'Oh, Orelolu, you were always such a bad liar,' Tony said. 'You know why? Because when you tell an untruth you always break eye contact. Also, pandering really isn't your thing. So who put you up to it? Actually, I know. It was Ayo. Ah, and there we have it. Because now you are trying so very hard not to look away that you are staring at me without blinking. Ayo will not talk to me, but she feels sorry for me, and here we are. Well, you can tell her that I'm not looking for a boyfriend.'

Orelolu smiled. 'He really is a good singer.'

'I would rather talk about Opeyemi.'

'To what point? The decision has been made. Nothing can undo it.'

Tony ignored that. 'He has been waiting for an excuse to shut me down. And when he finally finds one, he uses it to wreck what could have been a great chance for our family to turn its fortune around.'

'The thing is, T, it isn't all about you,' Orelolu said.

'It isn't? Then why am I the one who has lost his fucking ship?'

'I don't know how to put this delicately,' Orelolu said. 'So I will speak plainly, and you will have to forgive my bluntness. There is a majority in the family who believe that Ayo has been taking us in the wrong direction. That she has been taking too many risks. That she has been gambling with our fortune and reputation. You know how badly she was affected by the death of Ngoze. Some say that she has not been thinking straight ever since.'

'I know that she threw herself into her work. And that she resolved that it was time the family took back its rightful place in Commons affairs.'

'You've been away a long time, cousin. She has become somewhat erratic. Careless, even. She has made some bad decisions. People are rightly worried.'

'Are you one of these people?'

'You know very well that I keep out of that kind of thing,' Orelolu said. 'I care about patients, not politics.'

He was almost exactly Tony's age, a calm plump man dressed in the local fashion homespun wool trousers dyed purple by a lichen extract, an embroidered cotton shirt, a goatskin waistcoat with horn buttons. They had grown up together, and after two years away Tony was surprised and grateful that they were still good friends, despite the different paths their lives had taken. Orelolu had married three years ago, he and his husband had a son, conceived using the sperm-fusion technique and carried to term by a surrogate mother, and he had devoted himself to his work at the clinic where scions of honourable families and the rich suffering from sleepy sickness lived out the last of their days. The place where Ayo's eldest son, Ngoze, had died.

Tony said, 'For someone who claims to have nothing to do with our business, you seem to know an awful lot about it.'

'Even if you have no influence over the weather, you cannot ignore it,' Orelolu said. 'Ayo has lost crucial support in the past two years. Your adventure brought things to a head. Even those who still support her felt it was a step too far. Running contraband and cutting deals in the shade is one thing. Meddling in dangerous Elder Culture stuff is quite another.'

'I heard all that from the doubters, and I am sorry to hear it from you,' Tony said. His glass was unaccountably empty; he clicked his fingers to summon a waiter.

'I am merely reporting how things are,' Orelolu said blandly. 'I am sorry you will not accept it.'

'How things are, I have been given a hundred days to prove that this "meddling" could increase our fortune and standing,' Tony said. 'And I will. Don't doubt that I will. Despite the murder of their leader, my wizards are pressing on with their work. And Aunty Jael is doing all she can to help.'

But digging out the information from the stromatolites had turned out to be extraordinarily complicated. According to the wizards and Aunty Jael, sequences packed into the archival genetics were organised in overlapping frames, which meant that they could be read in hundreds of different ways, producing hundreds of different code strings. And they were also badly corrupted. The stromatolites were millions of years old, and although the microorganisms that had built them were highly modified and possessed a variety of proof-reading and post-replication mechanisms to ensure accurate copying of the data stored in their archival genetics, as well as the data transmission system that cross-checked and corrected copy families in different colonies, serious errors had accumulated. Information had been erased, or had been imperfectly copied, or had been compromised by insertion of multiple copies of nonsense sequences. Two weeks after they had started work, the wizards were still separating signal from noise. Only then, Aunty Jael said, could they begin to attempt a full translation of the archival genetics, and try to understand what it contained.

'At least she sees the importance of what we found,' Tony told Orelolu. 'She knows what is at stake. But no one listens to her. They treat her as if she is just another hand.'

'I know that she is so much more than that,' Orelolu said. 'I owe her my career. She encouraged my interest in biomedicine. She gave me a space for my studies. Without her I would not be where I am now.'

'Oh, I did not mean you, Orelolu. You are one of the good guys.' Tony drank half his new drink and said, 'So how are things with you? With your work? There was a D-class barge on the field when I touched down. Lowloaders were trundling hibernaculae out of the hold, and there were a dozen coffins stacked on the whitetop. New patients for the clinic arriving, I suppose, and the dead returning to their families. How many are you treating now? How many could be saved, if the doubters would allow my wizards to work as they should?'

