He fell back. The faint silvery flow, the death mask beneath his skin, was fading. His fist relaxed in Lisa's grip and something slammed through her. She felt the eidolons fly back into their tesserae, and then black lightning clawed across the inside of her skull and everything went away.

34. Real Free People.

Tony was imprisoned in a shed or shack with a beaten-earth floor and walls of roughly mortared blocks of sandstone. An unglazed slit window above his pipe-frame bed, a low doorway he couldn't quite reach because of the plastic cord that tethered his ankle to the bed. Peering through the window, he could see a cluster of stone shacks and a patchwork of small stone-walled fields. In the distance was the long low barracks where the children were kept.

The sky was on fire with the mad light of the long sunset.

When the wind blew in a certain direction it carried a stench like rot and charred plastic the smell of decomposing windrows of the self-reproducing photosynthetic monomers that an unknown Elder Culture had introduced into Dry Salvages's shallow seas. So he was somewhere on the coast, but had no idea where he was in relation to Freedonia. Pyotr, the old man who brought Tony's food, would not tell him who had kidnapped him or how long he was going to be kept there, and shrugged off threats of retribution and promises that Tony's family would pay a generous reward for his release.

'We are a long way away from the city and its laws,' Pyotr said. 'We are the real free people. Free to think as we will, free to live our lives. We answer only to God.'

The food was simple but good. Pyotr brought a pail of hot water every morning, and there was an ancient tablet containing a small library mostly theological texts and tracts, but some fiction, too, all of it predating the arrival of the Jackaroo and a chess program that even on its simplest setting beat Tony two times out of three. But Tony was not allowed to leave the shack, and whenever Pyotr visited there were always two strong lads stationed outside the door.

The old man was barefoot in a simple shift cinched at the waist by a belt woven from a rainbow of plastic threads, a tough bird with the serene manner of someone who didn't have anything left to prove. There were deep scars on his arms and the side of his neck, inflicted by a weircat ten years ago, when he had been on what he called a walkabout, wandering naked across the desert, living off the land. He had transfixed the biochine with a flint-tipped spear and bashed it to death with a rock.

He belonged to a sect that rejected the hypercapitalism of Freedonia and had chosen instead to live in what they called the real world. They strung kilometres of fine netting to harvest water from the fogs that rose at the beginning of each day, maintained an elaborate system of channels, water lifts and little dams to irrigate their crops of corn, squash, beans, sunflowers and melons, extracted fibrous plastic from seawater evaporated in lagoons and used it to weave mats, baskets and clothing. And they looked after children who had fallen victim to sleepy sickness.

Some were the children of rich citizens who paid for them to be cared for, but most had been rescued after being turned out of Freedonia and abandoned to live as best they could in the coastal margin lands. The real free people provided food and water and shelter, and gave them Christian burials when they died. Pyotr said that all children were God's children, even those whose minds had been overwritten by alien memes.

'What about the Jackaroo and the !Cha?' Tony said.

'Those also.'

'And the Elder Cultures?'

'Of course. The universe and everything in it is Her kingdom.'

'My religion has it that the Jackaroo and the !Cha lack souls, because they were not made in God's image.'

'There are some who believe that the Jackaroo are angels or devils,' Pyotr said. 'Others that they are secular gods, empowered by technology that appears to us to be miraculous, and with a long history we can only guess at. But compared to God, they are no more than we are. Creatures of stardust with finite lifespans and limited powers. It is a matter of perspective. From that of God, all are as children.'

They talked about the differences between the real free people's religion and the religion of Tony's family, whose God was served by lesser deities, orishas, which also controlled the destinies of people and acted as their protectors. Tony confessed that he had fallen out of love with religion, but supposed that his ship or at least, its bridle might be a kind of orisha.

'Is the eidolon in your head also an orisha?' Pyotr said.

'Who told you about that?'

Pyotr shrugged.

'My people believe that eidolons are false orishas,' Tony said. 'Because they come from an Elder Culture rather than from God they are as treacherous and evil as any demon.'

