'I'll do my best,' Lisa said, speaking around a hard ache in her throat.

Willie explained that his old friend Calvin Quinlan hadn't been able to make head or tail of the tesserae, so he'd had one of them analysed in the Alien Market. And that had attracted the attention of Ada Morange. Her people were on the lookout for Ghajar code; he was pretty sure that Carol Schleifer had told them about his find after he'd paid her to mirror the stuff. The deal had been clinched when they'd seen the drawings he'd been making. Turned out they were identical to a diagram that a Ghajar eidolon had put into the head of the little sister of the guy who had found the first operational spaceships. A map of pulsars that Ada Morange believed might lead to the Ghajar home world or some other equally momentous discovery.

'I made a deal with her people,' Willie said, sounding briefly like his old self. 'A pretty good deal, if I say so myself. They were so excited they didn't care what it cost. It was like taking candy from a baby who happens to own a candy factory. And frankly they got me cheap, considering . . . I should have asked for more, for all the good it would have done me. So anyway, we went out and started digging. We found a chamber tomb, and that's when things sort of went sideways.'

He'd glimpsed some kind of skeleton on the floor, and then eidolons had exploded around him and the Outland crew. The crew had started attacking each other; he'd fled. When he woke, he was in his truck, his nose crusted with blood, bruises on his chest, the windshield cracked. He'd crashed into a stand of iron trees half a dozen kilometres from the site, but had no memory of it. He believed that he'd suffered the same kind of fugue that had seized him and Lisa during the Bad Trip.

He drove back to the excavation site, saw several bodies lying all bloody outside the shaft and realised there'd been a breakout, and freaked out again.

'I thought that the police would think I murdered those people. So I unloaded the trail bike, put together some supplies, and set fire to the truck to cover up my disappearance. Crazy, I know, but I was sort of delirious by then.'

He had ridden until he had stumbled on this tomb, drawn there, he said, by some instinct not his. He slept outside on bare ground under the stars and woke up at first light, feverish and hurting. Needles were beginning to grow through his skin. Trying to cut one out had caused terrible pain. He couldn't go any further, knew he was in a bad way, and had used his satellite phone to ask the road dogs for help.

He believed that the crash site in the City of the Dead, the Bad Trip and his jackpot were all linked. 'The ship was damaged. It fell out of orbit and crashed. One of the crew escaped. Or maybe it was the only crew . . . Anyway, it got away, in some kind of lifeboat. It was hurt. It hid in that Ghostkeeper tomb, and repurposed the tesserae it found there. I think it put some kind of log or diary in them. Some kind of information.'

'What kind of information?'

Willie touched the scribbles on the rock beside him. 'It's out there. I can feel it tugging at me.'

'Where they came from?'

'That would be something, wouldn't it?'

Lisa started to tell Willie about the flow of Ghajar narrative code, the nodes she'd seen that Bria hadn't. He nodded out for a minute or so, woke and focused on her.

Saying, 'We had some good times, didn't we?'

'The best,' Lisa said.

They talked about the old times. Willie said that when he was fixed up he wanted to see some of the other worlds. Said that Ada Morange owed him that.

'You can come with me, Lize. You deserve it.'

'That's a fine idea,' she said, and held his hand until he passed into sleep again.

30. Dry Salvages.

Tony touched down outside Dry Salvages's only city, Freedonia, in the middle of the long afternoon of the planet's two-thousand-hour day, and rode a taxi into town. They had ceramic-shell ground vehicles here, propelled by engines that burned alcohol refined from sugar cane, and piloted by actual human beings. This one was red with a chequerboard stripe around its waist, owned by a garrulous middle-aged woman with a lot of curly black hair who drove with casual authority along the buzzing six-lane highway, trying to find out where Tony had been, why he was here and where he was going, offering to introduce him to the kind of good honest trader who was impossible to find in Freedonia without local knowledge. She laughed at Tony's dismay when she swerved around a truck that cut in front of them. 'You space jockeys are all the same. You ride in alien space-cans, zip through wormholes from star to star, but a little light freeway traffic makes you shit your underwear.'