'I admire your ambition, cousin,' Orelolu said. 'But it is not as simple as you seem to think. Even if there is a clue to the origin of sleepy sickness in those stromatolites of yours, it will take years to develop a cure.'

'Yes, and thanks to Opeyemi we have only a hundred days. And he didn't order the so-called execution of Fred Firat because he believed the man was a traitor. He did it to sabotage the work. He wanted us to fail.'

'Do you know how many wizards claim that they are close to finding a cure?' Orelolu said, with a spark of exasperation.

'Too many, I suppose. But the information that the stromatolites contain is old. Old enough to be the common link to all other Elder Culture code. That has to count for something.'

'Your sudden faith in science is touching,' Orelolu said. 'And I wish I had the power to help you. I really do. But I chose to take a different path.'

'Yes, you chose to help others rather than our family.'

The words tasted bitter, and Tony regretted them at once.

'I always hope that by helping others I am also helping our family regain its honour,' Orelolu said mildly. 'Now, hush. Let's not argue. He's about to sing.'

The young man, Danilo Evangalista, had taken his place behind a small upright harmonium. Glass beads woven into the cornrows that criss-crossed his shapely skull sparkled in blue light as he bent over the keyboard and picked out a brief melody before he began to sing: an old choro standard about songs so good and true they outshone the faults of their singers.

'So simple, and so lovely,' Orelolu said, when the young man had finished.

'I told you. And you can tell Ayo. Thanks but no thanks.'

'You feel wounded. It's only natural. But try not to see everyone as your enemy.'

'It is hard not to see those who would take away my ship and my work as friends. Opeyemi has no imagination, Orelolu. He does not understand what Ayo and I are trying to do.'

'Is that ship really more important than your home and your family?' Orelolu said. And then: 'Wait. What's wrong?'

Tony was pushing to his feet. He had recognised the introduction to the young man's next song. 'The Sky Has Closed Over Us.' A bright breezy tune with lyrics lamenting the cruel separation of two lovers after Skadi had been cut off from interworld trade because of the so-called treachery of his family. After his father had been killed during negotiations with the Red Brigade. After his mother's so-called suicide.

The singer fell silent when Tony stepped onto the stage. Someone in the audience laughed nervously. Tony mashed the harmonium's keyboard with his fist. The squealing discord echoed in the silence at his back.

'You have no right,' he said. 'You have no right to sing that song.'

'What would you have me sing instead?'

The young man's gaze was level and calm. There were flecks of gold in his warm brown eyes.

'Sing something happy, goddamn you,' Tony said. His sight swam with stupid tears. 'Stop trying to break my heart.'

11. The Bad Trip.

'It looks like an ordinary tessera,' Lisa told Bria. 'But I'm pretty certain that it'll yield Ghajar narrative code when I tickle it. Brittany kept it in the safe of the bar where she works she'd had some jewellery stolen from her motel room. When Nevers and his Jackaroo pal came knocking, they didn't think to look there.'

'And then she sold it to you,' Bria said.

'She loaned it to me. And in return, when this is over, I'll sell it for her on a zero-commission basis. We co-signed an agreement. One of her customers, he used to be a lawyer, drew it up. I'm not certain it'll hold up in court, but I intend to stick to it.'

'Drew it up on what, a napkin?'

'Her tablet. Brittany printed out two copies, had a couple of customers witness them, gave me one. She's smarter than she lets on.'

Lisa was at a roadside food truck near the shuttle terminal, talking to Bria on her new phone and sipping strong earthy Ethiopian coffee from a paper cup. Pete was sitting in the loadbed of the pickup truck, watching traffic scooting along the dusty two-lane blacktop. A flat-roofed factory building sprawled on the other side; beyond it, the level plain of the shuttle field stretched towards foothills shimmering in the deep orange light of the setting sun. A single ship hung above the field a bulbous, spiny S-class scow forty storeys tall. Ghajar ships, revived and repurposed, weren't an uncommon sight these days. Governments and private companies used them to transport people and goods between Earth and the Jackaroo gift worlds, and the worlds of the New Frontier. Anyone with a couple of thousand dollars could afford a ticket. But this one nagged at Lisa's attention perhaps her ghost was interested in it for some reason. The damn thing had woken up again, a spooky presence at her back, always just out of sight.

Bria was saying, 'The girlfriend sounds like a bill of goods.'

'I liked her. And she loved Willie, in her way. That was one thing he was good at. Getting inside your heart.'

There was a pause, and then Bria said, 'Have you been drinking?'

'Not really,' Lisa said, and knew it sounded evasive. 'Just this one beer. To be sociable while I had my heart to heart with Brittany. Right now I'm sipping some damn fine coffee made by an Ethiopian woman who was in Ethiopia just three months ago.'

'Because you sound a trifle manic.'

