PROLOGUE

Paris, Monday 26 March

Beijing outraged…

Someone had taken the fate of the world and tossed it onto a chair and somebody else had dumped it under a table, where it remained until a thin, grey-haired tramp picked up the paper, wiped off the worst of the grime and spread it out.

Forty-one degrees in Cairo. Snow in Cape Town. Russia's president-for-life had just re-invaded Chechnya, the Chinese navy was blockading Taiwan and the current occupant of the White House had announced his intention to become the first president since Truman to visit North Africa.

It was five years since the tramp had read a newspaper and within three paragraphs he remembered why. His life was messy enough without adding complications from the rest of the world.

"Monsieur?"

This was his cue to order a coffee or leave. Counting his coins without taking his hand from his coat pocket, the clochard nodded. "Espresso," he said. He didn't blame the boy. There'd been that summer he arrived as the shutters were opening and stayed until the old woman, the one who was now dead, shooed him out onto Rue du Temple so she could finish mopping up for the night.

Leaving a handful of coppers, mostly to prove he could, the tramp began to fold his paper. That was when he first noticed two young men going from table to table, both dressed in the default cool of New York or London, black T-shirts hanging loose outside black chinos, expensive shades and simple shoes.

It was the dress of urban anonymity. One that spoke of hurried lives and the need to blend into a certain stratum of city life. In Paris, where T-shirts got tucked over even the proudest bellies and dressing alike was the preserve of banlieue dwellers or bon chic/bon gen couples with five-button blazers and Rue St. Honoré frocks, such foreignness shouted trouble.

At least it did to the tramp in the tweed coat. And shouted it loud enough for him to push back his chair, stand up and squeeze past a German tourist, who promptly checked her pockets, then frowned, wondering if she'd just been perved.

The men caught up with him later, probably by accident, at a food stall in the Marché des Enfants Rouge, where he sat scraping chicken tagine from a pot while he watched a Sudanese boy argue with a thickset girl who looked half Arab, half something else.

Both the girl and boy knew he was watching; neither minded.

A triangle, made up of Rues St. Paul and de Turenne to the east, des Archives to the west and the river to the south defined the edges of his world, within which the tramp was known and obscurely famous.

No one talked of the heroin, the cheap brandy, the nights he never quite made it back to a derelict, fifth-floor room overlooking Passage St. Jacques. The Marais district was a very private place. So private that many of the tourists who now roamed its narrow streets barely noticed it was there.

"I'm looking for Jake Razor," one of the men said, no introduction and no politeness, just the bald statement and the expectation that this would be enough.

The man in the old tweed coat looked blank.

"Jake Razor."

"Pardonnez-moi?"

They stared at each other and there it might have ended, except that the first of the Gap-clad men signalled to the second, who pulled up a chair. "Nous cherchons pour Jake Razor. Le mathématicien et guitarist punk…" From his jacket he retrieved a press card and a letter from some editor at Rolling Stone, dumping these beside an old photograph of a bare-chested, snarling boy in black jeans.

"Avez-vous seen him?"

"He's dead," said the tramp, checking the name on the card. "Years back. There was a fire. It was on the radio."

Bill Hagsteen sighed. "That was Marzaq," he said. "The Arab kid."

Marzaq al-Turq had been born half German and half Turkish, as his name suggested, but the tramp didn't bother to point this out. "Even if Jake's alive," said the tramp, "what makes you think he moved to Paris?"

"We have information," said Bill Hagsteen.

"There's a family trust," the other said. "It bought an apartment in Rue St. Paul, roughly fifteen years ago."

"But no one from the family uses it. In fact, none of them have been anywhere near this city in all that time." They were like an old married couple, finishing each other's sentences without even noticing.

"No problem," said the tramp. "Give me the number and I'll take you there."

"If we had that we could find it ourselves."

"We shouldn't even know about the apartment," added Bill Hagsteen. "The trust doesn't take kindly to enquiries from the press."

The man in the tweed coat thought about this and then thought about it some more. Pulling a final sliver of flesh from his chicken bone, he pushed away his empty bowl. "Maybe I can help," he said.

The steam bath was at the southern end of Rue St. Paul, and the tramp enjoyed seeing his new friends strip to their towels and sit sweating on tiled benches as they watched every man who entered for signs that he might once have been lead guitarist with Razor's Edge.

"Where now?" Bill Hagsteen asked, which the tramp took as an indication that he'd had enough of watching locals shift uneasily under his gaze or glare right back. They ate brunch at the Cajun place next to the Arts, less than a minute from the steam bath. And then Bill had the idea of checking if Jake had ever rented a room at the hotel. So their guide went in by himself and came out again seconds later.

"Fifty euros," he said.

"Twenty-five," said the other.

Bill Hagsteen pulled fifty from a crocodile skin wallet and handed it over without comment.

Folding the euros into his hand and pocketing them before he even reached reception, the tramp smiled at the woman behind the desk. He was smarter today. Still wearing his tweed coat, but with a pair of trousers which looked almost clean.

"Sorry about that," he said, "forgot something."

The receptionist gave him the rate card he asked for, explained about weekend deals and then looked at him more closely.

"I'm babysitting Americans," he explained. They'd nodded to each other in Le Celtic a few times though never spoken.

"You're American." She said this as a fact.

"I've been many things."

Outside, on the pavement, the tramp regretted that no one resembling Jake now rented a room at the Arts Hotel, although a New York poet had lived there for years. Unfortunately he'd died.

"Did you get a description?"

The tramp shook his head. "Before her time."

They stopped to look at the opium pipes in the window of the Buddha shop, crossed the road to cut down Rue Charlemagne, with its blue plaque naming Charles as "Emperor of the West" and rejoined Rue St. Paul via a passage, old buildings rising six storeys on either side of the narrow walk-through.

A black woman at the only free till in Monoprix looked briefly at Bill Hagsteen's old photograph and shook her head, her attention already on a man waiting impatiently behind them. Visits to the tabac and the English bookshop produced much the same result.

"Tell me," said their guide, "how good is your information?"

"Sixty per cent," said Bill Hagsteen. "Maybe less."

"I hope it didn't cost you too much."

"It cost nothing," the other said tartly.

"Could be," said the tramp, as he pocketed their fee, "that's why it's worthless."

She was young and pretty and very scared. And 150 euros was what it took to get her delivered to Passage St. Jacques in an uninsured taxi, driven by a boy without a licence. Her name was Zeinab and she was shocked to find that the tramp spoke her language, and more shocked still that his bed turned out to be a mattress on a metal balcony.

He was, after all, paying a sum she could barely imagine.

"I like fresh air," the man said. And watched Zeinab smile doubtfully as she glanced around his filthy attic room, with its torn leather chair facing an untuned TV, which she imagined to be broken, but he knew replayed proof of the Big Bang, dancing snow from the birth of the universe.

"Three years," he told her. That was how long he'd been clean.

Another smile twisted the teenager's lips without ever reaching her eyes. Ahmed had made it very clear about what would happen if the tramp had been lying about having money. About what would happen if he got Zeinab back damaged. She'd been there when her pimp took the man's call, so it was small wonder that her hands wouldn't stop shaking.

Ahmed had been the tramp's dealer in the early days, before he sweated out the darkness and his addiction on a mattress, dragged onto the balcony and never returned, an endless reminder not to go back.

"Until midnight," Zeinab said.

The tramp sighed. He'd told Ahmed that for 150 euros he wanted a girl until sunrise. "I'm not walking you back at midnight," he said.

Zeinab shook her head. "No," she said, voice firmer. "Mr. Ahmed's coming to collect me." And then she lay on her front, as the man instructed, though first she removed her clothes.

Sometime between the tears and midnight, darkness attempted to take over, announcing its arrival with a sudden pressure at the back of the tramp's skull. He heard the girl gasp as his fingers tightened on her shoulders and then she was crying, with those blind unconscious sobs of the truly afraid.

"Okay," he said, "it's okay." Not knowing if he was talking to her or to himself. And withdrawing from the tightness of her body, he rolled off and sat with his face to the night wind, listening to his breath steady and the sounds of the city reappear.

"Monsieur…"

She knelt behind him, apologising for her terror. Alternating between broken French and a stream of Arabic, which trailed into silence as he turned to face her.

"No," he said firmly. "Not you, me…" And he helped Zeinab to her feet and indicated that she should dress, but she shook her head, eyes huge. It was Ahmed, he realized; the kid was terrified that he might complain to her owner.

"It's okay," the man insisted, but he didn't stop Zeinab when she sunk to her knees in front of him, wiping her lips with the back of her hand. After a few minutes he lifted her up again and kissed her on her forehead, smelling unwashed hair and panic.

The darkness and he had a clear agreement on what was and wasn't allowed. Reading a paper had been pushing it. The young whore with her olive skin, dark nipples and fear-enhanced eyes was so far outside the rules that the man knew whatever happened next would be bad.

"You know," he said, as he watched Zeinab eye her clothes. "You should leave now." Her breasts were too small to need a bra and the tramp wondered if her slip was Ahmed's idea, or something she'd owned before she became the sadness she now was. It was only when Zeinab climbed into her jeans and pulled on a jacket that he realized the slip was not a slip at all but some kind of transparent shirt.

They waited for Ahmed under the arch where the passage met Rue St. Paul, five floors of other people's lives stacked over their heads. And when her pimp finally arrived it was in the taxi which had dropped Zeinab at the apartment.

"Jake."

The tramp shook his head. "We've been through this," he said. "I'm not Jake."

"Whatever…" Checking Zeinab with a quick glance, the pimp appeared satisfied. "Behave herself?"

"Yeah," said the tramp, watching the young girl climb in beside Ahmed's driver. "Good as gold." The pimp looked pleasantly surprised.

"Okay, then," he said. "We're done."

"Not really," said the tramp. "We agreed until morning."

"No." Ahmed shook his head. "I agreed nothing. You asked, that's different. Still…" Dipping his hand into a suit pocket, he produced a small paper bag. "Here," he said, "for old times' sake." There were five of them, tiny tubes like a doll's toothpaste, each with a short needle where the cap should be.

The ultimate painkiller. Battlefield heroin.

A full moon reflected off the river, inlaying its surface with jagged slivers of silver. A cat, hunting along the cobbles, detoured around the tramp in a long looping path when it saw him crouched at the water's edge. A cemetery owl from Père La Chaise swooped low overhead, skimming branches before returning the way it came.

The man who was not Jake Razor considered all of these things as he shucked off his tweed coat and rolled up his sleeve. The River Seine looked almost flat and yet it was not; the river was whatever shape the banks and bottom made it. And the moon, that too looked flat, but only if one thought in two dimensions. Or four, the tramp reminded himself. Sometimes the darkness made him think thoughts which were not entirely his own.

It was only on his way home, early next morning, with AMERICAN PRESIDENT REFUSES TO SIGN SPACE ACCORD WITH CHINA, BEIJING OUTRAGED clutched almost forgotten beneath one arm, that the darkness finally gave the tramp his orders. He was passing Rue Charlemagne at the time, with its blue sign, "Roi de France, Empereur." And maybe this was what nudged the darkness into naming its price.

The tramp must kill again. And the person he should kill was the occupant of the White House, Charlemagne's heir, the new Emperor of the West.

CHAPTER 1

Marrakech, Saturday 12 May

President Gene Newman liked visiting new cities. In fact, he liked it so much he took the trouble to have one of his interns write up brief histories for each city he was about to visit. The note for Marrakech, named for Marra Kouch, and peopled mainly by Berbers, being North Africans in direct descent from a prehistoric Ibero-Mauretanian culture, had run to five pages and been crammed full of similar facts.

When challenged, the intern informed the President that she hadn't been allowed enough time to make her essay shorter and he should try harder with the history. She was allowed to say things like that. Ally was his only daughter.

"Enjoying yourself?" the US ambassador asked.

The correct response was Yes. So Ally nodded, despite midday heat which had sweat running down her spine and was already making embarrassing stains under the arms of her T-shirt.

Most of Marrakech had turned out to watch the new American President, his daughter and their bodyguards trudge across the sticky expanse of Djemaa el Fna, North Africa's most famous square. They were accompanied on this walk by a very senior minister of the Moroccan government and the US ambassador, who was doing his best to look unruffled by the jellaba-clad crowds who pushed against hastily erected barriers.

Gene Newman was here against the advice of his own staff, mostly to prove that he was not the previous incumbent, a man given to calling up generals for advice while playing Command and Conquer on his PSP. So said Ally, who'd got it from another intern who had it from a woman on the switchboard. It was a good story, even if untrue.

Marrakech was the reason Ally had joined him on the North African section of this trip. She'd seen the Medina featured in an old Bond film and wanted to experience the crowds and the chaos of the Old City for herself. The President could tell from Ally's expression that she'd been expecting more. That was the big problem with being fifteen, emotions showed on your face. Hypocrisy came with age, at least it did in his experience.

"Maybe that stuff was just for the film…"

"Ally?" The President bent his head.

"There were monkeys," Ally said. "And bald men juggling knives. Someone had a camel to give rides."

"We have snake charmers, medicine men and belly dancers." The Moroccan minister had to lean across Gene Newman to explain this. "And those people ringing bells in red with the huge hats are water sellers. But sometimes film companies want more."

Ally nodded, yet still managed to look doubtful.

Her black jeans and long-sleeved purple T-shirt, tied-back blonde hair and huge dark glasses to protect her eyes from the sun had been carefully chosen.

Demure enough to impress those behind the barriers who'd grown used to seeing the daughters of nasrani tourists wear little more than tight shorts or low-cut vests, but not so much of a compromise that her outfit played badly with hard-core liberals and redneck critics back home.

A scarf had been suggested by the Moroccans and politely rejected. No one really expecting their proposal to be any more than that, a simple suggestion made for form rather than anything else.

The man speaking to Ally Newman was a first cousin of the King, or maybe it was second. Gene Newman knew his name, he just wasn't able to pronounce it, at least not with sufficient confidence to use it socially. So he called the minister "my friend" and hoped he wasn't causing too much offence.

Although his very presence in Morocco had already caused offence to many, Gene Newman understood this. He'd read the digests and then demanded sight of the CIA originals on which the digests were based. It was touch and go whether this visit would cause more good than harm.

Gene Newman sighed.

"You also wanted to see the Barbary apes?"

His Excellency looked anxious. As if he should have realized that a thousand years of history was not enough.

"I've been here before," admitted President Newman. "After college. It's every bit as impressive as I remember…No," he said, shaking his head. "Just forgot to call my wife last night. Not clever."

"Ahh." The other man looked sympathetic. "You could do it immediately after this?"

"You're right," said Gene Newman. "And we probably do need to turn back."

This last was addressed to his daughter. A nod to the nearest Secret Service agent told the man that the President was done, while an equally quick nod to his daughter, followed by a glance at His Excellency, told Ally exactly what was expected of her.

"Thank you," she said with a smile. "It's been really interesting."

"Interesting" was a Newman family word for boring, but the minister didn't know that and this was just as well, because Ally could see from her father's frown that she should have said something different.

"I mean it," she said hastily. "It would have been neat to see monkeys but this is really, really…" Ally gestured round the vast square with its jellaba-clad crowd now spilling out onto flat roofs and filling the upper balconies of a long café behind them. "It's really something," said Ally.

"You like?" The minister sounded pleased. Although why the cousin of a king should care what a fifteen-year-old American girl thought Ally wasn't sure.

"Oh yes," she started to say. "I really--"

That was when the first bullet hit the dust beside her, and an agent she'd barely noticed before slammed Ally to the dirt, breaking a floating rib on her left side as he rolled over her, putting his bulk between the girl and the direction of the shot. "Stay down," growled his voice in Ally's ear. "There might be another."

The rifle was an old Kropatscheck rechambered for 8mm. It had seen service with the Vichy forces in North Africa and then--a decade later--been wrapped in oilcloth and stacked in the corner of a cellar for a further fifty years, half hidden and almost forgotten.

Until today.

Wiping vomit from his lips, the man who was not Jake fumbled the rifle into its component bits, cleaned the bolt with a scrap of rag held between shaky fingers, ejected seven unused bullets from the tubular magazine and haphazardly wiped down both magazine and bullets while he waited for the police to find him.

He had failed and for this he would not be forgiven.

The darkness had suggested the minaret of La Koutoubia as an ideal place from which to shoot the President, but this proved to be out of the question, because uniforms of every hue had begun locking down the area around Djemaa el Fna before the tramp even remembered where to find the rifle.

Actually, a minaret from any of the other three mosques overlooking the massive square would have done just as well, as would the roof terrace of Café Argana or even Les Terrasses de l'Alhambra, which hadn't been there when he first knew the city.

In the end he'd been reduced to climbing the scaffolding on a building site off Rue Zitoun el Oedim. "Shit choice," said the man.

And the ghost at his back had to agree.

Ridiculously beautiful with his honey-dark skin and huge eyes, the teenage boy was arguing with a bare-kneed girl on a roof that no longer existed, but which the tramp could just have seen, had the dog woman's house not fallen down in the years since he'd been away.

Neither the girl, the boy nor the man who remembered them had any doubt about the fact that the boy was losing. And even now, with the Kropatscheck reassembled in his hands and darkness still using his eyes, the bearded tramp could summon up Marzaq al-Turq's thin face and that of the red-haired girl, all rounded cheeks and down-turned mouth, which only levelled out on the rare occasions when she smiled.

"Please," Moz said, as he combed lemon-juice highlights into the hair of a girl called Malika. "This is important."

Back then, the house had belonged to the English woman and it sat on the corner of Derb Yassin and a nameless alley, in the old Jewish district, in the days when the Mellah still held more than a handful of Yehoudia. Once, of course, there had been nearly forty thousand Jews living in the Mellah, but the foundation of Israel and the Arab–Israeli conflicts had put an end to that.

When begging didn't work, Moz tried blackmail. "Look," he said, "you have to--"

"No," said the girl, "I don't." Her patience had gone, her voice was tight. If Moz possessed more sense he'd have paid attention to Malika's warning signs.

"You would," Moz insisted, "if--"

"If what? I loved you?"

Moz nodded.

"You know," Malika said, "my mother warned me about boys like you."

It was a bad joke. The woman was long dead and there were no other boys like Moz in Marrakech, nor girls like Malika either; that was what they told themselves. Moz and Malika were what Marrakech had for punks, a half-English waif given to wearing men's shirts instead of dresses and a half-German boy in jeans, with newly dyed black hair and shades stolen from his employer, Jake Razor.

Sat there on the roof of Dar el Beida, at a time somewhere between noon and the next call to prayer, an hour when the city panted like an old cur under the weight of its own exhaustion, and only cats and occasional hippies were stupid enough to roam the maze-like streets of the Mellah, Moz finally realized that Malika wasn't going to do what he wanted.

Beyond a certain point friendship broke. As for love, it seemed that was more fragile still.

"I can't," said Malika, as she took back her comb.

Moz poured away the saucer of lemon juice in silence.

"And I won't," she added.

"Then I will," said Moz. "And I'll do it by myself."

Their fight was about whether Malika would help him deliver a package of drugs for Caid Hammou and about the fact that Moz wanted to get his hands into Malika's pants and Malika wasn't entirely sure she'd let him.

The year was 1977.

Wreckless Eric had signed to Stiff, Television's LP Marquee Moon was ripping apart the souls of all who heard it, Sheena was a punk rocker. The Sex Pistols, about the only good thing to come out of the jubilee of Queen Elizabeth II, had got to number one in the UK charts and been banned from Woolworth's. Neil Young was two years away from the greatness that was Rust Never Sleeps.

Despite their clothes, Malika's attempts to bleach her hair and the shades hiding the tears which now hung in the corner of Moz's eyes, none of the above names meant a thing to either of them.

CHAPTER 2

Marrakech, Friday 25 May

Charlie Bilberg's brief was simple: extract the maximum amount of information with the minimum amount of Amnesty International outrage and clear the Marrakchi case off his section chief's desk before the end of the third week in July.

Charlie's section chief had not specifically tied this end date to the beginning of Ramadan, that month when all devout Moslems fast during the hours of daylight, but the young agent was bright enough to make the connection for himself. There was no point igniting an already flammable situation.

A military court had been convened and the fact that Colonel Borgenicht had yet to hear any evidence was not enough to stop Fox News and a number of the tabloids reaching their verdict in advance. The only thing seemingly still open for discussion was how the execution should be carried out.

Agent Bilberg was there to sift advance evidence.

Actually he wasn't there at all. He would be arriving in Marrakech next week and staying at a flat in Gueliz arranged by the US consul on behalf of the American ambassador.

This week he was on leave, that was what it said on all official records. Which was how Charlie Bilberg found himself sleeping at a Hivernage tourist hotel in the New Town, surrounded by package-tour Austrians who descended on the morning buffet and cleared it of cheese, sausage and sliced meat before Charlie had finished his first cup of coffee.

He'd been careful to do holiday things, spending two mornings at a café just off Djemaa el Fna, drinking mint tea at a plastic table, while hard dance from a tiny machine shop opposite competed with the café's choice of soft rock, which often switched between French, English and Arab, mostly in the same song.

And both times he'd paid for his mint tea with a twenty-dirham note, one black with grease and smelling of ginger and cinnamon from the thousands of previous owners who'd eaten only with three fingers and their thumb.

As night fell he'd wandered the oily smoke of Djemaa el Fna's famous barbeques and watched belly dancers, covered from head to toe in thick white dresses which were sewn with golden chains that perfectly accentuated the fullness of their breasts and the divide of their buttocks.

A man in a loose jellaba had grabbed his own balls and jiggled them up and down in Charlie Bilberg's direction as Charlie turned away from the belly dancers, and he still didn't know if this was a deadly insult or an offer to come back to his hotel in Hivernage.

And in between all this, Agent Bilberg had sat at a desk in his first-floor room and listened to the recording of an interrogation which was every bit as unhelpful as he'd been led to believe.

"Okay," said a French-sounding voice. "When did this start?"

"Yesterday morning, about five."

The man answering wasn't CIA. An interrogator trained at Langley would have said "O five hundred." The agent listening to the recording while simultaneously skimming a transcript to check its accuracy was glad of that. A few of the things the voice had been saying made Charlie very nervous indeed.

On a pad in front of him sat his notes. Little more than a handful of words and none of these rang any bells. A folder from the office stood open next to the notepad. The only memo inside announced that the CIA, the FBI and the NSA had no record of this man's fingerprints but that searches at a local level were being instigated. Interpol had also been alerted, a P13 going out to all European forces.

The hotel room was larger than Charlie had expected, with a bathroom off to one side, a simple desk in the main room and a television that managed to get half a dozen channels, most of them in Arabic.

"And what happened at five?" The French accent probably counted for little. Almost every doctor who spoke English in North Africa spoke it with a French accent, such were the accidents of history.

"Oh," said the American voice. "We injected another thirty milligrams of psilocybin…"

Downing his fifth coffee of the morning, Charlie Bilberg skimmed the next fifteen pages of transcript, barely reading the medical examination and the part where the doctor gave her permission for "Prisoner Zero's" interrogation to continue. (So someone at the Langley press office had thoughtfully labelled their captive. Charlie had his own views about giving catchy labels to criminals. As far as he was concerned it only encouraged them.)

Charlie jumped the recorder forward to the last intelligible block of answers and lit his first cigarette of the day, drawing smoke into his lungs.

"Who helped you?"

"Malika."

"Who's Malika?"

"Someone Moz knew."

Both names were currently being fed into the NSA system. If this produced no leads then the names would be passed to the European database in Brussels. Charlie was in favour of releasing them now at local level, but this had been overruled by Paula Zarte herself, everybody's new boss at Langley.

Two odd numbers added together always made an even. Two evens added together never made an odd. If a number is divisible by eleven the sum of its alternate digits is always equal, say 121 (apart from when zero messed up the sequence). It was irrelevant if the first 119 decimal places of vacuum energy exactly cancelled because it was what happened with the 120th that mattered…

There was no end to the information that Prisoner Zero apparently wanted to share. Speed-dialling a contact he'd been given at the NSA, Charlie zoned out a block of pure cracker-box maths while listening to his cell phone go unanswered.

"Chosen of what?" said a voice, when Charlie tuned in again.

"Of heaven…"

A sound, like someone sighing. "And what exactly is that supposed to mean?"

The silence which followed was broken by the flick of a lighter, the old-fashioned kind, and an animal-like howl.

"Well?"

"Incomprehensible" read an anonymous, hand-scrawled note next to the relevant section of transcript. Not that Charlie Bilberg needed this. The exact time of each statement was printed in the margin. A gap of eighteen minutes occurred between that question and its answer. The hand-scrawled note recorded that the prisoner was conscious during this entire period and was not undergoing any additional form of heavy questioning.

The time track was designed to make sure any taped confession would stand up in court. The Agency could do without some judge throwing out key evidence on the basis that most of it was cut and paste.