'We would say that although eidolons do not come directly from God, they are the creations of God's children. And like God's children, they have the potential for good as well as for evil.' Pyotr paused, then said, 'I was told that there is a possibility that your eidolon harbours secrets that could help us understand sleepy sickness.'

'I was told that too. But so far it has only led me into trouble.'

Tony was not especially afraid. Mostly, he was bored. Pyotr visited twice a day but otherwise he was left to his own devices. The nanotech inserted into his head by the surgical patch prevented him from calling his ship or anyone else, but he was not completely isolated. There was always the sense that something else was with him, in the bare shack. Sometimes he looked around quickly, trying to catch it out, but it always evaded him.

Sometimes he sang. Hymns, snatches of the old, old songs that Danilo had liked to sing. He had always liked to sing in church, loved the exhilaration of raising his voice in communal music, of letting go of himself in a great joyful noise. His voice was at best vigorous, but it didn't sound too bad in the small resonant space. He wondered what the eidolon made of it. And realised, with plangent regret, that he had never once sung with Danilo and his friends in one of their impromptu sessions in an after-hours cafe or someone's apartment.

He remembered the time he had conjured a window while he and Danilo lay together one night after making love, and he had shown the singer the luminous wheel of the Milky Way, the known stars in the wormhole network marked in red, scattered across its smoky spirals like flowers in a meadow. He had highlighted the stars he had visited, zoomed in through great drifts of stars to the star of Skadi.

'That's where we are,' he said. 'One star amongst four hundred billion. You could spend a lifetime travelling between the known worlds, and not exhaust them.'

Danilo laughed, saying that you could spend all your life in one place and still find something new every day.

'Aren't you curious about the other worlds?' Tony said.

'I'm curious about other people.'

'There are other people on those worlds. Strange and new and wonderful people. People unlike any here.'

'You miss your ship,' Danilo said.

'I miss my freedom,' Tony admitted.

'One day you'll get her back, and then you'll be gone. Out there somewhere, in all those bright stars . . .'

'I could take you with me. I could get permission, and if I didn't I could take you anyway. Show you things you wouldn't believe-'

Danilo placed two fingers on his lips.

'But it isn't about the other worlds, is it?' the singer said. 'It isn't about where you go. It's about the going. The flight. You're like a kite who can't settle on a roost. Always in motion, never at rest. Always between one world and another.'

Tony had tried to turn it into a joke, saying, 'Am I not part of your world?' But he knew now that Danilo had been right. He had only ever been a casual visitor in his lover's life. That was the worst of it. The root of his guilt. He could visit Danilo's world, but Danilo could never visit his. Could never, ever be a part of it.

Two days passed. Three. The conflagration in the sky intensified as the sun laboriously set; the patch of windowlight that fell on the far wall dimmed as it inched towards the ceiling. And then, on the morning of the fourth day of Tony's imprisonment, the door slid back and Raqle Thornhilde ducked under the low lintel. Behind her, stepping daintily over the threshold on three articulated legs, was the aquarium tank of a !Cha.

35. The Pyre.

In cold dawn light the road dogs used their Harleys to rope stumpy greasewood trees out of the stony ground and haul them, bumping and jerking, long leathery leaves trailing like the tentacles of dead squid, to the spot where they were building Willie's funeral pyre. They stacked the trees in lengthwise and crosswise layers, taking care not to get the caustic white sap on their skin, and capped the pile with a platform of brushwood and coral-tree branches. And then Willie's body, wrapped in a blanket, was carried out of the Ghostkeeper tomb and tenderly laid on top. Each road dog said his goodbye, gripping Willie's limp hand, telling him you're in a better place now, bro, and ride safe, and fuck an angel for me. Lisa brushed back black spikes and kissed his cold lips. Then Sonny sprinkled a litre of precious gasoline on the blanket and took a burning brand from Mouse and touched it to the congealed puddles of sap at the base of the pyre.

