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After an hour and twenty minutes the man stopped. The machine stopped after another couple of strides and stood rocking slightly on its metal legs.

‘I’m thirsty,’ the man said. The water in the canal was sluggish, flecked with green algae. He eyed it dubiously. ‘D’you know if that stuff’s safe to drink?’

‘It isn’t,’ said the machine. ‘And I can’t make it safe, without using up an amount of energy I’d rather keep. However, I can assure you that if you go on walking, with perhaps the occasional rest, you’ll drink in a bar in Ship City tonight.’

‘Mars bars?’ Wilde said, and laughed. ‘I always wanted to hang out in Mars bars.’

Another hour passed and Wilde said, ‘Hey, I can see it!’

The machine didn’t need to ask him. Without missing a step, it smoothly extended its legs until it was striding along with its pod almost on a level with the man’s head, and it too saw what Wilde had seen: the jagged irregularities at the horizon.

‘Ship City,’ the machine said.

‘Give me a break,’ the man shouted, hurrying to keep up. ‘No need to go like a Martian fighting-machine.’

The machine’s steady pace didn’t slacken.

‘You’re stronger than you think,’ it said. The man caught up with it and marched alongside.

‘I like that,’ the machine added, after a while. ‘“Like a Martian fighting-machine”. Heh-heh.’

Its laugh needed working on if it was going to sound at all human.

They walked on. Their shadows lengthened in front of them, and the city slowly appeared above a horizon that, for the man, was unfamiliarly but not unexpectedly close. The irregularities differentiated into tall, bristling towers connected by arches and slender, curved bridges; domes and blocks became apparent between the towers, among which a matted encrustation of smaller buildings spread out from the city, obscured by a low haze.

The small sun set behind them, and within fifteen minutes the night surrounded them. The man stopped walking, and the machine stopped too.

Jon Wilde turned around several times, scanning from the zenith to the horizon and back as if looking for something he might recognise. He found nothing, and faced at last the machine, dim in the starlight that reflected like frost from its hull and flanks.

‘How far?’ The words came from a dry mouth. He waved a hand at the blazing, freezing, crowded sky. ‘How long?’

‘Hey, Jon Wilde,’ the machine said. It had got its conversational tone right. ‘If I knew, I would tell you. Same spiral, different arm, that’s all I know. We’re talking memory numbers, man, we’re talking geological time.’

The two beings contemplated each other for a moment, then hastened the last few miles towards the city’s multiplying lights.

Stras Cobol, by the Stone Canal. Part of the human quarter. A good place to get lost. Surveillance systems integrate the view –

A three-kilometre strip of street, the canal-bank on one side, buildings on the other, their height a bar-chart of property values in a long swoop from the centre’s tall towers to the low shacks and shanties at the edge of town where the red sand blows in off the desert and family-farm fusion plants glow in the dark. On the same trajectory the commerce spills increasingly out from behind the walls and windows, on to the pavement stalls and hawkers’ trays. All along this street there’s a brisk jostle of people and machines, some working, some relaxing as the light leaves the sky.

Among all the faces in that crowd, something focuses in on one face. A woman’s face, tracked briefly as she threads her way between the other bodies on the street. The system’s evaluation routines categorise her appearance swiftly: apparent age about twenty, height about one metre sixty – well below average – mass slightly above average. Her height is lifted within the normal range by high-heeled shoes, her figure accentuated by a long-sleeved, skinny-rib sweater and a long narrow skirt, skilfully slit so it doesn’t impede her quick steps. Shoulder-length hair, black and thick, sways around a face pretty and memorable but not flipping any switches