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scroll. “The diagnostic’s finished. Step down, please.”
    Degrandpre dressed himself, still thinking aloud. “Personnel and Devices act like they can shuffle our priorities at will. I doubt the Works commissioners will put up with this kind of arrogance much longer. In the meantime, I’d like Zoe Fisher to survive at least until I’m safely back in Beijing. It’s not my battle, frankly.” Had he overstepped? “This is privileged, of course.”
    â€œOf course.”
    â€œNot galley gossip, in other words.”
    â€œYou know you can trust me, Kenyon.” He used the given name not as an impertinence but with downcast eyes, to ingratiate.
    â€œThank you,
Corbus.”
A gentle rebuke. “So? Am I healthy?”
    Nefford turned with visible relief to his desktop. “Your bone calcium is excellent, your musculature is stable, and your accumulated radiation exposure is well within tolerance. But next time, I want a blood sample.”
    â€œNext time, you may have one.”
    Once every calendar month, Degrandpre walked the circumference of the orbital station, from docking bays to sun garden, his left hand on the holster of his quirt.
    He thought of the walkthrough as a way of staying in touch with the IOS. Keeping the maintenance crew on their toes, citing Works staff for uniform violations—in general, making his presence felt. (In the case of dress-code infringements, he had long ago given up on the Kuiper and Martian scientists; he considered himself lucky if they remembered to dress at all.) Problems that seemeddistant from his chambers loomed larger from the deckplates. And he liked the exercise.
    Invariably, he started his inspection at the dimly lit cargostorage spaces of Ten Module and finished back at Nine, the garden. He liked to linger in the garden. If he had been asked, he might have said he enjoyed the filtered sunlight, pumped from fixed collectors in the IOS’s hub, or the moist air, or the earthy smell of the aeroponic suspensions. And all that was true. But not all of the truth.
    To Kenyon Degrandpre, the garden was a kind of pocket paradise.
    He had loved gardens even as a child. For the first twelve years of his life he had lived with his father, a senior manager at the Cultivar Collection in southern France. The Collection’s greenhouses ranged over thousands of acres of rolling pastureland, foundations tilted to the southern sky, a city of damp glass walls and hissing aerators.
    â€œParadise” was his father’s name for it. In biblical mythology, paradise was a garden called Eden; the Edenic world was cultivated, perfect. When humankind fell from grace, the garden succumbed to anarchy.
    On the IOS the garden was even more central, as delicate and vital as a transplanted heart. It supplied most of the station’s nutritional needs; it recycled wastes; it cleansed the air. Because the garden was both indispensable and fragile, it was, at least in Degrandpre’s eyes, the paradise of the Old Testament restored: orderly, calculated, organic, and precise.
    The gardeners, in their buff fatigues, acknowledged his presence by staying out of his way. He walked the garden tiers slowly, pausing in a glade of tall tomato plants to savor the smell and the leaf-green light.
    He had entered the Works with much of his father’s idealism still intact. Humanity had endured a wild Earth for too long. The price had been uncontrolled population growth, climatic devolution, disease.
    Kuiper radicals accused Earth of wallowing in stasis. Nonsense,Degrandpre thought. How long would a Kuiper habitat or a Martian airfarm last if it failed to regulate its ice and oxygen mining? How long could the IOS, for instance, sustain itself in a state of anarchy? But there was nothing special about the surface of Earth; the issues were the same, only broader, more diffuse. Consider Isis itself: a garden never cultivated. Beautiful, as freshly arrived Kuiper