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for longer than Polystom had been alive. For all they had fought, their relationship had worked.
    They seemed so incompatible, an ill-matched pair. His father so placid, a man who might go for a whole day without saying a single word. A tall man, skinny, but always a little hunched over as if in embarrassment at his height. Many mornings he would simply not attend to his hair, not even call a servant to smooth it down, so it flailed and spiked off the dome of his head. He would wear the previous day’s clothes, stained as they might be with food. There had always been that quality in his father of elsewhereness. As a boy it had infuriated Polystom, because he had read it as a sort of withdrawal, a stepping away from Polystom himself, as if his son’s demands were somehow irrelevant to the father. But perhaps there had been a greater peace in that elsewhere, wherever in his father’s head it was located.
    His co-father, on the other hand, had been a shorter, bulkier person, his body covered in hair. His beard had reached from just below his eyes right down to cover his face, chin and neck in sow-bristles. Even his back had been knitted with thick hair, as Polystom knew from swimming expeditions. And as if this bristliness were an index of sheer energy, as if the hairs were like iron filings standing up in the magnetic force of his personality, he had been enormously, bustlingly restless. Do! Do! Create! Create! What was needed was
action
– now above all!
Now
above all! The Mudworld was a threat to everybody, to the Stewardship of all the worlds! They must do something, organise, push
on
, sort something out.
    ‘Why?’ Young Polystom had once asked. ‘How exactly is the Mudworld a threat?’ The three of them had been picnicking on the eastern flanks of the Neon Mountains, father, co-father and Polystom, with servants and a car a respectful distance away. The afternoon had been hot and clammy, every crease of Polystom’s young body stuck with sweat.
    ‘Are you an idiot?’ co-father had blustered. ‘Don’t you read the newsbooks? What’s the matter with you? Your own cousin died fighting on that world!’
    His father, slowly pulling free the cork of a bottle of black wine, had said nothing. Polystom, hot and young and feeling bad-tempered, had pointed out that he had hundreds of cousins, had lost count of his cousins, but co-father ground him down with the relentless force of his personality.
    ‘Do you want me to recite the casualty lists? Don’t you see how vital it is to contain them there, on that world, rather than have them come through interplanetary space and attack us here? The whole System of Worlds has never been so tested! Young men like yourself have never had such an opportunity for glory and honour, for good working towards the common wealth.’ And so on, and so on.
    ‘I still don’t see why they’re such a threat, on that world,’ Polystom had grumbled; and co-father had gasped in exasperation, and father had silently poured three glasses of wine. Polystom had caught what he took to be a pained expression in his father’s eyes, although whether in disappointment at his son’s attitude, or distress that his partner and his son were fighting, was not clear.
    And when not blustering at Polystom, co-father had blustered at father, sometimes with enough intensity to provoke a response even from that serene man. They would be arguing over nothing, some irrelevancy; and the servants would shuffle awkwardly in the background, uncertain whether to stay or go. Maybe co-father would goad Old Polystom with some perceived failing or other, going at him for a quarter-hour, half-hour, until finally father’s colour would darken and he would reply. It wasn’t so, he would say in his grumbling baritone. It wasn’t like that. Then why, co-father would counter, is
such and such
the case? Eh? Why did
such and such
happen, if things are the way you say they are? I really don’t know, father would say with