The upper deck of the skytram stank like a farmyard.

Landholder Castelaine shrieked and was forced back into the doorway of the passenger lock as a startled chicken erupted in the air in front of him. He swiped at the creature with both arms, sending it squawking away in a cloud of feathers.

Castelaine rounded on his footman.

“Ashe, what the hell are you trying to do to me? This isn’t executive class. Have you checked the boarding passes?”

“I’m afraid this is executive class, sir. All seating restrictions have been lifted because of the emigration situation.”

“But I can’t be expected to muck in with the plebs for the next forty hours or however the hell long it is. The place is a menagerie. Look at it!” Castelaine picked at a few feathers clinging to his dress jacket and looked with distaste at the former executive lounge. Ragged people filled every available piece of floor space, sitting among boxes and battered trunks and wooden cages containing straw and chickens and other assorted animal refugees. Ashe saw a goat munching contentedly at the stuffing oozing from one of the reclining seats.

“Isn’t it illegal, transporting all this livestock off world? It ought to be impounded.”

“I’m sure they’ll sort it out at the other end, sir,” Ashe said. “If you’re to arrive in time for the negotiations we really must take this tram. I doubt any of the others will be any different.”

Castelaine nodded, sighed. “I suppose we’ll just have to rough it then. Pretend it’s a bit of an adventure, what?” He strode forward into the compartment, gaze sliding over the assorted dispossessed and oblivious to the resentful expressions he attracted. Ashe followed, clutching a business folder and smiling apologies.

“I always said it was a bad idea to allow the bloody Rockers to host the conference,” Castelaine moaned. “The whole thing’s a waste of time anyway. All we do is listen to them whining on for hours. They should save their breath and my time: it never makes any difference to the pricing plan. A bloody secretary could handle it by proxy. Even you could do it, Ashe.”

“Surely not, sir.”

Castelaine, typically, had left it to the very last to board, largely due to the preceding night’s entertainment. Ashe caught a whiff of alcohol as people grudgingly made a space for them on the viewing gallery.

There was a low vibration in the floor and the skytram began to slide upwards on electromagnetic rails. Ashe watched as the ground fell away, fascinated even after all these years by the alien topography of the root. Huge warty nodules and bulbous protuberances swelled from the base of God’s Rib, forming a massive knot of white bone that plunged deep into Cornhill’s crust.

Beyond the root, endless fields of yellow wheat stretched to the horizon, every stalk owned by one of the Landholder families. A highway packed with ramshackle trucks full of ‘emigrants’ linked the root with the city below the horizon.

“YOU HAVE FIVE MINUTES TO TAKE YOUR SEATS,” announced an automated voice over the PA.

“Best try and get comfortable,” said Castelaine. He shooed three damp-nosed children from a double acceleration couch. Each kid was dark and green eyed and beautiful under the dirt, dressed in faded hand-me-downs of uncertain vintage.

“Are you a toffo?” asked the eldest, gazing at the red velvet and glittering buttons of Castelaine’s jacket.

Castelaine frowned. “Go and find your mummy.”

“Toffos smell of soft poo!” yelled the other two. They all tumbled away shrieking with laughter.

“Bloody kids. They should all be grown in vats until they’re eighteen.” Castelaine fell into the couch, reclining so the footrest came up to support his legs. Ashe noticed that the lounge held more people than couches, and many were lying on the floor for the tram’s acceleration phase.

“I remember you were quite precocious when you were that age, sir,” said Ashe. “When I escorted your father up the Rib once twenty years ago, you screamed and screamed because you weren’t allowed to come.”

“I was never that age,” Castelaine said. “I’m going to sleep.” He produced a green vitamin patch from his purse and pressed it to the inside of his wrist in an effort to staunch the worst of his hangover. Then he leaned back and closed his eyes.

Ashe looked at the pale bone wall sliding past the diamond glass of the skytram’s inner wall. God’s Rib was not constructed from carbon nanotubes or crystalline graphite or anything a human engineer would build with. Nor did its apparent mass correspond to the thickness of the bone. The alien space elevator reached thirty-one thousand kilometres to Cornhill’s geosynchronous orbit point and resolutely failed to collapse under the strain of its own existence. The skytrams travelled along human-built magnetic rails fastened into a natural groove in the Rib’s side like ants crawling over a skeleton.

Ashe felt the acceleration press down on his chest, although there was little other sensation of speed. He heard a few kids crying and the noises of farm animals. All were headed for a new life in the Rock Garden. There was little left for them on the planet with the passing of the new Enclosure Laws, with the value of their labour continually devalued by advancing automation.

