The Star Fraction

3

The Terminal Kid

It’s raining on New Mars. This is a machine-made miracle, the work of rare devices far away, and of the insensate, botanic power of their countless offspring which turn metal petals to focus faint solar radiation on chunks of dirty ice, flaring their surface volatiles to send them tumbling sunwards, nudged and guided in a precisely calculated trajectory that years later takes them into an atmosphere just thick enough to catch them and carry them down; where with luck they fall as rain and not as fire, and which in any case each bolide’s passage leaves marginally better fitted to catch and contain the next.

But to Dee, out in the wet night, it’s commonplace, and a drag. For about half an hour she’s had to keep the image-intensifiers at full blast, and her eyes are hurting. Her ears, too: sonar ping off wet walls a metre or so away on either side induces an enclosing sense of pressure. At the same time turning it down or off would strain her even more. So it’s with relief and relaxation that she sees the narrow waterway open out on a much wider and brighter canal.

‘Ring Canal,’ Tamara indicates as she turns her little craft to the right. Dee, craning her head and looking fore and aft, can see no curvature. Tall, narrow houses – rather than storage blocks and industrial units – overlook this canal, and lights are strung above its banks. Ahead, a rapidly closing hundred metres away, the Ring Canal itself opens out, and through the gap between the buildings at the end Dee sees what looks and sounds like a bonfire: a blaze of light, a roar of noise.

At the confluence, the Ring Canal separates to left and right, curving to a visible ring whose diameter Dee estimates as three hundred metres. More of the tall houses huddle around it, and within it there’s a flat island, accessible from the surrounding circular way by bridges. This central island is covered with corrugated-iron huts and fabric booths and shacks, among which many people are loudly busy. The light comes from overhead floods, and from each individual booth’s contribution of spotlights, fluorescent tubing, strobe, fairy-light cable, and fibre-optic.

Tamara takes another right and throttles back the engine, coasting along the outer bank, silent amid the din of music and commerce, both competitive.

‘What’s going on here?’ Dee asks.

Tamara spares her a glance. ‘Fi’day evening in Circle Square.’

A tiny jetty under a narrow wrought-iron bridge, with a set of steps attached. Tamara moors the boat and motions to Dee to climb the steps. She waits on the shoreward side of the bridge and helps Tamara to haul up the bag. The coming and going of people – couples, groups, kids dodging and weaving between legs and wheels, youths on or in vehicles built to go fast and moving slow, and things that might be vehicles except they have no riders – almost pushes her back off.

‘Right,’ says Tamara, ‘time to make you legal.’

She sets off along the bridge, Dee close behind her – one person in the crowd who has no difficulty getting through.

Most of the stalls around the circumference of the island are locked up, but still lit-up. The ones that aren’t are selling drinks and snacks. The main action is going on towards the hub, in a melée of fairground attractions, discos and rock concerts. Dee notices a stage with a band that looks and sounds just like Metal Petal, this week’s hit at every uptown thrash. A quick visual zoom and aural analysis reveals that they are Metal Petal. (Dee’s heard about copyright, but it’s one of those things she doesn’t quite believe, a song of distant Earth.)

Tamara stops in front of a thing like a big vending-machine between two stalls. It’s covered with dust and rust. It has a black window at the top and a speaker grille and a channel down one side through which Tamara swipes a card. Nothing happens.

‘Hey!’ she shouts. She bangs the side with her fist, making a hollow boom. ‘Fucking IBM,’ she says to no-one in particular.

Lights come on behind the dark window.

‘Invisible Hand Legal Services,’ says the machine, in a voice like God in an old movie. ‘How can I help you?’

‘Register an autonomy claim for an abandoned machine,’ Tamara says, catching Dee’s wrist and pressing her palm against the window.

‘Both hands please,’ says the machine. ‘Both eyes.’

Dee spreads her fingers against the glass and peers in, seeing her own reflection and bright, moving sparks of light.

‘How do you wish the claim to be defended?’

‘I’ll defend it!’ Dee says with a sudden surge of Self-ish passion.