It was actually the prospect of confronting Raqle Thornhilde that was making Tony nervous. Fantasies of revenge were one thing; the reality was something else. He had spent a fair amount of his freebooter career on Dry Salvages, in Freedonia, but everything familiar seemed strange; the gigantic spires reared up ahead like the fangs of some planet-eating beast.

They were between one and a half and two kilometres high, the spires. Crooked and tapering and glossy black, woven from billions of strands of fullerene, a carbon allotrope harder than diamond. Their adamantine foundations went down half a kilometre and the land around them had eroded over the tens of thousands of years since they had been built, leaving them standing on a mesa elevated above the desert plain. Like all such spires, every square centimetre of their surfaces was covered in intricate carvings whose meaning and purpose were as yet unknown. Some believed that they were algorithms encoding the essence of the Elder Culture that had constructed them; others that they were vast libraries containing secret knowledge about the relationship between the Spirebuilders and the Jackaroo, or the entire history of intelligent life in the universe, or instructions that when deciphered would allow humanity to uplift itself into some higher state of being.

The spires that stood in the centre of the vast desert of Dry Salvages's southern continent were the largest known, surrounded by the detritus of Elder Cultures that had come to study, worship or rewrite their texts. This, and the small wilderness of mirrors that orbited Dry Salvages's star and gave access to a mostly unexplored portion of the wormhole network, had attracted freebooters, tomb raiders, scholars, wizards, pirates and hopeful dreamers from every part of the Commons and the fringe worlds. Artefacts and clandestine goods were traded in Freedonia's libertarian economy; brokers bought and sold information about new worlds and unexplored Elder Culture ruins. This was where Raqle Thornhilde had forged a contract with Tony and a crew of wizards, sending them out to track down the rumour of ancient stromatolites left by the Old Old Ones on a remote slime planet. And now he had returned to confront the wily old broker, to ask her who had told her about the slime planet, and to find out what she knew about the Red Brigade, Aunty Jael, and Ada Morange.

The freeway switchbacked through a steep fell field of tumbled rocks to the top of the mesa and the entrance of the great cavern that, carved into one of the spires, housed the city of Freedonia and sheltered it from the extremes of temperature during the long days and nights. The city's low-rise grid spread across the cavern's flat floor. One- and two-storey flat-roofed buildings, open-air shopping malls and food markets, a golf course with swards of artificial grass. Bubble cars and trikes and shoals of cyclists swarming along wide boulevards under illuminated hoardings advertising perfume and clothes, drink and drugs. All this encompassed by black walls, scaffolded at their bases with the platforms where scholars and tourists inspected the spire-builder carvings, that curved up to the dome of the cavern's roof and its fixed constellations of chandelier blimps and fierce stars of piped sunlight. It was like inhabiting the belly of a giant ship.

Tony spent most of his first day in the city recruiting a pair of bodyguards, a taciturn father-and-son team, renting two adjoining rooms in a motel they recommended, and hiring a little runabout. He dearly missed Junot Johnson, and his unflustered ability to sort out mundane matters. The next day he began the rounds of the bars, tearooms and cafes where freebooters and traders hung out. The routine was much the same in every place he visited. With one of the bodyguards stationed outside and the other keeping watch inside he would nurse a glass of tea or cup of coffee and fall into idle conversation with the other customers, working around to the prize that had been hijacked by the Red Brigade. They had murdered a bunch of wizards, he said, not needing to fake his outrage, and stolen valuable stromatolites recovered from a slime planet. Right now he was trying recoup his losses by selling some algorithms, unusual Ghajar stuff, that had been ripped from those stromatolites. Anyone who was interested in that kind of thing should come and see him.

He did not want to approach Raqle Thornhilde directly. It would imply weakness on his part. An admission that, despite the raid on his family's home and the hit to their reputation, it was their fault that they had defaulted on the contract. And besides, although he would have loved to storm her home and put her directly to the question, the broker had powerful connections in the city and was protected by layers of robust security.