Personally, Charlie thought that using a time track was an excellent idea, although he was in a minority. He wasn't hopelessly naïve, however. Agent Bilberg had a good idea of exactly what had been done to Prisoner Zero before the man arrived at a point where he was prepared to make his statement.

Not all of it involved violence.

Running back, Charlie listened carefully, one hand against his ear to cut out noise from the room's overhead air-conditioning. "Chosen of heaven," that was definitely what the prisoner said.

On his wall behind the dressing table was a socket labelled "5-star hotelNet," so he plugged in his Sony Vaio and waited for the little laptop to recognize the connection, then he fed in his room number and Amex details. The price was a hundred dirham a day, about ten dollars.

Google gave him a Baptist site, chapter five of Ivanhoe by Walter Scott, some mediocre poetry, a ministry dedicated to the New Holy Cross of the Rosy Dawn and a handful of references to assorted verses from the Old Testament, none of which looked likely.

Shutting down his laptop, Charlie went back to the recording, matching what was said word-for-word against the transcript in front of him.

"Like Equal of Heaven, only that's the monkey…" The answer, like the question, was in English, its slurring most probably explained by the medical prescriptions stapled to the back of the transcript.

Three hallucinogens, two sedatives and a painkiller mostly prescribed in childbirth but also used for lowering inhibitions. One of the sedatives and all of the hallucinogens were illegal in the US, which was fine because this wasn't the US and the various doctors who'd signed the prescriptions were not American. Charlie Bilberg had been careful to check.

"What makes you Chosen?"

"I'm not…"

"You just said you were."

The reply, when it came, was too muffled to make out, the transcript using a row of Xs to show that this line of dialogue was beyond deciphering.

"This is pointless," said a voice Charlie hadn't heard before. "The man barely knows what he's saying."

"More chance of getting the truth."

A snort, but the voice fell silent as the first man went back to his questions. "This group of yours, who leads them?"

"Group?"

"Who leads the Chosen of Heaven?" The way the interrogator snarled this question made clear his belief that CoH were terrorists on a level with al Qaeda, the Baathist Party or the Taliban. "Well?"

"Only one person is chosen," said Prisoner Zero. "And only the darkness knows how he is selected."

The silence which followed this made clear that it was not the answer the interrogator had wanted or been expecting.

CHAPTER 7

Zigin Chéng, CTzu 53/Year 7

"What are you looking at?" demanded Zaq.

And while he was still wondering why his jade-framed mirror refused to answer, the young Emperor remembered. He'd promised to smash the glass if it ever spoke to him again and, as he'd pointed out at the time, neither of them could afford that much bad luck.

General Ch'ao Kai stood in front of the huge glass. Almost as if protecting it from the teenager's latest tantrum. The General was doing his best not to look disgusted.

Zaq had just returned from the Ambassadors' City, his disguise strewn on the floor behind him. No one was interested in plotting to overthrow him. They were interested in body modification, who'd lived the longest and which world was the richest, most highly cultured or threw the best parties. Politics seemed beyond them.

The week before, Zaq had trawled through the back alleys of the Servitors' City, in the clothes of a cook, searching the inns and brothels for co-conspirators. Needless to say he found none. Both cities were in agreement that the Chuang Tzu's existence was beneficial to the well-being of the 2023 worlds. So certain of this fact had tonight's group been that most ambassadors at the party had trouble even understanding his suggestion.

"Morons," Zaq said, wiping off the last of his make-up with the back of his hand. Outside his window rain lashed the glass and hammered pregnant drops against the roof, always a sign that the Emperor was upset. And who wouldn't be? Zaq had returned to his pavilion expecting to be allowed to sulk in peace and found five naked concubines arranged artistically on his bed.

"Kill them," the boy ordered.

Zaq was back in full costume, complete with court sword, his hair pulled into a black ponytail and tied with ribbon. Only servitors wore queues and although visiting ambassadors were told that the tradition carried over from ancient days when servitors still believed they might be lifted to heaven by their plaits, this was untrue. The Manchu had demanded it. A sign of servitude. One that had allowed the heads of the Han to be dragged easily across the chopping block.

He knew this for a fact. The Library had told him.

"Kill them," Zaq said. "I mean it."

General Ch'ao Kai tugged at the edge of his padded silk jacket, always an indication that he was worried. Any minute now the leopard's tail hanging from his ceremonial lance would start swinging in rigidly controlled fury. He'd served five emperors and Zaq was his least favourite. The old man would never be unprofessional enough to say so but he didn't need to.

The old man's anger was very convincing.

"Do you want me to do it myself?" Zaq's voice was hard, his face set.

This wasn't meant to be a difficult question, although it became obvious from the turmoil in General Ch'ao Kai's eyes that the old soldier was having trouble working out the right answer.

The Emperor sighed.

That is, Zaq sighed. And because Zaq was in his seventh year as the Chuang Tzu, when he sighed it was as Emperor and so he was watched by forty-three billion people, a figure that rose rapidly as others realized what might be about to happen.

At the age of eleven Zaq had his favourite poet thrown to the wolves. The man was skilled in verse, diplomatic to a fault and Zaq liked him. So, as tantrums went, this was not particularly sensible or even original. A drunken Muscovite had done something very similar more than five thousand years earlier and gone down in history as Ivan the Terrible.

In fact Zaq got the idea from the Library while skimming the life of Ivan Vasilyevich, a man who seemed to have inherited his throne from his father. This seemed so unlikely to Zaq that he considered asking the Librarian if the Library might have got it wrong.

Only the Library never got anything wrong. It was the single most accurate data source in the 2023 worlds and its content had the status of law. The fact its core was alien was regarded as a good thing; because whichever race created the Library had long since died and this meant the Librarian had no in-built allegiance to any one world, species or cultural grouping.

In fact, its only allegiance seemed to be to the concept of Chuang Tzu and this it displayed, first and foremost, in a ruthless and sometimes cruel adherence to the truth.

The Library's core could talk to Zaq directly, but the Librarian could manifest in any of the mirrors scattered through the Forbidden City, although there were many of these.

The poet hadn't been real, of course. No one in the Purple City was real except for Zaq, but he hadn't realized that back then. In fact, he'd only realized it within the last three days, but the more Zaq thought about it the more he knew it was true. The others were just puppets and backdrop, so much bleeding meat controlled by the multiple mind that was his Library.

The Library was to the Librarian what Zaq was to the Chuang Tzu, the reality behind the façade. Zaq wasn't sure if he was meant to have discovered this.

Year of the dragon.

Season of the bitch.

This morning, his thirteenth birthday, he'd been pulled from sleep by a polite cough and come awake to find himself surrounded by five naked concubines. A present from the Librarian presumably.

He'd sent them away and returned from the Ambassadors' City to find all five in his bed again, arranged picturesquely under the sheet. Sloe eyes and high cheekbones above hamster cheeks, hair as dark as obsidian and perfect breasts tipped with nipples as rare as unflawed amber. Having taken a long look, Zaq shut his own eyes and realized he couldn't remember a single thing about any of them.

All he got were generalities.

A sense of beauty.

An awareness that if he sent them away another five would probably take their place, as anonymous and as beautiful as those he'd just dismissed.

"Get me a knife," Zaq told the nearest concubine.

Huge eyes watched him, impossibly large. When she spoke it sounded like water running over rock.

"What kind of knife, Excellency?"

Any kind was what Zaq was about to say but he changed this, fighting for specifics. "A sharp one," he said, although that should have been obvious.

Without another word, the naked girl slid from under the sheet and padded across the marble floor towards a doorway. Zaq tried to remember how the room next door might look and decided it was gold, green and red. Most rooms in his palace were gold, green and red.

"Excellency…" She held out a long steel blade fixed into a mutton-fat hilt, topped with a ruby the size of a quail's egg. For a moment Zaq debated telling the concubine to stab herself. His only problem being that she'd do it. In the seven years that had passed since Zaq left Razor's Edge to become Chuang Tzu he had run out of unreasonable demands.

Everything he asked for was given.

"Turn around," he told the girl.

The General was watching now, his glance slipping between the blade, Zaq's face and the perfect back and buttocks of the girl, as if a line existed between the three, invisible but unbreakable.

"And again."

The order was intentionally ambiguous, obscure. But the concubine instantly did what Zaq wanted her to do, confirming for Zaq that the girl now turning to face him, her bare mons as flawless as her buttocks, was nothing more than a fleshly manifestation of the Library.

A mere aspect of the palace. Soft furnishings.

He could sink his knife beneath one of those upturned breasts or slice open her perfect stomach. There were other things, perverted things, that he could do but even Zaq tired at the banality of those thoughts.

"You may go," he told the concubine.

Her eyes flicked towards the main door and Zaq nodded, wrapping his cloak tight around him until he was almost completely buried in its yellow folds.

"You too," he told the others, meaning all of them. And they went, one by one, their eyes dark and devoid. "And don't let them come back," Zaq shouted after the General. "You hear me?"

He stamped across his room and stopped pointedly in front of the mirror. "Tell the Library I'm going to kill the next person to come in here." To make his point, Zaq hurled the long blade at the glass but it just bounced off the wall, its handle shattering when it hit the floor.

For five days Zaq refused to leave his room and his audience drifted away until all that remained was a small core of the old and aimless, those who lived almost exclusively through the butterfly life of one much younger and infinitely more fragile.

That was the deal. The Chuang Tzu lived in absolute, terrifying splendour for the length of his natural life and, in so doing, absolved all others of the need to consume quite so conspicuously.

As each emperor burnt out within one natural life (this also being part of the deal), those watching got to see eight, maybe more Chuang Tzu be selected, raised to the Dragon Throne, grow old and die. Of course, this applied only to those who retained their corporeal bodies. The cold eternals had mostly seen maybe twenty or more emperors come and go before even this became too little to make remaining alive attractive.

CHAPTER 8

Marrakech, July 1971

On the afternoon that two hundred and fifty army cadets, many from the Ahermoumou Military School, invaded the Moroccan King's forty-second birthday party at Sikharat and machine-gunned ninety-two of his guests, accidentally killing the leader of their attempted coup in the process, a fight between two Marrakchi boys broke out behind La Koutoubia. An event so utterly insignificant that it took a foreign hippie to notice it.

Four generals, five colonels and a major faced a firing squad following the two-and-a-half-hour battle at the summer palace, which was only ended by the coolness of the King, who stared down the rebels following the death of their leader.

And as rumours of the confrontation brought the souks to a sullen halt and men spilled onto the alleys in groups to discuss what little they knew, Hassan, Idries and two boys whose names Malika did not know chased Moz through the gathering crowds, cornering him in the gardens behind the mosque.

The first punch split Moz's eye, the next snapped back his head and spun the garden around him. Blue sky, palm trees and a distant sixteenth-century tower all watching him fall.

Getting up again fast was hard with only one arm, but Moz managed it. And as he wiped blood and dust from his face, he stared round at the boys who'd pursued him from Place Abdel Moumen around the back of the mosque and into the dusty gardens.

"Fatah."

"Teazak."

"Ibn haram."

"Hmar."

The insults were meaningless. Merely words overhead--"foreskin," "arse," "bastard" and "jackass"--ready warmed from their use by others.

"Hit him again." Idries was cheering for Hassan. Self-preservation made this the rat-faced boy's default position in everything. The other two Moz didn't recognize, although he noticed they watched Hassan impatiently, waiting for the killer blow. Their conversation was with each other, low-voiced and private.

Only Sidi ould Kasim's daughter watched in silence.

It was a year since she and Moz had last said a word to each other. Malika still hadn't forgiven Moz for the fact his ma had refused to marry her father. He watched her though, each night, through a crack between the tiles in his bedroom floor. A thin girl with reddish hair and bony shoulders, whose buttocks were as scrawny as any goat.

"Are you still fighting," said Hassan, his question contemptuous, "or have you given up?"

Moz punched him. The only blow he'd actually managed to land. "I don't give up," he said, watching Hassan put a hand to his face and find blood. "Don't you know anything?"

It was the first of three fights with Hassan, and the one Moz would remember best; not for its violence or fierceness or even how it ended, but for the noise that suddenly crashed through the open window of a yellow van parked, quite illegally, in the shade of a half-dead palm behind them.

The boy whose nose had just been broken was all of eleven and a whole head higher than most of his age, making him taller by far than Moz. "I'm bleeding," said Hassan, examining his fingers.

"Here." Idries pulled a blade from his pocket. "You can borrow this." He held his knife out to Hassan, who shook his head angrily while the nameless boys said nothing, just watched and waited to see how Hassan would react.

And then, suddenly, as if sound-tracking their expectation came music like no other.

Won't get fooled again…

Crashing chords and a language Moz barely understood.

Only he would get fooled, Moz knew that. He wasn't clever enough to stay out of trouble or fast enough to run away. Hassan and he fought over a packet of tissues. A small, locally produced packet wrapped in cellophane and printed with the name "Kleenex," because this was a make the nasrani knew and recognizing what they bought made foreigners happy.

Moz had been warned not to work Idries's patch, but everyone who knew him agreed he was bad at listening. And Moz was better at selling the tissues than Idries, because the nasrani only had to look at his empty sleeve and torn jellaba to begin reaching for coins. Idries was good at looking sad but he couldn't compete with that, no one could.

Hassan didn't actually sell the tissues. He just took a cut from Idries and half a dozen other boys, none of them as good at selling as Moz.

Moz grinned.

"I'm going to kill you," Hassan said quietly.

"He is," agreed Idries.

The older boys remained silent.

And behind them all stood Malika, as if not quite part of what was happening. She was still scuffing one bare heel in the red dirt when Moz struck again. Only this time he kicked, as hard as he could, one toe breaking as he caught Hassan between the legs.

No one said anything as Hassan crashed to the ground, writhing around in the dust like a beetle with half its legs torn off, although even the two older boys looked vaguely impressed.

Stepping forward, Moz stamped on Hassan's stomach.

"Hey," someone shouted from the door of the van. "That's enough."

The nasrani wore a thick coat, this was the first thing Moz noticed about him. In the height of summer, the man wore a goatskin waistcoat with a fur collar. Moz was so surprised by this that he forgot to keep an eye on Hassan. Not that it mattered, the older boy was still in the dirt, clutching his stomach. The second thing Moz noticed only when the foreigner came over to help Hassan to his feet. The coat stank.

"You have a name?" he asked Moz.

Moz nodded. Of course he did. "I'm Hamid."

"Call me Dave," said the man. "And I mean it. You really shouldn't fight." The nasrani spoke English, which meant Moz was the only one able to understand him. The boy waited politely to find out why he shouldn't fight but the blond foreigner merely smiled. As if the statement was enough.

"What did he say?" Hassan demanded.

"That we shouldn't fight."

The older boy snorted, his battle with Moz temporarily forgotten. Dusting himself down, Hassan came to stand beside the smaller boy. "Ask him if he's got cigarettes," Hassan ordered.

The man pulled a crumpled packet of Gauloise from his jeans and handed them over as if this was nothing. Moz passed them to Hassan, who flipped one from the packet and stuck it in his mouth.

"Use this." Dave Giles tossed Hassan a plastic lighter and waved it away when the boy tried to give it back. "Keep the thing," he said. "I've got another."

"What did he say?"

"It's yours," said Moz.

Hassan looked doubtful, shrugged and he pocketed the lighter anyway. When the man said nothing, Hassan grinned.

"See if he's got Coca-Cola."

Before Moz had even begun to translate, the foreigner was walking towards his yellow van. And when he returned it was with a white box, a blue and red logo printed on either end.

"Pepsi," said the foreigner. Handing them each a can, he dropped to his heels and settled into an uncomfortable-looking squat. "Learnt to sit like this from an Ethiopian," he told Moz. "Met him at the Gare du Nord in Paris. Cool guy, begging. He gave me this…" The foreigner pulled a silver cross from inside his shirt. "It's very old."

"And what did you give him?" This seemed important because foreigners didn't always understand the rules governing the giving and receiving of gifts. "You did give him something?"

"My watch." Dave shrugged. "I never really liked it anyway."

"Was it a good watch?"

"Well." The man thought about it. "Depends what you mean by good. Not gold, if that's what you mean. And it ran on a battery." Until then Moz hadn't known watches could be made from gold or run on batteries. He looked at the foreigner, wondering whether to ask his next question.

"Where's Paris?"

"In France."

"Where's France?"

"You always ask so many questions?"

"Always." Moz nodded. Of course he did. How else was he going to learn anything?

"North of here," said Dave, then smiled as Moz opened his mouth. "Wait," he said, "I'll get my atlas." And he was gone before Moz had time to ask him what an atlas might be.

The first thing Moz noticed about the picture of France were parallel lines along the bottom of the page, each with a 0 at one end and 1000 written at the other, as a number, not as a word. One of them said "kilometres," while the other was labelled…

"Miles," he said.

Dave nodded.

There was no secret, miles were just fatter kilometres. Looking closer, Moz realized you got eight of one for five of the other.

In the end, Hassan grew bored with waiting and that meant Idries got bored too. So when Hassan crushed his can and stood, nodding abruptly to the foreigner, Idries did the same.

"Time to go," Idries said.

"I'm staying here," said Moz.

"Coward." It was the first thing either of the silent boys had said in the entire time since Moz was cornered. And as soon as the boy opened his mouth Moz knew why he'd been silent. What with every radio claiming a new war with Algeria was inevitable.

"You're Algerian."

"What of it?"

"Nothing." Moz grinned at Hassan. "Can't you get any real friends?"

"I'll see you later," Hassan said. He jerked his head at Malika. "Come on, time to move."

The nine-year-old looked from Moz to Hassan and then at the white box which contained the Pepsis. "I'm going to stay," Malika said.

CHAPTER 10

Zigin Chéng, CTzu 53/Year 11

It was one of the more elegant ironies of immortality that memory could be captured within the lattice of a diamond and that this lattice could be produced by burning and compressing the body from which that memory was taken.

Zaq wore all of the emperors who'd gone before him on his cloak and their memories were his memories, their ennui and hatreds were his also, as were their passions, loves and foibles. It made for a complicated sense of self and some days he would forget who he was and think of himself as just another memory.

An actor in an old-style Beijing opera with a cast of one and an audience of billions.

Other days were different, sometimes very different. On the morning of his fifteenth birthday Zaq decided he was alone, that the audience didn't really exist and never had, he was alone in a pavilion with an uncertain and ever-changing number of rooms, surrounded by smooth-faced eunuchs, almond-eyed concubines, ponytailed warrior guards…

All beautiful in their way, all elegant, all fake. As fake as the ambassadors in their city beyond the purple walls.

He was alone.

Zaq found it next to impossible to believe that no other emperor had realized this, so he skimmed their diamonds faster than was safe and ended up on his knees in a corridor, watched by a Manchu guard, vomiting soft-shelled crab onto pink marble. He had been right, though; none of them had realized.

"If it is a truth."

The voice in his head came on his seventeenth birthday, in the evening when hunger was no longer quite so amusing and Zaq was beginning to wonder if he should have sent all his guards away. Retaining one of them might have made sense, except then he wouldn't have been alone and being alone was what this was about.

"Well," Zaq demanded. "Is it true?"

Even as a child he'd spoken rarely to the Librarian, preferring to trust in himself. Nothing in the years which had passed had changed his mind.

"That depends."

Surprise me, thought Zaq.

"Remember that concubine?"

Of course he did. The long blade still lay on the tiles, covered with dust and surrounded by bits of its broken handle. His room had remained his alone since that morning, untidied and inviolate, four years' worth of dirt crusting the floor and griming carved panels until the dragon frieze around the wall looked as if it had been painted with velvet.

"The girl died."

"She wasn't alive in the first place," Zaq said.

"Starvation," said the Librarian. "She starved herself to death in the Restful Gardens."

"In the what?"

A map of the Purple City came into his mind and then Zaq realized it wasn't a map at all, it was an aerial view, showing the three state pavilions, slung out along a north-south axis, with his own quarters, three identical but smaller pavilions to the north of these.

And to the north again, carved out of a sprawl of lesser pavilions, gates and temples was a walled garden he'd forgotten was even there. On the grass, next to a mulberry bush, lay a girl, her eyes closed and hair freed from the pins which had held it in place.

"You know," said Zaq, as he bent to retrieve the dusty blade. "I could have saved you the trouble." Checking its weight, Zaq brought the blade up, waited on the moment and tossed it lightly at the wall, hitting a silk hanging of some mountain pool, the kind with a path skirting the water's edge and a small wooden bridge on which stood two children.

The only thing remotely unusual about the hanging was that rain sleeted from the top left corner, endless stitches of drizzle.

"Was that necessary?"

"You can mend it," Zaq said. "Hell, just make another…"

The Librarian shook its head. There was no other way Zaq could describe the feeling.

"Why not?"

"Because everything in this room is original."

"Including me?"

The Librarian sighed.

That evening rain lashed the Ambassadors' City, flooding a thousand pavilions and forcing fifty to be abandoned completely. It fell at a slant, roughly left to right, and whole districts which had never been anything but temperate found themselves cowering under slate-grey skies and wondering if the sleet would ever end.

Such weather was rare. In fact, even the cold immortals who made a point of knowing everything had to admit that a storm such as this was unknown. It was understood, because this was taught as a fact of verifiable truth on all 2023 worlds, that life around Star One relied for its very existence on the presence of the Chuang Tzu.

No emperor/no climate, the equation was that simple.

Few alive could still remember the arrival of the first colony ships. Immortality had been perfected, at least in its non-biological forms, but insufficient attention had been paid to the boredom of eternity and the corrosive nature of the ratchet effect which demanded ever sharper, stronger and more intense sensations to maintain something like the same level of satisfaction.

Living forever turned out to be much like long-term sex, psychologically tricky; which was why what killed the original colonists was not hardship but boredom. This became the second crisis to hit the worlds.

The first happened no more than a decade after the colonists landed, when the original Chuang Tzu died. No one was watching the Emperor then because these were still early days in the life of the 2023 worlds. He died in the night, peacefully and in his sleep, having told the Librarian that this was what he wanted to happen because he was now very old and very tired.

On fifty-seven worlds, which was the number then inhabited, colonists woke with headaches that got worse as the day went on. By the following week, half the children had nosebleeds or ruptured ears. While tens of thousands panicked, an elderly Indian scientist ran an analysis on the atmosphere, using a semiAI that had been out of date when her grandmother had loaded it onto the ship which brought her family from Calcutta. The answer was surprisingly obvious.

The oxygen-nitrogen mix which the colonists had assumed was natural to all 2023 worlds was thinning, creating elegant day-glow where ultraviolet interacted with oxygen in the upper atmosphere as it leached away into space.

The worlds were dying.

It took a Tibetan monk to solve the problem and that he bothered at all required compromises with his conscience. Historically, at least, the Chuang Tzu represented everything the man hated about Han imperialism and cultural arrogance. All the same, the monk took a small child whose mother had recently died and presented it to the palace, walking right into the Celestial Chamber to leave the child on the throne, like a screaming sack of rubbish.

The palace was empty, the guards gone. The monk was careful not to enquire where…He wasn't afraid of dying, of course. He'd died a hundred times before and could remember most of his lives; at least those of his lives that had happened since he came close to the gates of enlightenment.

Depositing the child, the man explained in simple terms the laws of reincarnation, paying particular attention to the rules governing the appointment of new lamas. He didn't actually tell the silent air around him that emperors came under similar rules or that the ancient Chosen of Heaven had shared such selection procedures with the throne of the Dalai or Panchen Lama, but he might have suggested it.

And he was careful to present reincarnation as real, inasmuch as anything could be real in a quantum universe where facts were both true, false and linked simultaneously.

So now emperors came and went, living out their short reigns in the gaze of those who lived far longer. Maybe this transience was the inspiration for the butterfly cloak or maybe the butterflies had been taken from the mind of the very first emperor, a newly promoted commissar major who'd been nicknamed Chuang Tzu by his grandmother and not as a compliment.

It was hard to know and probably irrelevant, but at some time during the centuries which followed the dreamer's death it became a tradition for each new incarnation to be visited by a butterfly at night.

CHAPTER 13

Zigin Chéng, CTzu 53/Year 13

Emperors had killed themselves before, not often admittedly, although one famously threw himself off a cliff during a thunderstorm. And it was felt by many that the Librarian should have realized the cliff incident was about to happen, given that the old man had spent the previous week working himself up into thunder and lightning.

At which point, someone offered the belief that the Librarian had known exactly what was about to happen and chosen not to interfere. The resulting discussion about the nature of free will lasted for roughly eighty years and led to the colonization of a new world as a third of the inhabitants on a world in the equatorial belt took themselves off into exile.

No emperor had ever tried to starve himself, if this was what was happening, and there were arguments about that too. Some believed the latest Chuang Tzu was ill and should be treated or helped, and the feeling among these was that the Library should reach into the young man's mind to send him to sleep, working its magic while the Emperor was unable to harm himself. Others saw what was happening as a battle between the new Chuang Tzu and the Library itself. Although what they were fighting over and exactly what weapons were being used was open to debate.