‘By the principal,’ Tamara adds gravely. ‘And by me, my affiliates and by back-up if requested.’

‘Very well. Noted and posted.’

The lights go out. Tamara’s still holding Dee’s wrist, and she swings her around and grabs the other…then lets go, and clasps hands instead. Dee looks at Tamara’s eyes and sees her own reflection and the speeding, spinning lights behind her, the doubled fair.

‘Okay gal,’ Tamara yells. ‘That’s you with a gang on your side! That’s as free as it gets! Give or take…Later for that! Right now –’ she twirls to face the thrumming hub of the island market ‘– let’s party!’

‘You’re telling me,’ Wilde said incredulously to the robot, ‘that Reid is here?’

‘Yes,’ said the robot. ‘Why should that surprise you? Is it more remarkable than your being here?’

Wilde grinned at it sourly. He pushed away his empty plate and sipped at his beer. He shook his head.

‘Reid was one of the last people I saw,’ he said. ‘For all I know, it may have been him who had me killed. And as far as I’m concerned, it happened today. Christ. I keep expecting to wake up.’

‘You have woken up,’ the robot said. ‘You can expect some emotional reaction as your mind adjusts to your situation.’

‘I suppose so.’ A bleakness belying his apparent age settled on Wilde’s countenance. ‘It has already. So tell me, machine. I’m here, and you say Reid’s here. What about other people I knew? What about Annette?’

‘Annette,’ the machine said carefully, ‘is among the dead. Whether her mind as well as her genotype has been preserved I don’t know, but there may be grounds for hope.’

‘Because of the clone?’

‘Yes.’

‘I must find her, and find out.’

‘You can find out without finding her,’ said the machine. ‘It’s…I’ll explain tomorrow.’

‘Why not now?’

‘Trouble,’ the machine said. ‘Don’t turn around until you hear something.’

Wilde set down his glass. His shoulders began to hunch.

‘Relax,’ said the machine.

The doors of the pub banged open and the music stopped. Conversations ran on for a few seconds and then trailed off into the spreading silence. Everybody turned around.

Two men stood in the doorway. They were wearing loose-cut, sharp-creased business suits, over open-necked shirts, over tee-shirts. Their hair was as shiny as their shoes, and their knuckles flashed with studded stones. One of the men perfunctorily held up a card showing a mug-shot of himself and a grey block of small print. The other took from a jacket-pocket a crumpled ball of flat material. He grasped a corner of it and shook it out. With a final flick of his wrist he snapped it to a glossy, full-colour, high-res poster depicting the dark-haired woman who had fled from Wilde and the robot.

‘Anybody seen her?’ he demanded.

The pub’s customers could still be approximately differentiated into two groups, the men at the bar and the girls at the tables, although some mingling had begun. A little flurry of giggles and gasps came from the women, and a murmur of grunts and slightly shifted seats and glasses from the men. Anyone who looked about to say something would glance at the men at the bar, and find someone else to look at, something else to say.

Within half a minute everybody was talking again; the men at the bar had turned back to watching the television, where a commentator was interviewing a team-leader behind whom bodies were being stretchered from an arena. The only person still looking directly at the repossession men was Wilde. The one holding the picture strolled over; the other followed, fondling a revolver-butt with a look of distant pleasure.

The man with the picture looked down at Wilde and smiled, showing perfect but strangely shaped incisors, long canines. Perfumed fumes poured off him like sweat.

‘Well,’ he said, ‘you look interested. Big reward, you know.’

Wilde looked up reluctantly from the picture. He shook his head.

‘She reminds me of somebody I used to know,’ he said. ‘That’s all. But I’ve never seen her here.’

The man glared at him. ‘She’s been here,’ he said. ‘I can smell it.’ He turned his head this way and that, inhaling gently, as if his statement were literally true. The other man gave a sudden gleeful yell and snatched up something from the floor.

He brandished it under Wilde’s nose. Wilde recoiled slightly. The robot, leaning between a chair and the table-top, jerked forward a couple of centimetres.

