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There are a couple of dozen people in The Malley Mile: farmworkers and mechanics on bar stools, and office-workers – mostly young women – around the round tables. Looks like they’ve come in here for a drink on their way home from work, and stayed for a few more. Good. She sees a notice: no concealed weapons. She takes a pistol from the purse she’s carrying and sticks it in the waistband of her skirt and walks up to the bar. The girls around the tables notice her, the men on the stools notice her, but that’s just because she’s pretty, not because she looks out of place.

The barman’s another giant, some brain-boosted gigantopith or whatever (she’s never had occasion to sort out the hominid genera) and he’s slumped sadly on his elbows, wrists overhanging the near edge of the bar counter. He turns away from the gladiators on the television and smiles at her, or at any rate bares his yellow fangs.

‘Yesh?’

‘A Dark Star, please.’

Without getting up the barman reaches for bottles and mixes her a rum and cola.

‘Eyshe?’

‘Yes please.’ She’s careful with the sibilants; the urge to slide into mimicry (it’s a bug in Spy, actually) is hard to resist. She lets Spy handle the process of paying, selecting the right grubby note from her filched collection of promissories. Gold values she can handle in any of her frames of mind, but crops and machine-parts, land and labour-time are foreign to most of them.

The ice clinks as she takes her drink to an unoccupied table nearest to the end wall. She sits down with her back to that wall. She lays her purse, and her pistol, casually on the table. She sips her drink, lights a cigarette, and keeps an eye on the door as if waiting for her friends or boyfriend to turn up.

The two photofit faces currently hovering in her pattern-recognition and target-acquisition software might come through the door any minute now. If she’s lucky, they don’t know she’s armed. She’s almost certain they don’t know about Spy, and Soldier, and all the other routines she’s loaded up. They’re expecting Secretary, and Sex, and Self, who between them can’t raise more than a kick or bite or scratch. They can handle that, and as for the others here…once the heavies flash their cards the customers will watch her being dragged out of the place with all the empathy and solidarity and compassion and concern that they’d give to the recovery of a stolen vehicle.

But there are people in this district who don’t see things that way, and if the repossession guys – the greps, as the slang goes – don’t come in and find her, or if they do and she gets away, she’ll be off into the back streets to seek human allies.

That’s all as may be. Her owner might by now have discovered just what hardware and software she’s packing, and he’ll have someone and/or something more formidable on her tracks.

She keeps her eyes on the door and her fingers close to the pistol.

‘English spoken here?’

Wilde scuffed the surface of the canal-bank path – it had changed from trodden dust to a strip of fused sand which broadened and merged with the street ahead, the permanent way made from the same material as if the finger of a god had drawn the lines from space – and waited for the machine to reply.

The city had grown on the horizon as they got closer, eventually into a huge, vaguely organic-looking jumble of soaring spiky towers, their visible structure like the interiors of bones or the skeletons of sea creatures, their outlines picked out by lights. What had looked from a distance like some matted undergrowth was now resolved into a fringe of low buildings which – unlike all the other shantytowns Wilde had seen – appeared to extend in through the main body of the city on whose edge they now stood. To their right and left were fields. The bulky moving presences of machines in those fields were the only traffic they had so far encountered. Lights had passed over, but it was difficult to tell whether they were natural or artificial. Once, something huge and silent and leaving a green afterimage or trail had rushed