon. Of course the River, the town, this home from which she had yet to venture far even with her parents, was a mere waystation, as she knew now. Just one more place for the River to pass in its twelve-hundred-kilometre journey from the Heartland Mountains at the centre of this Earth, all the way south to the Perimeter, where, it was said, the flow dissipated in the Tide, a waterfall full of the light of the end of the world.

And, looking downstream of the town, she saw that this evening the River was mirrored by a kind of ribbon of light, following the bank’s graceful curves, perhaps twenty metres from the water. That was a caravan, she knew, Immigrants, thousands of them from some other town further south. They were fleeing the Tide, fleeing the advancing Perimeter, steadily plodding upstream.

The Immies were camped for the night, she imagined, and she saw the glistening of their lamps and fires. But they were supposed to have passed through the town by tomorrow night.

Tomorrow being the day of Aunt Vaer’s funeral, of course, so Mela and Ish would be down at the cemetery, near the River, when the Immigrants might pass. Mother – and Father too, to some extent – had already issued stern warnings to the girls, Tabor too probably, about keeping a safe distance from the Immigrants, to let the Town Guards do their work if there was any trouble.

As she took in all this, Mela kept an eye on Ish, who, as usual, lagged behind as she climbed. The walk was deceptively steep. They were both panting by the time they reached the summit of the hill.

There were a couple of benches here, and play frames, litter left scattered on the grass by earlier walkers. Ish threw herself down at the base of a wooden play frame, and leaned back against a post. Rather than sit on the cold ground, Mela would have preferred to climb the frame. Even maybe hang upside down, so that it was as if she held up her whole world like a tremendous dish over her head, thrillingly threatened by the prospect of an endless fall into the sea of stars and Earths. But Ish was rarely up for that sort of thing, and certainly not tonight. So Mela sat down beside her, legs crossed, on a patch of bare dirt that wasn’t covered in damp, dewy grass.

And Ish was already counting the Earths. ‘Fifteen. Sixteen.’ She pointed to each one, each glowing dish in the sky.

Mela squinted. ‘I can never tell which ones you are pointing at.’

Though they were far outnumbered by the jumble of crimson stars beyond, and though they were regularly spaced across the sky in their cloud, the Earths were a bewildering horde, as if hanging from invisible threads, each a blue dot surrounded by a wider, elusive, silvery glimmer.

The teachers at school had tried to explain the sky, starting with baby-talk when the pupils were small, progressing to more detail as they grew older – even diagrams, numbers.

Mela knew that you had to imagine a greater sphere, with all the Earths, including this, her home world, like flat panels fixed to the inside of that sphere. She had long known that she would always be worse at geometry than at books and geography and stuff about people, but she got the general idea.

So here she was looking up at the interior of that greater, imaginary sphere, lying on one of those panels, looking up at the rest of all the panel-worlds around her own. Some were closer, others – nearer the apex of the sky – farther away, looking smaller.

The Earths were all the same size – the same size as her own – so the nearer they were, the brighter they looked, on average. But even on the nearest of those worlds you couldn’t make out features, not with the naked eye, as you would see on a map, if only because they were all but edge-on to her own. But Mela had learned at school that you could see more detail on distant worlds through telescopes.

To add to the spectacle, at any moment some worlds were dimmer than others, some brighter. They all went through their own daily cycles, as the daylight glow crept across their lands and seas, and washed away back to the night again – just as happened on Earth, their Earth, Mela’s and Ish’s. And, she supposed, her Earth would just be a blue smear to somebody living on one of these other Earths, lost in the cloud.

And still Ish counted them, every time they came out here like this, seeing how many of the legendary thousand she could pick out.

They were twins but not identical, as her parents always felt necessary to explain to people. Ish had always been smaller physically, quieter, shyer than her sister. Just as Mela had led the way up the hill now, so it was Mela who usually chose what game to play or book to read, Mela who read stories to her sister when she was sickly rather than the other way round, Mela who protected Ish from Tabor’s occasional meanness. The doctor said there was nothing wrong with Ish. Father called Ish precious, and Mela noble. Mother, when she looked up from her work – all her buying and selling, buying and selling – called Ish a coward.

Anyhow it was only now, now that they were twelve years old, that Ish seemed to be coming out of her shell and finding her own interests