The Star Fraction

9

Circuit Judgement

It’s early afternoon and the watches are beeping fifteen. Dee follows Ax across a high, narrow bridge. The walkway is barely a metre wide, the parapets little more than a metre high. Beneath it is a hundred-metre drop to the roofs of a lower level. Above it, taller towers rise. The bridge slopes gently up, curves smoothly around to the right. Dee walks it fearlessly; this is familiar territory to her, the high locale of the high life of those who, in Ship City, pass for rich. Fortunately, however, she has never met Anderson Parris, the man whose residence they’re approaching.

Dee has very little doubt that before the next hour is over, she’ll have killed a human being. She hasn’t done this before, and the prospect arouses in her a certain curiosity. The skills are there, of course, in Spy and Soldier. But she remembers rumours, as from a previous life (from her life before she awoke) that make her wonder if she can access those particular skills. If Sys has changed the permissions…There’s no way of telling, because that itself is a part of Sys to which she has no access. She recalls people talking, talking as if she wasn’t there, of the potential dangers of AIs wandering around in human guise, and she knows that humans set great store by the permissions.

She has no doubt at all that Ax will be able to do it. Ax is a human being, and human beings don’t need any permissions. Dee shivers, but not with fear or excitement. The wind is chill at this height, and her new clothes, even inside a green velvet cloak, do little to keep her warm.

The door is a bright, slightly convex steel panel, set back in the synthetic rock of the building. Dee admires her distorted reflection, practising transforms on it, while Ax exchanges a few words with a speaker grille. The door slides smoothly sideways, and Ax and Dee walk in. The entrance hallway has inward-sloping walls, and the rightward curve of its floor continues that of the bridge, further into the building. The hall is illuminated by a high skylight, and by tall windows in the outer wall. Electric lights hang at varying levels from the ten-metre-high roof, and likewise suspended bowls overflow with leaves and stalks, flowers and scents.

The door shuts behind them. Dee glances back for a moment, checking that it can be opened manually from the inside. It looks like it can, but Spy’s subtler senses are on the job, tracking the pulse-patterns in the wires behind the walls, just in case. Ax’s feet pad, Dee’s heels click around the curve of the corridor. The wooden doors leading off the corridor are closed. After Dee and Ax have walked to a point where the outer door is no longer visible, the corridor widens out to a stairwell. A few steps up the spiral staircase, a man stands waiting. He’s wearing a black kimono embroidered with deep-sky images. His fair hair is swept back from his high forehead. His face is narrow, lips thin, eyelashes sandy, expression serene. To Dee, his smooth and healthy features look old – older far than her, or Ax; almost as old as Reid. And yet they suggest some deeper immaturity, as well as a cruelty which Dee immediately sees as distinct from the cold ruthlessness which was the worst that Reid’s most unguarded moments – even now, in replayed recollection – ever betrayed. This man is not like Reid, nor any of his friends or casual acquaintances. No burly businessman who ever ogled her at a meeting, or pawed her at a party, ever made her feel the way she does now, as his gaze inspects her.

Anderson Parris descends the stairs and smiles at Ax.

‘Well, hello,’ he says, catching Ax’s hands. ‘I’m delighted to see you, and your most interesting and beautiful friend.’

Dee opens a frogged clasp at her throat and removes her cloak. She swings the cloak across her left arm, concealing the bag in her left hand, and languidly extends her right.

‘I’m charmed to meet you, Anderson Parris.’

After a nonplussed moment the man realises she expects him to kiss her hand, and he does. His fingers are cold, his lips damp. As his head lifts from kissing her hand his gaze travels from her high-heeled boots, past her black leather leggings under her black lace skirt, up the ladder of silver clasps and tiny bows on her black satin boned corset-top; to her neck, where a steel-studded leather collar matches the buckled straps on her forearms; to her darkly shadowed eyes. When their eyes meet she looks straight back, with the slight smile of a shared secret.

Sex is in charge here, and Sex has no difficulty in detecting that she has him on a leash. He waves her politely ahead of him, and they go up the stairs. She walks up slowly, letting him have a good view of her tight-laced back. His murmured conversation with Ax carries oddly in the stairwell.