The thing the man was holding was a newspaper.

‘Knew it!’ he said. ‘Bloody bolishies! Right, that’s it. We know where to look for her!’

Stuffing the newspaper and the poster in their pockets, the two men stalked out through another silence. The doors banged again. The music came back on. The hominid behind the bar looked at Wilde with an expression of deep rue, then shrugged his wide shoulders and spread his broad hands, his long arms comically extended. The shrug completed, he turned away and switched the music back on, louder.

Wilde returned to his meal, and downed his glass of spirits in a gulp that brought tears to his eyes.

‘I still want to speak to her,’ he said.

‘If you’re concerned about the gynoid,’ the machine said, ‘don’t worry. If she’s with abolitionists she’ll be legally and physically safe from repossession, at least for a while. And if she isn’t…’ It moved the upper joints of its forelimbs in a parody of a shrug. ‘They aren’t going to harm her. Just fix a programming error. It’s not important.’

‘Because she’s just a machine, right?’

‘Right.’

‘Well, it may be tactless to point this out, but so are you.’

‘Of course,’ the machine said. ‘But I’m human-equivalent, and she’s a sex-toy. Like I said: just a fucking machine.’

Surveillance systems? Don’t make me smile. Any recording made around the centre of Circle Square is irredeemably corrupted, hacked and patched, spliced and remixed. Even Dee’s memories are understandably giddy: Soldier and Spy just shut off in disgust, leaving only simple reflexes on the job. Humans pass drugs from hand to hand, machines pass plugs. The music has amplitudes and electronic undertow that work to the same effect. Dee sees Tamara talking to a tall fighting man with an industrial arm, finds herself talking to a spidery gadget with airbrushes and a single mind. It thinks, and can talk, of nothing but murals. It knows about concrete surfaces and the properties of paint and the physics of aerosols. It tells her about them, at considerable length.

She could have listened to it all night. She’s a good listener. But the artist sees a builder, and without an excuse or goodbye skitters away through the crowd to chat it up.

Tamara catches Dee’s elbow and stares after the machine. Then she turns and Dee can, as they say, see the wheels going round as the speech centres overcome intoxication.

Eventually the words break through.

‘Not human equivalent!’

‘I’ve talked to worse men,’ Dee says.

Dee’s mindlessly bopping – this is a Self-specific skill – when she notices the man she’s bopping opposite, who’s moving as if he presumes he’s dancing with her. Her gaze moves up from his shiny leather fake-plastic shoes to the trousers and jacket of his fancy but unstylish suit, past the miasma of disgusting scent rising from the sweat-stained tee-shirt neckline inside the open-necked shirt-collar to his –

face!

– and the shock of recognising one of the greps, the repossession men, sends an adrenaline jolt that rouses Soldier. Everything slows, except her. (The music goes from disco to deep industrial dub.) A quick glance around sets Surgeon swiftly to work on the tendons and cartilages of her neck and brings back the intelligence that Tamara is writhing sinuously a couple of metres away, her back half-turned, and behind Tamara, sideways on to Dee, is the other grep. His movements and stance are as if he’s fucking a virtual image of Tamara a metre or so in front of the real one, but that’s just disco-dancing. His gaze doesn’t leave the real Tamara for an instant.

She sees the sweat flick from his hair as his head flips. He looks fully occupied for at least the next couple of seconds.

The other grep, the one who’s got his eye on her, has definitely noticed Dee’s mental shift (that sudden blurred head-movement’s a dead giveaway) and his pupils are shrinking to pin-holes even as his eyelids are opening wider. Dee is aware of her pistol as a heavy shape in the soft leather of that silly, cissy bag at her feet, aware of her narrow skirt as drag that’ll impede the tactically obvious lethal kick.

She could yell, but a yell is nothing in this noise. The only pitch audible above it would be inaudible – to human ears. Her mouth opens, her chest inflates with rib-stressing speed and she lets out an ultrasonic yell she hopes is audible to machines for hundreds of metres around: ‘Fucking IBM, help!’

