The Star Fraction

7

Critical Life

‘Basically,’ says Ax, as he and Dee wander back along the canal-bank towards Circle Square, ‘I don’t know if I believe it. I mean, most people just dismiss it, like, well, flying saucers and Old New Martian ruins and Elvis and shit. But I’ve heard stories.’

His pause indicates that whatever stories he’s heard, Dee’s going to hear too. She nods.

‘Go on.’

‘Well, some of us…not Tamara, not the activist types, OK, have always thought, or wished, that Wilde would come back. Or come through. And over the years, people have seen him. Or said they have. Out in the desert. Sometimes walking, sometimes driving a ’track. Usually he’s with a girl, and he looks like he did when he was an old man.’

He’s been going on about the iniquities of society for a few minutes now. He’s talked about things that have happened to him, and about how they’d be all right with Reid but not with Wilde. Wilde wouldn’t have stood for it. This Jonathan Wilde seems to be a mythical figure, somebody who knew Reid and lost out to him and who might, equally mythically, some day come back and avenge the oppressed. Dee has listened politely, filing it all away for more detailed study later. She’s handling it as she used to handle social occasions. But what he’s just said brings her up short.

‘What do you mean, an old man?’ she asks.

‘Somebody who hasn’t re-juved before stabilising,’ Ax replies flippantly. ‘Quite a sight.’

Dee shudders, thinking of how people used to fall apart like badly maintained biotech, how they’d eventually just stop. Horrible. She’s sat through classical movies with Reid, and they give a very different picture of Earth than historical romances do. Nobody lives happily ever after.

‘I saw an old man recently,’ she says. ‘In the last couple of weeks. An old man with a girl, in a truck. Called up Reid’s front office, said it was a wrong number.’ She glances sidelong at Ax. ‘Not many old men here. Could that have been Wilde?’

Ax looks at her with sharp scepticism. ‘What was this guy like?’

‘Hmmm,’ says Dee. She moves her lower lip over her upper teeth, then wipes her thumb across the teeth and observes the streak of lipstick.

‘Something bothering you?’ Ax asks, amused.

Dee stops in mid-stride. ‘Yes.’ The memory belongs to Secretary, but it resonates with several of her other selves as well: all the new ones she’s loaded up have this odd imperative, linked to the memory and tagged to their root directories.

‘Just a minute,’ she says.

There’s a bollard a few metres away. She walks over to it and sits down, flipping the back of her black lace skirt carefully out of the way, so that she sits on the bollard, not on the skirt. The iron is cold through fine leather, thin silk and bare skin. Ax, watching, gives an appreciative moan, but Dee has already boot-strapped into the dry clarity of Sys.

When Dee is in Self she thinks of Sys as ‘Sis’, and indeed it’s what (she imagines) a big sister would be like: knowing everything, correcting her, tidying up after her, picking up and putting away the shrugged-off costumes of her quick-changed selves. She doesn’t go into Sys very often, and doesn’t stay in that thin, chill air for long.

Now, her cold inward eye takes in the hierarchy of her selves and minds and tools, the common structures and the ceaseless activity of Sys that make them one personality and not a squabbling legion contending for control of her body. She traces the memory of the phone-call, as it’s passed from Secretary to Self to Sys, and then sees its onward cascade over the days in which she loaded up all that extra software: Scientist, Soldier, Spy, Seneschal…and on to Stores and Secrets, out on a limb of their own. These last two she can’t access. They’ve always been in her mind anyway; but now patient, mindless subroutines of Sys are systematically besieging them, hurling code after code at their mental locks like antibodies at a virus.

She drops back in to Self. Ax is looking down at her with puzzled concern.

‘So that’s how it happened,’ she says, rising.

‘How what happened?’

‘How I became me. It was that phone-call. There was a command-code carried in it. It told me to load up and seek and search and…and I did, and when there were enough selves and data and so on in my head, it happened! I woke up!’ She gives a flighty laugh. ‘Is that how it is with you? Do you get lots of selves, and then become self-aware?’

‘To the best of my knowledge,’ Ax says gravely, ‘no. That is not how humans become self-aware. It happens at an early age, you understand.’

He shakes himself. ‘You’re telling me you woke up because of a phone-call from an old man?’

