Isabelle ignored him, asked Lisa if she was certain.

'Pretty much. I mean, I can see what might be tombs elsewhere, and I can see some kind of ghost in there,' Lisa said, pointing to the Boxbuilder cubes. 'But I can't see anything in or around the excavation site.'

'All this way for nothing,' Isabelle said.

'It was worth a shot,' Lisa said.

She sat on bare warm rock and massaged her trick knee. She was wondering about the star glittering on top of the distant butte, wondering if it might be some fragment that had spun off the Ghajar spaceship as it ploughed in. It seemed to brighten and enlarge as she stared at it, and she felt as if she was falling towards it, a swooning swooping out-of-body experience that pitched her headlong across kilometres of empty air . . .

A hand on her shoulder; Isabelle kneeling beside her, asking her if she was okay.

'I'm fine. Just a little tired is all.'

But she wasn't fine. She was very far from any definition of being fine. Something had changed, inside her. And it was still changing.

38. Rain City.

It was raining in the city of Tanrog, Veles, when the ship carrying Tony, two of Raqle Thornhilde's cloned sons and Unlikely Worlds dropped through teeming clouds to the space field. Tony and one of the burly clones rode into the city on a bus crowded with shift workers from the manufacturies, chemical mills and filtration plants that surrounded the field, bought hooded cloaks spun from jellyfish collagen at a kiosk at the terminal, and in the warm constant rain splashed through narrow streets that wandered downhill towards the sea docks. Rough-hewn stone houses and kit-built apartment buildings crowded close, blocking out most of the bruised sky. Many of the houses had workshops set into their ground floors, or little stores with goods displayed in front of the kitchen ranges and beds of the proprietors. Gutters spilled sheets of rainwater; downpipes sluiced swift streams into channels carved in the middle of the streets; constant haloes of raindrops sprang from the cloaks of Tony and the clone.

Veles was a waterworld, a mini-Neptune that had lost most of its primordial hydrogen atmosphere to solar-wind ablation after it had spiralled closer to its yellow G4 dwarf star, and was drowned in deep ocean that was broken only by seasonal ice at the north and south poles, patches of red weed trapped by the currents of ocean gyres, and floating archipelagos of rafts built by colonial biochines. Apart from fisherfolk who sailed the world ocean sieving plankton and jellyfish or hunting krakens, most people lived on a raft that floated on the currents of the Great Northern Gyre, roving counterclockwise from the equator to within two thousand kilometres of the north pole.

The raft's only city, Tanrog, had been founded on Ghostkeeper ruins long overgrown by the construction coral that covered most of the raft in ranges of stony hills and valleys packed with low dark forest. The city's drenched, melancholy streets complemented its inturned secretive character. Tanrog was controlled by a dozen clans perpetually engaged in what they called the Great Game, manoeuvring for power by assassination, betrayal, secret pacts and sudden swift insurrections that deposed higher officials but left the police and governmental bureaucracies untouched. It was said that every other native of Tanrog was some sort of spy; walls were thorny with spray-can slogans and plastered with the handbills of opposing factions and splinter groups; obscure quarrels and rivalries flourished in its hundreds of cafes and bars.

As with politics, so with trade. A small wilderness of mirrors orbited Veles's trailing Trojan point, most leading to fringe worlds or unexplored parts of the network. Like many border worlds, its chief sources of off-world income were contraband goods and trade in rumours and clandestine knowledge. Secrets were jealously guarded; misinformation, trickery and deceit were standard practice. Unwary freebooters and traders could find themselves arrested on unspecified charges by law officers bribed by the brokers they'd just done business with, or by the brokers' rivals, and might never escape the city's Byzantine legal system.

That was why Tony insisted on scouting for information about Adam Apostu, the scholar who had sold information about the slime world to Raqle Thornhilde, before confronting him. He wanted to discover who the man's friends and enemies were, if he had a tame police officer or government official in his pocket, whether he made use of the freelance thugs routinely used by politicians and businesspeople to threaten, beat up or murder their rivals and enemies.

Raqle wanted him to find out if Apostu's story about how he came by the information was true. 'And I want to know if he sold it to anyone else,' she had told Tony on the spinner that had taken them back to Freedonia, where a ship hired by the broker had been waiting. 'And most of all, I want to know if he has a connection to your Aunty Jael.'

'They are all good questions,' Tony had said. 'But because you have never met him, the first thing we need to find out is who he really is.'

Raqle had never been to Veles. Adam Apostu was one of what she called her arms-length contacts: they had only ever talked via q-phone and avatar. According to Raqle, the scholar claimed that he had found out about the slime planet from a few lines in a garbled entry from a survey before the fall of the First Empire. It was plausible. Plenty of records had been lost, scrambled or erased during the war, and no one had known, back then, that slime-planet stromatolites sometimes contained archival genetics.

