This story however is not about Susan, the aging professor. Nor is it about Zack the protege. This story is about Zoe.

Zoe sat in the dingy magic lantern theatre which her friends had dragged her to. She liked magic lantern shows, she actually had a fairly sizeable collection of them. And she kind of thought that she might have liked this one. Her friends had been ribbing her for months about it's release too. It was a standard joke that her mum and brother got so much the media attention where she got so little. She was used to it, it had been a fact of life. In this show however she was portrayed as a simple minded and deformed second twin. The bottom of the genepool.

She thought back to all of the visits by the writer two years earlier. He and a few loud and confident people had swamped in, stuck imagers in her face and ransacked the house and her bedroom for information. They had hours of extended interviews with her mother and brother. Her mother had tried to get her to join in but, she had been a difficult sixteen year old, she had suffered a lot of angst. Thinking back she realised that she might have slammed her bedroom door to deliberately disturb the interview sessions. She had thought it a little funny and thoroughly justified. At least she had at the time. And then there was that incident in the front hall, she may have screamed a little too loud and a little too wild and crazy when they threw out the old coat on the back of the stand by the front door. Maybe this strange girl on the screen had come from her angry teenage self, still she didn't deserve to be ugly and deformed. That was mean, even for media types.

The sad truth of it was that she actually was a mutant, if only the media types had seen that. They'd have her branded as a violent killer, threatening to usurp the Empire and vanquished at the end of the show in a great explosion by the cunning hero .. her brother if the on screen portrayal was anything to go by.

After the movie her friends rallied around her. They eased the pain as best they could. At one point Suzie said "Hey it's not everyday that your life gets made into a magic lantern show, even if they didn't get your character right", Zoe had just nodded through the after show kibbleshake, she knew they were only trying to help. But, even they didn't know her secret.

That night she could not sleep, she tossed and turned for hours. She woke up in the dead of night, she sat up and rubbed eyes. *lights, dim* she commanded her room's think machine, and her bedroom was gradually bathed in a gentle warm glow from hidden recesses between the walls and the ceiling. She wandered into her en-suite, grabbed a glass from the tray under the sink and held it under the tap. "water, cold .. no, refreshing" she said. The tap dropped half a handful of tiny ice cubes into the glass as it poured. She looked at her rather pretty reflection in the mirror, she had always dyed her hair dark brown. She had always wanted to distance herself from the others, she loved them of course, but she wanted to be her own person. They had got the colour right, damn them.

Then with a sudden realisation, the thing at the back of her mind came shunting forwards. What if one of those media types had seen her getting changed, had spied on her somehow. What if they had seen. She pulled her nightie over her head, turned, looked back at the mirror and examined her back. Where most people have a single narrow spine, hers was two or three times the normal width. And at regular intervals either side were little black lumps. Her spine protruded out of her skin in pairs of barely noticeable black lumps.

They both had a little of it, her brother and her. They had each cut themselves several times, her scabs would always form very soon afterwards, Zacks the day after. But they were both the same smooth black canopies. Zoe had seen a few beasts called 'snails' in the grand arboretum gardens, he told her that these scabs were like those shells. Zack had once broken his leg really badly, she had convinced him to climb after her into a den she had made down on sublevel 48, the level below the university. When they were leaving he was scared of the climb back down and had fallen. The break was bad enough that his bone stuck out, it was black. She had known to get her mum, not a local doctor. And Zack had stayed hidden for two hours until they had found him shivering and weak in a dark corner of the cavernous tunnel. Zack had never so much as looked at an adventure ever since she thought, with realisation. Whatever these simple things were they were subtle, and her mum had always told her to keep them secret but not to pay them any mind. She called them the 'Gloucester Genes', whatever one of those was.

Zoe climbed back into bed and dreamed of happier things. Whenever she was sad she always thought back to a very old memory, so old that she had to concentrate extremely hard to recall it.

It started with the bearded ticket inspector on the bullet train. He held out his hand and helped her to climb the long steps past the giant rings. The bullet is not like the Elevator Train, the 'elle'. It does not have wheels for a start. Instead it has dozens of giant blue glowing rings along the length. The rings are the same dimensions as the tunnels they travel down. This was always the same guard it seemed, though the odds of that are pretty slim. She had often wondered if there had been only the one trip, or if they had made the journey several times in close succession or maybe this guard was just her favorite. He had a dull red jacket and matching waistcoat and hat, and a full reddish brown beard. After they were seated the guard would wander along the carriage with his trolley, stopping at each of the six, or was it eight, seater cubicles. He would chat with her dad for a while, then give her a big bag of fluffy sweets. Then she would sit and pick at them for ages, carefully sorting out the ones where the sugar had crystalised on the edge. And when she found one that didn't make the grade she'd hold the packet out to her dad, with the failed sweet on top. He would take it and thank her like a noble would thank a lady of high station. Zoe smiled happily, these memories were precious to her.

