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She busied herself with making breakfast while Wilde padded about, getting washed and dressed and drinking the drug-laced coffee. The cabin had three adjoining rooms: a small bedroom with an elementary wash-stand and a tiny toilet; a small kitchen, and a larger room containing communications equipment and computer interfaces, all on a conference-table with half a dozen chairs around it.

‘How long are we expected to stay here?’ Wilde asked, shaving.

‘As long as it takes.’

‘Has Reid turned up yet?’

‘Yup. And his supporters. Odds are about even if it should come to a fight.’

‘That’s a happy coincidence.’

‘No, it was arranged by –’

‘Don’t tell me, Invisible Hand. OK. Jesus.’ He towelled his face. ‘I haven’t felt so unprepared for anything since my final exams.’

‘What are exams?’

‘Old primate custom.’ Wilde crunched his Harmony Oats. ‘I gather you’ve evolved beyond it. Let’s catch the news.’

Tamara set up the communications rig in the main room, while Wilde watched. She was still in her jeans and tee-shirt and flak-jacket, but she’d put on make-up and perfume as some kind of gesture towards formality or femininity.

‘Am I still a mess?’ Wilde asked.

She looked him up and down. ‘You’ll do,’ she said. ‘Use the after-shave, though.’

They checked out the news. The case was the lead item on all channels. Overnight, a whole sub-culture of newsgroups and discussion for a had sprung up around its aspects. The three killings claimed by Dee and Ax, their disappearance, and the appearance of Jonathan Wilde gave the whole affair an added edge of social panic. At least two heretical churches had already proclaimed Wilde a sign of the end.

‘I hope your abolitionist comrades are prepared for trouble,’ Wilde said.

‘What kind of trouble?’

‘You should know. Don’t you always get hassles, selling your paper? Hasn’t Ax shown what can happen if people suddenly think the world’s going to change forever? Imagine all of that multiplied by tens – hundreds!’

Tamara shook her head. ‘I can’t. I’ve read about riots and revolutions, but we’ve never had anything like that here.’

‘Count yourselves lucky.’

Tamara’s cheeks reddened. ‘Oh, I do, don’t get me wrong. Ship City’s basically not a bad place, it’s just that – there are all those wrongs done to machine minds, and – it’s a long way from the ideals of anarchism. And people really do think that you suddenly turning up means all that’s going to be put right.’

‘“The ideals of anarchism”,’ Wilde repeated heavily. He gazed at Tamara’s face for a few seconds. Nobody, looking on, could have had any doubt which of the two youthful faces in the cabin had the older mind behind it.

Wilde spent the next hour or so in conversation with a subset of Invisible Hand’s legal database, the ‘MacKenzie’s friend’ software. It was a friendly, and user-friendly, system. Its hardware component was an ear-to-chin phone that picked up what he said and heard, and passed it by short-range radio to a local relay. Its prompts could be whispered in his ear, or displayed in his contacts.

Shortly after nine, Tamara interrupted his study of precedents and arguments.

‘Reid’s come out of his cabin,’ she told him.

Wilde blinked away the display.

‘What’s he doing?’

‘Just wandering around with his friends, sipping coffee and chatting to people – and to the news ’motes.’

‘I think I’ll do the same,’ said Wilde. ‘Also, I wouldn’t mind talking to him.’

Tamara smiled wryly. ‘Bit late to settle out of court.’

Wilde stood up. ‘It’s never too late,’ he said. ‘But no, I don’t hold out much hope of that! The fact is, I can’t wait to see him.’

Tamara was silent for a moment. Wilde lit a cigarette.

‘I should warn you,’ Tamara said. ‘I spoke to him yesterday, when he called me, right, and…even though I’d seen him on the news and so on, I found when I actually spoke to him that he’s very…I mean he has a kinda, you know, presence. You may find him a bit…intimidating.’

Wilde stood up, with a harsh laugh.

‘I watched him watch me die,