They ascend into a circular room built around the stairwell. Its ceiling is a glass dome above the two-metre-high walls. Dee sees the sun, and the darting manta-shapes of passing aircraft. Nothing else overlooks the room, which seems to combine the functions of a studio, a gallery and a bedroom. There’s a drawing-console and a camera-array. Around the walls are chairs, low tables, and long couches which might be used as beds, though the artfully casual deployment of covers and cushions makes their function ambiguous. The walls are hung with ornate weapons – swords of beaten steel, lasers of brass and ruby – and with pictures, of children who look vulnerable and women who look invulnerable.

‘Would you like a drink, lady?’

‘I would,’ she says distantly. ‘Dark Star.’

Parris’s quick, almost obsequious smile can’t quite conceal his momentary grimace at her taste in liquor, but he goes over to a drinks cabinet and a fridge and prepares the mixture. He brings it over, ice clinking, and touches her glass with his own of chilled wine.

Parris smiles as she drains her glass. He discards his kimono. Under it he’s wearing deeply unoriginal bondage gear, a costume of belts and clips. His cock is straining against what looks like a painfully tight jockstrap, ‘strap’ being the operative word.

Ax, to her surprise, drops on all fours and scampers across the room to a big wardrobe. He nudges the bottom of the door with his head, and the door swings open to reveal an apparatus of chains and straps. Dee slams her (fortunately solid) glass down on the most expensive and delicate table-surface within reach, and turns on her heel and looks at Parris.

‘I understand,’ she says coldly, ‘that you have been a very wicked man.’

Parris nods. His eyes are shining, in a face that’s become a flushed mask of humility.

Dee lets the Sex program play out the scene. She slaps his face, a little harder than he perhaps expects.

‘I have come to judge you,’ she says. She pretends to think, scrutinising him. She looks around the room, until her glance lights on the open cupboard. Ax is squatting beside it, his tongue hanging out. Dee’s eyes widen in mock surprise. She points to the cupboard.

‘Over there,’ she orders. Parris walks towards it. He flashes her a servile, collusive smile.

‘Eyes down!’ Dee yells.

Parris obediently bows his head and walks to the door.

Dee has the whole protocol mapped out in her head, but she’s not really into this sort of thing (being, if truth be told, more sub than dom) and she gives the finicky business of shackling and binding him perhaps less attention than it deserves. It ends with her squeezing his cheeks until he opens his mouth. She pops a rubber ball into his mouth, closes his jaws with a finger on his nose and a thumb on the point of his chin, and slaps a piece of insulating-tape (of a suitably shiny black) across his mouth.

She drops out of character for a moment.

‘OK?’

Parris nods. Dee checks the restraints. They’re secure.

Ax, who all the while has been working his way slowly up from the man’s toes to his knees with playful nips of his teeth, suddenly stands up and steps back. Dee steps back too, and together they look at the man hanging in the cupboard.

Ax smiles into Parris’s suddenly troubled, puzzled stare. He reaches behind his neck, and the long knife is in his hand. He tosses it sideways into the other hand, and then back. He inspects the edge. The side of the blade catches flashes of sunlight; the edge betrays only the faintest flicker, as if even photons slide off it.

He looks again at Parris.

‘Woof,’ he says.

Wilde had more than one cigarette-stub at his feet by the time he saw the girl striding towards him through the market crowd. He straightened up from leaning on the mainframe.

‘Tamara Hunter,’ the machine said over his shoulder as the girl stopped and stuck out her hand. ‘Jonathan Wilde.’

She cocked her head sideways and looked him over as he shook her hand.

‘My God,’ she said. ‘You really are him.’

Wilde grinned. ‘You look somehow familiar yourself.’

‘The pub last night,’ Tamara reminded him. ‘Mind you, if ever anyone had eyes only for one woman, it was you.’

‘Ah, of course,’ Wilde said. ‘You were with…Dee.’

‘Yes,’ Tamara said. She looked about. ‘Where’s your robot?’

‘Hah!’ Wilde snorted. ‘You and I are supposed to be on the same side, according to this electric lawyer here, so don’t you go saying “your robot”. I’m damned if I’ll admit it’s my robot. The fact is, it’s fucked off on its own somewhere.’