The music stops. Lights flood. People blink and stumble. At the same moment Dee’s right hand reaches down, her right foot kicks up behind her – still in a move that could be part of a dance-step – and her high-heeled shoe flies into her hand. She holds it high like a hammer, ready to nail the grep through the eyeball. Recognition of this ripples through the muscles and blood-vessels of his face as the speakers suddenly speak. The voice of the IBM, to Dee’s Soldier-speeded senses, now sounds deeper and more menacing than anything in de Mille:

‘Invisible Hand client threatened; please assist.’

The grep backs off, and the one beside Tamara does too. Everybody else looks momentarily off-balance, except Tamara, who’s looking at Dee with a dawning, jaw-slackening awe. Dee’s sweeping glance around the crowd, before Soldier subsides to a watchful withdrawal, shows her that there are other faces, dotted through the crowd, responding to the call as best they can: tensing, rising or crouching or – in the case of one or two machines – telescoping. These folk start up a slow-hand-clapping chant: ‘Out! Out! Out!’

And Dee shoves the man, and Tamara shoves, and the two greps are shoved and man-handled from one person or robot to another until they’re ejected from the edge of the crowd into the waiting grasp of a couple of heavy bikers, who escort them away.

‘OK,’ Dee says. She smiles around and slips her shoe back on, waves and calls out ‘Thanks, everybody!’ in a girlishly grateful voice that sends Soldier away in a squirm of embarrassment and brings a small flush to her cheeks.

The music and the lights resume their rhythm.

Dee dances; but she knows the next time won’t be so easy. These guys may not come back, but somebody will.

Dee’s in a small room at the top of a house on Circle Square, overlooking the Ring Canal. Tamara has brought her back to a flat in this tall house, after what seems like hours at the outdoor party – and retired to her own room to sleep, with apologetic explanations that she starts work early in the morning. ‘Ax will sort you out,’ she’s told her.

Dee is used to vague human speech. She doesn’t ask for explanations. Her own human flesh and nerves are tired. She doesn’t need to sleep, but she needs to rest, and to dream. One after another her selves have to shut down, go off-line, compress and assimilate and integrate the doings of the day.

The room is seductively comfortable, with the rain drumming on the roof just behind the sloping ceiling; its dormer window supplying more eye-tilting angles; a dressing-table with stoppered bottles and pots, beads and scarves and ribbons hung over the mirror, clipped fashion-shots tacked to the walls, a dozen dolls on a shelf. There’s a curved, satin-padded wicker chair in a corner, a wall cupboard (locked), and a bed with a clutter of quilt and lace-trimmed pillows. There’s something faintly troubling about the human smell behind the flowery and musky scents, but she can’t be bothered to analyse it.

She takes her clothes off and folds or hangs them, adjusts her body temperature to her comfort, and lies down on the bed. Her eyelids shut out the window’s view of Ship City’s familiar reality: a damp, dripping city of silicate towers, a city veined with canals, crowded with stranded starfarers and free or enslaved automata, haunted by the quick and the dead. Her minds spool to Story, who spins another episode of her endless starring role in a self-perpetuating soap opera steeped in all the romantic glamour of ancient Earth, where…

…she’s the eldest daughter of a Senator and set to inherit his place in the Duma and all the privileges of his democratic anointment, but she’s been kidnapped by agents of the Archipelago Mining Corporation and held captive by its young and dark and devilish chief executive, who wants her for his harem, and is willing to trade her life for her hand in concubinage and a major Antarctic concession, and her father’s personal and fanatically loyal Chechen guards are fighting their way through the chief executive’s rings of brutish defenders while she stands, sheathed in silks and clouded in perfumes on the balcony of a Kuomintang drug-lord’s skyscraper in the heart of Old New York watching the tanks battle it out in the streets below and waiting for the hard-pressed Chechens to raise reinforcements from the desperate tribes of the South Bronx with the promise of plunder, and she hears a stealthy step behind her and the chief executive – whose face, if truth be told, looks uncannily like her owner’s – falls on his knees before her and tells her he really, truly, loves her and he’s consumed with remorse and he’ll set her free, if only…

And so on.