They all stepped back from the heat and flare. White smoke rolled up, stinking like molten road tar. Lisa wondered about contagion. What if the Ghajar nanotech had multiplied in Willie's body, and had been freed by the fire and was rising and spreading on the air?

Something had definitely escaped from him at the moment of his death. She supposed that it was his ghost, or what his ghost had become after the breakout, passing through her as it flew into the tesserae scattered across the walls of the tomb. She hoped that it had taken something of Willie with it. In ten or a hundred thousand years other clients of the Jackaroo might read in those tesserae something of the essence of his life.

Whatever it was, it had left its mark in her. She could see now dim phantoms in the landscape. Faint X-rays of the dead. She could sense the interiors of Ghostkeeper tombs in the cliffs across the valley. Indistinct gestures inhabited the Boxbuilder ruins up on the ridge. Something severe and forbidding stood in the chip of the moon as it fell towards the paling eastern horizon, and she could sense another presence in the sky an orbiting ship, maybe . . .

There was a sudden jerky movement inside the caul of flame. Willie's body sitting up in the fire, horrible to see.

'It's just muscles contracting,' Mouse told her. 'It don't signify.'

The body fell back into the flames, and a little later the platform on which it lay collapsed into the burning shells of the greasewood logs. Wild galaxies of sparks swirled up into the vivid blue morning sky. A great banner of smoke streamed down the valley.

The road dogs began to pack, getting ready to move out in case the geek cops spotted the tell-tale smoke and came to investigate. Lisa hugged and thanked them one by one.

'We only did what was right,' Sonny said, his usual belligerence slightly softened. 'You sure you want to go off with that woman?'

'You need protecting from the cops, let us do it,' Little Mike said.

'You don't want any part of the trouble I'm in,' Lisa said.

'Seems to me you're asking for more trouble, going with her,' Sonny said.

'I think she can help,' Lisa said. 'Or at least, I think her boss can.'

When the fire had at last burned down, the road dogs picked through the hot ashes. They found a few shards of bone and buried them near the entrance to the tomb, then swung onto their hogs and saluted Lisa and rode off towards the City of the Dead. After she had prised a couple of tesserae from the wall of the tomb, Lisa walked to where Isabelle Linder was waiting by her Land Cruiser, which had been hidden under a camo drop cloth that imitated the red rocks and grey brush with such fidelity that Lisa hadn't spotted it when she'd walked past it the previous evening.

Two hours later they were parked at the edge of the Badlands, in the shade of a cluster of organ trees, waiting to pick up someone who, Isabelle said, needed a lift. She wouldn't tell Lisa who it was because 'it would spoil the surprise'.

While Isabelle perched on the hood of the Land Cruiser, looking out across a glaring salt pan towards the highway that ran west across the Badlands to the copper mine at Mount Why Not, Lisa sat with her back against an organ tree's scaly column, sipping from a bottle of spring water. Brittle husks were scattered over the gravelly sand, dropped from the chocolate-brown froths of sporangia that sprouted under the notched swords of the tree's fronds. It was fiercely hot, timelessly quiet and still.

There was no sense of the history of Elder Cultures out there. No tombs, no ruins, no ghosts. The desert was empty of any meaning but its own. Lisa found the inhuman silence calming after riding through the far edge of the hills, with distracting glimpses of tombs and their inhabitants and inscrutable fragments of Boxbuilders long dead. She was trying to understand Willie's death. The fact of his death. The manner of his death. She was still kind of numb, the weight of what had happened poised above her head like a landslide. It could bury her if she didn't come to terms with it. If she didn't find some way of understanding it. Or if not understanding, because maybe it was impossible to understand, then at least some way of accepting it. Accepting that she had been changed. Accepting that the ghost tattooed in her brain had been changed too.

She kept touching her face. Half-expecting, half-dreading that she would discover hard points pushing through her skin. She had studied herself in the Land Cruiser's rear-view mirror, and although she had failed to find any trace of the silvery flow of information she'd seen under Willie's skin she supposed that it was only a matter of time before it appeared.