‘Oh,’ Tamara said. She glanced at the Invisible Hand mainframe. ‘We’re going for a private discussion,’ she told it.

‘Very well,’ the machine said. ‘I shall proceed with the technical aspects of the case.’

Tamara turned to Wilde. ‘Talk about it over a beer?’

‘God, yes.’

They wended their way between stalls and under trees. The market boomed around them. When they were – as far as it was humanly possible to tell – out of Invisible Hand’s earshot, Wilde asked, ‘Just as a matter of curiosity, is that piece of legal machinery self-aware?’

Tamara laughed. ‘Nah, it’s just an expert system. It has its little quirks, mind.’

‘Yeah, you could say that.’ He looked at a cluster of tables around an array of counter, refrigerator and grill, all small and all scorched. A tall Turk stood in the middle, his hands dealing out drinks and sandwiches for greasy wads of money. ‘Here?’

Tamara nodded, with an appreciative smile at his good judgement. Wilde ordered two litres of beer. They sipped for a minute from the beaded brown bottles, in thirsty silence, and checked each other out.

‘Smoke?’ Wilde said, retrieving a now battered pack.

‘No thanks,’ Tamara said. ‘But go ahead.’

Wilde smiled at her. ‘This is my first pack for centuries,’ he said as he lit up. ‘Not that that’s much of an excuse. For one thing, to me it all happened the day before yesterday, and for another it’s smoking that got me killed.’

Tamara frowned. ‘The books tell different stories, but I thought you died in some shoot-out.’

‘That was it,’ Wilde nodded. ‘Tried to run faster than a bullet, but –’ He looked ruefully at the cigarette, and took another drag as Tamara laughed.

‘This is weird,’ she said. ‘I’ve talked to some people who were in the ship, and who actually came from Earth – hell, my grandparents did – but they never talk about having been dead. They talk about having been “in transition”.’

‘Yeah,’ Wilde said sardonically. ‘“In denial” is the technical term for that frame of mind.’

‘But you do…and you being, like, a historical character. Wow, fuck!’ She studied his features judiciously. ‘You look different in the pictures. Older.’

‘In what pictures?’ Wilde demanded.

Tamara reached into an inside pocket, and passed to Wilde a plastic wallet containing a set of cards.

‘I, um, collect them,’ she explained as Wilde began to spread them out. ‘They come free with, uh, a cereal that gets made in this area.’

‘Harmony Oats!’ Wilde shouted with laughter. He spread out the wood-cut portraits. ‘Let’s see…Owen, Stirner, Proudhon, Warren, Bakunin, Tucker, Labadie, Wilson, Wilde. They’ve got the ancestry right, but I doubt I deserve such exalted company. I’m not sure whether to be flattered or appalled.’

He looked down at the scored lines of the iconic faces, and passed a hand over his own fresh features. He shook his head.

‘When I first looked like I do now I was far from famous,’ Wilde said. His voice sounded sad for a moment, cheerier as he added: ‘Perhaps it’s just as well.’

‘Dead right!’ Tamara looked around. ‘You’re going to be famous all over again, when this gets out. Which it will, when the court case starts, if not sooner.’

Wilde shrugged. ‘I’d like to delay it as long as possible. My grasp of the politics of this place isn’t strong enough to handle publicity to my advantage.’

‘OK,’ said Tamara. ‘We have a more immediate problem. Before I learned that you were involved, I got a message from David Reid. You…knew him?’

‘Sure did. Once.’

‘Right, well he’s suing me to get the gynoid, Dee, back. Fair enough, I expected that. I want to make a case of it. Invisible Hand has just told me you were being sued too, and that you wanted to combine forces. As a matter of fact you don’t have much choice, as it’s all part of the same case in actuality, so no other court is going to touch yours while ours is outstanding, and we’d have to bring you into it anyway, so you might as well go in on your own terms.’

Wilde spread his hands. ‘So what’s the problem?’

‘The first person on our list of preferred judges is a bloke called Eon Talgarth.’ She paused, waiting for some reaction. Wilde just raised his eyebrows. ‘He used to be an abolitionist,’ Tamara went on, ‘and he now runs a court out in the Fifth Quarter. That’s a machine domain. Most of the disputes he settles are between scrappies.’