Arguably, it was the Rib that had shaped the entire social structure of the Cornhill system. Without the Rib, it would have been unviable to sustain such a large orbital presence at such early stages of the colony’s development, and without the huge energy savings the Rib provided, the orbital colonies would never have allowed themselves to become so dependent on the Landholders’ food crops. They realised their slavery too late, and by then the Compulsory Trade Act had already become ingrained in the system’s structure. Ashe had reflected on this many times. An artefact so alien and so strange had within a handful of generations become co-opted as the basis for a regime of economic domination. It had been shorn of its wonder in the way only humans could make the amazing mundane.

The tram’s acceleration was over. Ashe must have dozed, because he had that sleepy taste in his mouth and had failed to notice the three men approaching. He stole a glance to his right and saw Castelaine was still out of it. A thin line of drool glistened on his chin. Ashe nudged him.

“You won’t gain anything here,” he said to the men. They were unshaven and thin, their expressions managing to betray anger and fear at once. “There’s no dignity to be had from this.”

“There’s little of that to dig for around here,” said their leader. He stood in the middle, dressed in a discoloured white T-shirt and grubby leather trousers. Tension ran through him, ringing a single desperate note. “We just want to make ourselves feel better.”

“This won’t help.”

“No? And what do you know about it? You don’t know us. We might be carrying our begging bowls to the Rockers, but at least we’re not slaves to the Landholders.”

“Not any more,” said the man to the left. He tried to put an ugly edge into his voice, but Ashe could see he was no fighting man. He was a farmer. Used to be a farmer.

“You can make a good life in the Rock Garden,” said Ashe. “There’s room there, plenty of industry. I have a brother there myself, a niece. You’ll be welcomed.”

The leader glared at Castelaine, who was blinking into consciousness. “Thanks to shit like him we didn’t get to make that decision for ourselves though, did we? The enclosures throw us off our land and we watch as the machines plough it up. We squash into the cities and fester. No work, only handouts and fighting.” There was real violence in the man’s eyes now. “We carry our lives in bags while he sits in his big country house. You clear out, slave, and let us to our business. Don’t make us do you too.”

The man produced a soft leather pouch from below his T-shirt. It was weighted with something heavy.

Castelaine leaned forward in his chair and peeled the vitamin patch from his wrist. It had turned yellow with toxins. “Who do you think it is you’re threatening here? You think you’ll be safe among the rocks?” he said. “We own them as much as we own Cornhill itself. You touch me or this man and my family will ensure you will starve to death in a Guild penitentiary.”

“Your family,” sneered the man.

“Sir, please,” Ashe murmured. “This isn’t helping.”

But Castelaine was not for turning. “The trouble with you people is that you don’t understand business. That land was never yours; it was leased. Labour is a resource. It has to compete with other resources and I’m afraid you are suboptimal. I don’t make that a personal issue and it’s frankly rather vulgar that you feel that you have to. So why don’t you tootle along, hmmm?”

For a moment, the men were stunned. So was Ashe.

“You bastard. You’ve got a face for hurting, landholder.” The trio’s leading man stepped towards Castelaine, hefting the cosh. Then he stopped.

“I don’t enjoy pointing this at you,” Ashe said quietly. The palm-pistol was the shape of an almond, with a tiny black aperture in the sharp end. It was heavy and solid in his hand. His thumb hovered above the firing stud.

The man snarled but moved no further.

“Please go back to your families.” Ashe shifted the pistol’s aim from stomach to stomach. The men backed away.

“A devil and his demon,” shouted one of the men. Ashe noticed for the first time that the lounge was silent. Even the chickens were quiet. The people turned away.

“Well handled, Ashe. You can put that away now,” said Castelaine. He pulled at the bottom of his jacket to straighten the fabric. “Sorry about my little speech. Got a bit carried away.” He winked and looked at his watch. “There’s not much gravity time left. I think some tea, don’t you?”

The skytram slid upwards through the stratosphere and into the mesosphere, heading towards vacuum. Cornhill’s pull would dissolve like the atmosphere in time and the car would accelerate again before heading into freefall. Everything would have to be strapped down before then.

Ashe watched as Castelaine drank his tea at the buffet. They attracted glances that led to lowered heads and whispers.

Ashe had worked in the Castelaine family service for most of his adult life and at that moment he could feel the weight of the years. The life of a Landholder’s son did not breed empathy with the common man, and the way he had spoken to those men was not so much a function of a cruel heart but a genuine disconnection. When the first robot probes to enter the system over three hundred years before reported the twin treasures of Cornhill and its remarkable alien legacy, the original stakeholders had rushed to divide up the new world. When the settlers arrived in their millions over the following decades, they found they were already tenants. It was as if two different species coexisted on Cornhill.

