After a timeless interval, Bria said, 'I think that's enough.'

'Just a little longer,' Lisa said. 'There's so much detail in here.'

'You've been staring at that loop for almost an hour now.'

It had seemed like a handful of minutes, but when Bria switched off the display and cracked open the pod Lisa realised that her eyes were dry and painful. Her mouth was dry, too, and there was a bone-deep ache in her lower back.

Pete, lying in a splash of sunlight by Bria's free-form desk, looked up and wagged his tail when they came into the office, asked if the hunting had been good.

'We definitely caught something,' Lisa said. 'All we have to do now is figure out what it is.'

She paced back and forth, drinking from a bottle of spring water. She was gripped by an electric excitement. She was thinking, in no particular order or pattern, about manipulation of three-dimensional superimpositions, interference transitions, Steiner structures, Floquet-Bloch states and high-lying Rydberg states, K-theory topology, harmonic oscillators, optical manipulation of topological quantum matter, selection components in a system-density matrix . . . If asked, she couldn't have explained why these particular concepts and conjectures seemed relevant. She knew only that they might have some kind of correspondence with the vortices spawned by the displacement in the flow of narrative code, might help her fix the alien and unfamiliar within the topologies of conventional maths and Elder Culture algorithms.

She said, 'It isn't a simple data matrix. There's definitely something active in there. But is it an intrinsic property of the stored information, or is it something else? An emergent property, some kind of observer effect . . . What? What's so funny?'

'You have the look,' Bria said.

'What look?'

'The look when you've hit upon what you call an interesting problem.'

'I think Willie must have seen it, too.'

'Because of his ghost?'

'I think so. Yes. Because our ghosts interact with the code in some way.'

'Of course, we still don't know that the tessera came from the breakout site,' Bria said. She was playing devil's advocate, as she so often had back in the day, trying to prevent Lisa's wilder flights of speculation from soaring off into the wild blue yonder. 'We don't even know where the site is, or if it has anything to do with what happened to you during the Bad Trip.'

Bria had checked the records; Outland Archaeological Services hadn't registered Willie's jackpot. They'd gone wildcatting.

'It's a clue, is what it is,' Lisa said. 'A clue about what Willie found out there, what he was hoping to find . . .'

Perhaps she didn't need to find out where the tessera came from. Perhaps it contained everything she needed to know, if she could only figure out how to decipher it.

She said, 'I need to read up on Ghajar narrative code. Carol Schleifer said that someone at Peking University is trying to crack it, read the text, whatever. Maybe I should talk to them. Could you do me another favour, let me use your q-phone? It would be a lot quicker to talk directly than exchange emails. And what about decompiling and reverse look-up? How long will it take to check this code against the catalogues?'

Bria held up her hands as if trying to fend off an unstoppable force. 'Before we do anything else, perhaps we should think about taking this to the police.'

'And have Nevers take it away from me, like he took everything else? No way.'

'But if it's linked to the breakout that killed the Outland crew, that killed Willie-'

'Willie left the tessera behind for a reason. Maybe he wanted me to find it. Maybe he wanted me to see whatever it was I saw in the code. And he knew I'd be able to see it, because of my ghost. This could help me understand what the Bad Trip did to me, Bria. It could help me find a way of fixing the damage it did. But if I give it up to Nevers he'll destroy it, or deep-six it in some vault. Because that's what people like him do with stuff like this. And then I'll never know what it is, or what it can do. But if you want out,' Lisa said, because she knew how much she was asking of her friend, 'I understand. I can take it elsewhere.'

'And have some cowboy outfit rip you off? No, I'll do the decompiling and all the rest,' Bria said. 'But there's a lot of data to process, I'll have to steal time on the cluster when my girls and boys aren't using it . . . It will take at least a day. Maybe two. And while you're waiting you should definitely take a stress pill.'

It was their old code for time-out when one of them had spent too many sleepless hours trying to crack a problem and needed the other to tell them to take a break, to eat, shower, sleep.

Lisa smiled. 'Absolutely.'

'And there's something else you should think about. You said that Willie found it. But suppose instead it found him?'