The first time Tony had met her, he had been summoned to her house, a rambling sugar-white confection in the exclusive district at the inner end of Freedonia, and had been subjected to intrusive security scans and an actual body search before being escorted by two burly men, alike as identical twins, to a tiled inner courtyard where water pulsed in a little fountain and birds chirped in gilded cages set amongst hanging ferns. He had sat there for more than half an hour before Raqle Thornhilde finally appeared, accompanied by a weircat and two men identical to Tony's escorts: the same burly build, the same scowl, the same beady gaze under a thick monobrow, the same cropped black hair. They were rumoured to be clones of Raqle Thornhilde's dead son. Why not? Many things forbidden elsewhere were legal in Freedonia.

The broker gave no excuse or explanation for the delay, which was clearly meant to underscore the point that this meeting was entirely on her terms. One of her escorts helped her lower herself onto a day bed; the other poured tea into silver-rimmed glasses while she studied Tony with a direct gaze that seemed to X-ray his soul.

'You'll like this,' she told Tony, as she took one of the glasses. 'A single-estate blend I import from Wellington for my own use.'

Her peremptory manner was not so much arrogance as indifference to any opinion that contradicted her tastes and decisions. Her bulk was draped in a scarlet and gold kaftan; her jowly face was powdered white, lips painted red. The weircat sprawled at her feet, long legs folded under its wasp-waisted body, its tiny head aimed at Tony, its red eyes glittering. When its mouth dilated in a kind of yawn, it displayed a rim of crooked black thorns.

After a brief exchange of pleasantries the broker explained that she had a lead on a pre-empire survey report about ancient stromatolites, was looking for someone who could take a crew of wizards to check it out, and believed that he was the person for the job.

'To be frank, I didn't invite you here because I was impressed by your experience, or your ship. It's because your family owns a laminated brain that could be of great help if the wizards actually find some algorithms. Are you still interested?'

Tony, scenting the possibility of a big score, admitted that he might be. Raqle Thornhilde introduced him to Fred Firat, the leader of the crew of wizards she had already recruited; over a dinner of imported oysters and roast beef, the wizard expounded on the expertise of his crew and the potential importance of the find with a fiery passion that was only slightly less impressive when he repeated the performance for the benefit of Ayo and Aunty Jael over a q-phone link. Aunty Jael confirmed that the report was very promising and Ayo shared Tony's enthusiasm, but there was a nerve-racking wait while she sought the approval of the family council. She called Tony early the next morning, told him that she had won the vote at the council meeting and the deal with Raqle Thornhilde and Fred Firat was on. Standing on the balcony of his motel room, still drunk from the night before, the guy he'd picked up in a bar snoring on the bed, Tony had believed that he had passed some kind of audition. That he had finally proven his worth to his family and was about to embark on the first of many fabulous adventures. He had been so stupidly happy.

He knew now that the adventure on the slime planet had been part of Aunty Jael's escape plan, and he wanted to discover if Raqle Thornhilde had been a willing collaborator. If she was, she might know where Aunty Jael, aka Ada Morange, and the Red Brigade had gone, and how to contact them. If she wasn't, she might help him track down the people who had cheated her out of her share of the find.

Innocent or guilty, she would know why he had returned to Freedonia, and suspect that his talk about selling Ghajar algorithms was bait for some kind of trap. But he was certain that she would not be able to resist checking it out. If she was innocent, she'd arrange a meeting and bluster at first, accuse him of cheating her and dodging his contractual obligations, but once they got past that Tony believed that she would be willing to negotiate. But if she had been collaborating with the Red Brigade and Aunty Jael, she would come at him some other way, and he would have to hope that the two bodyguards could protect him. And while she was checking him out and planning her move, he could try to find out if anyone knew why the Red Brigade wanted those stromatolites, and the copies of the Ghajar eidolon.

Mostly, he heard only the same old rumours. The Red Brigade had found the frozen body of Emperor Truman Johnson, and had laminated his brain. Their philosopher queen, Mina Saba, had cloned herself and the clones were riding a hundred ships in a hundred different directions, looking for the Jackaroo's home world. Or she'd already found that world, and ancient secrets she'd uncovered there had enabled her to transcend the limits of the human mind. And there were the usual stories about agents from the Red Brigade spreading sleepy sickness, contaminating water supplies with alien drugs or genetically engineered gut bacteria, launching cube sats that broadcast mind rays . . . The same old same old.