But history should never be used as an excuse. Ashe thought he had spent too much of his life making allowances for the Landholders. Things were changing. Now the land worked itself, and only the sky went untilled.

The apex of God’s Rib was like a head of cauliflower, a cosmic floret festooned with rocks stolen from the rings of Gilgamesh, the system’s inner gas giant. The Rock Garden hung over the skytram, an uneven roof netted together with cable and human ingenuity. Ashe could see false constellations of welding arcs as the Rockers made endless alterations to the intricate network of struts and tethers that bound their home to the Rib.

“What’s the bloody delay?” demanded Castelaine of the harassed customs inspector. They stood in Velcro slippers facing each other across the border. Behind Castelaine, kids whooped at the sudden gift of flight and adults vomited into paper bags.

“This is a contaminated transport,” replied the guard, eyeing Castelaine’s fine cloth and aristocratic bearing nervously. He wore the red and black of the Landholders’ Embargo Guild, as did the other officials nosing through the cabin asking questions. “There are food animals aboard,” he continued. “They will all have to be destroyed. And we’ll have to check every piece of luggage for seeds.”

“Do I look like a fucking vegetable farmer, man?” Castelaine roared, bobbing on his knees in the microgravity. “Or perhaps you think I’m bringing in contraband to undermine my own family business?”

“No sir, it’s just that procedure--”

“Perhaps I can help?” A long woman glided up behind the guard and dazzled him with a sheaf of authorisations. She made no effort to stand, content to hang from a handhold in the wall. She was dressed in a clinging white catsuit that revealed short legs and well-defined arms, small breasts and a slender, delicate neck. Her naked scalp was painted on one side with the tribal symbols of some new Rocker fashion.

Castelaine looked at her. “And you are? Where’s Coluum?”

“Principal Coluum is already presiding over the trade negotiations. Landholder Castelaine? My name is Officer Adve Ferfetti. You are a little late. I’m to escort you to the conference hall.”

Castelaine gave the woman an appraising look. He ran a finger round the inside of his collar. “Well lead on, then,” he said.

Ferfetti led them across the Enforced Sterile Zone and through corridors in easy coasts from wall to wall, ceiling to floor. Ashe, less agile, nevertheless followed in the same manner, enjoying the freedom and the sense of space that came with being able to move in three dimensions. Castelaine padded stubbornly along the carpeted floor.

“Slow down, man,” he called to Ashe. “I’d forgotten how much I hate freefall.” Ashe noticed his master’s face had already lost some definition, puffing up around the jowls. His eyes watered.

It was to get worse.

“I’m afraid that the conference theatre is no longer as close to the head of the Rib as you might remember,” said Ferfetti, turning to face them. Her eyes bulged slightly, but held a light of purest indigo. Ashe wondered if they were lenses, and decided that they weren’t. “You know how we topsiders like to mix the place around. We’ve got our own tectonics up here.”

Her smile was warm on Ashe’s face.

“So?” Castelaine’s discomfort had not added to his patience.

“Given we’re running a bit behind, the quickest way is to go outside. We have a monkeyshuttle waiting for you.”

“A what?”

The monkeyshuttle was a globe of brass. Inside, Ashe, Castelaine, Ferfetti and an operator hung cocooned in webbing, trussed up like food parcels in a monster’s larder. They swung back and forth as the vehicle lunged and jerked.

“This is intolerable,” repeated Castelaine in a personal mantra.

Outside, many-jointed telescopic limbs pushed and jumped, clambered and climbed. Through tiny portholes, Ashe glimpsed veering walls of rock, the blinding flash of a solar mirror, a shaking star field. Tiny people floated inside a transparent umbilical linking two of the trapped asteroids. Some of the habitats were spun up for fractional gravity, turning like ball bearings inside a giant stone machine. Most were not. The adapted vehicle scampered across the surfaces of this plateau in space, coasting in freefall from point to point.

Even in the year since Ashe’s last visit, the Rock Garden had changed and grown. Protected from cosmic radiation by skins of iron, rock and ice, the Rockers were born to thrive up here in the sky and they would have if they had been allowed to. The stranglehold of the Landholders’ food monopoly restrained the natural exuberance of freefall industry, kept bellies grumbling and birth rates low.

“Not far now,” said Ferfetti.

Ashe looked at his employer, but Castelaine’s eyes were screwed tight.

