• Choose a category
• All
• Classic-Fiction

‘So that’s the evidence,’ he said. ‘You needn’t introduce evidence about Tamara Hunter’s defence of Dee Model, as the incident is a matter of public record. The court acknowledges that there’s a case to answer, on the face of it.’

Wilde stood up, blinking spasmodically as the MacKenzie downloaded a sudden screed past his eyes.

‘We are prepared to answer it, and to lay counter-charges,’ he said. ‘However, I need a few moments to assimilate some new information. I crave the court’s indulgence for…ten minutes?’

A ripple of impatience and derision disturbed the crowd.

‘You have seven,’ said Talgarth.

What the MacKenzie adviser was telling Wilde, and which he précised to Tamara and a huddle of their supporters, was this:

Invisible Hand’s sub-contracted software agents, on a (necessarily slow) trawl of Ship City’s vast, unencrypted public records – which, in the absence of anything resembling a civil service, suffered from inadequate maintenance, low compatibility and shoddy indexing – had uncovered a single, intriguing reference to Jay-Dub and Eon Talgarth. They had never had any recorded contact since the landing, but they had been on the same work-teams back on the other side of the Malley Mile.

‘Does this change anything?’ Tamara asked.

‘I don’t know,’ Wilde said. ‘But Reid must know about this, just as he must know that Talgarth took a pretty dim view of my activities back on Earth.’

Ethan Miller thrust his face forward. ‘We should get the trial called off, man! The judge is biased against you, and maybe against Jay-Dub as well.’

‘We can’t,’ said Wilde. ‘We’ve agreed to him, I’ve said publicly I trust his judgement, and we can’t turn round now and say we didn’t know.’

‘But we can on appeal to another court,’ Tamara pointed out.

‘Ah,’ Wilde said. ‘So could Reid – this cuts both ways! We don’t know how Talgarth and Jay-Dub got on when they were both robots together – could’ve been the best of mates, for all we know.’ He straightened up, coming to a decision. ‘Reid can’t know that Jay-Dub never mentioned this, or for that matter that it’s currently out of communication with us. So he might be holding this back as grounds for an instant appeal if the decision goes against him. Fuck it. I’ll just have to bear it in mind. Play on.’

Dee hears a distant shout. The figures around the tower are yelling and waving at her, and moving away. The tower itself has changed, its barbed branches forming a pattern that looks somehow inevitable and right, ugly though it is.

She sighs and stands up. Now she’ll have to slog and slither all the way back down the hill, and along the rough road. Seeing as how this is virtual reality, she doesn’t understand why she can’t just fucking fly. Wilde has told her about something called ‘consistency rules’ but she’s not impressed. She doesn’t need a spurious consistency to stop her going mad.

But all this casting of curses and aspersions proves redundant, for without a moment’s warning she’s back in her tired and aching flesh. Her head hurts so much she wishes she were scrambling down that hillside, under the big, hot sun of Earth. Above her, tools and flashlights sway from hooks, and all around the deep electric hum of the crawler’s turbines tell her they’re on their way.

She sits up cautiously and swings her feet to the floor. Ax stands by the closing tailgate. Interior screens light up on all four walls of the vehicle’s hold as the rear door shuts with a sigh of hydraulics and a suck of sealing-strips. They are heading straight for the canal, which they cross with a gentle pitching motion. The crawler’s treads, Dee knows, are mounted on some kind of extensible legs which make drops of a couple of metres no more than bumps in the road.

‘What’s going on?’ Dee asks.

Ax shrugs, but Dee’s question is answered as the forward screen changes to a view over the shoulders of Wilde and Meg. Meg twists around and smiles, Wilde keeps looking forward but his eyes meet hers in the rear-view mirror. (Consistency rules again. Crazy, Dee reckons.)