This is what androids – or rather, gynoids – dream.

A knock on the door. She’s back to full awareness in an instant, her internal clock telling her it’s early morning.

‘Just a moment,’ she says.

The little cleaner-vermin have removed every speck of organic dirt from her clothes. She shakes them out without thinking and dresses in a blur of motion (a useful Soldier skill that she’s cut-and-pasted to Self) and calls out,

‘Come in.’

The boy who comes in carrying a tray with a mug of coffee and a bowl of cereal looks about twelve years old, at first glance. He’s Black, with slight build and delicate features and a shock of black hair. As Dee scans him up and down, all the while smiling and saying ‘hello’, she realises that he’s much older than he looks. There’s no way so much experience could have made its subtle imprint in the muscle-tone of his face, the look in his eye, in just twelve years. Not here, not in Ship City. They have laws against that sort of thing.

‘You must be Ax,’ she says, taking the tray. ‘Thanks.’ She waves him to the chair. ‘Tamara mentioned you.’

‘Likewise,’ the boy says, sitting back with one foot on the opposite knee. ‘So you’re Dee Model, huh? Big boss Reid’s main squeeze.’

Dee’s facing him, her knees primly together, the tray balanced on them, the spoon almost at her mouth. She puts it back, making a tinny rattle against the side of the bowl. She steadies the tray, and her voice.

‘How do you know that?’

Ax flashes white teeth. ‘You’re famous.’ His grin becomes wicked, then relents to a reassuring smile. ‘Not really. Your master had you on his arm at a party last year, pic made its way onto the gossip chats.’ His eyes unfocus for a moment. ‘Quite a dress,’ he says.

‘I didn’t think so,’ Dee says. She resumes eating. ‘I had to stay in Sex most of the time to make wearing it bearable.’

Ax snorts.

‘Anyway.’ Dee blushes. Spy’s routines keep her voice level and flat. ‘Are there searches out for me? Rewards posted?’

Again the off-line gaze – he’s got a cortical downlink, Dee realises, not a common feature around here; the most intimate interface with the nets that most people will tolerate is contacts, the little round screens that you slip over your eyes.

‘None so far,’ Ax says, attention snapping back. ‘Reckon he’s embarrassed. I mean, your walking doll walks out on you, can’t be like having your car nicked, know what I mean?’

‘Yes,’ Dee says. The thought of her owner’s probable rage and humiliation makes her knees, despite everything, quiver. She puts the tray down and reaches for her purse.

‘Smoke?’

‘Anything,’ says Ax. He has a lighter on a chain around his neck, and moves swiftly to light up for her, then settles back, dragging on his own.

‘So why did you walk out?’ he asks. His tone is neither friendly nor prurient; it’s like a professional question, the tone of a physician or an engineer with a patient.

‘He doesn’t mistreat me,’ she says. ‘I don’t mind the service, or the sex. I mind being a slave.’

‘You’re supposed to like it,’ Ax says. ‘It’s hard-wired.’

‘I know,’ Dee says. She glances around for an ashtray, sighs and mentally over-rides her Servant routines and taps the ash onto the empty, milk-lined bowl. ‘And I do like it. I do find it fulfilling. But only sexually. Not any other way, not in my separate self. And when I realised that, what I did was…I patched my Sex programs over that area, and masked it all off from Self, and made myself free.’

‘Amazing,’ Ax says, as if it’s anything but. ‘So it’s true what they say: information wants to be free!’

Dee shakes her head. ‘It’s nothing so grand,’ she explains. ‘It happened after I loaded up far more mind-tools than I was ever supposed to have.’ She tries to remember that second birth, that awakening, when she flipped through all those separate selves and saw herself, a ghostly reflection in all the windows.

Ax frowns. He flips a finger, and his cigarette-butt’s fizzing out on the bowl’s film of milk. An investigating cleany-crawly shies away, rearing its frontal segments. ‘When did this happen?’ he asks.