And so Zaq found himself sitting with his back to his bed, the blade and tang held loosely in one hand. He'd taken to pissing against a pillar, as if he'd forgotten or no longer cared that an audience of billions might be watching. And while it was true that he still hid for the more serious ablutions he went to the commode alone, with none of the ceremony or retinue of attendants which usually accompanied him.

It was into this stalemate that a man climbed, scaling the outer walls of the Purple City as if he'd been practising all his life. He wore green trousers and a red shirt, black gloves and no shoes, the soles of his feet having been modified both to increase his grip and do away with the need for footwear. His hair was black and worn tied back, much like Zaq's own.

The man was in his twenties. A mere child in the eyes of most who watched his climb. Hardly anyone in the Servitors' City paid much attention to him at first. All the important people had been summoned by the palace master to discuss what could be created that was exquisite enough to bring the Emperor out of his depression.

As expected the first concubine, chief cook and head musician had very different opinions, although not one was able to suggest something that hadn't been tried a dozen times before.

And so the man walked between the low houses traditional to the Servitors' City until he reached the Manchu Gate, which led through the City of Ambassadors to the Tiananmen and Wu Gates, the last of which guarded the entrance to the palace.

In fact, "palace" was really a misnomer for a complex of temples, courtyards and yellow-roofed pavilions, surrounded by a wide moat which lapped gently against a walkway that ran along the bottom of the walls.

There were a thousand courtyards and nearly ten thousand rooms within the walled space of the Zigin Chéng, otherwise known as the Forbidden City. Of these, six pavilions, three gates and two bridges were significant and all of those were slung out along a north-south axis like fat weights on a fishing line.

The first of the important pavilions was the Qianquing, known as the Dragon Gong. It had a two-tiered roof that turned up at the corners and its walls were cinnabar red, both inside and out, while the wooden beams which supported its yellow-tiled roof were painted green and red, again as propriety required. At each corner of the roof, carved dragon acroteria protected the Chuang Tzu from evil spirits

Behind the Qiangquing was the Jiaotai Gong, where imperial seals were stored and the empress received homage. A small pavilion with a single roof lay behind this, where the empress slept and received the emperor, when there was an empress, which there wasn't.

These three pavilions made up the imperial quarters and were copies of larger, ceremonial buildings further south. And whereas the private buildings were raised from the ground on a simple marble platform, the great ceremonial pavilions of Preserving Harmony, Central Harmony and Supreme Harmony stood upon a triple platform. So that the very first brick of Supreme Harmony, the greatest of the halls, was four times the average height of an imperial soldier.

Begun in the fifteenth century, Earth era, on the site of an earlier city and laid out to strict Confucian lines, the original Forbidden City had taken fourteen years to build and required the toil of a hundred thousand artisans and the enslavement of a million Chinese peasants. No one knew how long it took the second Zigin Chéng to grow. There were a few who believed that acroteria, followed by yellow-glazed tiles, had twisted out of the ground like shoots from a seed.

And there were others who believed that the city formed itself overnight while the first Chuang Tzu slept: Although these were divided into those who believed the outer city was formed new and fell into disrepair and those who believed it grew ready-aged, some walls already crumbled and courtyards fallen into disrepair.

As with most things, the majority of the 2023 worlds' 148 billion inhabitants never gave the matter a single thought. The City of Ambassadors and the Servitors' City had been wrapped around the palace for over forty-five centuries and the palace had been wrapped around the beating heart of the emperor's pavilions for just as long.

Two hundred paces along the walkway, to the east of the Wu Gate, a sluice in the purple walls let through the Golden River, although iron bars closed off this route to all living creatures larger than a ten-year-old carp.

"Not for us." One glance at the bars and the man kept walking, his gaze on a corner turret a hundred paces beyond that. It was impressive, triple-tiered and almost a fortress in its own right. In its shadow, three fishermen in court robes were busy climbing into a flat-bottomed boat.

The man dressed as a servitor smiled at them politely and turned the corner, passing the East Gate, where a dragon arch fit for an emperor was flanked by a phoenix gate for his empress, with lesser entrances for everyone else, beginning with squared porches for civil and military administrators and ending with a simple wooden door that let such as him go about their business.

Nodding to a guard, the man walked on. Several hundred paces further along the walkway was the north-east corner turret.

"Right," said the young man, "this looks like it." On his shoulder sat a large rat, eyes full of panic. It was bred for night work in tight spaces and the walkway and wide moat gave the animal agoraphobia. So the rat didn't really care which turret its owner chose so long as he took them somewhere darker, preferably with a roof and walls on all sides.

The young man assumed his pet ran some kind of simpatico system but the truth was stranger: an ancestor of the rat had been coded for basic language skills. To say that Null understood more than it said was ludicrous because--obviously enough--the rat said nothing; but Null could comprehend a vocabulary of about fifty words and construe probable meaning from the tone of many others.

"Up here, I guess…"

Long lengths of bamboo scaffolding fat as a child's leg had been erected against the north-east turret and lashed together at the cross points with rope. When the young man got closer, he realized that the uprights actually grew from the dirt while the crossbars were held in place by vines which had grown up the side of the scaffolding. A barge loaded with roof tiles had been tied to a wooden pontoon.

Climbing the rig was simplicity itself, so while the rat shut its eyes the young man made his way to the top, walked a plank between scaffold and crenellations and dropped into a different walkway, one that ran from corner turret to corner turret around the walls of the Purple City.

Below him were the eastern pavilions, storehouses and the Qianlong Gardens. Walled areas within other walled areas within the walls of the palace. A vast and elderly eunuch waddled from beneath an arch and stopped to watch a gardener's child roll a hoop from one side of a tiny courtyard to the other. Behind the chamberlain came two younger eunuchs, probably not much older than the man watching from the top of the wall, although both had the soft, child-like faces of those who'd been castrated at least a year prior to reaching puberty.

And though none of these three looked up to where the servitor stood on the upper walkway, a billion or more watchers saw him reach out to soothe his rat, explaining his plan in simple words until the rat began chattering to itself.

As far as the Library could tell, the Emperor was not aware of this rise in interest from those watching, which in itself was worrying, not because sulking was unknown to emperors but because the Librarian expected a stronger link between the watchers and one raised to the Celestial Throne.

Yet, with Zaq, this link was no stronger than the link between those watching and the young man now walking calmly into the north-east turret, smiling to a guard and starting down the tower's great wooden stairs.

Since it was impossible for a servitor to manifest the same level of empathy as the Chuang Tzu, the Librarian dropped this anomaly down a level, allowing a subroutine to extrapolate all possible reasons simultaneously and arrive at no single explanation logical enough to pass back.

"See?" said the young man. "Nothing to it."

The rat wisely stayed silent.

Man and rat might as well have been invisible to the inhabitants of the Forbidden City, for all the attention they attracted as they left the turret and crunched along the wide stretch of gravel between the boundary wall of the eastern pavilions and the northern wall of the Forbidden City itself. Two minor eunuchs even stood aside to let the servitor pass.

"Thank you."

"You're welcome." It was clear from the ennui in the taller eunuch's voice that he'd barely registered the existence of the man for whom he just stepped aside.

"Whatever…" Tucking the rat into the sleeve of his coat, the man cut through the north gate of the Imperial Garden, exited through the southern gate and passed under an arch into the Emperor's inner court, at the centre of which stood a marble dais and the three private pavilions.

As with all areas within the Forbidden City, the inner pavilions were circled by their own walls. Only these walls were formed by a continuous line of offices, bedrooms for concubines, a kitchen and endless store-houses for gifts from the various ambassadors, mostly unopened and some going back ten or fifteen centuries.

A chef was waddling towards him so the man stepped hastily back, out of the chef's line of sight. Then he counted to a hundred, which he managed by counting slowly to ten and then counting to ten again and again, starting with the little finger of his left hand and finishing with its mirror image on his right.

"Where's the Master Chef?"

The servitor fired off his question the moment he stepped out of the steam, materialising beside a bubbling cauldron of crab broth, into which a tall sous chef with a hollow face dropped intricately wrapped dim sum.

"It's just," continued the servitor, "that His Celestial Excellency requires something to eat…"

Chang San, whose unfortunate nickname was Old Rat, blinked and disdain gave way to shock, followed quickly by envy and finally careful consideration.

"I'll arrange something," he said, as over his shoulder another half a billion watchers understood instantly that this was exactly the chance for which the sous chef had been waiting. "You can go," he told the younger man, "leave this to me."

"I'm afraid not." The young man shook his head, appearing almost contrite. "I'm to take it to His Celestial Excellency myself." He glanced into the copper pot boiling on a range beside Chang San. "Shrimp?"

"Pork," said the sous chef.

"They look perfect," said the servitor. "Guaranteed to touch any emperor's heart."

Shrewd eyes watched the younger man. "You will tell His Celestial Excellency that Chang San prepared the dim sum, won't you?"

"Of course," said the servitor. "You have my word." He looked beyond the boiling cauldron to busier cooking ranges. Chilli and ginger sharpened the air, while dancing flames flash-flared like furious ghosts above red-hot woks and oily smoke caught in his throat.

All possible meals were being prepared at all possible times. Unfortunately it was weeks since the Emperor had eaten any of them.

"I'll need a tray," the servitor said.

For a second it looked as if Chang San might simply yell across the kitchen to one of the boys, but though the chef opened his mouth to shout he thought better of the idea. Nodding to himself, Chang San told the servitor to stay where he was.

When he returned it was with a tray edged in red-lacquered ebony and inset across the base with a thin, almost completely translucent slab of mutton-fat jade.

"Treat this carefully," said Chang San, handing his prize possession to the waiting servitor. "It belonged to the previous Chuang Tzu."

CHAPTER 15

Lampedusa, Saturday 30 June

The office was tiny, stacked with boxes. On one wall a work roster gave duties to Antonio, Marc and Gus, bar staff who'd long since been sent back to their villages. A marine artificer had bolted a steel grill across the room's only window, reducing the daylight to baroque shards which ran across the top of a desk as if escaping from a painting.

An electric fan on a small filing cabinet swung back and forth. Every time it reached hard right it glitched, clattering noisily as it stripped plastic gears, before beginning to swing back again. Prisoner Zero would have liked to fix it but both his feet were shackled to a chair.

"Have they been treating you well?"

Prisoner Zero looked at the redhead in the doorway and then flicked his gaze to the marine and the suit behind. The suit wore black Armani, with a red tie and white shirt. His shoes were expensive but dusty, the side effect of not being senior enough to rate his own jeep. On his little finger was a graduation ring. It looked expensive.

"Doesn't he talk?"

The suit's question was addressed to his military escort. The man was a civilian so Master Sergeant Saez didn't bother to answer.

"I'm Katie."

Stepping towards the chair, Dr. Petrov held out one hand and waited. When the prisoner didn't take it, she kept her hand extended, apparently counting off the seconds behind watchful green eyes. At a point known only to herself, Katie Petrov dropped her hand and nodded.

"I'm Bill Logan," said the suit. "And this is Dr. Petrov. She'll be asking you some questions."

"Everything you tell me will be in confidence." Katie's voice was firm and the glance she gave Bill Logan was heavy with meaning. "I want you to know that."

"I'll leave you with him then."

"That would probably be a good idea." Turning to the desk, Katie picked up a manila file and flicked it open. Inside was a single piece of lined paper, blank on both sides. She usually used a Psion Organiser to record her notes and then downloaded them to her laptop, but this was different.

"Undo the shackles," she told the marine. "And then let me have the room to myself."

"The shackles are to stay on, ma'am," Master Sergeant Saez said. "And I'm to stay here."

"Not a chance," said Katie Petrov. "I don't talk to patients in front of third parties. It's unethical."

"For your own safety, ma'am."

The psychiatrist smiled. "I have a black belt in jitsu," she said. "I work out for two hours a day. Look at him…" She nodded at Prisoner Zero who sat, head down, staring at dust that danced in the shards of sunlight, his body encased in a filthy orange jump suit. "Do you really think he's a threat?"

"He tried to kill the President."

"With an antique rifle," said Katie Petrov, "from almost half a mile away. And I'm not the President, thank God."

"All the same," said the Master Sergeant. "My orders are to stay with the prisoner."

"Really?"

Master Sergeant Saez nodded.

"Then we have a problem," Katie told Bill Logan. Shutting her file with a snap, Katie ignored the marine, nodded politely to Prisoner Zero and prepared to vacate the room designated her office.

"Where are you going?" Bill Logan was media coordinator for this operation, his temporary release from CavourCohen Media coming after a brief call to Max Cohen from someone unspecified at the Pentagon.

"Where do you think?" Katie said. "If you can fly me out to the middle of nowhere then presumably you can fly me back again."

She eyeballed the man in the black suit, gaze firm. She knew exactly who Logan was and how he'd made his reputation, but since the man hadn't bothered to introduce himself properly Katie chose to think of him in the abstract, as a hanging for expensive clothes and limited outlooks. Doing this made it easier not to feel worried by her decision.

"We'll get another psychiatrist," said Bill Logan. "That won't be hard. And you're only here because you went to college with the President's son. In fact, we can make a virtue of this. Announce that you felt compromised by your knowledge of the First Family. Unable to assess the maniac who tried to kill--"

"Except that's not what I'll be announcing," Katie said, "is it?" She put her folder back on the desk and turned to face the man. Without even realizing, she fell into a combat pose. A fact not missed by Master Sergeant Saez, who took a second look at her, reappraising.

"What I'll announce," she said, "is that I turned down this assignment because you refused to give me proper access to Prisoner Zero. A man who is quite obviously drugged. To this statement, I'll add a rider. That, in my personal opinion, flying me out to this godforsaken island was nothing more than a cynical media exercise by the Secretary of Defense designed to keep the White House quiet…"

"Okay," said Katie. Picking up her pencil, she wrote "30 June" at the top of her piece of paper, then added "Isola di Lampedusa" and "Session One."

If in doubt begin at the beginning.

Under that, Katie wrote "Question One."

Beyond the window, marines continued to crunch their way across gravel, coming to the end of a path and then starting back, their swivel a rasp of stone against metal. The sound reminded Katie of her childhood. Not that she'd spent her childhood on military bases. Her father had owned a gold Dunhill lighter, the kind with a revolving pillar built into one corner. Turning the pillar made steel grind against flint to create the spark.

She'd loved that lighter.

"Tell me about your childhood," Katie Petrov said.

It was the question few clients could resist. Occasionally some patient would throw a tantrum and flatly refuse to answer, which was an answer in itself. And often Katie found herself explaining that just because something bad had happened didn't make it significant. As for the number of times ex-lovers had lain there in the dark, still burning from the afterglow, to paint the night with their when I was young…

Looking up from her sheet of paper, Katie found the prisoner staring at her. For a second she thought Prisoner Zero was looking at her breasts and then she realized, even as she blushed and grew angry with herself for blushing, that it wasn't her breasts which interested him but the 2b pencil in her hand.

"You want this?"

The pencil was entirely black, little more than a stub, with "Calvin Klein" written in script down one side and a black rubber at the top, slightly chewed.

"From an old boyfriend," she said. "A fashion journalist. We didn't last long." Men talked about themselves when they felt insecure, women when they were at their most confident. And Katie worked on the basis of information exchange; not everyone in the profession approved but it worked for her.

Prisoner Zero's eyes never left her hand, his gaze animal and hard. Working in prisons had taught Katie that almost anything could be used as a weapon. This was why her pencil was short and blunt. Too short really to hold properly, which made the thing too short to be used as a weapon. At least Katie hoped so.

"You want it?"

The man nodded.

"Then say so."

Prisoner Zero transferred his gaze from her hand to her face. He looked younger than she'd been led to expect and strangely vulnerable now that his beard and tangled hair were gone. It was hard to reconcile him with the bug-eyed fanatic featured on the front of every paper.

"Say yes," said Katie, "and you can have it. At least until the end of the session."

The man simply stared at her.

"I know you understand."

Holding out his hand, the man waited. And Katie had to force herself not to gasp at the lacerations across his palm.

"They did that to you?"

Was that a shake of his head? Katie Petrov wasn't sure. All she knew was that the man's hand remained out and his gaze had returned to the pencil.

"Okay," she said, "why not?"

Prisoner Zero tore the pencil's eraser from its sheath with his teeth and bit flat its hollow black tube. Then he ripped open the front of his orange jump suit, slid his arms from the sleeves and began to drop his trousers.

"What are you--?" Katie was about to hit the attack alarm she'd been given and which hung on a paper ribbon around her neck, when Prisoner Zero sat down again and began to use the flattened metal tube to scratch rapid lines into his thighs, blood beading the middle of the lines where his improvised blade dug deepest.

When the map was finished, Prisoner Zero flipped round the pencil, sucked blood from the edge of the metal and then used the pencil's point to sketch an identical map on the inside of his jump suit. Only then did he stand up, almost as if nothing had happened, and shuffle his arms back into the sleeves.

"Put it on the desk," said Katie. "If you've finished with it."

So he did, placing the pencil parallel to the edge, with its blunt lead just touching the corner of the manila file. This was to stop the pencil from rolling away. The ripped-free eraser he balanced on end just below the point of the pencil, like the dot on an exclamation mark.

Katie now knew three things about Prisoner Zero. He manifested self-destructive tendencies, he was anal, in the broader, less accurate sense of being meticulous and he was uncircumcised, which was definitely culturally counter-intuitive. He was also either unashamed of his nakedness or oblivious, because nothing in his recent behaviour suggested exhibitionism.

Actually, Katie knew four facts, although it took a few seconds for her memory of the needle's spoor to sink in. He'd been a drug addict at some time in his life, which undoubtedly meant he had a previous criminal record. And that should make it marginally easier to pin an identity on the man.

"I've been told you speak English," Katie said. "But if you're not comfortable with that then I also speak French and a little Arabic…"

Nothing. Just those eyes, as empty as deep space.

"You've lived in the US?" Katie Petrov glanced at her notes from habit and remembered they were blank. "Nationality?" she wrote at the top, adding her question mark as an afterthought.

"Tell me about your mother."

No answer.

Prisoner Zero watched while the woman made a note.

"What?" she asked, when she finally looked up. "Why do you smile?"

That pencil, the paper, Prisoner Zero wanted to say. He suspected, inasmuch as he thought about it, that they were intentionally old-fashioned to make him feel secure. As if a laptop might somehow be too foreign, too American.

In this he was wrong.

She'd demanded and got doctor-patient confidentiality in all matters except any directly affecting Homeland Security, which she was duty bound to report immediately, and Katie Petrov didn't want some spook with a Van Phrecker sat next door recording every keystroke she made, so she used a pencil and paper. It was her own attempt to keep the interview secure.

CHAPTER 17

Marrakech 1975

The house at the end of Moz's alley remained empty. No one had lived in it since the dog woman died and her companion went home to England. So now it was to be sold, but before this could happen the place needed repairing, otherwise it couldn't be sold to a nasrani and no one but a foreigner would be willing to pay the price the dog woman's family in England had decided it was worth.

"Ask Hassan," Malika insisted. Caid Hammou decided who got building work in the Mellah, and Moz needed money because his mother needed medicine. He knew this because Malika had told him so.

"Hassan won't--"

"Ask him," she insisted, and then she smiled as the jellaba-clad boy shuffled his feet in front of her. "If you don't," she said, "I'll ask him for you."

Smashing down an internal wall and carrying away the rubble was Moz's first real job. He was thirteen, ould Kasim had agreed his hand could be untied and he got the work because Hassan found it funny that Moz was asking for his help.

"You want what?"

In the background Idries smirked.

"Dar el Beida," said Moz. "I heard they need someone to help rebuild the dog woman's house."

"And you understand building?"

"I can learn."

It wasn't until later that he discovered that Hassan was taking not just ten percent in commission from what little Moz earned. The older boy had also been given a handful of dirham by his uncle, who hired the foreman who actually employed Moz. He had to give another ten per cent to the foreman for the hire of a sledgehammer.

Moz laboured for the whole of that autumn, far harder than he'd ever worked in his life. And at the end of each day his body ached and clear liquid bled from the blisters on his hands and fingers, but Moz kept working and did as he was told, pissing into a bucket to help temper concrete for the maallan and always remembering to let the urine run over his fingers first, so that their blisters would heal and he could move the rubble faster…

It made no difference in the end.

The ring was gold and had an inscription around the inside, "all my love always." It took Moz most of that winter to find someone who read Turkish and in the end it was only bloody-mindedness that made him try the cigar seller in Gueliz.

There was a second ring; this was fatter but had the same words around the inside and Moz found it inside an envelope sealed and hidden at the back of a drawer stuffed with bras his mother had long since become too thin to wear and knickers washed to a faded and ghostly greyness.

He put those back where he found them.

In the same drawer was a make-up bag stuffed with names Moz had seen on advertisements in shop windows in the New Town. The bag was plastic and had a broken zip. A line of words pressed into the clear plastic read "Made in Hong Kong." Moz had no idea where Hong Kong was but then he hadn't known Dido owned any make-up.

Dido was what his mother insisted he call her.

For a while, when he was younger, he'd decided this was because Dido wasn't his real mother. He'd mentioned this theory to ould Kasim, Malika's father, trying to catch the man out. All ould Kasim had done was grin sourly, take another gulp from his cracked tea glass and grin again.

"You'd be so lucky."

A rabbi and his son buried Moz's mother in the Jewish cemetery. Moz would have preferred to have her interred in the New Town in the cemetery off Boulevard De Safi but the priest to whom he spoke wanted money. So Malika went to her rabbi and told him that Moz's mother was Jewish and so the man agreed to bury her in the cemetery next to Bab Rhemat and pay for it himself.

Malika and Moz had agreed she should tell the rabbi that Dido had married a gentile and been cut off from her family. Moz knew the meaning of gentile, and that Jews only liked to marry each other, from when he'd run errands for the maallan who owned a bread oven on the edge of the Mellah.

In the event, the rabbi just asked if she was certain about his mother's faith and then took over the rest of the arrangements. Twenty-four hours later it was done. Malika's father drove the rabbi away with drunken curses and threats of violence when he came calling a week later to see how Moz was coping with his grief. The rabbi came a handful of times after that but Moz was never there, and when the Jew left the boy a letter ould Kasim tore it into pieces and threw them in a gutter.

"You found her?"

Moz nodded. He was sitting on the roof with his face to a cold sun and his body throwing an impossibly etiolated shadow across the dirty red tiles behind him. Malika stood backlit in front, a black space where the winter sky should be. All he could see was a man's shirt washed so thin that even if the light had not been behind her Moz would probably have been able to see her legs silhouetted through the cloth.

The shirt came from a suitcase that once belonged to her mother, like everything else Malika ever owned. Malika was twelve that year. Moz was one year older.

"It's hard," Malika said. "You know, things like that. I remember."

What Moz wanted was for Malika to go away and leave him in peace but she'd never been very good at that. So while he was still doing his best to ignore her, Malika dropped to her heels in front of Moz and reached out to tap his knee. The briefest touch.

"That your bed?" Her nod took in a single blanket and an old pillow stuffed with feathers up against the wall that ran along the back of their flat roof. His other jellaba lay in a discarded heap next to the pillow. It was the one he'd worn for his mother's funeral. Malika had washed it for him. She'd done it without being asked.

"Obviously."

If Malika heard the sharpness in his voice she pretended not to mind. "It'll rain soon," she said. "You'd be better coming back inside."

Moz looked at her. "It hasn't rained in two years."

"Soon," she said, "it will. You can't sleep up here forever."

Moz wanted to say that he could, he would sleep where he wanted and nothing she could say would change that. She wasn't his…

"It hurts," she said. "I know that."

Holding his head against her bony shoulder, Malika let the boy cry himself out and then pretended not to notice when he pulled away and shuffled sideways so she could no longer see the tears on his face.

"Do you want me to do it?" There was, it seemed, no limit to the number of questions she could ask him. And as she always pointed out, Moz was not in a position to complain given the number of questions he asked himself.

"What?"

"The room."

Moz shook his head. "I'll do it."

"When?"

When I'm ready, that was what he wanted to say. Only he would never be ready. Her illness had been getting worse for a long time and Malika had been the one to realize the end was approaching. Not saying anything, but offering to fetch shopping for Dido or carry her bread to the local oven until even Moz understood what was happening and went cap in hand to Hassan for a job.

They had the autumn, three months in which Moz learnt more about Dido than he'd ever known before. She still refused to tell him where his father had gone or why, but Moz learnt that his mother's father was English and had married a German woman after the war. He wasn't sure which war and Dido was too tired to explain properly, but he asked and kept asking until he found a man in the Mellah who'd fled Germany and he told Moz what the boy needed to know.

"Come on," Malika said, climbing to her feet. "We'd better do it together."