He did hear one interesting tidbit in a small cafe with people playing backgammon at a couple of tables, under the husks of big silvery bugs hung from a mirrored ceiling. It seemed that a few weeks ago the Red Brigade had raided a police outpost at a small, recently discovered sargasso of Ghajar ships. According to the freebooter who told Tony the story, it contained a number of mad ships, and the police had been making arrangements to transport them to one of the collection sites in the Commons. The sole survivor of the raid claimed to have been interrogated by Mina Saba herself, said that the Red Brigade had made off with a mad ship caged in an automated U-class hauler.

Tony thought of his brother, commanding a similar lonely outpost; thought of Ada Morange's interest in mad ships. He asked if anyone knew what the Red Brigade wanted with their prize.

'Nothing good, you can be sure of that,' the freebooter, a shrewd sensible grey-haired woman, said. 'The Commons police have been rounding up mad ships ever since that terrorist gang, the ones claiming to be the true heirs of the Second Empire, tried to use one to drive an entire city crazy. I was there, one time. On Takama-ga-hara? You can still see the impact crater. Maybe you know the official story: how the mad ship parasitised the multiple-frequency bands the terrorists were using to fly it in by remote control, punched through their firewalls and drove every person and AI on board their ship insane. How it was brought down by a hero pilot who flew her raptor into the hauler carrying it before it could escape. Well, someone in Takama-ga-hara's traffic control told me that pilot flew into the hauler, all right, but she didn't do much damage. What really happened was that the mad ship crashed itself. It reached out to the terrorists and killed them, and then it committed suicide.'

Abass had once told Tony that story. He'd also said that the police team which had located and boarded the terrorists' ship afterwards had discovered a charnel house: its crew had killed each other with their teeth and bare hands.

'You have to wonder, if it really did commit suicide, why it did it,' the freebooter said. 'Maybe mad ships have some kind of ethical code, and it killed itself because it had been misused, and death was a way of making that good. Or maybe it's just that mad ships are crazy. What's your interest, kid?'

'Some wizards I know got themselves involved with the Red Brigade.'

'You probably don't want my advice, being young and immortal and all, but here it is anyway. You should fly on by. Wizards are clever, but they lack caution and common sense. They have moths, where you come from?'

Tony shook his head.

'They're from Earth. Winged bugs, a lot smaller and much prettier than those monsters,' the freebooter said, indicating the silvery husks overhead. 'They mostly fly at night, navigating by the light of the moon. Earth's moon, that is. Nothing else like her in all the known worlds. Nothing so big or so bright. I don't miss most things about Earth, but I miss that big old moon. But we were talking about moths. The point is, any light at night, they're attracted to it. They'll circle a candle until they burn up in the flame. Wizards are like that. And they'll take you with them. If you don't want to get burned, you should fly your own course, not theirs.'

'I hear that,' Tony said, thinking of Cho Wing-James and the others lying dead in the stinking aquarium water. I only want your head.

The freebooter said that she'd got the story about the stolen mad ship from a trader who had a contact in the military division that supplied stations that controlled sargassos. So maybe there was a grain of truth in it, just enough to make Tony a little paranoid, to make him wonder why Colonel X hadn't told him about it, and what other information the colonel might have withheld.

The bridle had at first been blithely optimistic about their quest; now she began to echo Tony's unease.

'You should trust your instincts,' she said.

And: 'When you feel it's time to cut and run I'll be ready.'

And: 'Whatever you choose to do, I'll always be there for you.'

Using her newly acquired abilities, she had delved into the records of Dry Salvages's traffic control, but the only G-class frigate to have visited the planet in the past year had been owned by the Commons police, and the three K-class freighters which had recently touched down had all had been registered to governments or legitimate companies, and none were in port right now. So if the Red Brigade had paid a visit to Raqle Thornhilde, they hadn't travelled to Dry Salvages on the frigate which had jumped the claim on the slime planet, and they hadn't used the hijacked freighter to deliver the stromatolites and Aunty Jael to the broker directly after the raid. The bridle had also checked the records of Raqle Thornhilde's previous contracts and trades, but could find no evidence that she had any involvement with the Red Brigade or their known proxies, or any previous interest in stromatolites, the Old Old Ones, Ghajar narrative code, or mad ships.