The monkeyshuttle leaped into space and Ashe’s stomach lurched as the craft guided them down a long vertical tunnel lined with snaking utility cables. The operator’s fingers danced in the air over virtual controls and the shuttle reached out to catch a waiting gantry. It hung there like, well, a monkey.

Ashe helped Castelaine through the hatch after Ferfetti, who led them along a long circular corridor melted through rock and covered in colourful wall art depicting riots of plant life.

“A school project,” Ferfetti explained. “The new conference theatre is to the right here.”

Castelaine was still quiet after the ride. He spent his time adjusting his collar and wiping at his eyes.

The conference hall was an impressive spherical chamber that played hell with the planet-bound’s sense of perspective. The various delegates clung to webbing on the walls and faced each other across open air, sipping at bulbs of imported champagne. The bottom of the room was filled with a black lens of opaque glass, providing a nominal floor.

Faces turned towards the new arrivals as they pulled themselves along purple guy ropes to their allocated patch on the wall.

“So sorry to be tardy. Hello! Hello!”

Recovering rapidly in the presence of his peers, Castelaine nodded to other Landholder representatives, exchanging smiles and words in degrees proportionate to status.

The Rockers waited patiently, arrayed across the other side of the hall. Most were dressed in plain overalls, with only subtle indications of rank. Several of the women and a few of the men sported the same scalp designs as Ferfetti. Ashe recognised most of the faces from his years of service at the annual negotiations. Principal Coluum gazed around the room, waiting for a silence that never came. Ashe had met with him personally several times down the years and admired the way that Coluum had demonstrated almost bottomless patience with the Landholders while his people continued to struggle in their economic grip. He was also known to have deftly defended his leadership from Rocker factions who sought more direct means of gaining independence. His survival was testimony to the regard and affection he had built among the vast majority of the orbital colonies.

Finally, he cut across the Landholders’ gossiping.

“Thank you all for coming to our Rock Garden, and thank you all for your patience with regard to our new meeting place. I hope you will agree it is very special, at least to us.” His orator’s pause was filled with indifference. Coluum went on, “Welcome to this, the 209th Annual Trade Summit of the Cornhill Duality.

“To go straight to business, I’d like to share with you the Rock Garden’s annual production figures in a number of key commodities.” Coluum waved a hand and corroborating graphics appeared in the centre of the hall. “As you can see, output of key medicines, chemicals and micro-g plastics have all risen by an average of nine percent, over three times the growth rate of Cornhill itself. Production of metals from the mining operations is up in double figures. Ladies and gentlemen, we are the system’s powerhouse. If some of the restrictions on asteroid harvesting and food production were to be relaxed, then I believe our growth could accelerate still further and benefit everyone in the Duality. I formally request a suspension of food price increases so that we can divert resources to bolstering greater growth.”

“We are delighted to be sharing in your prosperity,” said a Landholder called Morshead, voice dripping with sarcasm. “We saw it all around us as we came in.” There was a tittering from the assembled Landholders. “But if your growth is so impressive, and there’s no arguing with the numbers, then why be greedy? Perhaps greater growth would be less difficult to manage, create diseconomies. We don’t like those risks and besides, we have what we need.”

Ashe stiffened as Castelaine cleared his throat and hung forward from the wall. “Look, every year you seek to disrupt the status quo. We Landholders are defenders of the status quo, and we do so because it benefits everyone. You should be pleased with your production record. _We_ are pleased. And I think the pricing formula we have used down the years for our products must stand. You have just given us the proof of its efficacy.” There was a murmur of agreement.

“Landholder Castelaine, with respect, you are not maintaining the status quo. Our wealth accrues to you, the Landholders. There is a built-in imbalance. It’s true that has been the way of things throughout the Duality’s history, but the recent Enclosure Laws passed on the surface have changed everything. We must support thousands of emigrants with the same resources. We are not allowed to restrict their immigration, even should we wish to, and yet we are not allowed to increase our output in line with the new population growth. You must understand you are placing new burdens upon us. We ask for a ten percent stepped decrease in the price of all foodstuffs coming up the Rib.”

“But how would that possibly benefit us?” laughed Castelaine, glancing around his allies for support. “The balance would shift in your favour, and shame on you Coluum for trying to drown the fact in words. I move for a ten percent price increase,”

“You are a thumb over a tap, a tax on our economy.” Coluum at last lost his battle with exasperation. “It is totally unreasonable for you to expect us to support your stagnation. It is a system of greed built on an unjust monopoly and you have pushed us and pushed us and pushed us. You must be able to see the benefits of deregulation, cooperation, mutual respect.”