It was the fear of that, of how her ghost might have been changed, of how she herself might have been changed, rather than the possibility of arrest and indefinite quarantine, that had convinced her that she should throw in her lot with Isabelle Linder and Ada Morange. She wanted to talk one-on-one with the Professor, but Isabelle had told her that it was impossible the Professor had nothing to do with the operations of the Omega Point Foundation or the companies and research initiatives that it funded. Instead, Lisa had used the q-phone Isabelle kept in the glovebox of the Land Cruiser to discuss terms with someone called Malcolm D'Ath, one of the non-executive directors of the foundation. The man had sounded like one of those plummy actors in the British TV soap about old-time aristocrats and their servants that Lisa's mother had liked to watch way back when, but seemed pretty hands-on and straight-talking.

He was in London, England. It was two in the morning there, apparently.

'But not to worry, Ms Dawes. I'm used to keeping strange hours. And I am very pleased that you have decided to get in touch. I think you will be a great help to our programme. And, in turn, we can definitely help you.'

She would be handsomely rewarded if she allowed the Professor's researchers to investigate her eidolon and the tesserae she had taken from the tomb, he said, and assured her that they would do their very best to find a way to cure her.

'But the first thing we need to do is extract you, and get you to a place of safety. Did you know that you are on the TCU's watch list, and that a warrant has been issued for your arrest?'

'I can't say I'm surprised,' Lisa said, thinking of Adam Nevers.

'Our legal people can file an appeal against the warrant straight away. But it would not be wise to remain on First Foot.'

'Where would I be extracted to? London? Paris?'

'That would be a jump from the proverbial frying pan into the proverbial fire. No, our ship will return to its point of origin, Terminus. I am given to understand that the facilities there will be more than adequate to investigate your discovery. And also, of course, to try to rid you of your passenger.'

'Terminus.'

'Yes. A great opportunity, if I may say so.'

'I guess I have no alternative,' Lisa said, with a feeling of weightlessness.

'A simple "yes" will seal the deal.'

'Yes, then. Yes.'

'Very good. Our ship is already on its way, of course. Our agent on the ground will arrange the rendezvous. If I could speak to Mademoiselle Linder?'

'Wait a moment.'

'Yes?'

'Is it raining there?'

'In London? Not at present. Contrary to myth it doesn't always rain here.'

'Are you near a window?'

'Standing in front of one, as a matter of fact.'

'Could you open it?'

'One moment. There.'

'And hold the phone out.'

'Ah. I see. Of course.'

Lisa clamped the shell of the q-phone to her ear. Heard across tens of thousands of light years the faint rustle of a night wind in trees, a siren twisting above the surf of a great city.

Malcolm D'Ath said, 'Was that satisfactory, Ms Dawes?'

'Yes. Yes, thank you.'

'Goodbye, Ms Dawes. And good luck.'

The shadows of the organ trees turned and shortened across the dry stones, began to lengthen again. Ant-sized biochines scuttled from shadow to shadow on wiry multi-jointed legs. At last, Isabelle slid off the hood and called out that their passenger had arrived. Lisa climbed to her feet, dusting off her pants, and saw that a truck had stopped out on the distant highway. After a minute it moved off, the faint whine of its gear train passing over the salt pan as it picked up speed, heading east towards civilisation. A little later, a jiggling shape appeared at the far edge of the salt pan, broken and distorted by layers of hot air. Vanishing, reappearing upside down, vanishing again.

And suddenly it was close: a black, blunt cylinder prinking towards them on three slender legs like a miniature Martian fighting machine. Its flat top was at about the level of Lisa's chest. There were no cameras, no windows, no eyes, but she was acutely aware of the attention of the alien intelligence inside.

'Mademoiselle Linder,' an engaging baritone voice said. 'How good to see you again. And here's Ms Dawes and her guest! How marvellous! What fun we're going to have!'

36. The Children.