Holding her dad's hand she dragged him half running through the tunnels of the spaceport to the viewing station. It was a long corridor, and there at the end was a 'T' junction. There were windows all along either side, but this one. The first one they came to as they arrived was their viewing place. The spaceport on Liberty is huge. There were clouds in the valley on cold mornings, there were a thousand, or maybe a hundred thousand viewing places like this one all around the vast inverted cone where the ships docked. Sometimes there was even a space-only cruiser which would come down into the planet's docking area and dock to long spindles inside the cone that made it look like the ship was hovering. The smaller ships would have to dodge and weave past it as they departed. They stood for ages just watching the ships. Her dad would point them out; A light tramp freighter from Al-Malik space on the far side of the universe. A dirty mining ship from the edge of the solar system. Etc. He would seem to know them all. Zoe snuggled into her pillow as she remembered looking up at her dads face.

Then the hanger bay. The ship was probably tiny, but it seemed huge to her. She remembered it was sleek and white, with black lines and windows. They'd approach from the side, near the ramp up to the garage. Her dad would hold her up and she would put her hand on the panel under the hatch. Then with a quiet hiss, a door would come to life and rotate down. A staircase on the inside of the door would touch gently on the ground and they would climb inside. Her dad would lift her again, this time for the airlock. Another quiet hiss and they were inside a spotlessly clean white corridor. A yellow stripe along the middle of the wall concealed a handrail, used mainly for storing tools and rags from what she had observed. They followed the corridor, past lots of lockers with windows in them on the right, then they'd turn left into the bridge. This was more like a lounge than any bridge she had seen since. In fact she had been pretty unimpressed when she first saw the old college space-chariot's bridge. In her dad's bridge there were long narrow windows which wrapped the front of the ships stubby nose. They could be think machine panels at the touch of a console control. And at the back, between the two doors was the navigators chair. Above that so that only the legs dangled inside the lounge was the pilots seat. This was where she went to first. She climbed the narrow ramp, only wide enough for her dads foot if he was climbing up and into the pilots seat. Her dads chair. She was too small to see out of the large splayed half-dome which surrounded the seat at her dad's chest height. So she knelt on the seat instead. This meant that she could play with the inactive controls. This would entertain her for hours while her dad did stuff in the engine room and generally pottered about tidying up, and tinkering with things. This was where she got the bug. Not her dad's pet 'kl-kck;j-rqk', this was the bug for flying.

Her dad had left them shortly after that. She was seven and he had not said goodbye, or even hinted at leaving. But he had gone. She had blamed herself for a long time, because on that same day her dad had found her playing with three black and brass rectangles. They were really strange looking and she had been trying to figure out how to open them. Her dad had walked into the room with a big smile on his face, but when he saw what she was playing with he had really yelled at her very loud and, he was grumpy all of the way home. She now knew that the rectangles were all jumpkeys. Her dad had owned three of them! It was so unlikely that a commoner could ever own so many that she had built up a number of fantasies about her dad's realy history. In her favorite version he was a pirate captain who had swept her mum off her feet when he rescued her from a calamity in space. The truth was she did not really know. The ship was not much of a clue, it was such a clean thing only a noble would have it, but the one thing she knew about her dad it was that he was 'definitely not a noble'.

They had an unusual pet, he was a sort of giant beetle, with a torsoe the size of a man's. And he was remarkably intelligent for an animal, he could understand a full (though simple) language not just short commands. Although he could not talk. When her dad gave 'kl-kck;g-rqk' instructions, he used a funny set of clicky insect-like noises. The twins could both make the sounds too, it involved using the flap at the back of their throat. It wasn't a language really, but there were more commands than most beast trainer's used, and 'kl-kck;g-rqk' could use them in different strings almost like interacting with a think machine. Her and her brother would regularly get 'kl-kck;g-rqk' to do simple tricks on mum, they'd make him keep the door shut for them while they stole cookies, or tell him to hide on the back of a door when their mum shouted that it was his bath time. Poor old 'kl-kck;g-rqk' had died a few weeks before the media people had descended on them, she missed him

The memory helped, Zoe had soon drifted off to sleep and forgotten about the magic lantern show. In the morning she realised that they had found a pretty accurate lookalike to play her father. Which was strange, there were no photographs of him anywhere in the house.