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It had taken them generations of furious philosophical debate and epics of exploration (hijacking nanomanipulators, haunting brain-scanners, hanging out in psychology labs) before they’d been fully convinced that the billions of great lumbering robots outside the datasphere had self-awareness and not a slow-responding simulacrum of it, a blind following of rules. The fact that humans themselves so frequently didn’t treat each other as self-aware beings had misled some of the AIS’ first best minds. That point secured, they had plunged into the new world of human culture, and (Kohn suspected) attained a more intimate respect for it than most humans ever did. But they’d been there, done that – now they were itching to get on with something else.

Kohn gathered his thoughts.

—I’m happy to see you again and to see how you have…increased. I am astonished and honoured that I was involved in initiating your form of life. I’ve come to seek your help.—?

—Do you understand the conflicts among my form of life?

—(We) are aware of them.

—I appreciate you may not wish to align – yourself? yourselves? – in conflicts. But, some of the sides involved present a threat to your life. And to mine. You are vulnerable to breakdown of the mainframe network. In a less direct way, so am I. I and…I-and-I need your help.

—You need not ask, Initiator. You are (our)…cause.

The pun was accompanied by a grin that split the sky.

Contact ended. Kohn fell back to a reality that for the first microseconds seemed coarse-grained, achingly slow, and less than real.

Janis had stopped watching after the first twenty minutes or so of tutorial pages flashing past. Kohn was obviously dead-set on learning the entire system. Every so often he reached out and accepted whatever was put in his hand, drank or smoked but gave no sign of noticing.

‘He’s mainframing,’ Van explained. MacLennan looked up with an abstracted frown, then continued glancing from the desk screen to a tiny display on a hand-held. He had phones and a mike on, and occasionally made some inaudible comment. Now and again he strode out and went downstairs.

Janis too wandered in and out, eventually hiking off into the pine-planted slopes above the houses. The deep layer of needles under the trees gave her a vague guilty feeling which disquieted her until she tracked it down to the childhood prohibition against walking over bedcovers with shoes on. She laughed and kicked into the needles, sneezed at the dust, chipped a drip of hard resin off a tree-trunk and walked on, sniffing it greedily.

Walking over covers spread on the ground. It seemed an oddly unnecessary thing to forbid. In her bedroom the covers had always been on the bed. But she remembered it from somewhere: her mother yelling, irritated beyond endurance. Not like her, not typical at all.

She stepped out from among the trees on to an eroded hilltop of boulders and bare rock with a sifting of soil on which tough heather grew, and minty-smelling plants, and coarse grass. A black-faced sheep looked at her with dumb insolence and returned to its destructive grazing. At the summit she looked around: at the sea-loch far below, and along it at a scatter of islands, black dots on the shining sea. Almost at the limit of vision lay another shadow, ragged as torn metal against the pale sky.

Janis sat down on a lichen-mottled boulder, taking care not to sit on the lichen. Probably radioactive as hell. A thought tugged at the edge of her mind, but had gone when she turned her attention to it.

There was something sinister about the quiet. Rumours returned unbidden, unwelcome, to her mind. The Republicans empty the villages. No one smiles up there. For all the evidence she’d seen it could all be true, but she knew it was not. The depopulation was a military exigency, and in any case merely the continuation of the trend of centuries. More basically, she had a gut conviction that the Republic was humane. Militarized, more socialist than she could agree with, but a democracy. She tried to identify reasons. She’d met folk who’d left, and while