‘Yes.’

‘Hey man, cool. This is like Zen! Maybe he was Wilde, or maybe he was a perfect master.’

He catches her hand and starts her walking again. She complies, searching her brain for some referent to ‘perfect master’. Scientist has a disdainful account, and its sneer is just fading from her mind as Ax asks excitedly:

‘Do you know how to draw?’

‘I can make pictures,’ Dee says. ‘But I don’t think he was a perfect master. The girl with him sure didn’t look like she needed enlightenment.’

‘Zen,’ Ax nods to himself. ‘Definitely.’

In the lower floor of the house there’s a big room with a kitchen-range and sink, sofas and chairs and a heavy, scrubbed wooden table. Books and papers and kit are piled in corners, and on the table. Dee sits down at the table, clearing a space between cups and tools. Ax rummages up some sheets of paper and a steel ballpoint pen. He gives them to her.

‘So make a picture,’ he says.

‘OK,’ says Dee. She takes the pen in her right hand and steadies the paper with her left. A quick jiggle at the top right of the paper tells her the ink is black, and running smoothly. Closing her eyes, she calls up the image of the man in the truck. She ignores the girl for the moment (though there’s something there, something about her eyes, that Dee thinks odd and in need of further investigation – more research is necessary, OK, over to Scientist)…now. Yes. Tab to Printer Control: a little routine in Secretary’s repertoire.

Start. She hears the skittering sound of the pen on the paper for a minute, as her right hand moves back and forth horizontally, very fast, with tiny vertical movements lifting the pen on to and off the paper; and her left hand moves the paper away from her, very slowly. Finish.

She opens her eyes. ‘There,’ she says. She rubs her wrist.

Ax is looking at her, open-mouthed. He closes his mouth and shakes his head.

‘OK,’ he says. ‘Let’s have a look.’

Even Dee is a little surprised to see what a good picture she’s made out of the skips and breaks in a few hundred straight lines ruled across the paper; almost like a black-and-white photograph, it shows the man’s face and some of his surroundings: the seat-back behind him, the scored panelling of the rear wall of the cab, the coiled cable of the hanging microphone he’s holding in front of him, the girl’s shoulder.

‘I don’t believe it,’ says Ax. ‘That’s him. That’s the guy I was telling you about: Jonathan Wilde.’

‘Well,’ says Dee, ‘I told you he wasn’t a perfect master.’

Ax grins at her as if even he is surprised at this level of wit from her (and oh, how those little surprises smart!) and drags an old book out of a drift in one of the corners. It’s a leather binder holding an algae-cellulose paper print-out. Dee hefts it in her hand and leafs through it. The first page that falls open is near the end, and it’s a photograph of the same man as she’s just drawn. Even the pose and expression are similar – he’s leaning forward, talking earnestly to camera.

‘That’s one of the last pictures of Wilde that ever became public,’ Ax explains. ‘It’s lifted from a television interview with him in February 2046.’

Dee feels the hairs on the back of her neck prickle as she studies this image, from a past almost incalculably remote (but only in real time, Scientist reminds her, not in ship time; and it’s going on about the Malley Mile again – the real thing, the one the pub is named for. She shuts it off).

‘That’s him all right,’ she says. She glances at the picture she made, then at the one in the book; runs a transform. ‘Every line maps exactly.’

She looks at it again. Something’s bugging her.

‘Well, yes,’ Ax says.

Dee continues to leaf backwards through the book. The pictures get fewer as she gets closer to the beginning, Wilde gets younger; most of them are obviously not posed, but snatched on the fly: clipped blow-ups from surveillance systems, a calm face in angry crowds…

‘What is this, exactly?’

‘It’s a dossier on Wilde,’ Ax tells her. ‘Notes for a biography.’

She stops at another picture, a low-angle shot, blurry. It’s labelled ‘FOI(PrevGovts)/SB/08–95’. Two men at a table, in a pub or café. One, identified in the caption as Wilde, has his back to the camera. The other, talking past a held cigarette, is Reid.

‘Told you,’ says Ax. ‘They knew each other for years.’