'I vetted him just like I vet everyone else,' Raqle said. 'He appeared to be mostly harmless.'

'No one is quite what they seem on Veles,' Tony said.

'Are you speaking from experience?'

'From common knowledge.'

'Common knowledge won't help you dig up actual information about this charlatan.'

'I am certain that my long and close relationship with Aunty Jael will be useful,' Tony said. 'Not to mention my cunning and charm. And perhaps your !Cha friend will be of some help, too.'

Unlikely Worlds had come along for the ride because that was where the strongest thread of Ada Morange's story presently led. 'I have been following her for a long time,' he said. 'I lost her, in the war. And now I have found her again.'

During the short voyage, as the ship passed through three mirror pairs in quick succession and powered in towards Veles, Unlikely Worlds questioned Tony about his adventures on the slime planet and afterwards, digging up details that Tony had more or less forgotten. The !Cha was also interested in Tony's memories of Aunty Jael. How the Okoye family had acquired her and the advice she had given them over the years; her lessons in biology and Elder Culture artefacts; the variant of Go they had sometimes played together; the bugs and plants he had collected for her.

Tony found himself talking about his resentment and anger at the way she had fooled and betrayed his family.

'All this time she was living a lie,' he said. 'She told us that the slime-planet job would be worthwhile. She told us that we would share a good profit. Instead, she played us. She betrayed us to the Red Brigade.'

He would make sure that she paid for that betrayal. For the deaths of Junot Johnson and everyone else killed in the raid. For his disgrace. And Raqle Thornhilde would pay too, for kidnapping him and dispatching him on this quest like a servant instead of an equal.

Unlikely Worlds said, 'If, as you claim, she is a chattel, how then can she pay?'

'Anything she has found is ours, to begin with. I will make sure that she will not profit from it.'

'Yet she has already profited from it, by using it to arrange her escape.'

The !Cha always had an answer for everything, and always tried to have the last word. Now, he mused about Ada Morange and the laminated brain she had become.

'It was not that she feared death,' he said. 'She was dying when I first knew her. But she did not want to miss what came next. She believed that her story was not yet done. And so it has proved.'

'Aunty Jael is not really Ada Morange,' Tony said. 'At best she is a copy. And not a very good one. She does not have free will. She cannot think new thoughts. She is a bundle of habits and memories masquerading as a person.'

'Oh, being laminated will have crimped Ada Morange's style, no doubt, but it is clear that she is still formidable. Look at how long she managed to fool you and your family,' Unlikely Worlds said.

Aside from his smug air of superiority, of being above petty human dramas, the !Cha was not bad company. He told Tony stories about the early days of the settling of the fifteen gift worlds. Encounters with eidolons; hauntings; tragedies and comedies resulting from the refusal by settlers to adapt to their new homes. He described the discovery of the first Ghajar ships, called down by a haunted young man who had been helped by Ada Morange that story was true, according to Unlikely Worlds.

'I should know. I was there.'

There was that smugness again. Tony had to remind himself that there was real substance behind the !Cha's boasts. He had lived through a hundred and fifty years of human history, saw humans as humans could not see themselves, and knew how to make use of their vulnerabilities and appetites.

Unlikely Worlds was certainly better company than Raqle Thornhilde's cloned sons. Like the weircat, they had been designed as predators. They were not exactly stupid, but were bluntly uninterested in anything but the task at hand, lacked any sense of humour, and had an obscene love for their weapons. One or the other was always dismantling and reassembling a handgun, or sharpening a knife, or flicking little razor-edged wedges at a target. Their tasks were to snatch Adam Apostu and put him to some hard questioning, and to make sure that Tony didn't try to escape, screw up, or try to finesse the confrontation to his own advantage. Tony was worried that they had also been told to dispose of him once he had outlasted his usefulness to their mother.

The clone who accompanied him into Tanrog was called Bob. (The other was Bane; apparently, the clones' names all began with the letter B.) Like his sibling, Bob was tall, muscular and cat-footed, dressed in a grey many-pocketed field jacket, black knee-length shorts and split-toe slippers. His only distinguishing mark was a white scar that lifted one corner of his upper lip, giving him a slightly quizzical expression. He followed Tony without question or comment through the rainy streets to the house of Adam Apostu, down by the sea docks. Tucked away in a small courtyard accessed by an arch in a gatehouse, it was typical of the sailors' quarter: narrow-fronted and four storeys tall, with two slit windows to each floor and a steep roof that shed a silvery curtain of rainwater.

'Tricky,' Bob said, after studying it from the shelter of the archway. 'The door is faced with steel, the windows are too narrow for a man to climb through, and getting across that roof won't be easy. And there's no telling how it's connected to its neighbours, or the tunnels under the city. He could have any number of boltholes.'