14. Traitors.

The Red Brigade was an alliance of a dozen gypsy tribes that had evolved from a rogue element of the survey arm of the Second Empire's navy, haunting the lawless territories beyond the reach of the Commons and linked by q-phones, darknets and stochastic democracy, a perverted blend of chaos theory and behavioural psychology used by the Brigade's leaders to shape their plans and control and discipline their followers. Like other pirate groups, they claim-jumped finds, infiltrated trade routes and hijacked ships, ransacking their cargoes and ransoming their crews, but they had also turned science into a religion. They were bound by elaborate occult rites and deliberately infected themselves with algorithms, partial eidolons and ghosts ripped from Elder Culture artefacts. They were searching for the home worlds of the Elder Cultures and the origin of the Jackaroo and the !Cha. They were searching for ancient secrets that would enable individuals to transcend universal laws and every kind of ethical code. That would make them gods.

Twenty years ago, the Commons police had raided one of the asteroid reefs colonised by the Red Brigade, assassinated several of its prominent wizards and leaders, and destroyed more than a dozen of its capital ships. The Red Brigade's newly elected philosopher queen, Mina Saba, had sued for peace, and the Commons had agreed to a parlay at HD 115043, a planetless yellow dwarf star orbited by a scattered wilderness of mirrors. But the parlay had been a trick, an act of revenge for the police action. A Red Brigade attack wing had ambushed the Commons delegation and destroyed their ship and most of their escorts. Nonso Okoye, Tony's father, was one of the murdered delegates. Two days later, Tony's mother was found dead in her hotel suite in the fleet city of Great Elizabeth on Rn, the water world that was the seat of the Commons' political and military power. An apparent suicide that her family suspected was an assassination, part of the putsch that had given hardliners control of the government. The Okoye family and other liberal elements that had played a role in the so-called appeasement of the Red Brigade had been purged and disgraced; its world had been subjected to a ten-year trade embargo.

Like everyone else in the family, Tony was marked in blood and bone by the shame of its dishonour. That, and the humiliation of the council meeting, was why he thought Danilo Evangalista had been mocking him with a song about the human consequences of the embargo. But after his drunken outburst and a reconciliation engineered by Orelolu, Tony and Danilo had talked long into the night, and Tony had wound up in Danilo's bed and two days later moved out of his rooms in the Great House and moved in with the singer.

Danilo lived in an efficiency apartment in a crumbling stone building in Old Town, where they still called the city Yapur, the name it had been given by the original pioneers half a century before the Okoye family had been given control of Skadi and had renamed its only city Victory Landing. The apartment overlooked Rua Santa Clara, a long street that bustled with a produce market during the day and at night glowed with the neon signs of two dozen restaurants, bars, cellar clubs and cafes. Handwoven rugs covered the apartment's varnished floorboards; Danilo's musical instruments and clothes hung from pegs on the yellow plaster walls; there was the carved pine bed, a sagging armchair, a low table with a hammered brass top, a microwave and a small icebox. Bunches of dried flowers in glass vases, scarves muting the glow of little floor lamps, the scent of cedar and lemon. Tony loved it. The simplicity of it. The romance of it. He loved the cries of stallholders drifting up from the street in the day, and the music from the cafes and bars in the evening. He loved the old men who drank tiny cups of coffee and played chess in the apartment building's foyer. And he was in love with the idea of being in love with the singer, Danilo Evangalista.

They spent their nights in cafes and bars. Danilo played a set or two, gossiped with musicians and poets and hangers-on about everything and nothing. He and Tony would eat late, sometimes with the cooks and waiters of a restaurant after it had closed to paying customers, sometimes at a street stall, sometimes in the house or room of one of Danilo's acquaintances, where there would be more music, more talk, and towards dawn they would walk back to the apartment, past stalls setting up in the produce market, and tumble into bed and make love. Danilo had the ability to seem more naked than anyone Tony had slept with before. The singer would massage him, using his elbows, using his hands, his strong knowing fingers, the whole of his long supple body. Gliding caresses would slowly turn to sex. Afterwards, they would sleep until noon, Tony would drive out to Aunty Jael's laboratory to discuss the wizards' work, and in the evening he would find Danilo in one of his haunts and the night's round would begin.