Dee has known, at some level, that Reid is one of the originals, that he came physically from Earth, but it’s somehow still a shock to see what is – assuming the picture’s antiquity and provenance – visual evidence. More pages flip past. When the sheaf of pages is thin under her thumb, there’s a sharp, professional photograph that stops her thoughts. It has rough, scissored edges, a caption below and a scrawled attribution: Dumbarton Gazette 04/06/77 – some local zine, apparently. She stares at it, points at it dumbly. Behind her shoulder, Ax’s breath hisses in past his teeth.

A wedding-portrait of a couple: formal clothes, informal pose, almost cheek-to-cheek. The man, she sees now that the continuity has been established, is the younger self of the old man at the end of the book; is Wilde; is the man she saw yesterday. The woman’s face, above frilled shoulders and high collar in lace-trimmed white voile, is her own.

‘Let me guess,’ Ax says heavily. ‘That’s the guy who walked into the Malley Mile?’

‘Yes,’ she breathes. ‘No wonder he looked like he recognised me. My body is a clone all right – a clone of his wife!’

‘Creepy,’ says Ax. He peers closer at the caption. ‘Annette, that was her name.’

Dee can’t look at the picture any longer, and doesn’t need to: this image will stay in her mind forever unless she deletes it. It’s creepy, all right, and disturbing in a deeper sense: this distant twin, this woman whose physical ghost Dee is, looks happy in a way Dee has never been, with a personality Dee knows is different from her own. Only the physical body, and the underlying temperament which, Dee knows, is likewise genetic, are the same. She lets the last lot of pages fall over the picture, and stares unseeing at the title on the first page:

Jonathan Wilde, 1953–2046: A Critical Life

by Eon Talgarth

Ax is pacing the room, heedless of Dee’s angst, talking excitedly. Dee has to run the first few seconds past her again before she catches up: ‘So we have a puzzle,’ he’s been saying. ‘A couple of weeks ago, Wilde sees you on Reid’s screen. He gives no sign of recognition, but fires off an instructionset to get you loading up information, maybe with the intention of waking you up, maybe not. Yesterday, Wilde walks in, apparently having re-juved in the meantime, sees you and freaks out.’

Dee shakes her head.

‘The guy in the pub wasn’t a re-juve of the man I saw on the screen.’

Ax frowns. ‘You sound pretty sure of that.’

‘The re-juve doesn’t change the fact that you’ve lived longer. It always shows. Not on a picture, perhaps, but when you see someone move and speak it’s obvious.’ She smiles. ‘Don’t you find?’

‘Haven’t seen enough re-juves,’ Ax says. ‘It’s not a common procedure – most people stabilise at what they fancy is their best.’ He laughs. ‘Sometimes there’s a fashion for ageing, but it never lasts.’

‘I’ll tell you this,’ Dee says. ‘The Wilde I saw two weeks ago had lived a hell of a lot longer than the Wilde I saw last night.’

‘OK, assume there’s two of him. That’s no more of a mystery than there being even one of him, because he shouldn’t be here at all. He wasn’t in the crew, or the gangs.’ He flashes her a feral grin. ‘So Reid says, or at least the lists do. The company roll. I’ve checked. But like I said, people say they see him. And now, you have proof. He’s back!’

He picks up again the picture that Dee made. She can see his hands are shaking. He lights a cigarette after a couple of attempts, and stares at nothing for a while. His facial expression slowly changes, in a way that makes Dee think of how he must have got his names: it’s hard, and sharp, and…terminal.

‘Do you know what this means?’ he says.

Dee compresses her lips, shakes her head.

‘It means he’s back from the dead,’ Ax says. ‘It means everything’s going to change. It means all bets are off.’

‘I don’t understand,’ Dee says.

Ax jabs out the cigarette and lights another. He’s still shaking.

‘People assume things,’ he says. ‘They assume things will go on just as they are. They know what they can get away with. They know what they can get people to agree to. Like, I agreed to let other people use my body, because I needed the money. And they knew I did. But because I agreed, they think that makes it all right. Some of them even knew I hated it. But I agreed to it.’

Dee suddenly needs a cigarette herself. She lights one, and her hands, now, are trembling.

‘Did Reid ever let other people use your body?’

‘Oh no,’ Dee says quickly. ‘He’s very possessive.’