‘Scrappies?’

‘People like me, who go into the machine domains and hunt for useful bits of machinery and automation. He’s been known to let autonomous machines go free, and put injunctions on hunting them, but no other judge has accepted that as a precedent.’

‘All the same,’ said Wilde, ‘he sounds like a good bet for your case.’

‘Sure, which is why I didn’t expect Reid to agree. But he did. Great. Trouble is, I didn’t know you’d be involved. Shit.’

‘Why is it a problem?’

‘Because Eon Talgarth doesn’t like you very much.’

Wilde put down his drink and stared at her. ‘What? I never heard of him. What’s he got against me?’

‘Oh, nothing personal as far as I know.’ She shrugged. ‘He’s from Earth, he was in the labour-gangs, he was in the ship. So you could have harmed him somehow – he’s never said. But when he was an abolitionist, he used to argue against the idea which a lot of people here have, that you were some kind of hero and great anarchist thinker and represented an alternative to the sort of ideas that Reid implemented when he set this place going. He said you were an opportunist, that you made all kinds of dirty deals with governments – and with Reid, and that any conflicts between the two of you were just personal rivalries.’

She spoke in a light-hearted, say-it-ain’t-so tone. Wilde tilted his seat precariously back and rocked with laughter.

‘It’s all true, every word!’ he said. ‘I’m amazed there are people here who say I was a hero and a great anarchist thinker. Ha-ha! This Eon Talgarth has got me bang to rights.’

Tamara’s mouth turned down slightly. ‘It’s not really true, is it? That you were always an opportunist?’

‘Absolutely,’ Wilde said. ‘Only the other day – by my memory, of course – a woman I was once in love with told me I was responsible for the last world war going nuclear. By that time in my life, bearing in mind I was ninety-three years old and had taken a lot of flak for various…controversial decisions, I didn’t even take offence.’

‘But if…’ Tamara considered the implications. ‘That would mean you were to blame for –’

‘The whole fucking mess!’ Wilde said. He looked about him and waved a hand. ‘Everything that has happened since the Third World War is all my fault!’

‘That,’ said Tamara, ‘is what Eon Talgarth thinks.’

‘He could be right,’ Wilde said with a shrug. ‘I don’t think so myself.’

‘Oh, neither do I,’ Tamara hastened to add. ‘And neither do most people, abolitionists or not. In fact, some people think you’re, well…’

She hesitated, embarrassed.

‘What?’ Wilde leaned forward, cigarette in hand, daring her. ‘Something more than a great anarchist thinker?’

‘Yes,’ Tamara said. ‘They think you’re, well, still alive and out there somewhere. People say they’ve seen you, out in the desert.’

‘Do they indeed?’ Wilde sucked in smoke and blew it above her head, in a long sigh. ‘Now that’s really interesting, because the robot Jay-Dub claims to be another…implementation of me, and to have been around since before the first landing here. I wouldn’t put it past its capabilities to throw a fetch, or to appear as me on screen.’

‘Aha!’ said Tamara. ‘According to the message I got from Invisible Hand, Reid claims he has evidence that Jay-Dub hacked into Dee, and he holds you responsible.’

‘Me?’ Wilde said. ‘Well, Jay-Dub said nothing to me about anything like that. What a surprise.’

‘Yeah,’ said Tamara. ‘AIs are devious bastards, aren’t they?’

‘Devious and dangerous,’ Wilde said. ‘Wouldn’t trust them an inch, myself.’

Tamara laughed.

‘OK,’ said Wilde, ‘I reckon we need to fill each other in a bit. Us humans gotta stick together.’

Tamara recounted what had happened the previous evening, and that morning, and some of the background. Wilde kept smiling when she spoke about abolitionism. Then Wilde went over what had happened to him, and what the robot had told him. Tamara listened, sometimes wide-eyed, sometimes frowning. When he’d finished she sat silent for a moment.

‘What a bastard,’ she said at last. ‘Growing a clone of your wife’s body and using it as a gynoid. Jeez. Guess he didn’t expect to see you again.’

‘Maybe,’ Wilde said dubiously. ‘He must’ve known about the robot, though, surely? Could the robot have seen Dee before?’