'Maybe that's because I'm absolutely, one hundred per cent certain that Willie found the place where we were struck down. Not that stupid hole in the ground, but the real deal. Wherever it is, whatever it is, he couldn't afford to excavate it on his own, so he partnered up with this outfit his girlfriend told me about. Outland Archaeological Services. I just now paid a visit to their offices. Police tape across the door, no one home. This guy in the insurance brokers next door told me they'd been closed for several days, and the police had been around first thing yesterday. He said they carried out everything in the place. And he also said, get this, that there was a Jackaroo avatar poking around. Adam Nevers's sidekick. First they raid Outland's offices. Then, when they couldn't find anything, they go after Brittany and me.'

'I don't think I've ever heard of them,' Bria said.

'I googled them,' Lisa said. 'Turns out they're funded by this nonprofit outfit, the Omega Point Foundation.'

'The one owned by Ada Morange?'

'She doesn't exactly own it. But her company, Karyotech Pharma, is its major benefactor.'

Ada Morange was famous in the way that Albert Einstein and Abe Lincoln were famous. The kind of fame that was in the air, in the water. She had been involved in the discovery of the first Ghajar ships, the ones that a kid infected with some kind of eidolon had called down to a ruined spaceport on Mangala people called it a spaceport, although no one could say exactly what it was. A place those two ships knew, at any rate. And a couple of years later Ada Morange's company had located the first orbital sargasso. She was one of the richest people in human history, and most of her wealth was channelled into the Omega Point Foundation, which subsidised big astronomy projects, exploration of the new worlds of the New Frontier and research into Elder Culture technology, artificial intelligence and life extension, and promoted the idea that humanity could bootstrap its way to transcendence without the help of the Jackaroo.

Lisa told Bria that Outland had bought out the site in the City of the Dead where a Ghajar shipwreck had infected a hive-rat colony. 'And they were involved in digs looking for other traces of the wreck.'

'So is that what Willie found?' Bria said. 'Something to do with the wreck?'

'It's possible. According to Carol Schleifer, this tessera contains Ghajar narrative code. Which until now has only been found in Ghajar ships. I need your help, Bria. I need to take a look at this code.'

'Right now what you need to do is go home and get some rest.'

'And meanwhile the cops are digging up whatever it was that Willie found out there,' Lisa said. She was walking up and down at the shoulder of the road. She couldn't keep still. 'I need to look at this code, and I need you to go check recent excavation licences again. Willie didn't register his find, either because he couldn't afford the fee or because he knew it was something big, was worried that it would attract the wrong kind of attention. So he took a risk and kept it secret. But maybe Outland took out a licence after he hooked up with them.'

'We'll have to do that tomorrow,' Bria said. 'The licence office will be closed now.'

'Okay. But first thing. First thing tomorrow. The licence and the code.'

'Are you sure,' Bria said, 'that this isn't something to do with the ghost? That it isn't driving you towards this place? The place it came from, where Willie and everyone else was killed.'

Lisa realised that she was staring at the big ship hanging out there across acres of concrete. Had the Ghajar built those ships before their version of first contact with the Jackaroo, or had they found them afterwards, cast off by some previous client race? She deliberately turned her back on it and said, 'This isn't about helping it. It's about understanding it. Finding out what it is so I can get rid of it.'

'You just had a seizure,' Bria said. 'And then there was the bad news about Willie. Either one of those would have definitely put me in a spin.'

'I'm chasing it because I had a seizure,' Lisa said. 'Because Willie found something that woke the ghost in my head.'

'But first, maybe you should to take a step back and think this through. Think about what you really want. Think about the consequences of going up against the geek police. Not to mention the Jackaroo.'

'I don't want to get into a fight with anyone,' Lisa said. 'I just want to find out what it was Willie found. Find out exactly what it was that fucked us up.'

After all these years she still didn't have a coherent picture of what had happened to her and Willie during the Bad Trip. They had set out from Port of Plenty on one of their expeditions into the back country, and next thing she knew she woke up in the clinic in Joe's Corner, battered and bruised and sick, no memory of how she got there. Apparently she and Willie had ditched their truck in the City of the Dead and had been found by a tomb raider, badly dehydrated and suffering from heatstroke and retrograde amnesia. She'd lost almost three weeks of her life. Wiped clean. Gone. Later, she was visited by little flashes of disconnected memory fragments a sense of deep panic, as if she was struggling for her last breath deep underwater, dust whirling up around her, fighting with Willie over control of the truck as they fled helter-skelter from some vast black flapping doom but neither she nor Willie could ever recall where they'd been, how they'd got there, what they had found.

A couple of local tomb raiders had tried to follow their trail back into the Badlands, but the Badlands were big and empty, and the sandstorm season had arrived early and put an end to the search. A year later, Willie found that small excavation pit in what he claimed to be the right place, but although he dug all around it he hadn't turned up anything.