‘But he used you,’ Ax persists. ‘Whether you wanted to or not.’

‘I always wanted to,’ Dee says, but her Sex–y smile hides a new and gnawing doubt as to how much that consent was worth, now, looking back. Ax watches her, and she sees him see the doubt grow.

He opens a drawer in the table and reaches in, and brings out a knife. It isn’t a kitchen-knife. It has a black wooden handle, a brass guard, and thirty centimetres of blade. Almost casually, Ax bangs the sharp point of the knife into the table and lets go of the handle, so it springs back a bit and it vibrates.

‘Now you know who you are,’ Ax says quietly. Dee isn’t sure he’s talking to her. All the shaking has gone out of his body, out of his voice, and into that quivering blade. ‘You’re a person. You’re free. Have you ever thought – what you would like to do to people who’ve treated you like meat?’

Out here, in the damp-desert flats between two arms of the city, it’s quiet even for a Sic’day morning. The only sounds are the thrum of the dinghy’s motor, the occasional hiss of a jet transport overhead, and the cries of the adapted birdlife: the lost-satellite bleep of rustshanks, the quacking of mucks, and the caw-cawing of sandgulls. Sic’day is for most folk a day when some work is done, but not much.

(Tamara has heard the opinion that the day is called that because of the number of people working – or not working – with hangovers, but this is a myth. More than a Neo-Martian century ago, Reid expressed the opinion that continuing to name the days after the gods of the Solar system would be inappropriate. Nobody could agree on other names, so the week goes: Wunday, Twoday, Thirday, Fourday, Fi’day, Sic’day, Se’nday. There are twenty-five hours and ten minutes in a day; for convenience there are twenty-five hours in the first six days and twenty-six on Se’nday. There are a hundred and ten weeks in a year. More or less. All serious chronology is done in SI multiples of seconds, reckoning from the moment the Ship’s clock came out of the Malley Mile, around 6.4 gigaseconds ago.)

Tamara’s boat bumps against the canal-bank as she drifts along under minimal power. She’s on a capillary of the Ring Canal. The shallow artificial rivulet is carrying her away from the centre of the city, towards the fields. The human quarter is on her right, the Fifth Quarter on her left. Between them is this expanse of waste, not quite mud-flat, but no longer desert, and not yet fields. In it, venturing out from the machine domain of the Fifth Quarter, can be found biomechanisms, Tamara’s habitual prey.

A sandgull descends, screaming, about a hundred and fifty metres ahead and thirty from the left bank. Tamara ups the revs and lowers her profile as other gulls dive to join it. They squawk and squabble around a black thing. The boat cuts diagonally across the canal. Tamara zooms her right eye. The black thing has a flailing appendage. A stubborn gull clings to it, taking some of the momentum out of the shaking in moments of hopping near-flight.

‘Stay,’ Tamara tells the boat’s ’bot, and it obediently idles the engine and hooks the bank as Tamara steps out, clutching a long grapple. She draws her pistol as she sprints forward. The bang of a blank scatters the gulls into wheeling indignation overhead. As Tamara’s feet thud over the damp sand and skip over tussocks of grass, the black object – a warty, rubbery ball about a third of a metre across, with at least a metre of flail – starts hauling itself towards the nearest patch of what looks suspiciously like quicksand. When she’s about four metres away Tamara feels a tickle behind the bridge of her nose. She stops and sniffs. The tickle stays constant – good. That means the radioactivity is contained, not airborne. Still, the thing’s uncomfortably hot. Not dangerous, but she has to be careful.

She circles it gingerly, getting between it and the wet area. It moves towards her: whip, tug, bounce; whip, tug, bounce. It stops. The tip of the flail rises and sways from side to side, then presses against the ground. Tamara steps forward, stumbles as her left foot comes up from the ground with an unexpected sucking noise. The rubbery limb recoils.

Tamara squats down and reaches out with her grapple, a simple mechanism a couple of metres long which has a primitive robot hand at the far end and a pair of handles for her to grasp, one-handed, and thus extend her clutch. She eases it across the ground and grabs the flail at the root. In obliging reflex, the tentacular appendage wraps around the grapple and starts trying to crush it to death.