Tony paid a bribe to a minor official in the city's police who claimed that she would be able to dig up some dirt on Raqle Thornhilde, check for clandestine deals that didn't appear in the records, so forth. But every time he contacted the woman she said that she needed to do a little more work. It looked like the only way he could find out if Raqle Thornhilde was in league with the Red Brigade would be to ask her directly, after she came to him.

She seemed to be in no hurry to do that. Five days passed, six, and there was no sign that she was checking out Tony or probing his ship. He nursed his dwindling funds his bodyguards' per diem was substantial. He worried that Colonel X hadn't sent him to Freedonia as an independent investigator but to bait some kind of trap. He worried about the eidolon that had infiltrated Abalunam's Pride's systems, the conversation it was having with the actual ship that the bridle still couldn't understand.

He remembered his first trip off Skadi, accompanying his parents on some kind of diplomatic business in Great Elizabeth, on Rn. Just turned six (the trip was a birthday treat), excited and intimidated by the strangeness of it all, he had asked his nanny to leave the door of his bedroom ajar, to let in a little light from the sitting room. For a long time he had lain awake, listening to the low murmur of his parents' voices, familiar and soothing but indistinct. He told the bridle about this, but she didn't understand the comparison. She wasn't good with analogies because their slippery meanings overflowed the boundaries of logic.

'Keep listening,' Tony told her. 'Keep watching the skies.'

By now she was all up inside traffic control, watching ships in transit between the mirrors in the wilderness, but she saw nothing of interest, and still Raqle Thornhilde hadn't reached out to Tony. And then, one day at breakfast in the courtyard of the motel, the bodyguard sitting nearby (the father, a craggy man with deep-set eyes and a spade-shaped beard) suddenly became alert. Tony looked up and saw someone coming towards him, and knew at once that it was Raqle Thornhilde's emissary.

31. The Invitation.

Isabelle Linder told Lisa that a ship had been dispatched from Terminus more than a week ago, after ground-radar images had revealed a chamber at the excavation site. The original plan had been to transport finds from the dig directly to Terminus, bypassing UN controls; now the ship was going to take Willie there for treatment. According to Isabelle it was due to arrive in three days.

Lisa said, 'Then what? Can they cure him?'

'I will be honest,' Isabelle said. 'The experts listened to his story and studied the photographs I took, but it was not enough for them to be able to make a prognosis. When they can examine him properly we will know more.'

'By examine, I guess you mean experiment,' Lisa said.

'He has agreed to it,' Isabelle said.

'I bet. He thinks it's his only chance of surviving this.'

They were walking slowly between boulders and patches of catchclaw. Late-afternoon sunlight glowed on the cliffs that stood above them.

'We really are his best chance,' Isabelle said. 'The Professor has many good people working for her, and I am told she has taken a personal interest. That means everything that can be done for him will be done.'

She was a pretty young woman with a fetching French accent, dressed in a pink T-shirt, hiking shorts with big side pockets, sneakers stained with red dust. She told Lisa that she was Outland's office manager, and had stayed behind in Port of Plenty during the excavation of Willie's jackpot. About a week into the dig one of her colleagues had made a panicky call that had cut off mid-sentence. No one had picked up when she'd rung back, so she had used the company q-phone to call the head office for advice, and had been ordered to go straight to the site.

'I had no idea what to expect, or how I could be of help,' she said. 'So, first I stop at Joe's Corner. We have an understanding with the mayor there, because of our purchase of the crash site of the spaceship. He told me that the police had arrived, that already they have sealed off the excavation and set up a quarantine area. So I was cautious. I hired a tomb raider as a guide, a woman recommended by the mayor. We could not get so close to the site, but we found a spot where we could see it clearly enough. It is at the base of a big rock formation. The kind in cowboy films?'

'A butte,' Lisa said.

'Yes, I think so. A column of rock rising out of the desert floor,' Isabelle said, shaping the air with her hands to demonstrate what she meant. 'Everything bare, like the Sahara. Sand and rocks. And strange plants, some black, some orange. I could see the site very clearly. There were police working there, and also avatars.'

Lisa felt a cold clutch in her heart. 'Jackaroo avatars.'

'Of course.'

