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‘And you, Collins, I don’t suppose your descriptive powers are in any better shape, no?’

‘I was giving cover, Reid,’ Collins says. ‘Looking everywhere else, know what I mean?’

‘OK, OK.’ Reid stands up and looks them over, speculatively. He might be considering profitable uses for their body-parts, and suitable methods of rendering. ‘You did the job we agreed, as well as you could. If I’d wanted to pull in a man on sus, I’d have needed a warrant. And that’s what I’m going to need, gentlemen, so I’m afraid that rules you out. Full payment, no bonus.’

Collins and Stigler look relieved and turn to go. At the door Collins scratches his neck, looks at Reid. Reid looks up from the screen he’s turned his attention to.

‘Yes?’

‘Uh, Reid, question. You don’t happen to know who owns that robot?’

Reid thinks about this. His smile lets the two men know they’re his good friends, and not a couple of greps who haven’t come back with the data.

‘Stay on the case,’ he tells them.

Wilde stood up and walked to the end of the quay, past the people and the intelligent apes and the machines that might have been intelligent. He stared across the Stone Canal, and then looked down into the water for a while. He found, perhaps, some answer in his reflection.

The robot, Jay-Dub, was still crouched at the edge of the quay, poised like a predatory water-bird. Patterns of liquid crystal shifted in its shadowed central band as Wilde returned. Wilde looked down at it.

‘We’re not in Kazakhstan any more,’ he said.

The machine made no reply.

‘What happened?’ Wilde asked. He looked around. ‘Is it safe to talk?’

‘Safe enough,’ said Jay-Dub. ‘I can pick up most attempts to overhear.’

‘All right,’ said Wilde. ‘Tell me this: where did I hide my pistol?’

‘In the shower.’

‘What was the last thing I said?’

‘“Love never dies.”’

Wilde frowned.

‘What was the last thing I decided?’

‘That I’d – that you’d never smoke again.’

Wilde leaned down and tapped the machine’s hull.

‘That’s right. That’s a promise I remember making, and you can go right on keeping.’

He took the coffee-glass to the breakfast-food stall and returned with the glass refilled and a packet of cigarettes and a lighter.

‘I don’t approve of this,’ Jay-Dub said as Wilde sat down beside it and lit up.

‘Fuck you,’ Wilde said. ‘I want your story, not your opinions.’

He leaned back against the shell of the machine, which shifted its weight on its legs to compensate.

‘It’s a long story. You have no idea how long.’

‘So make it short.’ Wilde’s eyes were closed.

‘“Yes, master,” said the robot,’ said the robot. ‘OK, whatever you say. Basically, I died just after being shot. My brain was immediately scanned with a prototype neural imaging system and the pattern recorded.’

‘Come on,’ Wilde said. ‘We don’t – didn’t have anything like that.’

‘Reid’s people did. They were more advanced than anyone suspected. And I was the first. The first human, anyway. I believe most of the enhanced apes around here originate with the early experiments of that period. However, it was many years later – though not, of course, subjectively – that I opened my eyes and found myself in an impossible spacecraft. Comfortable, one-gee, but no rotation or acceleration was apparent when I looked outside. Virtual reality, of course. What was outside the windows was what was outside in the real world.’

It paused. A minute passed. The man reached his hand back and knocked the machine’s side with his knuckles. Then he sucked his knuckles.

‘And what was outside was –?’

‘Ganymede, I think,’ the robot said. ‘What was left of it. The machine that I inhabited was not much bigger than the one you see now. It, and thousands like it, were engaged in constructing a platform. All around the rings of Jupiter, other machines were engaged in related tasks.’

Again its voice trailed off.

‘The rings of Jupiter?’ Wilde said. ‘Somebody had been busy.’

‘Guess who.’

‘Reid?’

‘And company.’

‘They’d done that? By when?’

‘2093.’

Wilde opened his eyes and gazed out over the canal.

‘I take it,’ he said, ‘that the humans