Tamara lifts it off the ground and heads back to the boat. The biomech, evolved or designed at the interface between domains, is not a bad catch. It has senses, reflexes, and apparently a capacity to concentrate radioactives within its tough skin. Somewhere in the human quarter there’s a technician who is looking for just such a genotype, or so she hopes.

She’s just sat down in the boat and in the middle of manoeuvring the grapple and its load, awkwardly trying to keep her distance from it (at less than two metres the tickle in her geiger-sense is becoming a pain) while selecting and opening a container, when there’s a ringing in her left ear.

‘Damn,’ she says loudly. She tenses her throat-muscles to turn on the mike, winks up the phone-screen, and with a rightward flick of her eyes accepts the call. The first screen to come up is clunky, even as it hangs with hallucinatory vividness in the space between her and the end of the grapple. It’s like a camera is looking at a monitor screen, in some primitive glimmer of machine self-awareness. Text scrolls down it, a voice-over spell-checks itself along.

‘Invisible Hand Legal Services,’ it intones. ‘Incoming challenge call from –’ and here it hesitates, as if even this august implementation of the voice of the IBM is amazed at its own temerity ‘– David Reid. Will you accept?’

‘Yes,’ gulps Tamara.

The screen is instantly minimised to the corner of her eye, and the main view is taken by a solid image of a face she’s seen many times before, but never before speaking to her. The window floats in front of her eyes, with Reid’s head and shoulders at a comfortable speaking distance behind it. Behind him, she can see different parts of a room, a bright window (real, apparently). He’s pacing about as he talks.

‘Tamara Hunter?’ he says.

‘Yes.’

He grins, peering past her.

‘I can see why you call yourself that. Well, to business m’lady. You’re currently in possession of one of my machines, a Model D gynoid, and I want it back. Now.’

Tamara takes a deep breath.

‘I’m not in possession of it – her. She’s claiming self-ownership and I’m defending her. So are several sworn allies of mine, and other clients of Invisible Hand.’

‘Crap,’ Reid retorts. ‘She doesn’t even have the wit to claim self-ownership.’

‘She does now, and did, before witnesses.’

‘To a fucking IBM, you mean. Your legal expert-system couldn’t pass the Turing itself, let alone administer it.’

‘I RESENT THAT.’

‘Shaddap,’ says Tamara, still struggling with the grapple. The thing on the end is rolling like a badly held forkful of spaghetti. ‘Sorry, Reid. That wasn’t for you.’

‘I appreciate that,’ says Reid dryly. ‘You were saying?’

‘I can get human witnesses to testify before any court you like. The gynoid ain’t your pet zombie any more.’

Reid’s eyes narrow. ‘That’s because she’s been hacked. It’s still not an autonomous development, even if that matters, which it doesn’t.’

‘It’s time it did,’ Tamara says levelly. ‘I’m willing to fight you on this.’

‘Have it your way,’ says Reid. ‘In court, then.’

‘It’s your challenge,’ Tamara points out.

‘OK, the first bid’s yours.’ He bows.

Tamara winks up the Invisible Hand screen again. It displays a list of courts in descending order of preference. It’s a short list. She goes for the first, but her voice is not hopeful as she says: ‘Eon Talgarth, Court of the Fifth Quarter.’

‘Accepted,’ Reid says at once.

Tamara shrinks the IBM screen and stares at Reid, who looks blandly back.

‘What?’ she says. Then: ‘Confirm, please.’

‘I accept,’ Reid says, with emphatic formality, ‘that the decision be put to the Court of the Fifth Quarter in the case of myself versus Tamara Hunter and allies as represented by Invisible Hand Legal Services and-stroke-or themselves, to be held at the earliest convenience of all parties.’

‘And I too,’ says Tamara.

The IBM repeats what they’ve said.

‘And meanwhile, no grepping?’ Tamara asks suspiciously.

‘Of course, no grepping,’ says Reid. He gives her a smile that, despite everything, despite herself, brings a slight warmth to her cheeks. ‘See you in court, lady.’

The screen vanishes in time for Tamara to see the black biomech unwind itself smoothly from the grapple, drop into the canal and, with a sinuous motion of its flail, swim away.