But something had happened. Something that had stimulated a flight reaction, forcing them to run mindlessly until they could run no more. Something that had wiped out their memories and left atypical neurological activity in the temporal lobes of their brains. An infection with some kind of algorithm. An eidolon. A ghost.

Although actively malign artefacts were rare, all Elder Culture algorithms possessed some degree of toxicity. Despite using virtual sandboxes, Reynolds traps and other precautions, most coders and analysts suffered from headaches and transient visual or auditory hallucinations, while prospectors and tomb raiders, exposed to unshielded artefacts, risked all kinds of neurological damage, from hysterical blindness to pseudo-Parkinson's and the zombie delusion. There was always some old-timer in the corner of a tomb raiders' bar with the staggers and the jags, or an imaginary friend, or a demon on their back, or missing fingers or ears they'd cut off to prove that they were actually one of the walking dead. Lisa and Willie were haunted, but according to their neurology consultant their ghosts were mostly benign. They had been lucky to escape without suffering more serious damage.

Apart from the deep brainburn of knowing that they might never understand what had happened to them.

Apart from their marriage falling apart.

Apart from the bone-deep need to find out what Willie and his friends from Outland Archaeological Services had discovered out there in the Badlands. Maybe Bria was right. Maybe what Lisa thought she wanted was something the ghost wanted. Some deep alien urge to return to where it had come from, or something weirder and deeper. But at that moment she didn't care.

Bria said, 'One thing is certain: it's deeply and dangerously bad. And then there's the agent in charge of the investigation. Adam Nevers. I told you I had a contact in TCU? She says that he's one of their most senior field agents. Smart and tough, very experienced. And he has history with Ada Morange. He was on Mangala when she brought down the first Ghajar ships.'

'You're kidding.'

'He's hardcore, Lisa. Not someone you want as an enemy. A few years after the Mangala thing, he shut down one of Ada Morange's companies in France. Something to do with importing biochines without the proper licences. After that he was part of a big investigation into her affairs, just before she moved most of her business out to the New Frontier. And now he's here, and it looks like he's still on her case.'

'Which means that this is something important. That it's not just some trivial breakout.'

'Which means,' Bria said, with the exaggerated patience she used on her sons when they were acting up, 'that you don't want to get caught up in the middle of a feud between them. My advice? Forget it. It's Chinatown.'

'Bria, the whole fucking planet is Chinatown. We come up and out and build shopping malls and golf courses and pretend we've civilised the place. But there's a couple of million years' worth of weird alien shit lying around everywhere. Do you really think we can just ignore that? Do you really think it ignores us?'

Bria finally agreed to a meeting at the code factory the next morning. Lisa drove home through the stop-and-go traffic of the city's sprawl, through the hills on Highway One amongst the windy roar of big rigs and road trains, with the dazzle of oncoming high-beams on the other side of the highway nagging at her and a headache beginning to build behind her eyes. She was short of supplies and had planned to stop at the community store on the way home. Instead, she pulled into the lot of the Shop'n'Save on the commercial strip at the junction with the high desert road, one part of her mind knowing exactly what she was thinking of doing and hating herself for it, another part knowing that she needed anonymity.

She told Pete to guard the pickup truck and went inside and uncoupled a shopping cart and patrolled the towering aisles. She bought bags of dog chow and rice, cans of beans, a couple of kilos of frozen hamburger meat. Bathroom tissue. Fresh-squeezed orange juice. And here was the liquor aisle and the shelves where half a hundred brands of vodka were displayed, from generic gallon jugs to high-end Russian and Polish brands. Clear glass gleaming like a queen's ransom.

12. Wizard Work.

'Wizards work because they want to work,' Aunty Jael told Tony. 'There's no need to bully them into doing it. No need for threats. It's what they do. It's their vocation.'

'The problem is not their work ethic,' Tony said. 'It's that they don't seem to realise they must find something that can be used to win them more time.'

They were standing, Tony and the hand that Aunty Jael was currently using, in a glassed-in gallery overlooking the hangar-sized work space. Accommodation pods were stacked at one end; the big bubble of the aquarium stood in the centre, half-obscured by monitoring equipment. Inside, the stumps of the live stromatolites squatted in two metres of murky water; around it, the six wizards, dressed in traditional white coats emblazoned with heraldic stains, scorch marks and hand-lettered slogans in archaic fonts, scurried to and fro as they set up their latest experiment.

'Things might go more quickly if we had access to more processing space,' Aunty Jael said.

Today she was present in a skinny ball-jointed hand with glossy white plastic skin and a small head crowned by a circlet of stalked eyes. A number, 7, was stencilled in black ink on its chestplate. The 7 had, in the antique style that Aunty Jael favoured, a dash across its stem.