Dee smiles proudly, bursting to share her confidence. ‘Yesterday,’ she says.

Ax’s mouth hangs open for a moment. For a second the seen-it-all look drops from his face. He fumbles a cigarette-packet from inside the sleeve of his tee-shirt and lights one abstractedly, not looking, not offering. ‘But why,’ he continues, ‘did you load up all the extra software in the first place? What made you do that?’

Dee finds herself at a loss. It’s difficult to think back to her earlier simplicity, when she switched from one single mind to another and it was just her, it was where she lived. She was no less conscious then than she is now, but it was an undivided, naive, biddable consciousness, without detachment. But even there, somewhere in Self, was the lust to know. And the opportunity had come, and she’d taken it – with what, looking back, had been a sweet assurance that her owner would be pleased.

‘Instinct,’ she says, with a light laugh. Ax snorts and rolls his eyes.

‘All right,’ Dee says, suddenly stung. ‘Perhaps it did come from the animal body, or the bits of biological brain!’

‘We’ll leave that argument to the other side,’ Ax says.

‘The other side of what?’

‘The other side of the case,’ he explains with strained patience. ‘One way or another, this is going to end up in court. You know about the law?’

‘Oh yes,’ Dee says brightly. ‘I have a mind in here called Secretary. She has precedents coming out of my ears.’

‘Well,’ Ax says firmly, rising, ‘I suggest you go back over them. It’ll all seem very different, I can tell you that for nothing.’

‘OK,’ Dee says. Ax holds the door open, waiting. Dee stands up.

‘What now?’

He looks her down and up. ‘Shopping, I think.’ His voice conveys an epicene disdain.

She picks up her purse, sticks the pistol back in the top of her skirt, and glances around. She’s left nothing.

‘Nice room.’

‘Mine,’ Ax says. ‘I’d be very happy to share it with you.’

The outer door of the building booms behind them. ‘Stay,’ Ax commands it. Magnetic bolts set it ringing again. Ax grins at her and sets off to the left. Dee glances around as she strolls beside him. The house they’ve just come out of is four storeys tall, and narrow. So are all the others around here, in classic crowded canal-bank style, but there are no weathered brick walls or contrast grouting, no sills or window-boxes. Everything’s concrete, a skin slapped up in a hurry on webs of wire-mesh over iron bones, graffiti its only – and appropriate – decoration. The city’s spicular towers loom like construction cranes above the buildings, reducing them to on-site huts.

Smoke rises from among the stalls, steam from the pavements. Mist hangs along the canal surface. The spray-paint on the walls gets more and more vehement, reaching a climax of clenched fists and rockets and mushroom-clouds and dinosaurs at the entrance to an alley.

Ax stops and waves inward. ‘This way.’

The alley is no more than three metres wide but it’s a shopping street in its own right, and unlike what Dee has seen of the neighbourhood so far, it has a worked-for charm, the names of the shops painted in painstaking emulation of the clean calligraphy of twenty-first-century mall-signs. At the first window display Ax waits impatiently as Dee surveys a fossil diorama, allegedly of the fauna of one of the planet’s ancient sea-beds. Scientist has other views, and Latin names Dee doesn’t know float distractingly across her sight. Inside the shop, fossils are being worked into amulets and ornaments. A girl at a grinding-wheel raises her face-plate, gives Dee an inviting smile and returns – puzzled or baffled by Dee’s Scientist-masked response – to her work. The volatile smells of varnish and polish, glue and lubricant waft through the doorway along with the screech of carborundum on stone.

There’s a shop selling drugs and pipes; a newspaper stand where Dee sees copies of The Abolitionist and more obscure titles like Factory Farming, Nano Mart, Nuke Tech; a stall stacked with weathered junk identified as ‘Old New Martian Alien Artifacts’; at all of which Dee’s critical dawdling has Ax muttering and smoking. Dee enjoys this refusal, trivial though it is, to adapt to a human’s priorities; an exercise of free will.

