Chapter One
The Orchard Ring
The orchard ring of the Perennial was one and a half kilometres of curved and blossoming world, and Ivy Talan had walked all of it before breakfast every day of her life, which is how you inspect an orchard and also how you love one.
It was spring in the ring, because the ring's spring was scheduled and the schedule was sacred: eleven weeks of blossom moving through the plum rows and the cherries and the long apple slopes in a slow pink wave, timed to the bee cycle, tuned by nine generations of Talans until the whole kilometre and a half breathed like one orchard instead of four hundred trees in a spinning tube. Overhead, which was also across, the ring curved up and away in both directions, orchards climbing into the sky until they hung inverted a kilometre over their own roots, so that on blossom mornings the whole world was a wreath of flowers with a sun spine burning down its centre, and petals fell in the spin like unhurried snow, and new apprentices from the inner decks got vertigo and old orchard hands got poetry.