“Principal, stop telling us what we must do. I say ten percent,” said Castelaine.

Other Landholders took up the chant. “Ten percent, ten percent.”

Coluum stared at them for a full minute, face unreadable. Then he held up his hands in apparent defeat, the only way he could regain order. “If ten percent is your only offer, that that is the one we must all build our futures on.”

There were shouts of triumph from the Landholder side, victory yet again in an annual game that had long ago lost all sense of risk.

“For years the people of the Rock Garden have told me we should break the monopoly, throw the Embargo Guild and all your other spies out of the locks, but I always resisted.”

“Sensible!” shouted Morshead.

“I always resisted because we could not sustain ourselves without renewable food supplies, without breaking the tyranny of God’s Rib. I had hoped for more from you. People told me I was naïve and they were probably right. This is sooner than I had wanted, but the Rock Garden will not be choked any longer.”

Coluum made an unseen signal and suddenly the floor seemed to disappear. It took Ashe a second to register that the glass lens had lost its opacity. Ashe gasped with vertigo. They hung at one end of a tremendous vertical tunnel of green.

One side of the conference suite erupted. Landholders surged against their webbing, almost throwing themselves at their opposite numbers.

“This is a disgrace!”

“This is a flagrant violation of all out trade agreements.”

“This is fucking war!”

Ashe was stunned. He had never thought it could be this beautiful.

The great cylinder turned inside its shield of rock, lit by miniature suns. Ashe saw every shade and texture of green, explosions of flowers, the ordered structure of tended fields. The plants and crops grew from an endless soil, revolving to generate half a gravity. The stalks of wheat were tall and slender, the fruit of trees hung pregnant from branches that looked too thin to support them. Ashe imagined the scents of the gardens at the Castelaine home magnified a hundredfold. He imagined the songs of birds and rustling movement in thick undergrowth.

“Ashe, have you got your gun? Give me your fucking gun.” Castelaine was in a fury, his face sunburn red, hands shaking. Beads of sweat stood out on his forehead. Ashe watched as one detached and floated away.

“I surrendered it at the border,” Ashe lied. “Please stop it, sir.” He laid a restraining hand on the younger man’s forearm. He was aware of yelling, of adults trading blows in midair. He pointed between his feet. “Do you know what that is, sir?”

“Yes. It’s illegal cultivation. It’s a ‘fuck you’ to all the Landholding class. It’s a betrayal of trust a betrayal of all the principles that Cornhill was founded on. It’s a disgraceful display of unethical business practices.”

“No, sir. It’s the end.” Ashe began to tug his arms and feet free of the utility webbing.

“What the hell are you doing?”

“I’m sorry, sir. Things had to change. It’s the end.”

Ashe kicked away, propelling himself towards the other side of the room, too fast. Friendly hands cushioned the impact, pulled him to safety. In the greater volume of the conference hall, Ferfetti and a few of her men were restoring order.

“We have others like this, hidden among the rings of Gilgamesh,” Coluum shouted. “Not many, probably not enough, but we’ll get by. We always have, every year that you bled us. For thirty years this has been in the making. For thirty years I’ve dreamed about what this day would be like. I hoped it wouldn’t have to happen, and I never thought it would end up in a brawl, but then reality is often strange.”

“We will shoot you down. We will burn you out of your rat warrens.”

“This has been a quiet struggle, waged by quiet men. Your economy would collapse without our materials. Besides, we won’t be here. Ferfetti, take our guests back to the Rib.”

The gardens turned beneath the glass floor.

Ashe floated next to his brother Nathan in an egg-shaped bar nestling inside one of the smaller asteroids. They watched screens showing the last stages of the decoupling.

The Rockers had been readying themselves for years, but still it was a great technical achievement. Soon, the Rock Garden would be cut free from its alien tether. The energy from the Rib’s centrifugal force was enough to propel them from Cornhill orbit and out towards Gilgamesh.

“Do you think whoever built God’s Rib would have been impressed?” Ashe asked.

“Who cares? This is the only thing they ever really did for us,” Nathan replied. “It was the ones like you who did all the real work.”

“I wasn’t searched once in over twenty-five years. None of the footmen were. While the Embargo Guild stopped every ship and searched every skytram, we always just crossed the Sterile Zone with our pockets full. It didn’t even seem like a risk after a while.”

“It took a hell of a lot of pocketfuls to get to here, and a lot of bought silences. That fat Landholder belly of yours is going to shrink, I’ll tell you that now. Things aren’t going to be easy round Gilgamesh. We’ll be hungry a long time yet.”

“Still, from a few small seeds, eh?”