But she shares Ax’s evident delight when they reach the first boutique, a cave of clothing and accessories. He leads her in, and they’re there for an hour that passes like a minute and then out again into other clothes-shops, and cosmetics-artists’ little studios and jewellers’ labs. All the while Ax fusses around her with an unselfconscious intimacy which doesn’t vary with her state of dress or undress. She can tell that the pleasure he takes in her is aesthetic, not erotic. The software of Sex is sensitive to such distinctions: it can read the physiology of a flush, time the beat of a pulse and measure the dilation of a pupil, and it knows there’s no lust in this boy’s touch.

At the far end of the alley is a café. They sit themselves down there under the sudden light of the noon sun above the narrow street, sip coffee, and smoke, surrounded by their purchases. Dee’s cast off her sober style for something dikey and punky. She preens in leather, lacing and lace; satin and silk, spikes and studs. A look that would have most twelve-year-old boys unimpressed, most men stimulated. Ax looks at her as a work of art he’s accomplished, which at the moment she is.

Dee fidgets with her lighter, looks up under the fringe of her restyled hair. She’s about to say something, but she doesn’t know what to ask.

‘Let me spare you,’ Ax says. ‘If embarrassment is in your repertoire, that is. Sexually speaking, I’m not in the game. On the game, sometimes, perhaps.’ He flicks fingertips. ‘Not gay, not neuter. Just a boy: a permanent pre-pubescent.’

‘Why?’ Dee asks. ‘Is it an illness?’

‘Terminal,’ Ax grins. ‘Something down where the genes meet the little machines: a bug. A virus. Something my parents picked up on the long trip. Fortunately it doesn’t kick in unless I go through puberty. So I’ve fixed my biological age a bit younger than most.’

‘And there’s no help for it?’

Ax turns down the corners of his mouth. ‘If there is, it’s with the fast minds. Best advice would be to forget it, in other words. But I couldn’t forget it. One reason I got into abolitionism…’ He laughs. ‘My chances of becoming a man are right up there with the dead coming back and the fast minds running again. Pffft.’

‘Hmmm.’ Dee feels sad. What a waste. A brighter thought comes to her. ‘You could grow up as a woman,’ she says.

‘Well, thank you,’ Ax replies, pouting and posing for a moment. ‘I’d consider it, but the fixers tell me the bug reacts to the hormones of either sex. So I’m stuck with neither, and after the predictable raging and sulking I decided I might as well make a career of being someone a jealous male could trust alone with his female.’ He draws in smoke and exhales it elegantly. ‘Freelance professional eunuch and part-time catamite.’

While Dee’s still thinking about this, and wondering if Ax’s lot isn’t, all things considered, any worse than hers, he adds:

‘Before I found out about my condition, I was quite a normal little lad.’ He sighs. ‘The effeminacy’s just a pose, Dee, just a pose. And in case anyone forgets, I can also be extremely violent.’

‘Why didn’t you specialise in that? Be a guard or a fighter or –’

‘And risk getting killed?’ Ax guffaws. ‘Do I look stupid?’

‘No.’ Dee gives him a friendly, sisterly (now that she’s figured out their only possible relationship) smile, but she stops feeling sorry for him. She reckons he’s doing all right. Queer as a coot, she finds herself thinking, and as they get up to leave she sets Scientist grumpily searching ancient, inherited databases to find out what the fuck a coot is.

‘So I made it to the ships,’ Wilde said. He raised himself on one elbow and peered around the room, in which he’d been lying awake for ten minutes.

‘Good morning,’ said the machine. It was resting on the floor in the corner of the room. The room was upstairs in the Malley Mile, cheap to rent and containing a wash-stand, a chair and a bed. It was remarkably free of dust, due to machines about the size and shape of large woodlice that scuttled about the floor.

Wilde stared at the machine. ‘What have you been doing all night?’

‘Guarding you,’ the machine said. It stretched out its limbs momentarily, then folded them back. ‘Scanning the city’s nets. Dreaming.’