Once, Tony flew the singer out of the city to picnic in a glade in the native forest by a waterfall of glacial meltwater that tumbled into a broad pool; another time they flew to a long beach of black sand where they walked hand in hand in the freezing whip of the wind. Gavots floated on long narrow wings above surf exploding on the beach's steep slope, the broken temples of icebergs twinkled out to sea, and the two of them were consumed with happiness. And one day he took Danilo out to the space field to show him the ship.

Danilo marvelled at Abalunam's Pride's size and strangeness. The way she hung vast and still above the shadow she cast on the ceramic whitetop. Tony told Danilo that he wished that he could take him to other worlds and amaze people with his music. He told him about some of the things he had seen and some of the stories he had heard out there, asked if Danilo could use some of them in one of his songs. The singer laughed and said that such strange marvels were beyond him, that he wrote small songs about the small change of ordinary lives, and Tony wondered if Danilo would ever sing about him, his high-born lover. Some regretful lament that encapsulated their brief moments of happiness.

He knew that Orelolu was right: knew that their affair was in part a rebellion against his family's attempt to control him. He knew that it could not last. Sometimes, in a brief flash of self-awareness, he told himself that he would have to be careful not to hurt Danilo. That sooner or later this interlude would end. But he also told himself that the singer was tough and streetwise, and several of Danilo's friends had hinted that there was an older man somewhere in the mix, a lover or mentor wisely keeping out of the way. And sometimes he tried to absolve his conscience by telling himself that Danilo probably hoped to cash in on the relationship, like most commoners who become involved with someone in the family. That he would break Tony's heart by asking for a favour, the use of his influence in some way, before Tony could break his . . .

At the beginning, Danilo had explained frankly that Orelolu had asked him to be nice to Tony. 'It was just a favour to a friend. But I liked your passion. That grand gesture when you leapt up and told me to sing something that would make you happy, not sad.'

Tony said he'd already apologised for that.

'Oh, don't apologise! It made me want to find out who you really were.'

'Who am I, then? Really?'

Danilo studied him with a serious expression. 'Someone who is hurt. Someone who runs away from that hurt but always comes back. Someone who's looking for something he can't define. Maybe you're trying to find out who you really are, not what your family thinks you are.'

'I don't want to be what they want me to be.'

'Then don't be.'

'It is not as easy as that.'

'Because of who you are.'

'Yes. Because of who I am.'

'So be someone else.'

'I am, with you . . .'

Maybe it was not love, but there was real passion. A kind of hunger only partly satiated by sex. Tony wanted to be Danilo; he wanted to understand how it was to be him, what it was like to inhabit his skin, his life.

The singer had lived by himself ever since his father had died. The father had been crippled by an accident in one of the maker forges and Danilo had nursed him for a year as he lingeringly deteriorated, blind and racked by fits. His mother had died in childbirth long before that; the baby, Danilo's sister, had died too. After his father's death, Danilo had used what he called his small talent to support himself. His mother had been a singer, from a family of musicians, and several of Danilo's cousins were in the same business. They played in cafes, at private parties, at weddings and christenings, at rent parties thrown when one of their number was short of funds. Old songs brought with them from the old country; new songs in the old tradition.

And so the days passed. The wizards were no closer to being able to read the archival genetics in the stromatolites. Opeyemi's men watched Danilo's apartment from the street, and people Tony had hired from the local police watched Opeyemi's men and followed Danilo wherever he went, ready to protect him from harm. Sooner or later, Tony knew, Ayo or Opeyemi would step in and try to put an end to his little show of defiance. He was not sure, yet, how he would handle that.

After the church service one Sunday Tony was waiting by the great double doors, hoping to intercept Ayo, a mission he'd failed to accomplish the past five Sundays, when Opeyemi suddenly appeared beside him and clutched his elbow in a bony grip and leaned close. 'Walk with me if you would, nephew.'

Tony could not help looking towards Ayo. But his sister, her hair wrapped in a purple gele, was talking with the minister at the centre of a circle of people that included guards and Tony's cousin Julia, who was in charge of the Great House's security. Julia and two guards had intercepted Tony the last time he had tried to get close to Ayo. Julia told him that he had no right to harass Ayo in church; when Tony had asked loudly and angrily why he did not have the right to talk to his sister, Julia had said that perhaps he would be able to talk to her when he was calmer, and the guards had, humiliatingly, escorted him out.