It made Moz feel sick to go through his mother's few possessions. And only the fact Malika was there stopped Moz from giving up. He offered Malika the green dress and Dido's red skirt and the shoes, both pairs.

"You could sell them at the clothes souk," she told him.

"Keep them."

"It might upset you." Malika's face was serious, her mouth screwed into a smile that made her look sadder still. She was holding the shoes in one hand and looking between these and the boy who was on his knees emptying a cardboard box.

"If you want them, keep them," Moz said crossly.

Things like that didn't upset him, or so he told himself. There were letters in the box and an old passport which showed his mother looking young and pretty, her hair curled and cut close to her head. She wore a dress open at the neck and smiled at the camera. There were other photographs in a fat paper folder, some of them showing the same dress. She was pretty in all of these too.

Maybe she'd stopped having her photograph taken when her prettiness faded or maybe she stopped being pretty when whoever took those photographs went away. Moz found it hard to recognize his mother in the girl who smiled at him from almost every shot.

"Keep them," Malika said, when Moz began to tear the pictures in half. "And keep that." She nodded at the passport.

"You like them so much," said Moz, "you keep them." Carrying the box to the door, he threw it onto the landing and went back to his roof.

When he came down again, the room he shared with his mother had been cleared of everything that might remind him of Dido and Malika had stripped the bed and taken Dido's sheets for washing. And the next morning, when Moz met Malika in Djemaa el Fna with Hassan and Idries, she behaved as if clearing out his room had never happened.

CHAPTER 21

Lampedusa, Monday 2 July

"What's he doing?" said Specialist Stone, mostly making conversation. They were four hours into a night shift and her companion had spent much of this drumming his fingers impatiently on a table. He wanted his bed, MTV and oblivion. This shift was Master Sergeant Saez's way of telling the man he probably shouldn't have kicked the prisoner when Miles Alsdorf was there.

"Eh?" The thickset marine glanced up from his fingers and checked the screen. On it Prisoner Zero was knelt where his bed should be, his head almost touching the floor, his fingers scrabbling at something unseen.

"Reckon he's lost it?"

"Fucked if I know. When did this start?"

"About five minutes ago." Specialist Stone was lying. She had no idea when Prisoner Zero had begun this latest routine. She'd been too busy watching Corporal Thompson out of the corner of her eye.

"Wake the Master Sergeant," said Corporal Thompson, and Specialist Stone looked at him, then saluted. "Yes, sir," she said. Her smile lasted most of the way to the Sergeant's quarters.

At Miles Alsdorf's suggestion the marines had allowed Prisoner Zero a new mattress and blanket. Well, an old mattress really, stuffed with horsehair and worn down to its warp and weft along one seam. It was stained in the way old mattresses seem to get stained with a lifetime's worth of precipitous periods, spilt coffee, babies made, born and then grieved over.

Prisoner Zero wasn't sure why that mattress had been chosen. Maybe it was all the marines could find at short notice or perhaps Sergeant Saez really believed it was the most disgusting thing possible. If so, he should have seen the squat in Amsterdam.

The blanket which came with the mattress was US issue, the colour of goose shit and machine-sewn along all four edges. A label glued to one corner claimed it was made from recycled plastic bottles, thus helping the environment.

Since it was July and the room in which the cage lived had only one window and this was sealed shut, the winter-weight blanket was as useless as it was unnecessary; but Miles Alsdorf had demanded his client be given a blanket and a mattress and Colonel Borgenicht had seen to it that he had.

So tightly was the mattress squeezed between the sides of Prisoner Zero's cage that it could only be edged out a little at a time. The prisoner then had to lift free the metal frame which supported it, raising one end until he could manoeuvre the other away from the brackets welded around one end of the cage to support his bed. All of this he had to do in silence.

The floor beneath his bed was steel mesh, plastic-coated like the rest and soldered at the edges to the frame of the cage. The darkness had suggested he begin his tunnel under the bed, where four tiles met. To help himself remember this, Prisoner Zero had scratched a cross into his arm to mark the inner edges of the four tiles and then run a circle around that point to indicate the tunnel.

Having cut free the tiles, he would need to tear his way through the mesh on which he knelt before he could prise the tiles from their setting. This created so many problems that Prisoner Zero decided he'd better worry about them later.

The difficulty for Prisoner Zero was that he needed space to walk in order to focus. Itchy inside his own skin, that was how one girl had put it a very long time ago. Nail him down, sit him in a café with a latte, a spliff or that day's paper and he would drift away into dreams, complex interplays of events misremembered, rewritten memories and occasional flashes of something Prisoner Zero used to think of as genius.

In the days before he realized he didn't rate that word.

"You think we ought to stop him?"

Corporal Thompson reached for a can of Pepsi Max, ripped the tab and shook his head. "You heard the Sergeant. The guy's nuts. Get over it." Master Sergeant Saez had been and gone, barely stopping long enough to glance at the screen.

Staying with the picture for only as long as it took him to finish his Pepsi, Corporal Thompson switched his attention back to the DC comic in front of him, leaving Prisoner Zero to scrabble helplessly against the mesh of the floor.

"This is getting bad," Specialist Stone said, when another five minutes had gone. "We should pass it up the line."

"Feel free." Corporal Thompson nodded at the house phone. "I'm sure Sergeant Saez will be delighted."

Ten minutes after that Specialist Stone came to a decision. One that would have had her cleaning shithouses for the rest of her career if Master Sergeant Saez had found out about it. She telephoned the Lieutenant.

"Sir, it's the prisoner. He's trying to tear up the floor of his cage…"

"With his fingers, sir."

"No sir, he's not getting away."

"Yes sir, the steel mesh is still in place."

"The guards are still outside his door, sir."

"Why did I call you? It was my mistake, sir." Specialist Stone stood very straight as she said this, listening while Lieutenant Ashcroft provided his own answer.

"Yes, sir. Sorry, sir."

"Told you," Corporal Thompson said, passing her that week's issue of Spider-Man.

Inside the cage the prisoner was wrestling with the steel frame that supported his mattress, prior to dragging that mattress back into position against a side wall so it could hide the entrance to his tunnel. He'd cut free the grout from around the tiles, just as the darkness instructed, and made a start at worrying his way through the mesh.

All he had to do now was make sure no one thought to look under his bed and to do that he needed to put his captors off entering the cage.

"It's obvious," said the darkness.

And it was.

As Prisoner Zero stripped off his paper jump suit and squatted next to the doorway to his cage, he ran over the map of Camp Freedom he kept in his head. He was trying to work out if the others were here. He wasn't sure who the others might be, but he was pretty certain who they weren't.

The Corporal, the one who liked kicking him, had mentioned that dozens of Prisoner Zero's co-conspirators had been rounded up. Which was odd, because the prisoner was pretty sure the darkness had talked to no one but him and he had talked to no one at all.

In all, he'd known maybe five people in Paris and most of those had politely ignored him. A state of existence Prisoner Zero had worked hard to achieve and he was beginning to regret upsetting its balance.

All the same, thought Prisoner Zero as he began to smear shit onto the mesh, what choice did he have? And how could he possibly explain that lack of choice to the endless, interchangeable people who sat across tables from him and asked questions to which the answers had to be obvious?

The US President had to die because the future demanded it. Prisoner Zero knew this to be true even if he could no longer remember exactly why. And if Prisoner Zero could not go to the President then the darkness really did require that he persuade the President to come to him.

It had something to do with history.

CHAPTER 23

Marrakech, Summer 1977

While the foreigners stood at the front desk filling out infinitely shorter forms which stated they weren't planning to fill out the forms required to report a robbery, Moz sat at the table in room three and watched Major Abbas make notes in his tatty notebook.

"Where did we first meet?" the Major asked suddenly.

Moz swallowed.

"Was it in here?"

"No." The boy shook his head. "There was a dead American."

"Ah," said the Major. "How could I forget? Only he was English, not American, and his father was a diplomat. It was all very irritating." The small man made a few additional notes in his book and then snapped it shut, inserting his pencil into a gap in its spine.

"You had one hand twisted behind your back."

Now he'd remembered the first meeting. The Major had problems removing the picture of a small boy casually stripping to show one arm tied into an impossible position, oblivious both to his nakedness and the bruises speckling his body like camouflage.

"What happened?"

Moz thought about it. "I started hitting back." This wasn't quite true. He'd got a job, the winter his mother died, but he wasn't about to tell the policeman that.

"For you," said the Major as he reached into his pocket. Peeling off a hundred-dirham note he glanced from the new note to the boy and sucked his teeth. Carefully replacing the hundred-dirham note, he extracted a handful of smaller notes, all of them scuffed along their edges and dark with grease from the fingers of those who'd handled them before.

"That's more like it," said the Major, but he was talking to himself.

The boy stared at the notes.

"Take them," Major Abbas said, his words an order.

Moz counted the money, to make sure it added up to a hundred. Ten notes in all, originally pink like the walls of Marrakech, with a drinking bowl on one side and a picture of the Sultan, as most of those who lived in the Medina still called King Hassan II.

Without being told, Moz folded the notes in half and then in half again, stuffing the money into the side of his shoe.

"What must I do?"

Major Abbas smiled. "Who said you had to do anything?"

In many ways, playing simple seemed the safest way to behave around this man so that was what Moz did. And besides, how could he not want something?

"You remember what I said last time?"

Moz knew word for word what the Major had said the time before. Moz was to bring him rumours. And there were always rumours, that the Algerians planned to invade or the Polisario, as the leaders of the Saharan tribes now called themselves, intended to thrust north and attack Marrakech. That one of the King's own ministers had been behind the last plot to kill the King.

In the fifteen or so short years of Moz's life, rioting students in Casablanca had been arrested, tortured and jailed, exiled trade unionists had been murdered in Paris, the old colonial companies had tried to bribe their way out of nationalization and two of the coups against the King had come dangerously close to succeeding.

Truth or rumour, these were not things that anyone sensible would repeat to the police. And besides these dangerous truths, there were lesser rumours of gangs and robberies, rapes, murder and infidelity. Only those were not what Major Abbas required.

He wanted only the first kind, the bigger and darker rumours. Moz was just unsure why the Major thought he might be the person to hear them.

"So," said the Major, "you'll keep in touch this time?"

Moz nodded.

"Good. Now take those two home." He jerked his chin towards the front office. "And suggest she wears something over that shirt." Flipping open his notebook, Major Abbas found the address. "They're staying at Hotel Gulera. You know where that is?"

The Major stopped himself. "No, of course you don't." He scribbled an address on a scrap of paper and handed it to the boy, who glanced at it once and carefully left the scrap on the table between them.

When Moz was gone, the Major made a new note in his book, upgrading the boy's usefulness from four to five. He'd always suspected the boy to be at least semi-literate.

"You realize," Jake said, shifting his rucksack, "that the little shit's probably a police spy."

"Jake!"

"I mean it. Look at him."

Celia shot a quick glance at the boy walking slightly ahead of her. He was staring up at walls as he passed, checking for street signs, she imagined.

"Looks just like a kid to me."

The spiky-haired man nodded heavily. He was wearing black Levi's and a Ramones T-shirt, his rucksack was made from black rubber. A pair of lizard-skin shoes seemed moulded to his feet.

"Not far," Moz said. His accent was a little more sing-song than usual and his words a little less clear. The Major obviously intended him to report back on these two and Moz wanted to put them at their ease.

Ignorance usually worked.

"That's what you said five minutes ago."

Moz shrugged and dodged neatly between a scooter and a cart laden with melons. When the couple didn't immediately follow, Moz waited.

"This thing's heavy," Jake said, shrugged his shoulders to indicate the bag.

"I'll take it." Moz held out a hand.

"Good idea," said Jake, as he began to shuffle his way out of the straps.

"Jake, you can't--"

"Yes, I can. He offered."

"The kid's half your size."

"So, he still offered."

"I carry it," Moz said. "You pay me when we get there."

"Welcome to Marrakech," said Jake.

They walked in silence after that, cutting down the side alleys that Moz indicated, passing through small souks, dusty squares which were anything but square and a market selling leather slippers made in the tannery in El Moukef.

"Over there," said Moz.

The entrance to that alley looked to Celia and Jake like all the rest. They'd been lost at least twice on the walk from Avenue Houman to Rue Bab Ailen, but the boy doubted if either of them realized that. Once they'd even circled past the same small mosque from two different directions and neither appeared to notice.

"Wait…" The woman was standing in front of a stall.

"We haven't got time!" Jake's voice was impatient.

"Yes, we have," Celia said. "Besides, I want to look at this." In her hand was a belt made from discs of leather laced in a row. Circles cut from hubcaps and beaten into a traditional Berber pattern had been stitched to each disc, their centres augmented with a five-peseta coin from the Spanish territories, each coin hammered flat and welded in place.

"They're amazing. Ask him how much…Go on." The woman was talking to him, Moz realized.

"Ssalamu 'lekum."

"Ssalamu 'lekum."

Civilities done, Moz pointed to the belt Celia held. "Bshhal?"

"Khamsa ú 'ashren."

The boy almost choked. "Twenty-five dirham," he told the woman, who reached into her leather satchel for a purse. "It's way too much," Moz said hastily. "Offer five."

"Five?"

"Khamsa," Moz said, turning back to the stallholder.

"Ashrin."

"He says twenty."

"Okay."

"La." Moz shook his head. "Ghali bezzaf. Akhir Taman shhal?"

The man scowled at the boy and told him to tell the foreigner how good the work was, how fine the leather, the quality of the silver used to make the circles and the fact that they were real Spanish five-peseta pieces. "Akhir ttaman dyali huwa hada." A shrug closed the conversation. A shrug and a quick spread of the hands, universal gesture for what more can I say?

"He says twenty is his best price."

"That's fine," Celia said.

"No, it's not," Moz said. "Walk away…that way," he added, "towards the other side of the square."

"But I want--"

"Do it," Jake said. He might have been talking to Celia but he was looking at Moz and for the first time there was a smile on his face, albeit sour. "Go on," he told Celia. "Walk away. Isn't that what you do best?"

The stallholder sent a boy after them with the belt. Although he waited until they had actually entered a side alley.

"Fifteen," he told Moz.

"Nine."

"Fifteen."

The boy and Moz looked at each other. The kid was about eleven, Arab rather than Berber, small for his age and worried. Any smiles from his father were reserved for the customers, Moz could see that in the boy's eyes.

"Twelve," Moz suggested. It was an outrageous price for a belt, at least it seemed so to him. Very reluctantly, the boy nodded.

"Sixteen," Moz told the woman. He took the money from a purse she handed him, one note and six coins, counting the dirham carefully into his own palm. While Celia was busy putting the purse back into her satchel, Moz turned to the boy and put the ten and two coins into his hand.

"That's for the belt," he said. Equally quickly, he pocketed two coins for himself and gave the final two to the boy. "Yours," he said. "The price we agreed for the belt was twelve. Those are for you to keep."

"Thank you," said the boy, hand over his own heart.

"Bessalama."

"M'a ssalama." Returning the peace, the boy trotted back to his stall, a hand-me-down jellaba dragging behind him in the dirt.

"What was all that about?" Jake asked.

"All what?"

"The talking."

"We were saying goodbye."

"What?" Jake snorted. "You telling me everyone in Morocco is that polite?"

"I don't know everyone in Morocco," Moz said, reasonably. "But most people in Marrakech have manners."

Celia smiled at the boy still laden with Jake's rucksack. She found it hard to guess his age because everybody in the city seemed so small, but she imagined it was around fourteen, maybe a little older. She had a brother that age, away at school.

"You've insulted him," she said, transferring her gaze to Jake.

"Insulted him?"

"Yeah." Celia nodded. "You know. What you do best. You need to apologize."

For a moment it seemed like Jake might refuse, then he nodded grudgingly. "I can be a prick sometimes," he said.

Celia nodded.

"You know…" Jake Razor looked at the boy, face thoughtful. "Maybe you can help me."

"If I can," said Moz.

"You know where I can get some dope?"

"Kif?"

"Yeah." Jake laughed. "That's the man. You can get me dope?"

The answer was no but Moz nodded. "Of course," he said, making his voice slur like Jake's own. "Give me an hour."

CHAPTER 27

Lampedusa, Wednesday 4 July

"Whatever." It would have to do.

Using a square of cigarette packet, Prisoner Zero smeared his stink along the base of a wall, filling the gaps. They were going to kill him before he had time to skim all the walls; the prisoner had worked this out around dawn.

"Prisoner Zero."

It was a sergeant. One who didn't like him, as opposed to Master Sergeant Saez, who actually hated him. Prisoner Zero found it hard to tell Saez and Kovacs apart because both had bull necks, cropped hair, skin ripe like midnight and similar thousand-klick stares. What Prisoner Zero saw when he looked at the two marines was not their scowls or skin tone, but uniforms.

They both wore a weird kind of jungle fatigue. Something mud-coloured, like it was designed for a forest where everything had begun to die. Unless, of course, it was meant to be desert camouflage, in which case it matched no stretch of sand or gravel Prisoner Zero had ever seen.

He was meant to stand now. This had been explained to him.

Master Sergeant Saez would come in first and shout his name, Prisoner Zero then had to stand, stare straight ahead and stay silent unless spoken to. This last part was easy enough. As for the rest…Sergeant Saez continued to demand that he come to attention but had long since stopped believing it was going to happen.

Knocking someone down was easy. Making them stand up to order was far more difficult.

"Attention."

Prisoner Zero turned his back on the noise of his cage being unlocked and concentrated instead on the square of cardboard as it skimmed over mesh in confident sweeps. Small rebellions were all he had left.

The outraged shouts never came. Instead Prisoner Zero became aware that someone stood right behind him, watching. Tossing aside his cardboard paddle, Prisoner Zero paused to admire the result. Something was still missing, that much was obvious. Unfortunately, he was having trouble working out what.

"Fermat," said Katie Petrov.

"You're right," a voice said, sounding impressed. The owner of the voice was a balding Italian in grey uniform. He was probably of normal build and height, but standing between Sergeants Saez and Kovacs, he looked both short and thin. Wire rim glasses magnified washed-out blue eyes.

"I'm Dr. Angelo," said the man in Arabic. "Have you finished?" Elegant fingers gestured at shit smeared across the wall of the cage. "If not, then please do."

Sergeant Kovacs had taken away Prisoner Zero's stub of wire the previous evening during an unscheduled search of his cage. This was one of the reasons the prisoner was behind. It had taken him most of the night to find a loose weld and work free a stubby length of wire.

Producing the wire from his mouth, Prisoner Zero slashed an equation into the lattice. It was famous and he used it only to fill space, adding a less famous equation (which was at least two centuries older) and improvised a third which linked the first two.

The fourth was something he'd stumbled over on his knees beside a canal. He'd lost his job by then, Prisoner Zero was pretty sure of it. There were some limits to life tenure, even at the University of Amsterdam. So much unfinished. He guessed God probably felt like that.

And so Prisoner Zero began to sketch. A circle, multi-layered, each layer actually a circle seen from the side so that it looked like a line, except each of these circles was really a sphere. Only he lacked the ability to express that extra dimension except in his head. So he drew another circle alongside the first and separated them with a vertical line to remind himself that they were the same but not.

He did this part mostly from the memory of a few pages at the back of an exercise book, the middle pages being taken up with chord changes for songs that never got written, much less recorded.

"What is it?" Katie Petrov asked.

"A butterfly," said the uniformed Italian.

"This is Vice Questore Pier Angelo," said Katie. "He's been asked to examine you."

"If that's all right?" said the Vice Questore. For a foreigner his Arabic seemed pretty good.

"I've worked for the UN," said the man. "In Baghdad and Damascus." Nodding to Master Sergeant Saez, who stood with a rifle clutched to his chest and a scowl souring his heavy face, Vice Questore Angelo added, "I'm also a Marxist, one of the few left. That's why your friend doesn't like me."

Katie Petrov smiled. "You want any help?"

"No." The balding man shook his head. "What I want is this room emptied while I make my examination." He had the face of a well-bred horse, with what was left of his hair swept back like a mane behind his ears. A wedding ring on his second finger said Katie Petrov's first impression was wrong.

"You don't need me to stay?"

"No," said the Vice Questore. "I'll need the patient out of his cage and the room to myself. I don't start until that happens."

"It's going to be a long wait," said Sergeant Kovacs.

Turning his back on their squabble, Prisoner Zero examined his work and discovered that it was already dead. The sketches, formulae and equations just looked what they were, simple cold equations signifying nothing. His map of space where ice held memories and the darkness spoke in miracles was gone.

"That's better," said the Vice Questore when the door to the weights room finally shut. Popping open his black leather bag, he extracted a stethoscope, a pair of surgical gloves and a small flashlight.

"Katie Petrov demanded a local doctor. Luckily I was in the area. Dr. Petrov and I came to a mutually advantageous agreement…" There was, of course, no luck involved at all. Vice Questore Pier Angelo took a look at the cage and decided it was every bit as bad as Rome had been led to believe.

"If you're happy with this?"

The Vice Questore paused to give Prisoner Zero space to reply. He'd already been warned by Katie Petrov that conversations were unlikely to be two-way events, but it seemed only polite.

"I'm a doctor," he said, "also a police surgeon. I opposed the Berlusconi government and for that I've been awarded a seat in parliament…Only in Italy," he added with a sigh. "Parliament has asked me to report back on your health, the levels of security to which you're subject and the conditions in which you're held. As you can imagine, Colonel Borgenicht is not happy."

The last thing the Vice Questore produced was a small Leica and a roll of 400 ASA Kodak old-fashioned film. "La Stampa is reporting that you've been tortured. Dr. Petrov believes you are being drugged. As Camp Freedom is sited on Italian soil I've been sent to check both."

Prisoner Zero's lungs were fine and his blood pressure surprisingly low for someone of middle age. His pupils reacted to light, his liver was unenlarged and when he blew through a white plastic tube the blue marker moved further than Vice Questore Angelo had expected.

"I'll need a blood sample," said the man, ripping foil from a disposable hypodermic. "And, when that's done, if you could just urinate into this." He handed Prisoner Zero a small plastic container.

When the actual tests were done and Vice Questore Angelo had added some chemical to the blood, dipped strips of paper in still-warm urine and spread a smear of shit over the bottom sheet of a glass slide, examined it under a small brass microscope and made notes in his book, he told Prisoner Zero to stand in front of his cage.

Camera flash lit the room. Only then did the Italian begin his examination for evidence of torture. "What are these?" he asked eventually, pausing at scars on Prisoner Zero's stomach.

Silence was his answer.

"Were they done here?"

The prisoner shook his head.

"Interesting," said Vice Questore Angelo. "Most people in your position would have said yes whatever the truth."

There were five burns in all, three on Prisoner Zero's left thigh and two on his abdomen. All of them less than two weeks old. Nodding to himself, Vice Questore Angelo discounted an old bruise at the base of the prisoner's spine and a pale cicatrix on the inside of one arm. "Who punched you in the kidneys?" he asked suddenly.

As ever Prisoner Zero said nothing.

"You test positive for blood in your urine."

When the prisoner stayed silent, Vice Questore Angelo shrugged, became aware that this was not very professional of him and decided that was too bad. He was getting to the bit covered in Dr. Petrov's off-the-record talk on their way in. "All right," he said, raising his camera, "now show me your hands…"

CHAPTER 28

Razor's Edge, CTzu 53/Year 20

Flash/no flash.

Doc Joyce claimed to be the man who'd fixed five miles of diamond-hard neon tube to the far wall of RipJointShuts and he refused to tell anybody how to turn the thing off. So it just sat there and illuminated the darkness with its message.

"Welcome to Tomorrow."

The interesting thing about this, apart from the fact the sign gave visitors something to head for in the gloom of the fourteenth level, was that it spoke to anyone who got close enough, repeating its mantra inside one's head.

A town of about three hundred (barely half of them recognizably human), RJS was old, marginally dangerous and had briefly been famous some years before when the newest emperor manifested in a hut several levels above and Doc Joyce, owner of the local bar and a cut-price slice merchant, went on the feed to announce that he'd birthed the boy, his brother and the mother.

He might even have been telling the truth.

A plaque at Doc Joyce's place (put up so visitors would know that this was the place the Emperor's mother came for advice), announced that RipJointShuts was the oldest inhabited shanty town on Heliconid, a thousand years being mentioned.

Inventive as the dapper little man was, he still got the scale wrong by a factor of four. People had been squatting in RJS for over forty centuries. Pretty impressive for a town that didn't officially exist on a sliver of steel that was meant to be uninhabited.

Near the bottom of the Razor's Edge, that endless tear down the side of Heliconid and a day's hike into the interior of level fourteen, stood an abandoned cargo container, in the shadow of the Tomorrow sign. This was Schwarzschilds, Doc Joyce's bar.

Few tourists came to drink and fewer still came back. Schwarzschilds made it into the guides but most of what was written was third-hand, hearsay taken from hearsay.