Wilde remained leaning on one elbow, looking at the machine with a suddenly reckless curiosity. ‘I didn’t know machines dreamed.’

‘I also reminisce,’ said the machine. ‘When there’s time.’

Wilde grinned sourly. ‘I suppose time is what you have plenty of, thinking so much faster –’

‘No,’ the machine snapped. ‘I told you. I’m a human-equivalent machine. My subjective time is much the same as yours. No doubt my connections are faster than your reactions, but the consciousness they sustain moves at the same pace.’

‘Does it indeed?’ Wilde got out of bed, looked down at his body with a flicker of renewed surprise, smiled and washed his face and neck and put his clothes on.

‘So tell me, machine,’ he said as he tugged on his boots, ‘what am I to call you? Come to that, what are you?’

‘Basically,’ said the machine, detaching a filament from a wall socket and winding it slowly back into its casing, ‘I’m a civil-engineering construction rig, autonomous, nuclear-powered, sand-resistant. As to my name.’ It paused. ‘You may call me anything you like, but I have been known as Jay-Dub.’

Wilde laughed. ‘That’s great! That’ll do.’

‘“Jay-Dub” is fine,’ said the machine. ‘Not undignified. Thanks, Jon Wilde.’

‘Well, Jay-Dub,’ Wilde said with a self-conscious smile, ‘let’s go and get breakfast.’

‘You do that,’ Jay-Dub said. It unfolded its limbs and stood up, revealing a litter of torn foil carapaces with now-stilled tiny legs and dulled lenses. ‘I’ve eaten.’

The Malley Mile was silent, the bar shuttered and swept and polished and hung with damp cloths when they picked their way downstairs and out through a one-way-locked door.

‘Trusting,’ Wilde remarked, as he let the door click back.

‘It’s an honest place,’ Jay-Dub said. ‘There’s little in the way of petty crime. For reasons which I’m sure you know.’

The small sun was low above the towers, laying lacey shadows on the street. Boats and barges floated down the canal, heading out of town.

‘Where are they going?’ Wilde asked. The man and the robot were strolling towards a small dock a hundred or so metres up the street. There were food-stalls on the dock.

‘Mines or farms,’ the robot said. ‘They aren’t entirely distinct, here. They’re both a matter of using nanotech – natural or artificial – to concentrate dispersed molecules into a usable form.’

‘And people work at that? What are the robots doing?’

‘Heh-heh-heh.’ Jay-Dub’s voice-control had advanced: it could now parody a mechanical laugh. ‘Robots are either useless for such purposes, or far too useful to waste on them.’

The small dock was busy. People – mostly human, but with a few other hominid types among them – were embarking, or unlading sacks of vegetables or minerals from long narrow barges. Electric-powered trucks were backing on to the quay, loading up. A family of what looked like gibbons with swollen skulls hauled a net-full of slapping, silvery fish along the quay and spilled them into a rusty bath behind one of the stalls, where a burly woman immediately began to gut and grill the fish. Wilde stopped there and, somewhat hesitantly and with a lot of pointing, got her to put together fish and leaves and bread. Coffee was for sale in glass cups, deposit returnable.

Wilde took his breakfast to the edge of the quay and sat down, legs dangling, and slowly ate, looking all around. The robot hunkered down beside him.

‘Time you told me things,’ Wilde said. ‘You said you made me. What did that mean?’

‘Cloned you from a cell,’ the machine said. ‘Grew you in a vat. Ran a program to put your memories back on your synapses.’ It hummed, remotely. ‘That last could get you killed, so keep it to yourself.’

‘Why did you do it?’

‘I needed your help,’ said Jay-Dub. ‘To fight David Reid, and to change this world.’

Wilde looked at the machine for a long time, his face as inscrutable as the machine’s blank surface.

‘You’ve already told me what you are,’ he said. ‘But who are you? The truth, this time. The whole truth.’

‘What I am,’ the machine said, so quietly that Wilde had to lean closer, his ear to a grille between its metal shells, ‘is a long and complex question. But I was you.’