Opeyemi saw his glance and said, 'Given the circumstances, it would be better for you if you did not trouble her today.'

'It is hard not to hear that as a threat.'

'It is useful advice. As is what I want to tell you. Come. It will not take long.'

Tony followed Opeyemi to the edge of the promenade that fronted the church. Beyond a slope of orange twitch moss, the roofs of the city tumbled towards the harbour. A bank of mist hazed the sea; the sun was a pale coin in the white sky. Tony shivered in a cold wind that carried the fresh salt scent of the sea and the burned plastic odour of the refinery. He was ready to hear the worst about Danilo. He was certain his uncle was going to make an end of it. Perhaps he already had: a shoot-out outside the apartment building, a kidnapping, Danilo ransomed for a promise of obedience . . .

Opeyemi leaned on the low slate-topped wall and looked out towards the sea, as if measuring the advance of the mist's tendrils as they groped towards the harbour's sturdy breakwater. He said, 'You visited the space field a little while ago.'

'I cannot check on my ship remotely any more.'

'There is no need for you to check.'

'She is still my ship.'

'But not for much longer.'

Opeyemi had the look that Tony remembered from childhood games of chess: the look that meant he was about to make a killer move Tony had failed to spot. Despite the difference in their ages, Opeyemi had never given any quarter. 'Talent counts as much as experience,' he would say. And: 'If I let you win, the game will be spoiled for you for ever. Don't expect anything in this life to come easily, just because of who you are.' Tony had never managed to beat him, but he had never given up trying, either, and Opeyemi's rare words of praise had been better than any victory. Tony had so much wanted to be like his uncle then: cunning, clever, and calculating. It was only when he had grown up a little that he realised that Opeyemi was a lonely man trapped in a role he had put on like armour, only to discover that he could never again take it off.

'How is the work with your wizards?' Opeyemi said.

'Even if we do not find a cure, I'm sure that we will find something else. Something useful. Something valuable. But we need time to do that, and you refuse to give us time because you have already decided that we will fail.'

'Talking of failure, your last experiment didn't go too well, did it?'

There had been more attempts to animate eidolons with the Ghajar algorithm isolated from the stromatolites. The last, just two days ago, had ended in confusion when the eidolon turned into a cauldron of virtual fire that filled the workspace with roaring blue light. Everyone had fled, half-blinded, and because there had been no way to extinguish the display it had raged for several hours until finally dying back of its own accord.

Tony said, 'It proved that the algorithm we have discovered is active, with coherence and internal consistency. Another step towards cracking the archival genetics.'

That was what Cho Wing-James had told him. He and Aunty Jael had seemed pleased by the virtual conflagration, and were designing a superconducting pipe containing frozen photons of crystal light that would, according to them, resonate with the Ghajar algorithm and mirror its quantum properties. It still seemed a long way from finding out how to read the ancient information stored in the stromatolites, but Tony wasn't about to admit that to his uncle, or tell him how, two nights in a row, he had woken beside Danilo from nightmares to the creepy feeling that someone else was in the room.

'Actually, I'm beginning to believe that there may be something of value,' Opeyemi said. 'Because someone else does.'

'Yes. The Red Brigade. From whom I escaped by the skin of my teeth.'

'Whoever the claim jumpers were, the traitor Fred Firat called them down on your head,' Opeyemi said. 'And now it seems that there is another traitor. Someone in that mad little crew you are supposed to be supervising has been sending reports of their work to someone on Dry Salvages.'

The mist was creeping through the streets. The buildings nearest the harbour were almost entirely drowned; only their red-tile roofs and the upper storey of a stone tower showed above a white sea.

Tony said, 'That is a serious accusation, uncle. I hope you have serious proof.'

'Deadly serious,' Opeyemi said. 'My people have discovered encrypted packets steganographically inserted into communications traffic in the common exchange.'

Commoners did not have access to q-phones, which transmitted messages instantaneously across any distance. Instead, their off-world communications were sent via an exchange linked to a q-phone network. Messages could hop through a dozen or more exchanges and q-phone pairs, zigzagging across the Milky Way until they reached their destination.