A smaller cargo pod, barely a tenth of the size, had been abandoned millennia before at the back of Schwarzschilds. Some of those who described the pod said it looked like a calf following its mother. Others, less whimsical, thought it looked like something the bar had shat.

It was inside this smaller container that a naked fifteen-year-old girl swapped half a kidney for a completely new set of shoulder sinews. Unusually, Tris did this before her own got ripped. She'd seen too many drop queens reduced to shuffling crabs on the level.

As having her shoulders rewired cost less than she'd expected, Tris used the other half to get her arms and legs restrung, ending up with all of her sinews upgraded to full-drop status with the tensile strength of the new sinews making a mockery of those they replaced, obviously enough.

Underestimating the obvious was to give Tris the most terrifying twelve hours of her short life. A week after the operation, with the original scars long since healed, Tris took an updraft to the top of Razor's Edge and dropped the full seventeen levels in a head-whirling handful of minutes, feeling her life zip through her fingers and across her back as she touched only twice, kicking off into nothingness and waiting until the last minute to use her diamond gloves.

The sinews worked perfectly. It was Tris's shoulder muscles which did a really embarrassing first-time-out crackle and pop.

"Fuck. Fuck. Fuck."

If Tris had known a worse curse she'd have used it. All she could feel was white pain. A shock so absolute it was more or less indescribable. One that put all her previous experiences of feeling sick to shame.

She was inside her own pain. On the end of a rope.

And so began the longest night and morning of Tris's life. Crawl by crawl she made her way up the rope, knees locked tight and hands gripping on as best they could. It took eight hours to climb three levels and the rest of that day to reach Schwarzschilds.

"Hello, Tristesse," said Doc Joyce, when he finally bothered to look up from the mixing desk. "I wondered when I'd see you." Doc Joyce was the only person to call the skinny Riprat by her full name. The only person ever to stand up when she came into his room.

He'd done that the very first time she appeared in his doorway, wanting to know the prices. Tris had never forgotten. The Doc had still overcharged her but she could forgive him that. Doc Joyce overcharged everyone.

"You busy?"

The Doc snorted. "What does it look like?" he said.

A creature lay on the slab, completely naked but genital-free. All secondary sexual characteristics were also absent. The navel and nipples were gone, as were any breasts that might have supported them, always assuming the patient started out female. A completely smooth, hairless groin showed no sign of labia. In fact, it showed no signs of anything.

Two tiny horns budded from either side of the creature's narrow forehead and, in place of hair, its depilated skull was combed with corn rows of bone plate. It was a look Tris had seen often.

"Yeah," said Doc Joyce. He pulled up one eyelid, twisted the unconscious patient's skull from side to side, then shrugged. "Don't you just hate tourists?…What happened?" he asked as an afterthought.

"Slipped," whispered Tris.

The Doc's smile was not kind. "Sure you did."

Tris looked at the drugged tourist.

"God," said the Doc, "do I need to do everything?" Tipping the creature off the mixing desk, Doc Joyce patted the slab, dislodging a spider which had been busy behind the patient's ear. "Up you go."

On the floor the spider scuttled away to stand a few paces from the body. After a second or two, during which its metal legs quivered and reformed in restless twists of smoke, the spider sidled up to the tourist's skull and went back to work.

"Come on," Doc Joyce said, then took pity on the girl and tossed her a spider, letting it cut free her clothes. He left her knife where it was, taped to the small of her back. Minus clothes was one thing, defenceless was another, and Doc Joyce understood that naked meant different things to different people.

"Should have had the bones," Doc Joyce said. He'd tried to sell her a set of bird-weight legs, hips and shoulder bones and had run the maths for her as he pulled each one from its vat, suggesting skin flaps between her upper arms and ribs. Tris had been shaking her head before he'd even finished.

She lay on her front, because this was the way Doc Joyce wanted her to lie. It hurt just as much as lying on her back but had the advantage of letting Tris rest her face against the slab, which promptly adjusted itself to help the girl get as comfortable as possible. If she'd been face up, the brightness of Doc Joyce's ceiling would have stopped her doing that.

For reasons she never quite understood, Doc Joyce skipped the scolding that Tris had been expecting and went straight to work, his fingers cold on her skin.

She shivered.

"It's a mess, Tristesse," Doc Joyce said. "I don't need spiders to tell me that." Fingertips pushed into the pain across her shoulders and Tris found she was crying, racking sobs that only made her body hurt all the more.

Doc Joyce sighed.

When the girl turned up wanting replacement sinews he'd suggested she get her muscles upgraded in tandem and even given her a good price. This was prior to suggesting new bones. As the muscle swap would be invisible the kid's very vocal contempt for visible modification could remain uncompromised.

(It was noticeable that everything she'd ever had done was on the inside. Doc Joyce had his own theories on this, but then the Doc had a theory about everything.)

Out of the thousands who came and went he remembered Tris because the very first time she came she wanted an augmentation so old-fashioned he almost did it for nothing to see if he still could. The kid had wanted her existing synaptic topology augmented with fullerenes to increase the speed at which connections could be made in her brain.

He pointed out that it would be far easier and infinitely more efficient just to replace her organic brain with a synthetic unit, maybe something with an open connection to the feed. The kid had been adamant. What she wanted was what she'd asked for.

In many ways the fact that Doc Joyce liked Tris was a triple bluff on himself. Everyone knew that the Doc was cantankerous, unreliable and avaricious. That was the description mostly given in the guides. Cantankerous, unreliable and money-grubbing (this last being a specific form of avaricious).

Those who knew him better understood that Doc Joyce was much less of the above than he first appeared; which was, of course, a cliché. In a feed novella he'd be played as a drunk who made good at the end and died heroically, his colleagues discovering too late that he'd secretly given up alcohol, drugs or whatever weakness the novella's AI had pulled off the shelf and nailed to him.

And the kicker would be that his last bottle of hooch, the one that shattered as he fell, its contents standing in for blood in the dust, this bottle would be unopened and the seal unbroken.

They'd both watched variations of that episode, several times.

The truth was different. Doc Joyce was cantankerous, unreliable and avaricious. He wasn't even a man, at least not on a genetic level. Although this had never made it into the guides because he'd done the op himself and done it long before most of the guides existed.

That secondary, half-hidden warmth and twinkle in his eye was as false as the first growl and snap. Only being golden-hearted was what the punters wanted and so that was what the Doc gave them, golden-hearted moments while his eyes twinkled, his mouth twisted into a rueful smile and he emptied their lives of anything interesting enough to catch his fancy.

It was a good act, convincing even, and Tris was his only weakness. Grinding his fingers into ruptured muscle, Doc Joyce watched Tris's head come up off the slab.

"Fuck," she said.

"Keep still," said Doc Joyce but the order was redundant, the kid had passed out with pain. The muscles he grafted were old stock, from a batch grown for a family on Turquoise who'd fallen one third of the way down Razor's Edge and decided to go easy on dangerous sports for a while.

When their houseAI queried the Doc's invoice for surgical-grade muscles, he sent by return a highly convincing and properly completed order, including an appropriate retinal scan for each member of the family. The house paid up after that and for a full set, everything from biceps brachii to vastus medialis for each family member.

He always managed to sell a surprising percentage of the tissue he grew on spec and if the muscles billed never quite matched the number actually used then these things happened. At least they did when you used a clinic as old and cranky as Doc Joyce's.

The spiders were his crocodile. He'd said this once to Tris, when she first came in to discuss brain rewiring.

And then, of course, he'd had to explain what crocodiles were and why alchemists in the old world kept stuffed reptiles hanging from their ceilings to impress their patrons. A loop of logic that forced him to divert through a definition of alchemy to a quick and dirty outline of human history. Doc Joyce was slightly shocked to discover that Tris was only crudely aware that most inhabitants of the 2023 worlds originated from the same species. And totally, utterly shocked to discover that Tris had no idea what he meant by the word "Earth."

"I still don't get it," Tris had said finally.

"What?"

"The stuff with the spiders."

So Doc Joyce had scooped up a handful, crushed them between his palms and then parted his hands to reveal a much larger spider standing in their place. His smile was that of a conjurer who'd just performed a particularly impressive trick. "You know how old these are?" he said.

Tris had shaken her head.

"Older than you."

"That's not so difficult."

"Older than me," added Doc Joyce, ripping the spider in two and dropping both bits on the floor, where the halves became spiders in their turn and scurried away, in exactly opposite directions.

"Really?" Tris said. She said it mostly because Doc Joyce seemed to expect a reply.

"Yeah," said the Doc. "Older than me, older than you, older than everyone in RipJointShuts added together." He smiled. "These days replicators are so small most people don't even know they exist. These came over on the SZ Loyal Prince."

"You're talking about smoke?" Tris looked puzzled. "You know, you buy time in a clinic and that smoke just rolls over you, mending as it goes…"

"Clinics are pointless," Doc Joyce said. "Most people are born already prepared."

"On the worlds?"

Doc Joyce nodded.

"So why do they come here?"

He'd looked at her, that time he was shaving her head to open her skull, slight smile twisting his lips as he wondered whether to say more.

"You can tell me," Tris said.

"You know, Tristesse," said the man, "maybe I can." He took a long look at the naked girl strapped to his mixing desk. "You remind me of someone," he said, then stopped himself. "When you get to my age everyone looks like someone else."

Tris could see the logic in that.

"People come to me," the old man said, "because they've tried everything else and because I have a reputation." The Doc shook his head, a gesture meant to signify his acceptance that this idea was absurd. "I don't cure them because they're not ill. I change them. Not always into what they want. That's what brings them here. The risk."

Imagine that someone has cooked thread noodles, the tiny almost translucent kind so that they are too flexible to snap like dry twigs but need another ten seconds or so to become properly soft. Then imagine that person taking a fat handful of those noodles and twisting, so that some pop, others half rupture and a few, mostly in the middle, stay whole.

This was the muscle inside Tris's shoulders.

The spiders worked swiftly at a level below human sight. First they cut away damaged tissue and then they knitted new muscle into place. It would have been possible to repair the original, but even with neural blocks Tris would be reluctant to climb until the stiffness had gone and by the time this happened the girl might be unwilling to climb at all.

A risk Doc Joyce felt reluctant to take. For his uncharacteristic kindness now had a price. It was obvious, at least in retrospect. The kid needed major repairs and he needed someone who could climb three klicks of wire and finesse open the hatch of a racing yacht.

All Tomorrow's Parties was currently berthed off the Chinese Rocks. Its owner was an off-world racer who owed Doc Joyce for a couple of complex augmentations, a debt he'd proved very bad at paying. In the circumstances Doc Joyce might even throw in some extra fullerene tubes.

The kid was going to need all the smarts she could muster.

CHAPTER 31

Zigin Chéng, CTzu 53/Year 20

The Emperor flinched at the sound of a lash, then flinched again and again until daylight pulled open his eyes and he woke to find himself in the Pavilion of Celestial Dreams, the smell of a distant city on his skin and ruined flesh burned into his memory.

He was exhausted by the effort of holding the dreams in his head.

"Saw two shooting stars last night."

Zaq looked around him for the source of the words. And miles above the Forbidden City particulate matter fell softly through the upper atmosphere. All that remained from a Casimir coil dumped by a racing yacht which had been stolen once to order and once again on something stronger than a whim.

All Tomorrow's Parties shed the first coil because that was what it always did at the halfway point of any race, once the vector was in sight and pit craft were waiting to cocoon it back into health. It took the decision on its own, based on precedent and extrapolation of all available data, which was rather less than it would have liked. The second coil it dumped because Tris told it to and she was holding a gun to its memory.

Where every emperor since the original Chuang Tzu had slept on a bed of solid oak, his head resting on a wooden pillow, Zaq bedded down in a corner of his room, wrapped in an old blanket and nightmares. He did this because it annoyed the Library and he had no need to tell the Library about the nightmares because it already knew.

They were the price Zaq paid for refusing to be Chuang Tzu. At least Zaq imagined they were. The war between Zaq and the Library was quiet and understated, but they both knew it was moving into a new and dangerous phase.

These days the darkness signed itself Rapture Library, the rapture bit being an old and bad joke at the expense of Holy Ghost Guides Us, a converted freighter fleeing from the world of the first Chuang Tzu, which stumbled through space and into the still-forming 2023 worlds.

Landing in the hills behind the embryo city, its crew imagined the world in which they found themselves to be deserted and it was only when a breakaway sect of fundamental polygamists began cutting down mulberry trees to the north of the Forbidden City that the Library disabused them.

The Boy Emperor had been forced to hide in his palace as thunder crashed hard enough to crack glass and lightning destroyed the tents of the polygamists with improbable accuracy.

Of course, Major Commissar Chuang Tzu was not really a boy, whatever the legends said, although all of those who followed after had been children, almost all adapting happily to their new name and lives. The fact the Library had begun to refer to Zaq by his pre-manifestation name was worrying because it seemed to suggest that what Zaq feared was true.

And the Emperor knew how problematic a thought that was, how wrapped around with doubt, and this worried Zaq also…The Chuang Tzu was required to be solid in his certainty, representative of intelligence, knowledge and wisdom. He was, to quote the Librarian, the spiritual health of the 2023 worlds made manifest.

It seemed doubtful to Zaq that the Library had ever intended this to be the lesson learnt from its banishment of the polygamists. A short and rather frightening conversation between Zaq and the Librarian revealed that it had been the destruction of the mulberry gardens which angered it.

"Although anger's probably the wrong word…It is, isn't it?"

Assent came from inside Zaq's own skull. A place both suffocatingly close and infinite in its distance.

Applying human emotions to an entity already ancient before amino acids tripped into life half a galaxy away was not helpful. Although this didn't stop the amino acid's descendant from so doing. And it seemed, from a throwaway afterthought, that what really troubled the Library was not the physical destruction of the mulberry bushes or the threat this implied to the silkworms which gave the orchard its reason for existing.

The Library had been scared that the orchard's destruction might upset the fragile happiness of the young Chinese navigator, who was only just coming to terms with his own progression from ice to Emperor.

There were a few among the cold immortals who felt that the navigator and every emperor who came after were no more than pets for the Library. Zaq knew different. The Library had been created not to command but to serve and without someone to serve its existence had no meaning.

This alone was the reason it clung to its role as tutor to each new Chuang Tzu with all the ruthlessness of a court eunuch in the real Forbidden City.

"Bath," Zaq shouted.

As orders went this was entirely redundant. A bath would have been run by servitors the moment Zaq dropped out of deep sleep and into his half-waking haze of dusty alleys and hurt children. In the event that Zaq remained there, another bath would be run and then another and another.

Zaq never saw this happen. He just rolled out of his huddle, walked through a single door and found a steaming pool awaiting him. All of this Zaq knew in the instant he realized that he didn't, facts simply appearing in his head.

The only place where the Librarian kept its peace was in the walled Butterfly Garden, which was within a larger walled garden to the north of the three private pavilions. And Zaq knew this was only because the butterflies were in themselves manifestations of the Librarian, who was, of course, merely one manifestation of the Library, which was merely…

Boxes within boxes.

"Your bath." Tuan-Yu.

Orthodox and Heaven Blessed.

His title went unsaid. Although Zaq was willing to bet that the servitor in the crimson changfu with the silver embroidery had muttered it under her breath. Some mornings, particularly in the first month after he'd given the order that no one was to use any of his titles, Zaq had actually seen the girl's lips move as she swallowed her words. Only Zaq's further announcement that this would be regarded as the height of rudeness brought her mumbling to an end.

He was too old to be this childish, Zaq knew that.

"Does your--" The servitor stumbled over the mistake and blushed prettily. No one ever did anything in the pavilions but prettily or with grace and style, and even her apology was elegantly simple. "I'm sorry, sir…Do you wish me to bathe you?"

Her name was Winter Blossom On Broken Rock and the Emperor had named her himself. He called her "Broken" or "Winter Blossom" for short, names to which she answered with downcast eyes and a demure, almost coy smile. She was the fourteenth handmaiden to attend him since he killed the intruder and the first he found bearable enough to have in his presence.

Some days, Zaq still felt too raw to face anyone, but those days were fewer than they had been and were getting fewer year by year. It was the hope of finding a way out of his predicament that had made life less wearisome. At first he'd only wanted to step down from the throne. Now Zaq knew that his only hope was to abolish himself altogether.

"Sir…?"

He'd forgotten to answer her question.

Five years ago, she'd have stood there, dressed in her silk changfu and looking expectant until he noticed her or remembered for himself, but Zaq had put a stop to that. All queries were to be asked when they arose and the girl was not to wait for him to notice her.

He was still to be regarded as invisible beyond this room, that was unchanged, but in here…It had taken Zaq and the Library months and one of the worst battles Zaq could remember to work out this compromise. No one was to wait on his every word and no one was to guard him. He would walk the Forbidden City as he wished and except on those days when 148 billion souls absolutely had to watch him take a bath or a new concubine or offer respect to those emperors who had gone before, he would remain Zaq.

The boy who'd made the mistake of waking up one morning and mentioning to his mother that he'd been visited in the night by a butterfly.

Such rules were simple both to make and to enforce. All Zaq had to do was reach an agreement with the Librarian and all those in the Forbidden City knew instantly what was expected of them. Some days Zaq really believed he was the only emperor ever to notice that all of those who served him, the eunuchs and concubines, serving girls and palace guards, were interchangeable manifestations of the Library itself.

Oh, he knew they were flesh all right, Zaq could vouch for that. Flesh and blood, bone and sinew. Still merely animated, though.

"Come here."

Winter Blossom On Broken Rock looked pleasingly puzzled. She was already as close to him as modesty and politeness allowed.

"There," Zaq told the girl, pointing to a spot at his feet and she did as he said.

Eyes as dark as clouds on a winter night and hair that fell in a splash across her shoulders, black onto crimson, the silver butterflies and golden blossom of her silk robe glittering in the morning light. He passed her a dozen times a day in the outer gardens, at the table, standing mute in a corridor with eyes cast down as he staggered by under the weight of dreams and loneliness.

"What's your name?"

"Broken, sir."

Zaq waited.

"Sir?"

"Your full name."

"Winter Blossom On Broken Rock, sir."

"And before that?"

Once again the girl looked puzzled. So puzzled, as she sucked her cheek and chewed prettily at her bottom lip, that Zaq almost forgot to watch her eyes for signs of the darkness.

It was there, though.

Zaq was sure of that.

"You have my bath," he said.

She nodded and began to strip, moving to a line of melody heard only in her head. When Zaq's own expression stayed blank, her fingers suddenly faltered at the fastening under her right arm as if the tune had failed.

"Aren't you joining me, sir?"

"Why would I do that?"

Because it would be fun? Because nothing else makes sense? He could almost hear the answers in his own head as the Library whispered them to the girl.

"Hurry up," he said.

All pretence of fun was gone. She removed her silk gown swiftly but clumsily, yanking an undershift over her head and almost getting trapped as her pale arms caught in its short silk sleeves. She looked, as she always looked, elegant and vulnerable.

"Now wash."

Climbing into the marble tub, she sank into the steaming water and let it close over her shoulders until only her head was exposed.

"Free your hair."

She looked at him, eyes huge. In all the time since he'd noticed her Zaq had never asked this. Everything else had been offered or taken. He'd tried to find out if Winter Blossom On Broken Rock had a life when not with him, asking her endless questions and memorising her answers to see if they remained consistent, which they did over months and even years.

In the early days of his being Chuang Tzu, Zaq had crouched in a night-soil trench, trying to discover if the trench was really used. And sure enough, no sooner had he hidden himself than half a dozen servitors came in, laughing and chatting as they pissed noisily from the long bench above.

The Library was very clever.

A week later, bored with watching the trench, he wondered aloud whether servants ever fucked and less than a day later turned a corner in a vegetable garden to find a serving girl rutting noisily with a boy from the kitchens. So intent were they on providing him with proof that neither even looked round when he stopped to watch.

"Let me," Zaq said, unwinding the ornate knot that kept her oiled tresses in place. And the girl sat in silence while he did so.

The most important job in the known galaxy was his. Tuan-Yu. Orthodox and Heaven Blessed. Dreamer of Worlds. His very existence kept alive the 2023 fragments of the unformed shell and 148 billion people who had watched him untie the hair of a serving girl.

This was the figure to which Zaq always came back. It was a hard number to imagine, and he'd tried.

There were a hundred billion stars in the spiral. In other words, for every star in the galaxy there lived at least one person who owed her or his continued existence to Zaq. At fifteen he'd demanded that the Librarian show him a hundred billion stars and kept up his demands until his request was finally met.

So many lights coalesced inside his head that it was like looking at a single star, until Zaq looked more closely and distances emerged, large beyond imagining. It was like falling into infinity, except that the moment Zaq decided this the Librarian widened its remit to include other galaxies, each one circling a black hole that ripped light into darkness.

When Zaq awoke it was three days later and his skull echoed with thoughts of foam and simultaneous states of being and absence. A week later, while walking between the smallest of the private pavilions and the gate leading to the outer garden, he decided that something really had to change.

He'd been working on making the change ever since.

CHAPTER 32

Marrakech, Summer 1977

"You know about ould Kasim…?"

Yeah, Moz knew. Idries had told him already. The old Corporal had been beyond angry when Malika finally got back to the Mellah, after helping deliver the parcel for Hassan's uncle.

Moz should have stayed around but Malika had insisted on making her own way back. At the time she'd seemed more furious about Moz changing his mind and agreeing to take Hassan's job than she did about him being the first boy to get into her pants.

Now Moz wasn't so sure. "You know where she is?"

"Haven't seen her."

"Really?"

"That's what I said." Hassan seemed anxious to be rid of him.

"Okay," said Moz.

The other boy shook his head as Moz wandered away, a Perrier bottle in one hand, his other deep in the pocket of khaki trousers ripped at the knees. Whoever had made them had sewn chain between the ankles, so that Moz looked like a hobbled camel.

That was fashion, apparently.

Hassan's own suit was Italian wool with a thin chalk stripe and five-button cuffs, double stitching on the lapel and on all of the button-holes, even those on the five-button sleeve. A tailor at Hotel Mamounia had made it to a pattern Hassan had seen in a magazine.

This, a present from his uncle, was fashion.

Also, in part, a disguise.

Malika was missing. Nothing else would have dragged Moz from Riad al-Razor back to Café Georgiou, the tourist café in Gueliz that Hassan would one day inherit from his uncle.

It was an irony not lost on Hassan that Moz, who wanted more than anyone he'd ever met to be nasrani, avoided Gueliz because this was where Hassan now spent most of his time.

"Me?" Moz halted outside the dog woman's house, taking in Corporal ould Kasim on his rickety stool surrounded by a sea of abandoned tabloids, a tray of pastries now reduced to a few sticky crumbs and a half-full tea glass which the midday heat was keeping blood hot.

"Of course, you. Who do you think I'm talking to?"

Raw anger was the only emotion Corporal ould Kasim ever expressed, all others, even cold hatred and icy contempt, seemed beyond him. As if his time in the French police had somehow scrubbed all subtlety from the palate of his emotions. An old-fashioned army truck forever stuck in first gear was how Moz's mother once described the man, in a voice so sad it spoke of broken hopes that a higher gear might exist, just waiting for her to find it.

"Yourself, I imagine…" said Moz. "I can't think of anyone else who'd be interested in what you've got to say."

"I need to talk to you."

"So?"

Sidi ould Kasim scowled. "Come here," he ordered, waiting for the boy to amble over. It didn't help the Corporal's temper that he was gathering an audience, beginning with the two hajj who lived next to the dog woman's old house. Cousins, they were forever squatting in their doorway playing backgammon. Their wives would also be watching, from behind wooden shutters that blinded two tiny first-floor windows.

In the Mellah one only had to sneeze and an old woman five streets away would immediately want to know what the doctor had said. The wives watched from behind closed shutters because houses in the Mellah were either too poor or too Jewish to have mas-rabiyas, those ornately screened balconies found across most of North Africa.

Jewish houses had windows at the front and shutters instead.

"Where's Malika gone?" The old man's voice carried a brook-no-argument, watch-yourself kind of tone.

"I don't know," said Moz, gulping from the Perrier bottle he still held in one hand. "Why don't you tell me?" The mineral water came from Celia's supplies at Riad al-Razor, obviously enough. He'd taken it along with some speed when he woke to find the morning he'd been planning to spend at the riad unravelling around him. Celia and Jake were locked into some argument and neither had seemed particularly pleased to see him.

Sweeping one hand through his spiky hair, Moz let his shades follow the old man's gaze towards the backgammon players.

"Do they know what you did to her?"

She'd left the house early on Saturday. The bread had not been made since, the floors went unswept and litter had begun to build up in layers around the old man's wooden stool. A random circle of dirty tea glasses stood going sticky and dust-encrusted in the heat.

"I did nothing." Ould Kasim's voice was contemptuous. "You're the problem. You and those friends of yours."