‘Sure,’ said Tamara. ‘That kind of rig would have comms, if nothing else. And Reid’s claiming Jay-Dub did hack into Dee. But the robot said nothing about that?’

‘Nothing to me,’ Wilde said. ‘I definitely got the impression that it knew something about Dee, in fact it insisted Dee wasn’t human even in the sense that it is, but it never gave any hint that Dee was part of its plans, whatever they are.’

‘And now it’s disappeared,’ Tamara sighed. She looked about, as though hoping it would reappear. ‘Presumably it doesn’t know about the legal case, and it figures it’s best to lie low.’

‘That would fit in with its personality all right,’ Wilde grinned. ‘And mine!’

‘Let’s hope it finds out before the trial,’ said Tamara. ‘Otherwise it is in even deeper shit…You still want to go before Talgarth?’

‘From what you’ve told me,’ Wilde said, ‘I don’t have much choice in the matter.’

‘That’s right,’ said Tamara.

Wilde responded with an ironic grimace. He stood up, without saying anything, and wandered about the nearby stalls. Every so often he smiled to himself, and then he turned and smiled at Tamara, who’d silently followed him.

‘There’s something about this place,’ he explained. ‘I always knew there would be places like this, trash markets on other worlds. It makes me feel so homesick that I know I’m the same man I was on Earth.’

Tamara looked down and scuffed the dirt.

‘I’m sorry,’ she said. ‘I’ve heard so much about Wilde, but my mental picture of him is always like – you know, those cards, posters I’ve seen. I know I’ve been sort of presumptuous, talking to you like you’re as young as you look.’

Wilde snorted and slapped her shoulder. ‘Knock it off,’ he said. ‘I’ve only come back from the dead in a literal sense.’

They went over to Invisible Hand and registered Wilde as a joint defendant, and Wilde laid a counter-charge against Reid of having been responsible for the death of one Jonathan Wilde, of London, Earth. The machine took it all in without demur, but its internal lights moved about in an agitated manner.

‘What now?’ Wilde asked Tamara.

‘Well, perhaps it’s time you met Dee. She’s staying at my place, and it’s only five minutes away from here. Ax – that’s a…kid who lives with me – said he’d take her out shopping this morning.’ She looked at her watch. ‘Fifteen-thirty. They should be back by now.’

‘OK,’ said Wilde. He stood up. For the first time since they’d met, his face showed something less than composure.

‘Let’s go.’

Ax retrieves the knife from the closed door of the wardrobe, paces back a few metres, and throws the knife again. It thuds into the door and sticks there, adding to the rough human outline of gashes that repeated throws have left in the wood. A faint groan and a banging noise come from inside the cupboard.

Dee looks up from rummaging through Parris’s picture collection. She feels nauseous. It’s impossible to tell if the pictures are of real scenes, or posed, or are simply computer-generated imagery. She doesn’t particularly care. She wants to wipe them from her memory, and their originator from the world.

She still doesn’t know if she can do it, or even stand by and let Ax do it. She doesn’t know if the permissions for her lethal skills have been reset. She suspects that if they haven’t, it won’t be anything dramatic; no staying of her hand, no rooting of her feet; just some quite reasonable and natural-seeming inhibition, a distaste or disquiet that won’t let her follow it through.

‘Haven’t you done enough of that?’ she asks Ax.

Ax tugs the knife out of the wood once more. ‘I suppose so,’ he admits. He grins at her. ‘You get carried away.’

Dee takes her pistol out of her handbag, tucks it in her waistband and walks over.

‘Well I say finish it,’ she says.

‘Fine,’ says Ax.

He opens the splintered door. Inside, Parris is still hanging in his bonds. His eyes are tightly closed. Tears are running down his face, and the sticky-tape gag is slimed with the snot that the tears have brought with them and which he’s blown from his nostrils in frantic snorts.

Ax traces a line with the knife’s tip, along the man’s bare belly. Parris’s eyes open, and roll from side to side, looking at Ax and then, as if in appeal, to Dee. Blood wells along the cut. The sight of it makes Dee stop, and catch Ax’s arm.

‘No!’ she says. The images from Parris’s collection are crowded out by images from Soldier, an encyclopaedia of injury and blood: spurting, spraying, oozing, dripping. She imagines it spattering her clothes, and shudders.