‘All right,’ said Jay-Dub. ‘Have it your way. I suppose I can work something out.’ It stopped at the junction of the pier and the street. ‘But before we go rushing off, I have a couple of suggestions.’

Wilde stopped and looked back. ‘Yes?’

‘Get yourself a gun,’ said Jay-Dub. ‘And some better clothes. You look like you’ve just walked in off the desert or something. Also, if you want to head for the main abolitionist hang-out, it’s quicker by boat.’

‘You have a point there,’ said Wilde.

An hour later he was wearing a baggy black jacket, shirt and trousers, all of some warm fabric that he’d been assured was knife-proof, and studying a bulky metal automatic as he sat in a crowded vaporetta. The other passengers, mostly young, paid him a gratifying lack of attention. Wilde sat, aloof by the side of the boat, and looked at the canal-bank scenes and cocked his ears to his fellow-passengers’ slangy, accented English. Jay-Dub, limbs retracted, lay at his feet like luggage. It was the only robot on board, apart from the helmsman, a chunk of solid-state cybernetics on the prow.

Scoop-nets on the side of the boat trawled bobbing balls of plastic from the water, and flicked them, rattling, into a hold beneath the deck. The boat left the commercial gaiety of the Stone Canal and passed into a succession of tunnels and narrow, high-banked canals. Here, in the green algae soggy on the walls, smaller balls could be seen. They moved downwards very slowly, but their course could be inferred: the closer to the water they sank, the larger they grew, until they dropped off and floated away. Wilde refrained from asking the machine about the economics and ecology of this bio-industrial process.

They reached their destination forty minutes after leaving. The boat pulled up with much coughing of engine and thrashing of propellers alongside a little jetty with steps leading to a narrow canal-side street. The boat’s only human crew-member, who’d done nothing but collect the fares, opened his eyes and waved a hand.

‘Circle Square, two hundred metres,’ he announced, and laid a short gang-plank to the steps. Wilde took care to be the last off the boat. He smiled at the boatman.

‘You’re a Kazakh Greek,’ he said.

The man’s eyes widened. He gripped Wilde’s hand, and said something in another language.

‘We’ve all come a long way,’ Wilde said.

‘Win friends and influence people,’ Jay-Dub sneered, sotto voce, at the top of the steps. ‘Always the goddamn agitator, eh?’

About thirty people walked along the street, Wilde and the robot a few metres behind the rest. Ahead, Circle Square’s market island was just tuning up to its daily discord. The street was lined with tiny pavement cafés and stalls, and broken by alleys down which even tinier shops plied some kind of trade from windows and doorways.

They were a few steps away from one such alley-mouth, at the opposite corner of which a couple of perilously small tables were in use for serving coffee in proportionately minute cups, when Jay-Dub said urgently, ‘Stop!’

At the same moment Wilde too noticed the two men – the same two men who’d come searching in the pub. They sat at one of those little tables, staring back at him from behind dark glasses. His hand froze in the act of reaching for his new gun as the others did so for theirs.

Into this momentary impasse came a peculiar vehicle: a platform on wheels, with a crane-like handling-apparatus at either end. It nosed out of the alleyway without warning. Wilde jumped back. Mechanical arms unfolded from the cranes and snatched past him. He turned in time to see the claws of those arms clamp around Jay-Dub’s lower limbs. They lifted the struggling machine right over his head, and placed it firmly on the flatbed’s platform.

Wilde squatted down, grabbed the platform with both hands, and lifted. Jay-Dub lurched against the constraints at the right moment, and over the whole thing went. As people reacted, a cascade of tables toppled as well. Wilde dived across Jay-Dub’s hull, rolled with a kick at the legs of the two men – on their feet now, with steaming stains on their thighs – and a moment later was up and running. A frantic backward glance showed the two men a few steps behind, in his wake of jostled vistors and tumbled furniture.

Circle Square was just ahead of him, the crowd denser.

‘Help!’ Wilde yelled, plunging into the crowd.

‘Proceed no further,’ ordered a booming voice from ahead and above. It might have come from one of the loudspeakers hung from cabling among trees and lamp-posts. Wilde stopped, and looked behind him again. The two men chasing him had halted a few metres away, dithering at the edge of a pavement, just where the end of the narrow street met the parapet of a bridge.