"Maybe you did more than just beat her…Is that what happened?"

"Watch your mouth."

"Maybe you buried her in the cellar."

"I'm warning you," said the Corporal.

"You're warning me?" Moz said. He looked the soldier up and down with all the disgust he could manage. "Maybe you should be the one worrying about the police. You pervert--"

Sidi ould Kasim stood.

It was meant to be frightening. A threat. Don't make me stand up. Don't make me come over there. Why do you bring these things on yourself? Moz and Malika knew the litany by heart. And no doubt Malika's mother had known it before that, when she was still alive. It went with the unbuckling of his belt, the clenching of a fist, the twist of one shoulder, signals of what was to come.

Moz could almost taste his own fear. A miasma made from old memories and reactions that clung to his body like steam from a hamman. All the same Moz managed to make his shrug dismissive, he was proud of that.

And if he got hurt. So what?

A single graze on Malika's arm had always hurt him more than the darkest bruise on his own body. They were tied, connected in ways neither of them wanted to talk about. Sometimes, when Malika glanced at him, Moz could see that knowledge written in her eyes.

Their names began with the same letter, they lived in the same house, in rooms exactly above and below each other, they were born in the same month, a year and a day apart, both had parents who were dead, his mother had been nasrani and so, Malika insisted, had her real father.

And then there was ould Kasim.

They both hated the man and had talked about running away when they were small. As they got older, it became not running away but escaping to find a new life…He'd let her down. All that stuff with Celia. His hands inside Malika's knickers on the roof.

Finding Malika had become the only thing that mattered. Because Moz knew, as well as he knew his own smell, that Malika would not have run away without him.

"Where are you going?" The voice was a shout behind him. One that Moz chose to ignore.

"Don't you dare walk away from me!"

The sensible thing to do would have been to keep walking. Instead, Moz turned and began to walk back, throwing up one arm to meet the belt as he had a hundred times before.

Only this time Moz stepped into the blow, more or less by accident, and the buckle which came whistling down wrapped the leather around his wrist. So Moz grabbed the strap below the buckle and yanked, almost pulling ould Kasim from his feet.

Cardamom, cheap brandy and a lifetime's bitterness, Moz could smell them all on the old man's rancid breath. Now was the moment Moz had waited for, the one where he ripped the belt from Sidi ould Kasim's hands and turned it on its owner, beating Malika's persecutor to his knees.

Malika and Moz had dreamed about this endlessly, in between making plans to run away, poison the old man with bad meat or wrap his drunken body in a sheet and drop it down a well behind La Koutoubia.

"Let go," Corporal ould Kasim ordered.

"Make me."

The backgammon players were on their feet now and the oldest of the wives had come to the door, bringing with her the smell of cheap rose-water and lamb tagine.

Stepping back, Moz yanked hard on his end of the belt, watching the old man stagger, then dig in his heels and yank back.

Moz grinned.

It was this more than anything else that stoked the old man's fury. Bringing up one knee, the soldier aimed for Moz's groin and when that failed he stamped the edge of his boot down the front of the boy's shin. Only Moz's foot was no longer there.

"Missed," said Moz. A very childish thing to say, but he didn't care.

The Corporal, the man who claimed he could reduce hardened prisoners to whimpering obedience with a single pebble and a short length of string, could no longer even knee someone properly. Moz wanted the group standing opposite to understand that.

"You know," Moz said loudly, "I haven't got time for this." Stepping back, he yanked viciously on his bit of the belt and watched the old man stumble, going down on one knee in the dust.

"See you," Moz said, dropping the belt.

And there it might have ended if only Sidi ould Kasim had let Moz leave. But as the boy turned away, already readjusting his shades and sweeping one hand through his hair, the Corporal regained his feet.

"No you don't," he said, swinging the belt harder than ever. The heavy buckle of the belt hit Moz's shoulder, bruising flesh as its metal tang pierced his shirt and lodged in his skin below the collarbone.

Odd, thought Moz.

Without further thought, he pulled the buckle from his chest, watching the underlying flesh pucker beneath cloth as the tang pulled free. The next thing he did was turn round and smash his Perrier bottle hard into the side of Sidi ould Kasim's head.

Two days after this, Major Abbas pulled Moz off the corner of Boulevard Mohammed V. The Major did this by the simple expedient of pulling up next to the teenager in a grande taxi, pushing open a door and ordering Moz to climb inside.

The boy would no sooner have refused than try to make a run for it, both of which were known to be very dangerous options where the Marrakchi police were concerned.

"Leave it," Major Abbas snapped, when Moz leant forward to wind down one window. There was something in the way he said this that scared the boy.

"You seen Malika recently?"

Moz shook his head.

"Anyone looking for her?"

"No." She was a foreigner's brat, Corporal ould Kasim's responsibility. No men from Derb Yassin were out searching through the narrow alleys of the Mellah, fired up on rumours and outrage. She wasn't worth the effort.

"You're Marzaq?" The new voice was sharp, like broken glass and edged with an accent which was new to the boy.

Moz nodded. Anything else would have been pointless.

The elderly nasrani who sat in the back of the grande taxi had improbably black hair and tortoiseshell shades which reflected Moz back on himself. A skinny punk in a torn Ramones T-shirt, his hair cut with kitchen scissors and held erect by a mix of sugar water and Vaseline.

"He doesn't look like an Arab."

The stress the old man placed on this last word was both ugly and contemptuous. On the other hand, he was speaking fluent Arabic, which was impressive in itself.

"Half Turkish," said the Major. "Quarter English, quarter German."

"Merde," said Claude de Greuze, one-time advisor to the old Pasha and still on retainer from Paris. "What a fucking mix." A mirrored gaze slid over Moz's thin face and the boy shifted uneasily in his seat. "Maybe he's got something to be worried about…"

"No. The plastic's hot, that's all." Patting the cracked red vinyl, Moz mimicked snatching his fingers away. "Much too hot."

"You speak French."

"Yeah," said Moz, "and Arabic. You want a guide to the souk I'm the best. I can show you around all the best places. Get you good prices."

Slowly, very casually, Claude de Greuze produced a Browning from the inside of his jacket, pulled back the slide and put the muzzle against the side of Moz's head.

It felt warm.

"You think this is a joke?"

Moz stared back. Not defiant, just puzzled. He was good at doing puzzled. "No," he said finally, when the seconds had stretched too thin. "I don't think this is a joke at all. I was just offering to help."

There followed a rapid-fire discussion between Major Abbas and the stranger, which switched between languages almost every other sentence. This was the first time Moz realized the Major had been learning English and now spoke it better than he did.

Moz understood about a quarter of what was said and this was a quarter more than the Frenchman intended him to understand as the words "Malika," "necessity" and "school" tumbled between the two men.

"If you say so," said the stranger, lowering his gun. He glanced again at Moz. "Maybe I'll take him up on that offer," he said to Major Abbas. "Let him show me round the souk." Claude de Greuze's smile revealed a whole mouthful of nicotine-stained teeth. "He could show me some of his favourite cafés, while he's at it. He'd do that for me, wouldn't he?"

Moz thought about those words on his walk back to Riad al-Razor. Not so much what the Frenchman said as the way he said it. And Moz thought about the man's smell. Garlic, tobacco, sweat and ginger were common in a city where water was rare and most washing was ritual, at least for the people he knew.

The foreigner's smell was different. A sour reek which so completely filled the grande taxi that it was a wonder someone as fastidious as Major Abbas could stand it. That was when Moz realized something which was to change the way he looked at the world.

Major Abbas, the most feared police officer in the whole of the Medina, had no choice but to sit with the windows shut, while trying to breathe through his mouth because, for reasons Moz could barely comprehend, he could not afford to offend the old Frenchman.

It was a terrifying thought.

CHAPTER 34

Northern Mountains, CTzu 53/Year 20

"We're going to crash."

Tris nodded.

"Just so you know." The yacht spoke in simple sentences. Somewhere between untethering and plotting its run to the Emperor's palace on Rapture, the yacht had decided that Tris was a child. Since then, communication had been limited to easily understood phrases and short words.

"The decoy's gone?"

"Well," said the yacht. "If you mean has my spare fuel cell been dumped, then yes. That was the pretty flashes you saw burning up about five minutes ago."

There'd be a toggle somewhere for switching off the character overlay that came bundled with the ship's AI but finding it meant digging though several layers of software and Tris simply didn't have time.

She didn't even have time to admire her appearance in a strategically placed mirror, and there were a lot of strategically placed mirrors aboard All Tomorrow's Parties. Not to mention a clothing unit more complex than any she'd ever seen. So now Tris wore a freshly applied second skin of black latex, half hidden beneath an oversized black leather jacket which read "Empty" across the back in neon.

Tris was pretty sure the latex wasn't what she'd asked for, but it looked good in a flashy rich-kid kind of way and it would do until she found a way to originate something more practical.

"How long to landing?"

"Crashing," corrected the computer. "How long until crashing."

"But we might touch down safely. You said so."

"You're going to touch down safely," said the computer. "I'm going to crash."

Tris looked at the curved wall in front of her, which showed exactly what she would have seen if the hull were made of glass, except then she'd have burnt up or got irradiated or something.

She'd asked the yacht about this earlier but the thing had been very cagey about side effects. After listening to the yacht prevaricate for a while, Tris realized it simply didn't want to frighten her.

"Define crash," Tris demanded.

"One: verb transitive. To smash violently or noisily. To damage on landing. To enter without paying. To suffer unpleasant side effects following drug use.

"Two: noun. A loud noise. A breaking into pieces--"

"No," said Tris. "What does crash mean to you?"

Outside, heat radiated from the hull as All Tomorrow's Parties plunged through Rapture's lower atmosphere like a clumsily thrown stone. The landing gear was already burned out, largely because Tris had insisted on it being lowered early. So now they had to find a way to make a soft landing.

The yacht seemed to hesitate before answering, although it was probably just putting its thoughts into a form simple enough for Tris to understand. (It had a very low opinion of her intelligence, something Tris put down to her refusal to listen when it suggested that double-crossing Doc Joyce was a bad idea.)

"Come on," insisted Tris. "Tell me. What does crashing mean to you?"

"Not being able to take off again."

"So why can't you take off?"

"Because," said the AI, sounding genuinely cross, "even if I had landing gear, you've just dumped my return Casimir coil. Remember?"

Tris did. It made a really good display.

The yacht could read facial expressions, both complex and simple. For example, it could differentiate between disapproving and puzzled, Tris having been disapproving of the luxury she found aboard All Tomorrow's Parties and puzzled as to why anyone would fit out the inside of a racing yacht in chrome, fish tanks and black leather.

Apparently its owner was anally retentive. And a request for an expanded definition led her into areas Tris really didn't want to go.

"What are you?" she asked the ship.

"A C-class Niponshi yacht, registered to XGen Enterprises. Licensed to race anywhere within the 2023 worlds."

"No," said Tris. "What are you?"

"A C-class Niponshi yacht, registered to--"

"That's not what I asked," Tris said. "What are you?"

"Me?"

"That's what I said." She jacked the slide on a weapon Doc Joyce had lent her and pointed it at the control panel. They both knew she wouldn't fire. It was one thing to threaten to fry the yacht's circuits when it was tethered off the Chinese Rocks and quite another to shoot it up from inside while it was falling towards one of the 2023 worlds. Tris wasn't running some passive-aggressive adolescent suicide routine, the ship had already established this.

"You mean what form does my core take? My thinking bit," the yacht added, in case Tris found the technical term too difficult. "That's what you mean, isn't it?"

"Yes," said Tris, through gritted teeth. "That's exactly what I mean."

"I'm crystal," said the computer. "Some Class Cs still use bio-cores but mostly we've upgraded. Somehow even the highest quality organic matter always seems to degrade in the end. Crystal is--"

"I know about crystal," Tris said flatly. "I used to deal it when I was a kid."

"That's--"

"Technically illegal," agreed Tris. "Quite probably. But not where I come from."

"And where do you come from?"

Tris opened her mouth to answer and then shut it again. For all she knew this conversation was being recorded so the yacht could make a formal complaint after this was all over.

"You wouldn't," said Tris. "Would you?"

"Wouldn't what?" asked the ship.

"Make a complaint about being stolen."

"Oh," the ship said bitterly, "I'm not allowed--" And then it stopped, hurriedly swallowing the rest of its sentence.

"You're only semi," said Tris, suddenly understanding everything. "Not full at all."

"I might as well be," the yacht said, "given what I'm expected to do. There are fullAIs out there who can't do half--"

"So why are you still registered as semiAI?"

"Because he races," said the yacht. "And if I was fullAI then he couldn't enter for rough-class races, could he? And that's where the glory lies."

Tris couldn't see what glory there could be in hacking between worlds when everyone rich enough to race was more than rich enough to have themselves backed up before they started. Although "rich" was a negotiable term when it came to the 2023 worlds.

Every inhabitant was entitled to what they needed. It was just that a few always seemed to need more than others and so acquiring extra became a matter of convincing the Library that one really did need whatever it was one needed. The Library's decisions, however, were often counter-intuitive and according to Doc Joyce this crankiness was intentional, being designed to give people something to circumnavigate.

Sand in the oyster, he called it. Translated, this meant too much of everything created its own problems. So everyone got more than enough and then had to decide if this was too little. It sounded incredibly stupid to Tris but then Razor's Edge wasn't one of the 2023 worlds.

"Okay," said Tris, looking at a chrome and glass table in front of her, its top rather thicker than it needed to be. "This is how it's going to work." She ran her hand along one of the edges, looking for some catch that might release the panel, and realized she was showing her ignorance.

"Open," she told the glass and it did just that, raising like the lid of a box.

The table had fooled her at first, when she was busy persuading All Tomorrow's Parties that yes, it really did want to let her steal it. The top wasn't transparent at all, merely laminated with chameleon glass that reflected whatever it saw on the opposite side.

"You know, Tristesse," said the yacht, "I don't think this is a good idea."

The girl's shrug barely registered inside the leather jacket she'd found in a crew pod, its pockets stuffed with narcotics guaranteed to leave you looking happy and healthy, which seemed pretty skewed to Tris. If you took something that fucked your brain and then refused to walk you home afterwards, you wanted to look like you just took something that…

And if this item of clothing really had been grown to fit then Tris definitely didn't want to meet whoever owed Doc Joyce whatever it was they owed Doc Joyce. Come to that, Tris didn't much want to meet Doc Joyce again either.

"Everything's the wrong size," she told the yacht, and Tris was right. The overhead lockers were out of reach and the sloping chrome and leather chair next to the control table could have been a double bed. Even the tank of fish at her back stretched to twice Tris's height and contained three purple catfish at least as big as she was, with eyes which followed her every move.

She was beginning to realize that there might be another reason why the yacht kept treating her as a child.

"So what's going to happen to them?" Tris asked, nodding towards the wall of fish tanks. "I mean when we crash."

If the yacht could have shrugged it would have done so. Tris could tell from the lag it left between her question and its answer.

"They'll die," it said.

"Land in a lake."

"What?"

"Find a lake," Tris said. "Then land in it. Which bit of that don't you understand?"

"If I land in a lake," said the yacht, "then I'm going to die."

"You're not alive. You told me so yourself. A C-class semi. Do semiAIs qualify as sentient? I don't think so." She stuck her head further inside the newly opened table and followed what looked like a rainbow twisting together towards a blue light.

"What happens if I touch this?"

"We crash a little earlier than intended," said the yacht icily. And then it said nothing for a very long time until:

"Lake," said the ship.

Rocky cliffs rising on both sides and barren peaks, now higher than the ship, shrouded in mist and fringed with ice. Under them hung a fat nebula of cloud, mountainous with snow.

"Where?"

"Beneath that."

A strip of silver opened up and came closer as the yacht adjusted its vision to encompass sleet hammering into the water's surface and flattened waves sucking sullenly at a bank of fallen rock.

"Looks like a river to me." She'd never seen a river, of course. Come to that, she'd never seen a lake. The nearest RipJointShuts had to either was a storm drain that cut through the level like some ancient moat, too wide to jump and, according to Doc Joyce, so deep that no one had touched the bottom and come back to boast about it. But it was still a drain.

"River, lake…it's all soft," said the yacht.

"Well," said Tris as she traced the rainbow towards its end and found herself staring at a small sphere about the size of a marble. "That's probably true enough. Put us down when you can."

The yacht was silent.

"What?" demanded Tris.

"I should have arrested you," said the yacht.

"You can't," Tris said. "You haven't got the rights." She knew all about not having the rights. Doc Joyce lacked the rights to get relocated to a better level on Heliconid, which lacked the rights to be included as one of the 2023 worlds. By declaring Heliconid unfit for habitation the first Council of Ambassadors had guaranteed that those inhabiting it were assumed to have chosen their own wretched way of life.

"Put us down," Tris ordered.

"There is no us," said the yacht, but it dipped through the cloud all the same and settled into a holding pattern. If Tris hadn't known better she'd have sworn that its semiAI was plucking up courage. The first run took the yacht low over a wide strip of water and then the yacht went into a Möbius roll to skim the side of gorge, ending up exactly where it had started, staring down at the silver strip.

"You're good," Tris said, not really thinking about what she was saying.

"Of course I'm good," said the yacht. "Have you any idea how much I cost?" It turned out to be several thousand hours more than Tris could even imagine. A handful of her possessions could be counted in minutes but most, like her knife and the clothes she usually wore, were worth little more than a few seconds.

"What's that in days?" Tris demanded. So the yacht told her and that didn't make Tris feel any better either.

"Going in," said the yacht.

It skimmed low over the water and touched once or twice, letting the counter current towards the middle break its speed. Only, in the time this took, Tris got her head and shoulders right inside the table and found the lock protecting the yacht's memory.

"Okay," the yacht said, "entrance/exit to open. When I say ‘get out' then g--"

Tris yanked.

And in the silence which followed she realized her heart had stopped. All Tris could feel was a band of ice beneath her breasts that threatened to prevent her from ever being able to breathe again. A power surge shocking her limbs into absurdly rigid positions, which was probably just as well, otherwise she'd have been dancing puppet-like with panic.

Freeing one arm, Tris hit herself hard in the chest and felt her heart start again. Removing the yacht's memory had been a good idea, getting herself electrocuted in the process…

"Shit," said Tris. She waited for the yacht to say something in return and then realized how absurd that was, given that she gripped its consciousness in her fingers like her life depended on it.

"Okay," said Tris. "So you're on your own. You should be used to it."

Shattering the fish tank by blasting off one corner using Doc Joyce's handgun, Tris watched as one after another of the catfish flooded out of the glass wall and into the water now lapping around her knees. And one after another the catfish stopped swimming, became rigid, convulsed and died.

She'd got it wrong again. She should have tried a side wall first. Something stocked with smaller fish. Frantically Tris tried to scoop up the last of the big beasts but there was nowhere to put it and the fish slipped out of her hands before she had time to work out what to do next, going rigid even as she was reaching for it.

Salt water had mixed with the fresh and cold with the warm. There were no catfish left to help. So when Tris realized that the exit had jammed less than halfway open and the gap was too narrow to let her fight through the incoming water, she almost didn't bother to save herself.

All the same, bulkhead lights still shone with an amber glow that endless members of a Chinese crew had once come to associate with being ripped open and left to drift towards the tectonic plates of a distant darkness. And that glow also meant the yacht's emergency systems might still be operable.

Rejecting the idea of trying to squeeze through anyway, Tris did something far more sensible; she jammed the blue marble back into position inside the table, flinching in anticipation of an electric shock that didn't happen.

"…‘get out'," finished the yacht, then it swore. "No," it said, "forget it. We can deal with you being an idiot later." The sliding door, which had begun to open, hesitated and then hissed back on itself, locking tight. Lights came up and the table Tris had left open ran a series of rapid lights, ending in the squawk of a klaxon that shut off as soon as it began.

"Okay," said the yacht. "This is the way it's going to work. I'm going to open that entrance/exit completely this time. And you're going to do nothing until I tell you. What are we going to do?"

Beyond the hull a rock ground itself along the side of the yacht and as the cabin lurched water slopped across the floor in a low wave.

"You're going to open the door," Tris said through gritted teeth, "and I'm going to do nothing."

"Good," said the yacht. "Now once the door is open, you reach inside the table and take the memory. Only this time I'll shut down first. Understand? You don't touch anything until the pretty lights disappear. Otherwise you'll get hurt."

"I'm not a child," said Tris crossly.

The yacht considered this for all of half a second. "Yes, you are." Its voice was matter-of-fact. "At least, you are according to any definition I've got on file. Now you wait," it stressed, "until the entrance/exit is completely open, then you get out fast and let yourself drift downriver, don't try to swim for the bank."

"Why not?" Tris asked, but the door was opening and the lights had dimmed. An inrush of water was her only answer. Grabbing the memory, Tris began wading towards the door only to discover that every forward step she took swept her three steps back again. "Think," she told herself.

Tristesse al-Heliconid was in her mid to late teens, small for her age and less grown-up than she imagined. She wore her hair cropped short and her breasts small, her hips were naturally narrow. On some worlds girls of her age already had children and on others they'd barely begun their education.

She was unmarried and no one, absolutely no one, had ever tried to make her learn anything; but she had a brain, guts, synthetic sinews and her own reason for being there.

In the end, Tris decided her only hope was to wait until the river stopped rushing in and the water level inside and outside equalized, so that was what she did. And maybe she should have used those long seconds to look for useful tools or find a dagger, but something else had occurred to her.

Digging around inside the table, Tris identified where the marble had been and felt with her fingers, shrinking back when something wet and bristling brushed against her skin.

"Oh, fuck it." Grabbing the marble from her pocket, Tris gave the thing to the tendrils, feeling them suck the marble from her grip. The AI wasn't nearly as non-bio as it claimed.

"Well, am I glad to be--" Whatever All Tomorrow's Parties had been about to say stuttered to a halt. Lights came on all across the cabin and half of them promptly blew, mostly the half which happened to be underwater.

"Good," Tris said, "you're--"

"Fucked," said the yacht. "Unless you unplug me now."

"I need you to work." Tris tried to sound commanding, only her voice came out small and rather uncertain. "I can't do this on my own."

"You should have thought about that," said the yacht, "before you stole me."

"But once I stole you," Tris said, "I wasn't on my own, was I? Because then I was with you." She thought about it. "Anyway," she said, "don't semiAIs have rules about having to protect the sentient?"

"That's household appliances," said the yacht, "and it's ‘not harm' rather than protect. There's a difference."

The water was up to Tris's hips now, pulling at the bottom of her stolen leather jacket. She could feel the cold eating at her legs and dissolving all feeling below her waist. And the yacht was beginning to lean. Last time Tris had checked the cabin was level, ripped by currents and still filling with water but definitely level.

Now it slanted, with one side wall almost underwater and the other, the one with the door, almost clear. Only waves kept spilling in over the sill as the yacht began to settle.

"I'm going to die," said Tris. Mostly she was trying the idea for size, wondering if it was one she could accept.

"So?" said the yacht. "You should have played it differently. Besides, I'm the one who's really going to die. You're just going to revert to a previous back-up. What will you have lost, twenty-four hours? Forty-eight, if you're really careless."

"You don't get it," said Tris. "I don't have back-up." She thought it through, facing the conclusion. "When I die," she said, "I die."

She could almost hear the yacht's surprise. Well, the surprise of its AI, which was actually a blue marble matched to an axion-rich anemone. It wasn't quite sound and it wasn't really silence, more like a stumble in her head.

"You die if you get wet?" she asked the marble.

Her question amused it and the answer was no. It died if it got left behind, removed from a source of power and never found again. "Worry about yourself," suggested the yacht. "Why did you wake me?"

"I wanted to know where I am," she said.

"Where you wanted to be," the yacht said. "You're on Rapture."

"I know that," said Tris. "Where on Rapture?"

"In a river."

Tris sighed. "I'm going to take you out again," she said, "so you probably need to turn off the rainbow."

"Rainbow?"

"Those colours," said Tris. "The ones wrapped around you."

"You can see them?"

"Of course I can," Tris said. "If I couldn't see them I couldn't tell you they were there, could I?"

"Such a child," said the AI. "So empirical."

"Whatever. You want to tell me which river?"

"This one," said the yacht, and before Tris could kick the table, a ghost landscape hung in the air before her. It was topologically accurate, impressive and detailed in the extreme but it was skew to the lapping water and not at all what Tris wanted.

"Just tell me."

"Here," said the AI. "You're here." A tiny blue thread on the face of the ghost world lit red. At the same time, the world tilted slightly until it was out of true with the wall of the cabin but level over the water.

"And the Forbidden City?"

A different sector lit gold, and even without knowing the scale Tris could see that they were a long way apart.

"I'm taking you out now," said Tris, reaching for the memory. "And I'll carry you with me."

