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‘Dead right!’ Tamara looked around. ‘You’re going to be famous all over again, when this gets out. Which it will, when the court case starts, if not sooner.’

Wilde shrugged. ‘I’d like to delay it as long as possible. My grasp of the politics of this place isn’t strong enough to handle publicity to my advantage.’

‘OK,’ said Tamara. ‘We have a more immediate problem. Before I learned that you were involved, I got a message from David Reid. You…knew him?’

‘Sure did. Once.’

‘Right, well he’s suing me to get the gynoid, Dee, back. Fair enough, I expected that. I want to make a case of it. Invisible Hand has just told me you were being sued too, and that you wanted to combine forces. As a matter of fact you don’t have much choice, as it’s all part of the same case in actuality, so no other court is going to touch yours while ours is outstanding, and we’d have to bring you into it anyway, so you might as well go in on your own terms.’

Wilde spread his hands. ‘So what’s the problem?’

‘The first person on our list of preferred judges is a bloke called Eon Talgarth.’ She paused, waiting for some reaction. Wilde just raised his eyebrows. ‘He used to be an abolitionist,’ Tamara went on, ‘and he now runs a court out in the Fifth Quarter. That’s a machine domain. Most of the disputes he settles are between scrappies.’

‘Scrappies?’

‘People like me, who go into the machine domains and hunt for useful bits of machinery and automation. He’s been known to let autonomous machines go free, and put injunctions on hunting them, but no other judge has accepted that as a precedent.’

‘All the same,’ said Wilde, ‘he sounds like a good bet for your case.’

‘Sure, which is why I didn’t expect Reid to agree. But he did. Great. Trouble is, I didn’t know you’d be involved. Shit.’

‘Why is it a problem?’

‘Because Eon Talgarth doesn’t like you very much.’

Wilde put down his drink and stared at her. ‘What? I never heard of him. What’s he got against me?’

‘Oh, nothing personal as far as I know.’ She shrugged. ‘He’s from Earth, he was in the labour-gangs, he was in the ship. So you could have harmed him somehow – he’s never said. But when he was an abolitionist, he used to argue against the idea which a lot of people here have, that you were some kind of hero and great anarchist thinker and represented an alternative to the sort of ideas that Reid implemented when he set this place going. He said you were an opportunist, that you made all kinds of dirty deals with governments – and with Reid, and that any conflicts between the two of you were just personal rivalries.’

She spoke in a light-hearted, say-it-ain’t-so tone. Wilde tilted his seat precariously back and rocked with laughter.

‘It’s all true, every word!’ he said. ‘I’m amazed there are people here who say I was a hero and a great anarchist thinker. Ha-ha! This Eon Talgarth has got me bang to rights.’

Tamara’s mouth turned down slightly. ‘It’s not really true, is it? That you were always an opportunist?’

‘Absolutely,’ Wilde said. ‘Only the other day – by my memory, of course – a woman I was once in love with told me I was responsible for the last world war going nuclear. By that time in my life, bearing in mind I was ninety-three years old and had taken a lot of flak for various…controversial decisions, I didn’t even take offence.’

‘But if…’ Tamara considered the implications. ‘That would mean you were to blame for –’

‘The whole fucking mess!’ Wilde said. He looked about him and waved a hand. ‘Everything that has happened since the Third World War is all my fault!’

‘That,’ said Tamara, ‘is what Eon Talgarth thinks.’

‘He could be right,’ Wilde said with a shrug. ‘I don’t think so myself.’

‘Oh, neither do I,’ Tamara hastened to add. ‘And neither do most people, abolitionists or not. In fact, some people think you’re, well…’

She hesitated, embarrassed.

‘What?’ Wilde leaned forward, cigarette in hand, daring her. ‘Something more than a great anarchist thinker?’

‘Yes,’ Tamara said. ‘They think you’re, well, still alive and out there somewhere. People say they’ve seen