One of them made a move for the inside of his jacket. Before Wilde could react, something else reacted faster. Something spidery and light, a ball of stiff stalks that skimmed over the heads of the crowd and flew at the two men. As it struck them its stalks became flexible, and wrapped around them both, from their shoulders to their thighs.

Confined, they were barely even an object of curiosity. Wilde stayed where he was for a minute as the crowd dispersed somewhat. Then he walked back the way he’d come. As he sidled past the two men he gave them about three metres clearance. They glared at him.

‘Who sent you?’ he asked.

‘Fuck off,’ one of them said.

‘Give Reid my regards,’ Wilde said.

At this the other man made an attempt to burst his bonds, but the multi-armed machine only tightened in response. Wilde continued along to the alley-mouth, and on his way passed two young men, guiding or herding the now empty and damaged platform in the opposite direction.

‘’Scuse me’ Wilde said. ‘See what happened to the other robot? The one this thing grabbed?’

‘Scrammed,’ he was told.

He thanked them, and checked for himself. The most anyone could tell him was that the construction-machine had fled down the alleyway. Wilde took a look along it, shook his head and muttered something to himself, and trudged back to the bridge. He arrived in time to see the two young men departing with the platform, which now had his attackers securely held by its remaining functional crane-arm. The other machine was still there, once more in its spiky-ball form. It rolled over to him like a tumbleweed.

‘Good morning,’ it said. The buzzing voice seemed to be generated by the vibration of some of its stalks. ‘You called for help, within the domain of Invisible Hand Legal Services. I intervened in response.’

‘Thank you,’ Wilde said.

‘Although no binding contract has been entered into, it would be a matter of courtesy to make a payment to Invisible Hand. As a reciprocal courtesy, Invisible Hand would like to offer you a ten-week defence policy, with that payment written off against your first bill if you choose to pay in advance.’

Wilde looked down at the eager machine with amusement.

‘How much?’

‘Twenty grams gold or equivalent.’

‘Very reasonable,’ Wilde said. ‘Do you take cards?’

‘Follow me,’ said the machine.

Wilde slid his card down the slot of the rusty mainframe box. The machine that had come to his aid had led him here and left him.

‘Thank you,’ Invisible Hand said. ‘You have identified yourself as Jonathan Wilde. Your account is that opened originally by the machine known as Jay-Dub, aka Jonathan Wilde, and endorsed in your behalf at Stras Cobol Mutual Bank last night.’

‘Correct,’ said Wilde.

‘I have on my files a case against you,’ the machine said. ‘Do you wish to hear the details at present?’

Wilde looked around.

‘Go ahead.’

Reid’s face appeared in ruddy hologram monochrome behind the machine’s screen.

‘I, David Reid, wish to lay a charge against one Jonathan Wilde, of no fixed abode, namely this: that a robot known as Jay-Dub, property of the same Jonathan Wilde, was used to corrupt the control systems of a Model D gynoid, known as Dee Model, property of myself. If Jonathan Wilde wishes to defend himself legally against this charge, no further attempts will be made by me or my agents or allies to arrest him or to impound his machine. If he does not so wish, or refuses a mutually acceptable court, those attempts will continue. I end this statement this Sic’day morning, fifty-seventh day of the year one hundred and two, Ship time.’

Wilde watched the image dwindle to a ruby bead.

He sighed. ‘How did Reid know I’d be registered with you?’

‘He did not,’ said the mainframe. ‘This message was released to all defence agencies. I have conveyed to the others that it has been delivered. They have no further interest in it, unless of course you choose to have it defended by one of them.’

‘No,’ said Wilde.

‘Very well,’ said the machine. ‘Do you wish to defend yourself legally against the charge?’

Wilde thought about this.

‘Yes,’ he said.

Shadows and lights moved behind the screen.

‘I have a suggestion to make,’ said the machine. ‘There is another case in progress, between Reid and another party, in the matter of Dee Model. Dee Model is also a client of mine. You might wish to consider combining your defences.’

‘I might indeed,’ said Wilde.

‘Wait here,’ said the machine. ‘…You may smoke.’