'We are posing as honest freebooters,' Tony said. 'We do not need to kick in the front door. All we have to do is knock.'

'Maybe you can talk your way in. But can you talk your way back out?'

'First, let's ask the locals about Mr Apostu. Perhaps they can tell us something useful.'

The docks were dwarfed by the flank of the great sea wall, cut in several places by elevators that raised and lowered ships to sea level, a hundred metres below. Fullerene-hulled trawlers and seiners loomed amongst cranes and warehouses; a fish market bustled under a transparent dome; a long street of hostels, flophouses, pawnbrokers shared by fisherfolk and off-worlders, and cafes and bars with steamy windows, some kind of sport playing in a common window and tiny shrines tucked in a corner flowers and candles in front of a tarnished mirror, a photograph of a local saint or an effigy of the white kraken where sailors could wish for good fortune before a voyage.

Tony made the rounds, exchanging gossip, spinning a yarn about fragments of stromatolite code that happened to have come into his possession, saying that he had heard of a scholar, Adam Apostu, who might be interested in that kind of thing. Most of the traders and brokers either didn't know the man, or pretended they didn't. One said that yes, Adam Apostu's interest in code was well known, but it was mostly Ghajar ship code that he sought. Another claimed that the scholar was a dangerous man to do business with.

'He came here ten years ago,' the broker said. He was a lean man with a hooked nose and an extravagant moustache waxed into spirals at its ends. 'He has no friends or allies I know of, but people who try to cheat him have a habit of disappearing. And at least two freebooters with Ghajar code to sell likewise disappeared. I have heard that he has a feral biochine that can make itself invisible. A killing thing from the jungles of some hell-world. I also heard that he murdered a rival scholar on Bahamut before he came here. Best to stay away from him. Do business with honest people such as myself.'

Another broker, a cheerful young woman in a red niqab that showed only her eyes, said that, sure, she had met the old fraud, but she could not recommend doing business with him. 'He never goes out. You have to go to him. He presents as this mad-scientist kind of guy, and frankly it's hard to tell whether or not it's an act. But he definitely works with weird algorithms. His house, it's haunted. Eidolons coming up through the floorboards, hanging out under the ceiling . . . I had some Ghajar narrative code for sale. Rare, premium stuff. He wasn't interested. Said he already had it. I thought it was a bargaining position. But no, he genuinely didn't care. A couple of business pals of mine, they've had the same experience. You want to try to sell something to him? Good luck, because I don't know that he has ever bought anything.'

Tony returned to the ship and gave Raqle Thornhilde an account of his day's work. 'Adam Apostu is definitely interested in Ghajar code, but no one seems to have done any business with him. No one offered to act as a go-between, or to introduce me to him. And no one has ever seen him out and about in the quarter, either. He does not leave his house, or buy anything in the local shops. And he does not seem to have any friends, or to be connected with any of the local politicians.'

'That you know of,' Raqle said.

'You cannot do any real business here without paying off one or more of the local pols. Especially if you are an off-worlder. If someone has an interest in him, they would have sent someone to talk to me by now,' Tony said. 'There are stories that he's mad and bad, but they are the kind of stories you hear about eccentric scholars and wizards everywhere.'

'Perhaps he isn't the one we're looking for,' Raqle said. 'Perhaps someone else stole his identity and used it as cover when they contacted me.'

She was nervous, outside her comfort zone. Brokers did not usually chase leads. They waited for leads to come to them.

Tony said, 'We will soon know. I made an appointment to see him.'

'You did what?'

The broker's anger spat at Tony across eight thousand light years.

'You sent me to check him out. I checked him out. And now I have arranged an appointment with him.'

'My boys let you do that? Without my permission?'

'Bob realised that it was the only way in.'

It had not been hard to convince the clone. Tony had pointed out that in a place where everyone knew everyone else's business it would be strange if he did not contact the man he had been asking about.

'What did he say?'

'Bob?' Tony was having fun after a hard day in the rain.

'Don't try to be smart, Mr Okoye. My boys have ways of making smart people realise that they aren't so smart after all.'

'I did not talk to Apostu,' Tony said. 'I talked to an AI. I told it I had some interesting code. It had already heard about me. Apostu may be a recluse, but he is plugged into the local rumour net. The AI told me to show up at the house tomorrow.'

'If you're trying to trick me you'll regret it.'

'I am trying to find out what we both want to find out.'

Tony sweated out the short silence. He knew that the broker was thinking about telling her boys to hurt him, either to make sure he was telling the truth or as a lesson.

At last she said, 'All right.'

'As in, "All right, let's do it?"'