‘No,’ she says. ‘It’s enough.’

Ax glares at her, but she outstares him. He backs off. Dee sets to work, loosening, unshackling, unbinding. She steadies Parris as he stumbles out, and lets him sink to the floor. He’s making noises through his nostrils.

‘Oh,’ says Dee. She’d forgotten that. She stoops to rip the tape from his mouth, and as it comes off she notices that Parris has come, and more than once, even with his cock bound back. Semen is drying on his thighs.

He falls forward into a kneeling posture, and looks up at her, gasping and smiling.

‘Thank you, mistress,’ he says in a low voice. ‘I deserved that, all of it, I truly did!’ He looks at her with sly hope. ‘When can you visit me again?’

Dee stares at him. She takes a few steps backward, still thinking of keeping her nice new clothes clean. She turns and walks further away, past Ax, to the top of the stairs.

‘Mistress, please…’ Parris calls after her.

‘Oh, fuck this,’ she says.

She draws the pistol from her skirt, takes aim, and blows his head off.

The shot echoes around the circular spaces of the room and the stairwell and leaves her ears ringing. She grins at Ax, who despite his instigation of the whole thing is looking at the remains of Parris, and then at her, with a shocked pallor.

‘Now I know,’ she says. ‘I do have free will.’

‘That must be very useful,’ Ax says. ‘I’m a bit of a determinist, myself.’

Dee smiles at him reassuringly as she briskly gathers up her stuff.

‘Time to go,’ she says.

Ax is pointlessly wiping the tip of his knife on a piece of drapery.

‘Shouldn’t we, you know, clean up?’ he asks. ‘Can’t you see fingerprints and stuff?’

‘Oh, sure,’ Dee says, fastening her cloak. ‘They’re all over the place. And our skin-cells. Not to mention our images on the house’s cameras.’

She looks up and smiles and waves at a tiny, hooded lens.

‘Shit,’ says Ax. ‘Can you do anything about it?’

Dee flashes him a puzzled look and starts to go downstairs.

‘Of course I can,’ she says. ‘But it’s very important that I don’t, and you know it. Come on, before somebody comes.’

Ax follows her, still reluctant.

‘Nobody’s gonna come,’ he says. ‘I don’t think Parris had his nest video-linked to the nearest security-service.’

‘I guess not.’

Unlocking the door doesn’t require any of Dee’s deeper abilities. It closes itself behind them as soon as they’re out. They walk down the long ramp in silence. Near the bottom a side-ramp leads to a nearby residential door. Dee scans its electronics.

‘This’ll do,’ she says. ‘Somebody’s home.’

Ax stops walking. For a moment, he looks like a stubborn child.

‘This isn’t what I meant,’ he says.

Dee tries not to wheedle.

‘It’s important,’ she says. ‘It’ll help your cause, as well as your case.’

‘I don’t give a fuck about a case,’ Ax says. ‘That shit is over.’

Dee regards him levelly while recalling the things he’s said earlier.

‘The dead may rise,’ she says, ‘and you may be right, but one way or another, this will all come to judgement.’

Ax stares back at her for a moment, then nods.

Together, they walk down the small ramp to the door. Dee pings the bell. They wait. A little screen above the bell lights up, a woman’s face appears.

‘Yes?’ she says.

Dee stands a little straighter and taller.

‘This is Dee Model and Ax Terminal,’ she announces firmly. ‘We have just killed your neighbour up the way, Anderson Parris. Call you witness.’

The woman gives an exaggerated blink.

‘W-witnessed,’ she says shakily.

‘Thank you,’ Ax says.

‘Goodbye,’ says Dee.

Then Dee and Ax hurry back to the main ramp and down steps and slopes to a level walkway, and up in a lift to a high platform, where they join a small queue of well-dressed people waiting at the air-stop to catch a flit. Ax occupies his time by tuning in to the stop’s news-service. Every so often he shakes his head and smiles at Dee: no hue-and-cry yet; and uses these interruptions in his glassy trance to study a list.

Dee sees he’s already crossed off one name, and that there are a lot more to go.

