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morning excissiere patrols were becoming
increasingly frequent and there were few people on the streets. I hid in the shadows, waiting until they had passed by. Occasionally, there was the whirring roar of orthocopters overhead: Caud was
so clearly preparing for conflict. My words to Gennera rose up and choked me.
    I reached the ruin of the library much later than I’d hoped. The spars of the blasted roof arched up over the twisted remains of the foremost stacks. The ground was littered with books,
still in their round casings. It was like walking along the shores of the Small Sea, when the sand-clams crawl out onto the beaches to mate. I could not help wondering whether the information I
sought was even now crunching beneath my boot heel, but these books were surely too recent. If there had been anything among them, the Matriarchy of Caud would be making use of it.
    No one knew who had attacked the library. The Matriarchy blamed Winterstrike, which was absurd. My government had far too great a respect for information. Paranoid talk among the tenements
suggested that it had been men-remnants from the mountains, an equally ridiculous claim. Awts and hyenae fought with bone clubs and rocks, not missiles, though who knew what weaponry the enigmatic
vulpen possessed: they were said to have intelligence, whereas awts and hyenae did not. The most probable explanation was that insurgents had been responsible: Caud had been cracking down on
political dissent over the last few years, a dissent spawned by its economic woes, and this was the likely result. I suspected that the library had not been the primary target. If you studied a
map, the Matriarchy buildings were on the same trajectory and I was of the opinion that the missile had simply fallen short. But I volunteered this view to no one. I spoke to no one, after all.
    Even though this was not my city, however, I could not stem a sense of loss whenever I laid eyes on the library. Caud, like Winterstrike, Tharsis and the other cities of the Plain, went back
thousands of years, and the library was said to contain data from very early days, from the time when humans had first come from Earth, to settle Mars. There were folk – the Caud Matriarchy
among them – who considered that to be heresy; I considered it to be historical fact. There had been a time when all Mars, dominated by the Memnos Matriarchy, had believed ourselves to be the
world on which human life had originated; we were more enlightened these days.
    Civilized. Or so it was said.
    I made my way as carefully as I could through the wreckage into the archives. No one else was there and it struck me that this might be a bad sign, a result of the increased presence of the
scissor-women on the streets. I began to sift through fire-hazed data scrolls, running the short antenna of the antiscribe up each one. In the early days, they had written bottom-to-top and
left-to-right, but somewhere around the Age of Children this had changed. I was not sure how much difference, if any, this would make to the antiscribe’s pattern-recognition capabilities:
hopefully, little enough. I tried to keep an ear out for any interference, but gradually I became absorbed in what I was doing and the world around me receded.
    The sound penetrated my consciousness like a beetle in the wall: an insect clicking. Instantly, my awareness snapped back. I was crouched behind one of the stacks, a filmy fragment of
documentation in my hand, and there were two scissor-women only a few feet away.
    It was impossible to tell if they had seen me, or if they were communicating. Among themselves, the excissieres, as they call themselves, do not use speech if they are within sight of one
another, but converse by means of the patterns of holographic wounds that play across their flesh and armour, a language that is impossible for any not of their ranks to comprehend. I could see the
images flickering up and down their legs through the gaps in the