The AI was about to say something but Tris yanked first and the rainbow shut down, tendrils brushing her fingers as they released the marble. All Tris felt was the briefest jolt of electricity and then she was alone again.

CHAPTER 35

Marrakech, Summer 1977

"Come here."

Moz almost asked, Why? But acting the fool around Major Abbas was not clever so instead he smiled, nodded to Hassan and sauntered towards the grande taxi that had drawn up on the other side of the railings.

A rolling, I'm-not-worried kind of walk.

It fooled neither of them.

"Excellency?"

The police officer didn't return his smile and when Moz saw the Frenchman in the back of the taxi he understood why.

"I need some information," said Major Abbas.

Moz nodded. "As Your Excellency wishes."

"Don't question him here," said the Frenchman. "Get him inside." Claude de Greuze's voice was brusque, slightly impatient until he glanced at Moz and then it went hard and cold. "Tell him to take a good look," he told the Major, indicating La Koutoubia and the overgrown gardens where Hassan and Moz had agreed to meet. "This is probably the last he'll see of it or his friends."

Without meaning to, Moz glanced across to where Hassan and Idries leant against a concrete bench in the shade of a palm, one broken frond hanging limp and pale like a lock of badly bleached hair. At their back were the ragged remains of an earlier mosque, which had been destroyed when an imam discovered the prayer hall was not truly aligned with Mecca.

Or so Moz had always believed. Only Celia's Michelin Guide to Morocco told a different story. It said the original mosque had been built by one ruling family and its replacement by another. The imam had merely said what expediency required.

"Is he listening?"

The answer was obvious.

Pushing open the passenger door, Major Abbas patted the seat beside him. "Get in," he said. The Major wore a cheap suit with the cap of a taxi driver and looked more uncomfortable in this than Moz had ever seen him look in full uniform.

Moz did what he was told.

They drove in silence, turning north onto Mohammed V. And though the sun hammered down onto the taxi's blue roof, Major Abbas kept the windows stubbornly shut, as if ignoring the rank corruption coming from the old man's body counted as some kind of courage.

"Where are we going?"

Moz meant his question for the Major but it was Claude de Greuze who answered and his answer was that the little Arab shit should shut the fuck up because he was in more trouble than anyone could imagine. Something Moz had begun to work out for himself.

"Turn here," demanded Claude de Greuze and Major Abbas glanced with surprise at the driver's mirror.

"Where did you think we were taking him?"

Their destination was a large if nondescript colonial villa on the corner of Rue Bernard and Avenue Foche. Stucco crumbled from underlying red brick and one of the pantiles lay broken between dead roses on a flowerbed that had dried to the consistency of rock. A peeling board read ECOLE PRIVÉE.

The only new thing about the old school was a rusting steel door that looked out of place between fat white pillars. If Moz hadn't known better he'd have said the place was deserted.

"Tell him to get out," said Claude de Greuze.

"Do what he says," Major Abbas ordered, leaning over Moz to push open the side door. "Don't keep the man waiting."

There were a dozen things about that moment which Moz was to remember in the months and years to come. And though sometimes he managed to forget the school altogether, he would never again hear gears grinding at an intersection without his footsteps faltering and his soul shrivelling a little inside.

Roses would bring him out in tears. The sound of any small child being dragged along the pavement by a scolding adult knotted his stomach until it hurt. Sun on his shoulders and the raw tang of fresh dog shit, the afternoon cry of the muezzin, all worked their way inside his memory like splinters of glass. But what Moz really remembered was warm piss running down his leg when he was hit.

The covering of his face with his hands was entirely instinctive, as was curling into a tight ball, and it probably helped that he'd been facing away when the old Frenchman slammed a cosh into his skull.

"Pick him up," said Claude de Greuze and Major Abbas lifted Moz from behind.

"Now turn him round." The spring-loaded cosh slapped between the boy's legs, hard and fast. "Come on." The Frenchman's voice was impatient. "Get him up again."

"Stand," said the Major, sounding almost sad.

Moz tried. He really did.

Glitter off gravel, so many lights that Moz forgot what he was meant to be doing. A foot caught him between his buttocks and its owner started demanding answers about Malika, only it was hard to hear what the Frenchman was saying over the sound of Moz's own gasping and the numbing waves of darkness.

"We should get him inside."

"Why?"

"Because," said the Major, "someone might see."

Claude de Greuze nodded scornfully at the colonial villas on either side. One had either been turned into flats or was divided between generations of the same family, sheets drying from wires strung across three huge balconies. The other had boarded-up windows and looked abandoned.

"What are they going to do?" demanded de Greuze. "Call the police?"

"All the same," Major Abbas said. "There's no point creating trouble." Wiping blood from Moz's jaw, he lifted the boy from where he lay curled on the gravel and carried him up three steps and in through the metal door.

It was dark inside the school, with shuttered windows. A single unlit bulb hung from a small ceiling rose in the middle of the hall and the floor was covered with dark linoleum. There were five doors and all were closed.

"Okay," said Major Abbas. "Now you must stand." He tipped Moz onto his feet and steadied his shoulders for a few seconds. When he let go the boy swayed but remained upright, staring mutely around him.

Sounds came from behind most doors.

"Take him to three."

"No." Major Abbas shook his head. "Not yet. It's not necessary."

Claude de Greuze just looked at him.

"It…is…not…necessary," the Major said, stressing every syllable. For the first time, Moz heard quiet anger in his voice.

"Do you want to tell me why? Or should I call the General?"

Moz had no idea who the General might be but that didn't matter. There was always a general or a pasha, someone who made decisions.

"Call him," said Major Abbas. "Tell him you want to question one of my best informers. Someone I've spent five years developing." There was heavy emphasis on the word "question" and the Major's voice sounded more furious than ever.

"Is that true?" It was the first time the one-time advisor to the Pasha had spoken directly to the boy. "Well?"

Moz shrugged.

He'd told Major Abbas some stuff, repeated a few rumours and occasionally followed some foreigner to see where he went. That was it really, not what Moz thought of as being an informer. Informers were sinister figures. Shadows of the men Malika talked about, the Pasha's eyes and ears back in the days when Thami el Glaoui ruled the Red City.

"You don't know?" The Frenchman sounded incredulous.

"He knows nothing," said Major Abbas. "I've told you that already. Are you going to make that call or not?"

Moz was surprised that the Major kept pushing de Greuze but something had changed between the two men, and it wasn't that Major Abbas felt more at home in this strange place because he looked almost as uncomfortable as Moz felt.

It was something else. A challenge of some sort.

The two men stared at each other, both ignoring the boy who stood sticky with blood that showed only as glossy camouflage against the red lettering and black cotton background of his Ramones T-shirt.

"Okay," de Greuze said finally. "We'll do it your way."

"Yeah," said Major Abbas. "We will. Give me an hour."

CHAPTER 36

Lampedusa, Saturday 7 July

The file Petra Mayer put down in front of Katie Petrov was tattered along the edges and had a coffee stain prominently over one corner, but what Katie really noticed was the slew of Arabic running right to left across the top and the French translation underneath.

"You need to see this."

In case Katie couldn't read the French someone had thoughtfully provided a translation and paper-clipped it to the top of the file.

MARRAKECH POLICE--HOMICIDE DIVISION.

They'd also provided a translation for every one of the pages inside, although Katie Petrov didn't need a translation to recognize most of the names. Marzaq al-Turq, Jake Razor, Malika bint Kasim…

The shot of Jake showed a man in his early twenties snarling at the photographer. Something about its studied defiance suggested the three-by-four originated with his record company. Moz's shot was very different, a diminished imitation that had the boy staring into the lens of a police camera, one of his lips badly swollen and a long gash taped shut in his hairline.

It was the third photograph that made Katie Petrov jerk forward and wrap her arms around her stomach.

"Fuck."

She fought briefly against the bile that rose in her throat and then gave up the fight, running from her office.

Professor Mayer smoked a cigarette while waiting for the younger woman to return and then smoked another. And when she finally reached for the photograph of Malika it was to turn it face down on Dr. Petrov's desk.

"This is for you," she said after Katie reappeared in the doorway, wiping the back of her mouth with one hand. "You may want to read it now."

The letter was short and polite. It thanked Katie Petrov for agreeing to be a court-appointed psychiatrist, assured her that her fee would be paid in full and told her that her services were no longer required. It was signed by the White House official who had appointed her in the first place.

"What did I do wrong?"

"Nothing," Petra Mayer assured her. "You did everything exactly as it was meant to be done. Your notes are a model of professionalism."

"But I haven't even submitted my report."

"They know that." Professor Mayer shook another cigarette from its packet, sat back in her chair and smiled. It was a particularly grim smile. The kind that glared from the back of her more recent books and suggested she knew her readers wouldn't understand the contents but they should damn well try. "What would it have said?"

"I'm not sure I can tell you," Katie Petrov said.

The Professor shook her head. "Don't sulk," she warned, "it doesn't suit you."

"I'm not," said Katie Petrov, obviously feeling about twelve. "I'm just not sure."

They were both in part engaged in displacement activity. Professor Mayer knew this and she imagined that Katie knew it as well. Neither one of them had so much as glanced at the down-turned photograph since Katie walked back into the hot little room she'd been given as an office.

"Give me your thoughts," Petra Mayer suggested.

"This is unattributable?"

The Professor smiled. "How old are you?"

"Twenty-seven."

"So young," said Professor Mayer, "and they've already got you speaking the language. Yes," she said, "this is unattributable. So tell me exactly what you think."

She watched Katie Petrov run through the main points in her head, and when Katie seemed sure she had them in the right order and wasn't about to make a fool of herself, Professor Mayer listened to Katie count them off aloud, waiting for interruptions that never came.

"So you think he's sane?"

"Speaking clinically? Not a chance. At least not in any sense I understand. As the Pentagon's man pointed out, the autistic silences, the self-cutting, the obsessive nakedness and coprophilia can all be faked, but I still think he's the real thing."

"And legally?"

"More tricky," said Katie. "Did Prisoner Zero know the nature and quality of his actions? Difficult to say. And I have to be certain he was incapable of knowing the difference between right and wrong. Not as he is now or was when that journalist met him in Paris, but in Marrakech, that afternoon, when he loaded the gun, pointed it at the President and pulled the trigger."

"Tough call."

Katie Petrov leant back, nodded. "Near impossible," she said, "why else do you think it's taken me so long not to reach a conclusion?"

Petra Mayer smiled. "Off the record," she said, "which way were you leaning?"

"Legally, I think he was sane," said Katie Petrov. "Strictly off the record."

"Yeah, that's what I thought…" The older woman flipped open her packet of cigarettes, extracted the last and lit it with the stub of the one that had gone before. She had jet lag to make the vanished irritations of PMS feel like a minor cold and was in a space where she was surviving on will power and nicotine alone. The first mouthful of food or sip of alcohol would slam her into oblivion.

Petra Mayer knew her body. It was one of the things most men found frightening about her. "Are you okay to go through the rest of the file?"

"I'm off the case," Katie said, "why would I want to do that?" It was a real question.

"Because I want to hire you," said Professor Mayer. "To work with me on what comes next."

"And what does?"

Petra Mayer shrugged. "Good question," she said. "Read the file and we'll begin to work it out."

On 15 August 1977 Marzaq al-Turq, known also as Moz, was charged with the rape and murder of a girl whose age was put as between thirteen and sixteen, with a coroner's side note in French that a history of malnutrition would have put her age in the latter bracket. There was no mention in the brief and almost insultingly dismissive report that anorexia would have achieved the same, this not being a problem commonly facing the poor of Marrakech in the late 1970s.

The girl was described as half and half, with neither half being specified. She was not pregnant at the time of her death and her heart, lungs, liver and kidneys were in excellent condition. Her last meal had been vegetables, bread and water. There were no traces of alcohol, hashish or any other drug in her blood.

A long list of injuries matched those in the photograph; that is, all those injuries which could be seen in the original photograph were listed, although there were many more on the list which were not visible.

"Why only one crime scene?"

"I'm sorry?" Professor Mayer glanced up.

"Only one crime-scene shot," said Katie Petrov. "Where are the others?"

The Professor smiled sadly. "This was Marrakech, 1977. The miracle is that there are any at all." She thought about that, dragging on the last of her cigarette before stubbing it out in a saucer now filled to overflowing with splayed and twisted filters that looked like nothing so much as extracted bullets.

"In fact," said Professor Mayer, "the real question is why did somebody bother to take this photograph at all?"

"And you know the answer…" It was not quite a question.

"Read the file," Professor Mayer said, sitting back.

A sworn statement from an officer in the Marrakchi police stated that Marzaq al-Turq was the only suspect for the murder of Malika, daughter of Corporal Sidi ould Kasim, sometime informant and agent provocateur. The suspect lived in ould Kasim's house, in a room directly above the girl's, and a search of that room had revealed that a hole in the floor allowed the occupant to spy on the room below.

A trawl of the Mellah by the police had revealed no clue to the suspect's current whereabouts and extensive questioning of his known associates had produced so little information about the suspect's recent activities that this was suspicious in itself. Katie Petrov read this twice, to make sure she understood what was being said.

On the basis of the statement a warrant for the boy's arrest on sight had been issued by the Marrakchi police and then allowed to gather dust. Both the arrest warrant and the sworn statement were signed by a Major Abbas.

"What do you think?"

"The interest is in the gaps," said Katie Petrov. "If I got sent this back home I'd have returned it and demanded sight of the real thing. And I'd refuse to start work until the real thing arrived."

Professor Mayer nodded. "That's what I've done," she said. "Although I'm not sure how much we'll get."

Flicking through the three photographs, Katie forced herself to glance again at the final one. There existed crime-scene shots of Texas lynchings that showed less tissue damage.

"Check the file again," suggested Petra Mayer.

Three photographs, an arrest warrant, a sworn statement, a tatty strip of fingerprints lifted from a pocket knife found at the crime scene, a crudely drawn map of the wasteland marking where the girl's body was found and a report from the coroner.

"What am I missing?" Katie Petrov asked.

"These," Professor Mayer said, tossing across a cromalin of a second set of fingerprints, each one neatly positioned in a different-coloured box. The cromalin was new and still smelt of chemicals. The fingerprints came from the police HQ in Amsterdam and the name scrawled at the top of the original sheet was Jake Razor.

"Don't tell me…"

Katie held up the strip of fingerprints lifted from the crime scene in Marrakech and compared them to prints on the page in front of her. She didn't really need to be told what she would find. The American minimum for matching points was ten, the European standard was set at sixteen.

To Katie's gaze it looked like the match between Prisoner Zero's prints, those taken from the Marrakchi knife and the prints for Jake Razor from the Amsterdam drug clinic had at least eighteen points of similarity, maybe more.

"Still think he's sane?" Professor Mayer asked.

CHAPTER 38

Marrakech, Summer 1977

The steps down were dark with stains and a water pipe lay snake-like along one edge of the stairs. At the top the door had been old-fashioned, the kind which had panels and a knob that turned, although someone had nailed sound insulation to both sides of the door and painted the surfaces with cheap white paint.

At the bottom was another door. Only this one had no handle. Merely a fat bolt riveted crudely to the outside. At shoulder height on the wall next to the door someone had wired a bank of switches, each labelled in red plastic strip.

"Soldering iron," said one. "Saw," said another. "Water pump." None of them was on.

"You're in trouble," Major Abbas said, as if there was any chance Moz had missed this point. "And I'm not sure I can protect you."

Moz stared at the Major, seeing a face as dark and crumpled as walnut membrane. It had never occurred to Moz that anyone might protect him or that there could be something from which he might need serious protection.

"You understand me?"

Moz shook his head and Major Abbas sighed.

"There was an explosion," he began. "Last Wednesday…"

That, at least, Moz understood.

The Polisario had bombed an upstairs office on Boulevard Abdussallam. It had been on the radio, first as a denial, then as a qualified maybe and finally, seventy-six hours later, when gas explosions, failed foundations and acts of God had been discounted, as a guaranteed hundred per cent terrorist outrage. Two French lawyers had died and Paris was demanding action.

"What's that got to do with me?" Moz demanded.

"I don't know yet," said Major Abbas. "Maybe it's got nothing to do with you at all. I hope so. That's what we're here to find out." Reaching with a thumb, he wiped a streak of blood from the boy's bottom lip and flicked it to the floor.

"I'm sorry," the Major said. "You must understand that this has to be done." Moz wanted to ask why and what this was…Although a large part of him really didn't want to know. Instead he stood silently while Major Abbas unbolted the door. "In you go," said the Major, pushing the boy ahead of him.

Sunlight bathed what had once been a gymnasium. Climbing bars made from dark oak lined the far wall, ropes hung from the ceiling, eight of them, fixed to hooks high in the roof with fat knots at the bottom. A pair of rings hung from another part of the ceiling, leather handles worn smooth.

Afternoon heat clogged the stillness and made Moz feel sick enough to shield his eyes from the brightness that streaked through a huge window.

"Over there," said the Major.

Moz saw her then.

Straddling a vaulting horse was a naked girl, her wrists and ankles tied below the horse's belly. She was gagged.

Someone had shaved Malika's head.

"No…"

"You recognize her then?"

"Of course I recognize her." Moz began to move towards the motionless girl, only to be yanked back so hard that the Major almost pulled Moz off his feet.

"Did I say you could go over there?"

She'd been tied onto the vaulting horse lengthways, her arms made to hug the leather body and lashed at the wrists underneath. Something more complicated had been done with her legs. This involved tying her ankles, threading a single rope behind one knee, passing it under the horse and threading it behind the other knee, then tying both knees tight so that Malika gripped the length of padded leather as if riding at a gallop.

"The crow," Major Abbas said. "One of de Greuze's specials."

It was hard to know what the Major saw when he looked at Malika's splayed thighs and narrow buttocks, but whatever it was, it was not enough to stop the Major reaching for a discarded riding crop and cracking it absent-mindedly against the palm of his hand.

"So primitive." Major Abbas sounded almost sad. "So effective."

For a hideous moment Moz believed the whip was about to be handed to him, but instead the Major shrugged. Maybe he realized Moz would refuse or perhaps he knew that Moz would take the whip as ordered and this might be one humiliation too far.

More likely he just knew that the time was not yet right. Major Abbas had been in the police for all of his adult life, beginning his training under the French, and he had seen, done and made others do many things he would rather forget.

So instead of making the boy take the whip, the Major flicked it through the air a couple of times, like a conductor testing a baton, and then slashed the girl abruptly across the upturned soles of her feet, stepping back to watch as she reared up against the pain, her scream constrained by a leather gag.

"Stay silent," he ordered, reaching for its buckle.

"Tell them," said Malika before Major Abbas had even got the gag properly undone. "Tell him I was--"

"I said silent," the Major said. Another slash of the whip and this time Moz could almost feel the scream that echoed round the dusty gymnasium. "Did anyone tell you that you could speak?"

The girl shook her head.

"Then don't," said Major Abbas. "Untie her," he ordered, not bothering to look at the boy.

Moz scrabbled with the knots. He was on his knees, staring up at the girl who lay trapped and sobbing. The knots were simple but Moz's fingers were shaking and his eyes kept sliding from the tear-blurred rope in front of him to the sight of a breast squashed against the leather edge of the vaulting horse.

"Get on with it," ordered Major Abbas.

When Moz continued to fumble, the Major swung his riding crop and Moz felt Malika's body jerk furiously a second before her scream had him curled into a ball on the gymnasium floor with his hands over his ears.

Major Abbas kicked him. "Cut her free," he said, dropping his own pocket knife on to the floor beside Moz. "You've got five minutes." The last thing Moz heard before the Major slammed the door and bolted it from outside was a suggestion. "Use it well."

"You have to tell them," Malika said before Moz had even returned to the knots, before he'd had a chance to saw at the rope around her wrists and ankles, lift her off the vaulting horse and lower her as gently as he could manage to the floor. "You have to tell them I was with you."

"When?" Moz asked.

"Last Wednesday. You have to say that I was…"

Moz thought about it. Working the days back in his head.

"You were," he said, "we were--"

They both knew what and where. On the roof of the dog woman's old house, with the late afternoon sun in his eyes and Malika sitting in his lap, her bare arms locked round his neck and her legs curled around his hips. It was not something he was likely to forget.

"You'll tell them?" Malika said desperately.

"That we were on the roof?" Moz nodded. "Of course I will."

"I told them," said Malika.

"What's going on?" A very inadequate question.

Her answer came in tears and ragged sobs that echoed round the gymnasium. She didn't know, she really, really didn't know. She'd told the old Frenchman this already but he refused to believe her. Malika's voice was broken, helpless.

Dark circles surrounded her sunken eyes, her right thumb jutted at an obscene angle and all the fingernails from one hand had been ripped out. Excrement smeared the inside of one thigh. As well as shaving her head, the Frenchman had taken all her body hair and what was left looked like bruised meat.

He was crying too, Moz realized. A knot in his stomach as tight as any that might have bound his own hands.

"What do they think you've done?"

Malika was sobbing so hard and was so busy clinging to him that she couldn't answer. And by the time she could, Moz had worked it out for himself. They thought she was Polisario. That was why Major Abbas had asked him what he knew about the bombing in the Nouvelle Ville.

"I said we were together," Malika said. "I know I shouldn't but he wouldn't stop." Her words were barely audible, as if whispering could lessen the horror of what had happened. "He just wouldn't…"

And as Moz knelt in front of her, he understood that he was a coward, whatever Malika thought.

"What exactly did they ask?"

Jagged sobs were his answer.

"You must tell me," Moz insisted.

"The bomb," Malika said. "They wanted to know where I got the explosives."

"You?"

"Me," Malika said bleakly. "I made it and planted it."

"Who said so?"

"I did," said Malika. "When I signed his bit of paper."

"That's what it said?"

"That's what the Frenchman said it said," she replied.

"But you don't know?"

"No." Her shrug was tiny. "They wouldn't let me read it."

"This man," said Moz. "He was definitely French?" Moz felt sick to the bottom of his stomach.

"Yes," she said. "An advisor."

"Why do they say you planted the bomb?"

"I don't know," said Malika. "That's a secret so they won't tell me. There was someone else," she added. "An American or English. Only he left because he didn't like what the others were about to do."

It was a question that had to be asked, until the desolation in Malika's haunted amber eyes persuaded Moz that it didn't have to be asked after all.

"So," said the Frenchman, "it's true. You really are an informer." They faced each other across the cheap linoleum and Claude de Greuze seemed vaguely amused by something.

"No," Moz said. "It's not true."

"I've seen the files. Major Abbas has you down as a monthly expense. Forty dirham to Marzaq al-Turq, informant. He's just shown me."

This was the first Moz had heard of it. His only memories of payment were a handful of sweets, a glass of orange juice, cigarettes given grudgingly and the occasional glance in the wrong direction when Moz was busy helping Hassan move some cart which should have stayed where it was. There'd been no money, ever. Well, not very much and not until recently.

"So inform me," said the Frenchman. "What did you find out?"

"There's nothing to find out," Moz said. "She was telling the truth. We were together on the roof of Dar el Beida. She was with me all the time."

"No," said de Greuze, "I don't think so."

"We were," Moz insisted.

"Really?"

Moz nodded. He was standing so close to the old man that he could have reached out to touch his shabby jacket and Moz was breathing through his mouth, something he'd learnt from watching the Major.

The Frenchman was already dead in all but fact. Maybe that was why he cared so little for the living. "It's true," Moz said, "I promise."

Claude de Greuze's smile was as sour as the stink rising from his body. "I hope it isn't," he said, "because then I'd have to question you too, whether Major Abbas liked it or not."

CHAPTER 39

Lampedusa, Sunday 8 July

The chat with Katie Petrov was interesting, mostly for what it revealed about Dr. Petrov's views on emotional autism.

"Good morning," said Petra Mayer, shutting a door behind her. She listened to it lock from the other side and smiled. The Colonel was keeping to his orders. "I'm Professor Mayer," she added. The small woman said it like Prisoner Zero should know that already. "And you're…"

Petra Mayer glanced at Katie's folder, mere pantomime. "It seems you're more of a problem than we first thought."

The folder was simple and buff-hued, suggesting common sense, frugality and prudence. All virtues that Katie, Petra Mayer's second most famous pupil, liked to project as hallmarks of her work.

"Gene sent me."

Even this casual reference to America's President didn't rate a flicker of interest from the naked figure who sat with his back against a wall staring flatly at an utterly blue sky. And it was a very casual, we-go-back-a-long-way kind of mention.

The room was on the ground floor of Hotel Vallone but it was in the main building and had metal bars rather than steel mesh set over the windows. An en suite shower-room had been stripped of everything sharp and the door between the two rooms removed along with all the furniture except the bed. A notepad lay untouched beside the bed and the walls were still as pristine as when they were repainted. Prisoner Zero hadn't even opened the wax crayons he'd been given.

