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‘Okay gal,’ Tamara yells. ‘That’s you with a gang on your side! That’s as free as it gets! Give or take…Later for that! Right now –’ she twirls to face the thrumming hub of the island market ‘– let’s party!’

‘You’re telling me,’ Wilde said incredulously to the robot, ‘that Reid is here?’

‘Yes,’ said the robot. ‘Why should that surprise you? Is it more remarkable than your being here?’

Wilde grinned at it sourly. He pushed away his empty plate and sipped at his beer. He shook his head.

‘Reid was one of the last people I saw,’ he said. ‘For all I know, it may have been him who had me killed. And as far as I’m concerned, it happened today. Christ. I keep expecting to wake up.’

‘You have woken up,’ the robot said. ‘You can expect some emotional reaction as your mind adjusts to your situation.’

‘I suppose so.’ A bleakness belying his apparent age settled on Wilde’s countenance. ‘It has already. So tell me, machine. I’m here, and you say Reid’s here. What about other people I knew? What about Annette?’

‘Annette,’ the machine said carefully, ‘is among the dead. Whether her mind as well as her genotype has been preserved I don’t know, but there may be grounds for hope.’

‘Because of the clone?’

‘Yes.’

‘I must find her, and find out.’

‘You can find out without finding her,’ said the machine. ‘It’s…I’ll explain tomorrow.’

‘Why not now?’

‘Trouble,’ the machine said. ‘Don’t turn around until you hear something.’

Wilde set down his glass. His shoulders began to hunch.

‘Relax,’ said the machine.

The doors of the pub banged open and the music stopped. Conversations ran on for a few seconds and then trailed off into the spreading silence. Everybody turned around.

Two men stood in the doorway. They were wearing loose-cut, sharp-creased business suits, over open-necked shirts, over tee-shirts. Their hair was as shiny as their shoes, and their knuckles flashed with studded stones. One of the men perfunctorily held up a card showing a mug-shot of himself and a grey block of small print. The other took from a jacket-pocket a crumpled ball of flat material. He grasped a corner of it and shook it out. With a final flick of his wrist he snapped it to a glossy, full-colour, high-res poster depicting the dark-haired woman who had fled from Wilde and the robot.

‘Anybody seen her?’ he demanded.

The pub’s customers could still be approximately differentiated into two groups, the men at the bar and the girls at the tables, although some mingling had begun. A little flurry of giggles and gasps came from the women, and a murmur of grunts and slightly shifted seats and glasses from the men. Anyone who looked about to say something would glance at the men at the bar, and find someone else to look at, something else to say.

Within half a minute everybody was talking again; the men at the bar had turned back to watching the television, where a commentator was interviewing a team-leader behind whom bodies were being stretchered from an arena. The only person still looking directly at the repossession men was Wilde. The one holding the picture strolled over; the other followed, fondling a revolver-butt with a look of distant pleasure.

The man with the picture looked down at Wilde and smiled, showing perfect but strangely shaped incisors, long canines. Perfumed fumes poured off him like sweat.

‘Well,’ he said, ‘you look interested. Big reward, you know.’

Wilde looked up reluctantly from the picture. He shook his head.

‘She reminds me of somebody I used to know,’ he said. ‘That’s all. But I’ve never seen her here.’

The man glared at him. ‘She’s been here,’ he said. ‘I can smell it.’ He turned his head this way and that, inhaling gently, as if his statement were literally true. The other man gave a sudden gleeful yell and snatched up something from the floor.

He brandished it under Wilde’s nose. Wilde recoiled slightly. The robot, leaning between a chair and the table-top, jerked forward a couple of centimetres.

The thing the man