'It was cleverly done,' Opeyemi said, 'using a variation of the classic chaffing-and-winnowing technique. Fortunately, our security protocols detected and pieced together two messages, including headers that addressed them to Dry Salvages. As to their content and who they were sent to, we have not yet broken the encryption. But it is only a matter of time before we do.'

'If you have not read the messages, uncle, how do you know that they came from one of the wizards?'

'Because they began to be sent after you returned home. And they were traced back to Aunty Jael's laboratory.'

'I need to see them.'

Tony was afraid and angry. He half-hoped that this was some trick of his uncle's. A bluff with nothing behind it, an attempt to shut down the work on the stromatolites before the deadline expired.

Opeyemi said, 'My word should be enough, but I'll arrange it.'

'Who knows about this?'

'Don't worry, nephew. I came to you first. If you follow my advice and act quickly, you will be able to come out of this with some kind of honour. First, you should shut down the research. Suppose your wizards actually found something? The traitor could send the information to their friends. Second, you should put the wizards to the question. I will be happy to help you with that. My people have considerable expertise.'

Two years ago Tony would have surrendered to the canon law of Opeyemi's counsel. But he'd been tempered by hard lessons in the freebooting business since then, and knew a thing or two about countering threats and intimidation. He met his uncle's blinkless stare and said, 'I'll find this traitor, but I will do it my way. For now, everything will continue as normal. I will do nothing that could alert the traitor and give them the chance to destroy all evidence of their actions before they are brought to justice.'

'And exactly how do you propose to do that?'

Tony flatly lied. 'Oh, don't worry, uncle. I have a few ideas.'

'Then you had better get to work,' Opeyemi said. 'If you don't identify the traitor soon, I will be forced to act for the good of the family, and you will lose what little reputation you have left.'

'Oh, I rather think this enhances my reputation,' Tony said. 'After all, other people believe that the research is important. And sending the wizards to Dry Salvages is no longer an option, because the recipient of those messages might well be Raqle Thornhilde. Once I have got to the bottom of this, I will ask the council to reconsider its deadline.'

15. Crashing And Burning.

On her way out of the city, Lisa stopped at Skate Planet, the only skateboard store in Port of Plenty, on the whole damn world, and bought a twelve-pack of Club-Mate. The soda, juiced with caffeine-laden yerba mate, had powered the Crazy 88's exploits back in the day: Lisa had a lot to do and sleep didn't figure in her plans.

When she got home, she dug up a plastic box buried in the pounded earth floor of the pen of the big male hurklin. Inside, wrapped in layers of polyester soft-shell material, was the exabyte drive that contained a mirror of the files in her confiscated massively parallel computer. She placed Willie's tessera in the box and reburied it and stamped the earth flat, cracked open the first bottle of golden rocket fuel, and fired up Sorabji's Opus clavicembalisticum on the sound system (Pete gave her a soulful look and padded out of the room). She liked to work to music, mostly solo piano pieces, some ambient stuff, Pink Floyd's Wish You Were Here, her father's favourite album. Silence was a big empty room in which every distraction echoed; music was a train that took her somewhere useful, sharpened her focus, inspired connections and little leaps of logic, shut down extraneous thoughts. And for deciphering this mad strange code, what better inspiration than Sorabji's enormous, wild, incantatory masterpiece? As its opening bars rang out, she plugged the mirror drive into the powerful tablet she'd borrowed from Bria, and got down to it.

She was certain that the narrative code was connected with the mystery artefact that had zapped her on the Bad Trip: that was why she could see the distortion in the silvery flow, the sparks in its wake. Something that had reached out to her. She needed to find out what it was. What it did and how it did it.

She brought up a sandbox, froze the playback when the distortion appeared, and used the zoom tool. She was hoping to glimpse some kind of fractal activity, but the edges of the distortion were smooth all the way down to the limits of resolution. She ran the looped playback over and again, watched the distortion appear and disappear until she couldn't really see it any more, closed the sandbox with an angry gesture and shut off the sound system. She felt threadbare, shaky, sick with frustration. Silvery eels swimming everywhere she looked. The ghost leaning at her back.