Tamara looked at the little stack of incriminating material on the table: the Talgarth file on Wilde, the picture Dee had made, and a scrawled apocalyptic rant from Ax. Wilde had just finished reading it.

‘God,’ he said. ‘I’ve heard of suicide notes, but this is the first time I’ve ever come across a murder note.’

Tamara was holding her hands to the sides of her head.

‘I’ll murder the little pervert, if I ever get my hands on him,’ she said. ‘Honestly, Comrade Wilde, if I’d even suspected he was capable of going off the fast end like this I’d never’ve let Dee out of my sight.’

Wilde reached over and caught her hand.

‘Easy,’ he said, ‘easy. What have I ever done to you to make you call me “Comrade Wilde”? My name’s Jon, OK? And you’re no more responsible for losing Dee than I am for losing Jay-Dub. They’re both free agents, isn’t that what this is all about?’

‘I suppose so,’ Tamara said. ‘And Ax is claiming he wasn’t, when he did some…degrading things. I can see why, too, in a way, but then…Aaach! It’s so complicated! What do we do?’

‘Tamara,’ Wilde said gently, letting go of her hand and sitting down, ‘how long have you lived?’

‘Twenty years.’

Wilde lit a cigarette.

‘New Mars years?’

‘Yes.’

‘Well then,’ said Wilde. ‘You’ve lived in an anarchy twice as long as I ever managed to, and you surely know the answer to that, or the way of finding the answer.’

Tamara sat down at the table and looked back at him, baffled and defiant.

‘I don’t get you,’ she said.

‘Look,’ Wilde said, ‘when we want to know whether something was worth making, we look for the answer in a discovery machine called the market. When we want to know how something works, we have another discovery machine, called science. When we want to know if somebody was right to kill somebody else, we have a discovery machine called the law.’

‘Yes,’ said Tamara. ‘I know that. It’s not going to be much help to Ax and Dee, if they get caught. Or us, if we wait too long before trying to stop them.’

‘It’s worth a try, OK? And if the law really lets you down, and you can’t live with it, then –’ He spread his hands, smiling.

‘What?’

‘You’re back in the state of nature. You fight. OK, you might die, but so what? Same as if the market lets you down. It does happen. You’re starving. You steal.’

Tamara looked taken aback.

‘But that would be –’

‘Anarchy?’ Wilde grinned at her.

‘You’re saying people can do anything?’

‘Literally, yes. In any half-decent society you’re far better off respecting the law and property and so on, but the bottom line is, it’s your choice. You always have the option of making war – on the whole world, if it comes to that.’

‘But you’d lose!’ Tamara said.

Wilde looked back at her, unperturbed.

‘You might not. Locke said you can always “appeal to heaven”, and God or Nature might find in your favour. What I’m saying is, Ax has made his choice, and Dee hers. Maybe they can justify that choice in front of a court, maybe not. Either way, it isn’t for us to decide, and I’d be more than happy to justify not warning their potential victims. But if you want to, by all means go ahead.’

Tamara rubbed her chin and looked down again at Ax’s screed. She looked at Dee’s picture, and Talgarth’s file. Then she looked up at Wilde and asked, as if wanting to settle one final question: ‘What do you do if science lets you down?’

Wilde laughed. ‘Trust to luck.’

He stubbed out his cigarette and jumped up.

‘The sooner we get to Eon Talgarth’s court, the better,’ he said. ‘Am I right?’

‘Yes,’ said Tamara. She rose and began to hunt around for maps and provisions and arms.

‘So how do we get there?’ asked Wilde. ‘Aircraft?’

Tamara was packing ammo clips. She turned to him and laughed.

‘Talgarth doesn’t take kindly to aircraft landing nearby,’ she said. ‘He doesn’t trust them, for some strange reason. Nah, we take just enough weapons and gadgets to get through the wild machines, and we walk. Everybody does.’ She grinned. ‘It’s the law. It reduces the chances of fights breaking out in court.’

‘There’s a lot I don’t know about this place,’ Wilde acknowledged wryly.

Tamara grunted, testing the weight of a pack. She took out a heavy pistol, and passed it over to Wilde. She shoved Talgarth’s file on Wilde across the table.

‘Take that and read it sometime,’ she said. ‘There’s a lot this place doesn’t know about you.’