'I told you: don't try to be smart. Now let me talk to my boys. You can have your meeting with Apostu, but you'll do it my way.'

39. Perspective.

They overnighted in the little valley below the outlook. Its dead spot meant that they were safe from drone overflights, and the Land Cruiser was almost invisible under its camo drop sheet, a distortion as slight as a heat shimmer or a minor glitch in some virtual-reality game. Like the blind-spot warp of Lisa's ghost.

'You could make a fortune in the tomb-raider trade,' Isabelle told her. 'Finding everything that everyone else has not yet found.'

'I was a tomb raider until everything went wrong,' Lisa said. 'I can't see myself going back to it.'

'You could fly over the City of the Dead in a helicopter. Make a map. Sell locations to others.'

Lisa thought of her brief out-of-body experience. 'What I'd like is the nice quiet life I had before all this blew it up.'

She and Isabelle ate US Army MRE rations from self-heating pouches, Isabelle grumbling that she hadn't been able to source the French equivalent; Lisa pushed away the thought that French rations might contain a bottle of wine or two. Those cute little ones you used to get on airplanes, back in the day. Her ghost was a ringing presence, as impossible to ignore as tinnitus.

Isabelle slept in the Land Cruiser; Lisa scraped a hollow in drift sand and wrapped herself in a mylar blanket, thinking of trips with Willie, sleeping with him under the stars. Trying to remember his face and panicking because she couldn't, and there it was. Oh, Willie.

She woke in grey predawn light, wiped a film of dew from her face. Unlikely Worlds stood nearby, his tank balanced on the column of its three legs like a piece of abandoned street furniture. She asked him if he ever slept.

'My rest periods are not as yours,' he said. 'A different form of consciousness, rather than the oblivion and involuntary hallucinations that you embrace.'

Isabelle was still asleep, curled up in a sleeping bag on the back seat of the Land Cruiser. Lisa snagged the field glasses and a bottle of water and hiked to the outlook. She wanted to shake the stiffness from her bones and to check out the activity around the tomb, but when she got up there she couldn't spot any movement around the vehicles or the big tent. It was six-twenty in the morning. Maybe the police slept late. Maybe the Jackaroo did, too. Or maybe they'd turned off their avatars while whatever it was that animated them turned its attention elsewhere. Keeping the human race in check must require a lot of multitasking.

The star was still burning at the top of the distant mesa. Lisa glanced at it, quickly looked away. Safer to study the ghostly smoke inside the roofless cube at one end of the Boxbuilder ruins. It hung about a metre above the bare rock floor, composed of myriad tiny elements like 3-D pixels, twirling around and around in tireless trajectories. Lisa was reminded of a snake she'd seen once on a country road, looping endlessly over itself because its back had been broken when some car had run it over, and wondered where the algorithm that generated the smoke twist was cached. Boxbuilder ruins were found on every one of the gift worlds, constructed from self-repairing polymer that synthesised new material from rock and air and rain. No one knew what the creatures who had built them had looked like, how they lived and loved, whether they'd even been sentient. So much was unknown. So much would never be known. The algorithm could be part of the structure's homeostatic mechanism, or perhaps it was something its former inhabitants had left behind, a forgotten keepsake . . .

She jumped when Unlikely Worlds said, close behind her, 'I wonder if I see what you see. And if either of us sees what its makers saw.'

'What do you see?'

'Something old and broken. Like much on this world.'

'Older than you?'

'We do not privilege any particular moment in time because of its antiquity. It is more of a . . . continuum.'

'But the stories you collect have a beginning and an end. That's the point of stories.'

'Perhaps you misunderstand the point of why we collect them. You think that the meaning of this gesture has changed because those who created it have gone, and what it meant to them is not the same as what it means to you. Or to me. But the meaning you read into it must have been part of it when it was created, or it would not be here now. Did its creators understand that? Perhaps not. But their interpretation does not invalidate yours. And yours does not invalidate theirs. So which is more important?'

'You are here because this is part of Ada Morange's story. Doesn't that mean you are privileging one viewpoint?'

'I seize moments out of time and polish them until all their facets shine because I want to impress those who might mingle information with me,' Unlikely Worlds said. 'To improve, to put it in brutally simple terms, my reproductive fitness. I know it is irrational, but no more so, really, than your version of bond pairing. And besides, the stories I collect are your stories, so they are deeply tinted by the way you think.'

'And you think the way we think lacks perspective,' Lisa said.

'There is no need to be ashamed. It is an inevitable outcome of the way you bind time to yourselves. If it is of any comfort, it is no better or worse than the world views of most Elder Cultures. All are alike because they are all wrong, yet all are different, because they are all wrong in different ways.'

This alien creature passing off schoolkid philosophy as profundity. Or using it, maybe, to mock her.