'How many?'

'At least three. It was a long way away and they were coming and going around the shaft. And even face to face it is hard to tell them apart. At least three.'

'One visited me,' Lisa said. 'Whatever your people found out there, the Jackaroo don't like it.'

'Yes, that is very clear. We thought we had taken precautions, but alas, they were not sufficient.'

'No kidding. So how did you find Willie? Did he call you?'

'Not exactly. I must tell you that there was a certain amount of distrust between us. He has a certain . . . reputation, shall we say. And although the contract specified that we share all finds, we knew he had held back some items from his initial excavation.'

'Willie always likes to have an edge,' Lisa said, thinking of the tessera he'd given to Brittany Odenkirk.

'Yes. So that is why we placed a tracker in his phone. Simply as a precaution. When I was close enough to check, it showed that he was some distance from the dig site. I followed its signal, and found him here, with his friends. And then you found us, and here we all are.'

'You were lucky to find him. There are plenty of dead spots in these hills.'

'Good luck had nothing to do with it,' Isabelle said.

'I mean for Willie, not you.'

'You might call it predestination,' Isabelle said. 'How paths come together at the right time. Those seeing it from the inside might call it luck. Those who know better would not.'

'You mean the Jackaroo?'

'I mean that the Professor sees much that we do not,' Isabelle said.

There was a kind of shine in the young woman's gaze. Lisa remembered with a twinge of unease that Nevers had warned her about the fanaticism of Ada Morange's inner circle.

It turned out that this wasn't the first of the Jackaroo gift worlds that Isabelle had visited. Two years ago she had been part of a team that had unsuccessfully attempted to raise the remains of a Ghajar ship from silt a hundred metres beneath the surface of the world ocean of Hydrot. She had been there for six months, working out of a tiny office on one of the islands at the south pole, organising resupply and the procurement of new equipment while the underwater excavation work, using remote-controlled robots, was delayed by endless difficulties.

The Ghajar ship had broken apart on impact. The wreckage was scattered across an ellipse more than twenty kilometres long, and each piece had to be dug out of several metres of silt before it could be raised to the surface. The robots were unreliable; the generator of the deep-sea trawler that acted as the expedition's platform kept breaking down; the local workers went on strike after one was killed by a broken cable's whiplash. At last, an approaching hurricane that drove twenty-metre waves ahead of it had brought a premature end to the attempt, but two fragments of memory laminate had been retrieved, Isabelle said, and Ada Morange's scientists were still attempting to crack the narrative code they contained.

Ada Morange believed that the Ghajar had mapped the entirety of the vast wormhole network of the New Frontier, and she was also attempting to piece together their history. There had been a war, that much was clear. Either between opposing factions of Ghajar or against some external enemy another Elder Culture, perhaps, or even the Jackaroo. Half a dozen crash sites had been discovered on various worlds, and a huge debris field orbited a white dwarf star in the New Frontier: billions of particles and fragments of metal, polymer and deep-frozen organic matter. And then there were the so-called mad ships, which killed or drove insane anyone who attempted to board them. Ada Morange believed that the mad ships were the key to the Ghajar's history, and had invested a significant portion of her fortune in researching ways to neutralise and enter them.

After the expedition on Hydrot, Isabelle had been promoted to a position in the head offices of the Omega Point Foundation, in Paris, France. But her plan to work her way up the management chain had been frustrated by what she called an indiscretion with a senior colleague during a conference on Ghajar technology. The man had made things difficult for her, and eventually she had been dispatched to First Foot.

'I hoped it would be a temporary assignment. Winding up the affairs of the investigation into the crash site in the City of the Dead. But then your husband brought in his find, and now I am caught up in the mainstream of the Professor's interests again,' Isabelle said. 'I am no archaeologist. I am not interested in Elder Culture artefacts, or the "deep time" projects. I have a degree in accountancy. Yet here I am.

'Some say that great people in history make their own luck. I think in the Professor's case that is especially true. She saw the importance of Elder Culture technology before almost everyone else. Without her, the first Ghajar ships would not have been found. She has done much to map the New Frontier. And now this. I am part of that luck, and so are you.'

'It didn't work out so well for Willie, did it?' Lisa said.