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‘Why didn’t you specialise in that? Be a guard or a fighter or –’

‘And risk getting killed?’ Ax guffaws. ‘Do I look stupid?’

‘No.’ Dee gives him a friendly, sisterly (now that she’s figured out their only possible relationship) smile, but she stops feeling sorry for him. She reckons he’s doing all right. Queer as a coot, she finds herself thinking, and as they get up to leave she sets Scientist grumpily searching ancient, inherited databases to find out what the fuck a coot is.

‘So I made it to the ships,’ Wilde said. He raised himself on one elbow and peered around the room, in which he’d been lying awake for ten minutes.

‘Good morning,’ said the machine. It was resting on the floor in the corner of the room. The room was upstairs in the Malley Mile, cheap to rent and containing a wash-stand, a chair and a bed. It was remarkably free of dust, due to machines about the size and shape of large woodlice that scuttled about the floor.

Wilde stared at the machine. ‘What have you been doing all night?’

‘Guarding you,’ the machine said. It stretched out its limbs momentarily, then folded them back. ‘Scanning the city’s nets. Dreaming.’

Wilde remained leaning on one elbow, looking at the machine with a suddenly reckless curiosity. ‘I didn’t know machines dreamed.’

‘I also reminisce,’ said the machine. ‘When there’s time.’

Wilde grinned sourly. ‘I suppose time is what you have plenty of, thinking so much faster –’

‘No,’ the machine snapped. ‘I told you. I’m a human-equivalent machine. My subjective time is much the same as yours. No doubt my connections are faster than your reactions, but the consciousness they sustain moves at the same pace.’

‘Does it indeed?’ Wilde got out of bed, looked down at his body with a flicker of renewed surprise, smiled and washed his face and neck and put his clothes on.

‘So tell me, machine,’ he said as he tugged on his boots, ‘what am I to call you? Come to that, what are you?’

‘Basically,’ said the machine, detaching a filament from a wall socket and winding it slowly back into its casing, ‘I’m a civil-engineering construction rig, autonomous, nuclear-powered, sand-resistant. As to my name.’ It paused. ‘You may call me anything you like, but I have been known as Jay-Dub.’

Wilde laughed. ‘That’s great! That’ll do.’

‘“Jay-Dub” is fine,’ said the machine. ‘Not undignified. Thanks, Jon Wilde.’

‘Well, Jay-Dub,’ Wilde said with a self-conscious smile, ‘let’s go and get breakfast.’

‘You do that,’ Jay-Dub said. It unfolded its limbs and stood up, revealing a litter of torn foil carapaces with now-stilled tiny legs and dulled lenses. ‘I’ve eaten.’

The Malley Mile was silent, the bar shuttered and swept and polished and hung with damp cloths when they picked their way downstairs and out through a one-way-locked door.

‘Trusting,’ Wilde remarked, as he let the door click back.

‘It’s an honest place,’ Jay-Dub said. ‘There’s little in the way of petty crime. For reasons which I’m sure you know.’

The small sun was low above the towers, laying lacey shadows on the street. Boats and barges floated down the canal, heading out of town.

‘Where are they going?’ Wilde asked. The man and the robot were strolling towards a small dock a hundred or so metres up the street. There were food-stalls on the dock.

‘Mines or farms,’ the robot said. ‘They aren’t entirely distinct, here. They’re both a matter of using nanotech – natural or artificial – to concentrate dispersed molecules into a usable form.’

‘And people work at that? What are the robots doing?’

‘Heh-heh-heh.’ Jay-Dub’s voice-control had advanced: it could now parody a mechanical laugh. ‘Robots are either useless for such purposes, or far too useful to waste on them.’

The small dock was busy. People – mostly human, but with a few other hominid types among them – were embarking, or unlading sacks of vegetables or minerals from long narrow barges. Electric-powered trucks were backing on to the quay, loading up. A family of what looked like gibbons with swollen skulls hauled a net-full of slapping, silvery fish along the quay and