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‘What about preparing our case?’ Wilde asked. ‘I don’t know anything about your laws here, let alone the specific code Talgarth operates.’

‘Oh, that’s all right,’ Tamara said. ‘Invisible Hand will take care of it. You can get someone to stand counsel if you want, but if you ask me you’re just as well letting Invisible Hand patch you a MacKenzie remote.’

‘A what?’

‘A software agent to advise you on points of law, when you’re representing yourself.’

‘Ah,’ said Wilde. ‘Progress.’

Tamara wandered over to the kitchen-range and began brewing up a large canteen of coffee.

‘Expecting company?’

‘Allies,’ Tamara said. ‘Invisible Hand is calling some in for me.’ She smiled mischievously at him. ‘None for you.’

‘Consider me one of yours,’ Wilde said. He looked about the room, searching. ‘Do you have any way of keeping up on the news?’

Tamara looked at him oddly. ‘Yeah, sure.’

She went over to a shelf and picked up a television screen and unrolled it and stuck it to the wall behind the table. The tall kettle was boiling. She turned to attend to it. Wilde looked at the screen, caught Tamara’s eye. He waved at the screen’s blank pewter surface.

‘Oh!’ Tamara tapped her temples with her hand. ‘Sorry. You don’t have contacts?’

‘Something the robot evidently neglected to tell me about,’ Wilde said.

Tamara told him about a good local stall where he could buy contacts, and how to get there. He wrote down her instructions, drew a sketch-map, checked it with her, and left. He returned about half an hour later, blinking and wide-eyed. ‘Wow,’ he kept saying. ‘Wow, fuck!’

Tamara’s allies turned up in ones and twos over the next hour; eventually, a dozen of them were filling the room, sitting on the table, checking weapons and drinking Tamara’s coffee. Most of them smoked and all of them had strongly held opinions on aspects of the case, as well an embarrassed, and embarrassing, interest in Wilde. The man from the dead! Wilde rapidly lost track of their names or interest in their obsessions, as he found himself backed into corners by a crowd of mostly skinny, mostly young, all heavily armed strangers telling him things he didn’t know about himself.

‘I’ve always thought your later works denouncing the conspiracy theory were forged by the conspiracy –’

‘No.’

‘– and Norlonto, right, that was an ideal community –’

‘No.’

‘– the basic idea of abolitionism, that machine intelligence has artificial rights, was based on the same premises as your space movement manifestos –’

‘No.’

‘They say this is all because Reid is screwing your woman –’

‘No.’

And so on.

And then everyone started and fell silent at the same moment, even Wilde who had by now got the hang of tuning his contacts to the television screen. The news, like most news on Ship City’s channels, was delivered by an excited child. (Wilde had already expressed his opinion that this was one of the most enlightened and appropriate uses of child labour he’d ever come across.)

‘News just in!’ said the blonde-curled bimbette on the Legal Affairs Channel. ‘Three sensational developments! David Reid sues abolitionist for return of his gynoid, Dee Model! And – he sues the long-dead anarchist and nuclear terrorist, Jonathan Wilde, on a related charge! Finally, Dee Model and another abolitionist call witness that they’ve killed the renowned artist, Anderson Parris! Hue-and-cry raised – bounties posted shortly!’

Pictures of those mentioned zoomed giddily onto the screen as she spoke, and the channel then split into sub-threads exploring the implications of each aspect, the biographies of the alleged participants and the eschatological significance of the return of Jonathan Wilde.

‘Nuclear terrorist?’ The man who spoke was called Ethan Miller. His appearance was older than most of those present, with lank black hair, skin the colour of the vile tobacco he smoked, and a face like a well-used hatchet. He wore nothing but leather trousers and a ragged TOE-shirt which he claimed was an original, though the Malley equations now had even more holes in