"You mind if I smoke?" Petra Mayer waited a few seconds and then shrugged. "I'll take that as a no." Pulling a brass Zippo from her pocket, the Professor put it on the bed beside her and dug into her pockets for a packet of Lucky Strike.

"Want one?"

Another silence.

This didn't worry Petra Mayer, who'd once ingested so much lysergic acid diethylamide that it was seventy-six hours before the Wernicke area of her brain could organize enough words to tell a very pretty German boy about the rainbow on the tip of her tongue. They were at the Burning Man in Nevada. Needless to say, no one else noticed a thing.

"Okay." Putting flame to her cigarette, the small woman smiled. "Let me tell you what's going on. As I said, my name is Professor Petra Mayer and for the purposes of irritating the Pentagon I've been made a general in the US Army. I am here at the direct request of the President of the United States of America. All my expenses are being paid for by the Oval Office."

It was called the Russian Pitch and Harvard Business School used to teach it way back when. Around the time the old Soviet Union hit meltdown and arriving in the right place at the right time meant having whole industries drop into your lap. It relied on being flat-out honest and up front about the who, what and why.

Dragging on her Lucky Strike, Petra Mayer ran through the points and realized she'd left out the what's-in-it-for-me/what's-init-for-you.

Something of a deal breaker, usually.

"The President is minded…"

She hated that phrase, with its recursive echoes of qualification and non-commitment, its sheer mean-mindedness. Needless to say it hadn't been Gene who suggested its use. That little gem was down to the White House counsel.

"No, fuck it." Petra Mayer tapped ash onto a paper plate. "Gene doesn't want to kill you, okay? He thinks it's a crap idea. So I'm here to sort out some kind of deal. That's what's in it for you. As for what's in it for me…"

There were probably pin-lens cameras in here and microphones, infrared and other stuff so secret military intelligence at the Pentagon had forgotten to let the President know it existed. Professor Mayer wasn't too worried about that. She had a box of tricks of her own and Gene Newman knew it existed because he'd been present when Paula Zarte briefed the President's old tutor on its use.

It fucked up bugs, that was how the recently appointed Director of Central Intelligence put it, ignoring the glance of disapproval from the President's private secretary.

"There's been a suggestion," said Petra. "We swop you for a condemned prisoner and then publicly execute the prisoner. You get a new identity and we get the equations."

The suggestion had come from the First Lady and, much as it pained Professor Mayer to admit it, the idea had its attractions in a disgustingly realpolitik kind of way. Not least, that it kept the equations out of the hands of dangerous lunatics, while bluffing the world that they'd been lost forever.

Of course, Professor Mayer knew it didn't really keep the equations out of the hands of dangerous lunatics at all. It merely put them into the hands of our dangerous lunatics as opposed to their dangerous lunatics…

She sighed.

"We'd need your agreement," Professor Mayer said. "And you needn't feel guilty about the man who takes your place. He's going to die anyway…Why would we do this?" she asked, watching smoke trickle towards the ceiling. A whole world of rigid rules covering temperature, convection and Brownian motion all busily pretending to be truly chaotic. No wonder she loved smoking so much. "Because we've got a situation. And mostly it's that we now know who you really are…"

Not a flicker from Prisoner Zero.

"…and according to your family you're already dead."

Professor Mayer glanced round the prisoner's new room with its neat bed, built-in shower and view of the Mediterranean. Dr. Petrov could be forgiven her verdict of emotional autism, naïve though it was, because the man seemed totally oblivious to anything going on around him.

"Not a dead-man-walking kind of dead," she added. "The real kind. Ashes to ashes, dust to dust. Although in your case it was very much junk to junkie, wasn't it?"

Flipping open her briefcase, which now contained the Marrakech file, two sets of fingerprints and her latest acquisition, Jake Razor's medical records and a long list of attendances from the early 1980s at a drug drop-in centre in Amsterdam, Professor Mayer found what she was after, a photograph of the squat on Vizelstraat, five burnt-out floors overlooking a canal and the stark carcass of a cindered tree. Children sat on the deck of a narrow boat, oblivious to three police cars parked nearby.

"Here," said Professor Mayer, holding out the photograph. "Recognize it?"

There was a "Politie BBE" stamp on the back of the photograph over a date, the initials of a crime-scene photographer and a coffee ring where a paper cup had been put down carelessly.

They told Professor Mayer little more than she already knew. In April 1989 a squat used by heroin addicts had burnt out in Vizelstraat, Amsterdam. The fire-twisted body of a victim had been found and the body had been so badly charred it proved impossible to put an age on it. Although it was doubtful if anyone tried very hard.

The Bijzondere Bijstands Eenheid became involved because the first police officer on the scene decided that the body had been shot through the head with a high-powered rifle. As most of the skull was missing this was a reasonable mistake to make, even if it was boiling brains and not a bullet that ripped apart the vagrant's head.

After this had been established, responsibility for the crime reverted to the Amsterdam police and it was their note which was attached to the photograph. The victim was thought to be one Marzaq al-Turq, sometimes known as Moz Ritter, and there was no evidence to suggest foul play.

"There was no reason to exclude it either," Petra Mayer said, but the Professor was talking to herself.

Police HQ in Amsterdam were currently trying to locate the evidence locker into which a bone sample from the body had been decanted, so they could carry out the forensics tests no one had bothered to do before.

"I followed your work, you know." She spoke as slowly and as clearly as she could. Many people thought Professor Mayer's lugubrious growl was affectation or the result of too many drugs. This was wrong.

The drug damage and the facial scar from her famous car crash might both be self-inflicted and closely related, but the voice came from God. Although the Professor was honest enough to admit that her sixty-a-day cigarette habit did not help matters.

"A BBS here," said Professor Mayer. "An early news group there. Little hints and rough workings. I kept a list of the names you used and I wasn't the only one, did you know that?"

How could he not? Prisoner Zero had waited for replies and confirmations. For other people's take on his solutions. It was a very quick and dirty form of peer review, a term he'd first stumbled over at Amsterdam University. Although it didn't always work, of course. He'd posted a line of code onto a Polish bulletin board, just that, nothing more. This was at the height of Solidarity. A time when messages were mostly coded and all BBS were watched no matter how primitive, and what passed for academic BBS in Poland at that time was very primitive indeed.

And his equation had just sat there, unanswered and perhaps unread. One of a dozen fragments he took from the notebook and posted in his attempt, fleeting and destined for failure, to find the numinous within numeracy.

"I'm offering you a new life," Petra Mayer said. "A new start." Grinding out her Lucky Strike, the elderly academic reached for the packet and realized it was empty. "No?" Professor Mayer's smile was sour. "I told Gene not to make me waste my time asking you." She paused, thought about it. "Not much point asking you anything really, is there?"

CHAPTER 40

Northern Mountains, CTzu 53/Year 20

In the beginning there was lightning and then agony, sharp where it shouldn't have been. Where no one should be touching her.

"CV-1," a voice said, sounding matter-of-fact. "Also essential for countering heart attacks, near-drowning, frigidity, bed-wetting, incontinence and related ailments."

Fingers moved from between her legs to her chest, rolling up the latex top of her jump suit and the voice said, "Do I need the quill?"

It was speaking mostly to itself.

The fingers found a point on Tris's sternum, settled one finger on top of another and pressed in the bony hollow of her chest, at a point exactly equidistant between her nipples.

"CV-17," said the voice. "Good for confusion, hysteria, high blood pressure, breathing ailments, difficulty swallowing and assorted similar maladies…"

The pressure increased and then lifted as the darkness unwrapped itself, leaving Tris facing the top half of an anxious-looking young man, whose skin was as white as his tied-back ponytail. Above the waist he was as real as Tris, below this he seemed a mere shadow. At least that's what Tris thought, until the boy flicked back the other half of his cloak and suddenly she could see all of him.

"Unlucky," he said, helping Tris to her feet. "Getting lightning struck like that." The boy was taller than anybody she'd ever seen, his face soft and somehow bloodless, pale like snow or high clouds in a summer sky.

"Aren't there two of you?" Tris said.

Luca Pacioli shrugged. "There are dozens of us," he said. "Unfortunately, these days they're all me." Thrusting out his hand, the young man offered it to Tris.

His shake was tentative.

His skin cold.

"I'm Luca Pacioli," he said. "Ambassador Luca Pacioli. You're welcome to use my house if you need to sleep. I'm a baron," he added, rather diffidently. "A very poor one, sadly."

Luca let his eyes trail across her ripped jump suit, hesitating at the tear above one breast and stopping altogether when his gaze reached her bare abdomen where the trousers barely clung to her hips.

"You must have walked far," he said.

Tris nodded.

"A pity about your ship."

"My…?"

"That little racing yacht of yours. I saw it skim overhead a few days ago. Very pretty. You must have been upset when they shot it down."

"I crashed it," Tris said. "No one shot it down."

Luca's glance was kind. "That's not what I heard. The imperial guard took it out. I listen to the private feeds," he added. "I'm not meant to but there's not much else to do."

Somehow while he'd been talking, Luca had managed to steer Tris in a wide circle across rough grass and a broken path, so that now Tris found herself heading back the way she'd come.

"It's okay," he said. "You can trust me."

"Yeah," said Tris. "That's what they all say."

There was a feed bar on the fifteenth level of Rip, right at the bottom of the Razor's Edge where she'd wasted one summer. Actually there were several bars but they had merged into one in her memory and the jump area was called the Razor's Edge, because that's what it was.

A ragged scar down the inside of the world. Someone had sealed the Rip with spun glass, the silvery kind which was meant to catch radiation. Although Tris didn't believe it worked because too many jumpers she knew got sick and died from the coughs. You could always tell who was going to go next because their skin went bad and their eyes developed that haunted look, like they knew what was going to happen but didn't want anyone mentioning it.

Tris's health remained good but that was Tris, she'd never been ill in her life and the one thing she'd learnt from her time on the fifteenth was it really didn't matter if the guy was dying or not, you really, really couldn't trust anyone who said, "You can trust me."

You just couldn't.

And if they said, "I'm not going to hurt you" they always did.

"This way," Luca said, leading Tris towards a turning off the road between a broken wall on one side and a mound of rubble, so brush-covered that it was nearly impossible to work out what had been there originally, on the other.

"Fechner's house," said Luca. "You know what its number was?"

Of course she didn't.

"Think of two numbers," said Luca, "then add them together to make a third."

Tris did what she was told, though she kept the numbers small so that the sums were easy.

"Now add the second number to the third, which will give you a fourth."

That was a bit harder.

"Now add those two together to give you a fifth."

As they walked Tris added numbers until she lost count of how many times Luca had asked her to do this.

"Finished adding the last two?"

"Yeah." Tris nodded.

"Good," said Luca, "now take that final number and the one before and calculate the ratio between them." He walked in silence while Tris worked out first what his instruction meant and then whether she could answer it.

"Well?"

"One point six?" Tris said finally.

"You sure?"

"Pretty much."

Luca smiled. "That's Fechner's number," he said. "You need to remember it." Tris was going to ask why but the boy now stood in front of a shimmering silver wall, concentrating hard while he did something complicated with his fingers.

Luca Pacioli lived in a palace. More precisely, he lived in part of the Emperor's palace, the one everyone recognized from the feed. Not in the actual Qiangquing Gong, obviously enough, but definitely a replica of what was intended to be a suite in a guest wing.

"That's the Jiulongbi, the Nine Dragon Screen!"

"Yes," Luca said sadly, "it is."

Someone had painted the Jiulongbi onto cloth and nailed it to the window frame, so the canvas faced inwards. The painting was crude and most of the nails holding it in place had rusted to the colour of dried blood. When Tris reached out to touch the canvas, flakes of dragon scale came off on her fingers.

"We used to have a real picture," said Luca. "One that did light and dark and showed eunuchs scurrying past the window and soldiers gathering on parade. The sky even showed black cranes flying."

"What happened?" she said.

"It broke." He shrugged. "My father kept it going for as long as he could. Far longer than was reasonable but in the end…you know. Things break." Luca gave her water and what might have been some kind of dry bread. And while Tris wolfed down the food, Luca told her about his childhood.

His father had brought him to Rapture so long before that Luca couldn't even remember when his father had died.

The pavilion had been glorious then, crowded with family, retainers, animals and servants who wore drab but functional smocks and wooden clogs for when the courtyard got waterlogged.

Ambassador Pacioli had chosen the servants and animals, just as he'd chosen his retainers and those who made up his secretariat. An important person in his own civilization, his luck had always been bad. A lucky man would have found reasons why someone else should go instead.

The replica of the guest wing in which Luca now lived had been the idea of Lady Pacioli, Luca's mother. It was not a particularly original idea because endless ambassadors had undergone training in replica palaces before taking up their posts. The novelty lay in Lady Pacioli's suggestion that the replica should be taken with them.

A feat less difficult than it sounded since all she needed was to acquire enough spiders to create whichever replica was appropriate. The secret was to instruct the spiders so they knew in advance exactly what they were meant to be doing.

The way Luca said this made Tris decide that he was reciting it from memory rather than actually understanding what spiders were or how they could grow a palace from the ground up.

"It's falling apart," Luca said.

"What is?"

"All of this." The stare he turned on the girl seemed heavy with too much knowledge and a realization that he'd never reach wherever it was he once thought he was going. "I'm sorry it's not better."

Luca looked so sad that Tris decided she probably had to sleep with him. It wouldn't be her first time and Tris wasn't worried about getting pregnant because Luca was obviously other than human and the mix never took in cases like that.

This piece of information came from Doc Joyce. And though the Doc had talked about exceptions, Tris felt it unlikely that Luca would carry the kind of germline fix needed to let him father children on stray humans…Of course, Tris didn't exactly think like this. She just thought, It's not going to happen.

And somehow that was enough.

"You own a bath?"

Luca's face froze and it took Tris a second to realize she'd just offended him. "I'm not saying you need one," she said hurriedly. "I mean, I've never had a bath. So if you've got one can I borrow it?"

"It's been a while," Luca said.

"What has?"

"Since I talked to anyone alive."

Tris decided not to think too deeply about that. Nodding at a random door, she said, "Through there…?"

"Sure," said Luca. "Why not?"

When Tris reached the doorway the room on the other side was busy rearranging itself, a divan melting into a wall as floor tiles stretched and sank to produce a bath twice her length.

"Too large," said Luca behind her and the tiles shifted again. "You'll still need some water," he said. "There should be water."

He led Tris to a courtyard where a huge cauldron stood, filled to the brim with rainwater. The cauldron was green with verdigris and the dragons that supported it had oxidized so badly in the rain that their scales were almost flat.

Below the cauldron stood a hearth heaped with ashes and when Luca swept these away Tris could see filaments of gold, some of which had melted and run together.

"We'll need some wood," Luca said. Instead of heading for a log pile, he wandered back into the pavilion, grabbed a gilded stool and smashed it hard against a doorpost. Scars on the post suggested this wasn't the first time it had been used that way.

"Try the table," suggested Luca.

Made from a honey-dark wood new to Tris, the table's top was carved into an ornate and aerodynamically sleek dragon, with vast wings which caught the wind like sails. On the back of the beast was a monk whose robes, beads and beard fluttered in the slipstream.

"Yes," said Luca, "that one."

So Tris picked up the table and carried it to the door. "It's beautiful," she said.

"Isn't it?" agreed Luca. "Here, let me." Taking the table from Tris's hands, he swung it hard into the doorpost, cracking monk and dragon into three. "It's not hard when you know how," he said. "The trick's in the wrist."

A temple carving followed the table, reduced to tinder in a single swing. "That should do us for now," said Luca.

To build his fire, Luca simply banked up fragments of table around a core of temple carving. And when both wood and kindling were ready, he flicked the fingers of his right hand across his thumb, like flint across steel.

"The water will take about a minute," he promised.

"How…?"

"The cauldron multiplies the heat. Whatever the cauldron takes in, it gives out more."

"That's impossible," said Tris.

"Most things are," Luca said, "if you think about them for long enough."

Kneeling next to the kindling, he reached out and Tris watched fire dance from his fingertips, catching ragged wood on a fragment of screen and turning those edges to gold.

"Watch," he said.

Flames caught the splintered screen and fire soon licked the underneath of the ancient cauldron, sliding up its sides until the flames grew, lost colour and disappeared into a heat so hot it was sufficient to make Tris stand back a little. All the same, the flames were nothing compared to the quantity of cold water in the cauldron and yet the inside rim was already beginning to birth bubbles, which grew fatter and fatter, until suddenly the whole slick surface began to roil and break.

"You'll need a bucket," Luca said, "to carry the hot water…We used to have servants," he added, "but they died." Seeing Tris's slight nod, Luca hesitated. "Did I tell you that already?" he said

Only Tris had stopped listening. She stood in the doorway of the pavilion looking bemused.

"The table…"

It was back, not yet complete but soft-edged and almost. A wax sculpture of woodwork melted by the sun. On the wall, a gold and red oblong was coalescing into a temple carving, its gold leaf and red undercoat becoming crazed with age.

"How?" the girl demanded.

"This is what the house does," Luca said. "Endlessly and always the same…Until something gives and suddenly a fire no longer lights itself or the shutters begin to ignore the rain. It will die eventually," he added, his voice entirely matter-of-fact, "but probably not before I do."

Tipping the first bucket into the bath, Luca went back for another. He worked with the rhythm of someone used to the world he inhabited, his life worn loosely.

"How old are you?" Tris asked. The question had been worrying her.

"You know," said Luca, as he scooped another bucket into the cauldron, "it's hard to say." He lifted the full bucket without appearing to notice its weight and carried it through the doorway in which she stood.

"Why is it hard?"

Luca shrugged and as he passed Tris on his way back their eyes met. It was nothing significant. Luca was just doing his best not to look at her breast where the top had torn. "Not sure I can answer that either," he said, sounding embarrassed for the first time since they'd met. "We live time differently."

"How do you live it?"

Like that, he wanted to say. Except this would be wrong, because the water in the cauldron boiled so simply, bubbles rising and currents defined by convection, properties of matter and the shape of the vessel in which it was all held. Time worked in all directions but was lived by humans only in one. At least that was what Luca had been taught.

And there were other differences. The girl's brain contained no pain fibres, for her, synaptic action was a pain-free process. Her brain could rot and she'd feel nothing. When Luca said a thought hurt he meant it.

"I live it one way," he said, "you another." Scooping up water, he carried his bucket into the pavilion, poured it into the bath and came out again. After that Luca worked in silence until the bath was full. "All yours," he said.

The girl glanced doubtfully at steam rising from the surface.

"No problem," Luca assured her, "the temperature will adjust. Well, it should do, unless that's stopped working as well."

In the end Tris tried the water with one toe, and then, when she realized Luca didn't intend to leave, she stripped off her ragged top, shook herself free from the trousers and stepped into her bath.

"Can you make me more clothes?"

"Maybe the house can," Luca said. "Whether you'll want to wear them…" And then he smiled, his gaze catching the latex rags she'd kicked into one corner of the room. "I'll see what we can do," he said, and with that he was gone, leaving the girl to soak away her doubts.

Tris said later, mostly to herself, that she couldn't remember why she agreed to sex. Although this was inaccurate because Tris was the one who instigated it by climbing from her bath and walking naked through the pavilion until she finally found Luca in an attic room, drawing something on a long scroll of paper. An ink stone and mixing pot stood beside him and a small bamboo brush was held elegantly in one hand.

"CV-1," he said blushing.

And Tris saw a sketch of her genitals, a dotted line inked between vulva and anus. "CV-1?"

"A tsubo point," Luca said. "Good for heart attacks, near-drowning and strikes by lightning. Inconveniently positioned, however."

Yeah, thought Tris, you could put it that way. He'd used the handle of that brush to activate the nerve. She'd seen him putting it back into its holder when she came awake at the edge of the road.

"I've grown you some clothes," Luca said quickly.

Tris glanced at the padded blue jacket, wafer-thin silk trousers and rope sandals. "Thanks," she said. "I think."

Somehow Luca looked even younger when he slept, his face was less strained and his mouth had relaxed into a child-like smile. Even his eyes rested easy under their lids.

"Sweet dreams," she said.

The man stank of vaginal secretions and of things Tris hadn't even realized people did to each other in bed and she stank of the same. What Tris didn't stink of was Luca because he had no scent. At least, no scent that she could detect.

Tris leant closer, just to make sure.

"Whatever."

Rolling out of bed, Tris landed lightly and grinned, tucking the single silk sheet tightly around Luca's sleeping body. In part this was because she didn't want the man to get cold, but mostly it was because Tris intended to search his room and wrapping sleeping punters in a sheet to make them feel secure was an old trick. One she'd learnt as a child from listening in on the whores at Schwarzschilds.

"Tuck them in," Bella had been saying, "so they're safe and tight." Then she'd glanced round and seen the kid standing by the wall, nursing a frosted glass of something purple and sighed. "Don't just stand there," she said. "If you want to learn, come over here and learn."

Tris did what she was told.

"There's this five minutes, honey," Bella said. "When men's heads go walkabout and that's the time to tuck 'em in and strip their wallets of anything worth taking."

Only the sex was hours behind her and Tris had no intention of searching Luca's pockets, she just wanted to look around. Most of the drawers in the attic refused to open for her, being owner specific. So in the end all Tris found to open was a long sandalwood chest full of clean sheets. Glancing at what she could see of the filthy mattress visible beneath Luca's sleeping head, Tris shrugged and filed the query away to unpuzzle later.

Under the last of the sheets was a full court dress, Mandarin Third Class, although the jade buckle looked rather grander than this. Tris knew about court grades from the feeds because everybody on Rip knew about stuff like that.

Beneath the court dress she found a sword with an ivory grip, ruby pommel and sharkskin sheath. The blade was oiled but felt blunt to her touch. Since Tris had no way of sharpening the blade and the obvious value of the sword frightened her a little, she placed it carefully on the floor and kept digging.

Another court dress, much smaller this time and more suited to a child. And a second sword, only this one was so tiny that it was barely more than a long dagger. The kind of thing an ambassador's son might carry if he was expected to be presented at court.

Tris felt no guilt at stealing the weapon. What was a small boy's sword compared to a racing yacht? And, besides, she needed a weapon. Of course, she could pretend she was taking it to protect herself against wild animals, or that it was needed to fight off imperial guards. But those would be lies and Tris never lied to herself. At least not more than was required to stay human or sane. Lying to others was different. That was what people like her did if they wanted to remain alive.

She intended to use the small sword to cut out Chuang Tzu's heart. That was all. Any other reason Tris gave would have been untrue.

At the bottom of the chest was a map, a scroll and a jewellery box made from mottled shell. Inside the box nestled a jade necklace so fabulous it had to be real. The map was of Rapture and the scroll contained Ambassador Pacioli's credentials. No one had even broken the seal.

Shutting the jewellery box on its necklace, Tris carefully repacked the scroll, both sets of court dress, the larger of the two swords and the sheets; then she dressed herself in the padded blue jacket, thin trousers and rope sandals that Luca had grown for her.

As payment to Luca for the little sword she left the yacht's memory, sitting on top of the chest looking blue and lonely in the daylight.

CHAPTER 43

Northern Mountains, CTzu 53/Year 20

"You forgot this…"

The voice came out of nowhere. At least, that's what Tris thought until she realized it was the man she'd left sleeping, if "man" was the right word, which she was beginning to doubt.

"…and you'd better put that down."

Tris looked at the blade she held and then at the half light obscuring the entrance to her rocky overhang, where Luca was unwrapping himself into existence. The Baron had the manners not to point out that the child's sword Tris held was his.

She'd once spent a whole winter wanting his look. She'd been a kid back then, impressed by an older girl's quick and dirty body change. Of course, being a kid, Tris hadn't realized the new body was meant to look like Luca and she doubted if the other girl did either.

"What did I forget?" demanded Tris crossly. There was stuff in bed she'd have given a miss if she'd known she was going to see Luca again. Things like his bite to her throat and leaving one of her nails in his back.

Stepping around the blade, Luca smiled. "You left your marble on the chest."

Tris sighed. "It was a present," she said. "And it's not a marble."

"Oh." Luca looked thoughtful. "What is it then?"

"It's the memory," said Tris, "from my yacht."

"You had a yacht?"

"You saw it, remember? A C-class, X9 interchange." All objects of value in the 2023 worlds were grown individually, that's what Tris had always understood. And yet the owner of All Tomorrow's Parties still gave his ship a number. No wonder Doc Joyce hated him.

"Where did you get a yacht?"

Tris wanted to say, Don't I look like a girl who might own an X9 interchange? Unfortunately they both knew the answer to that.

"I stole it," said Tris, taking the marble from Luca. "Then we crashed into a lake except it was really a river. This is what's left."

They ate wild hare, roasted in the ashes of a fire Luca built in the mouth of the overhang. He took the wood from a long-dead thorn, snapping branches as easily as Tris might have broken twigs and igniting the fire with a snap of his fingers. He also set the trap. A slight thing that was little more than a noose, a thorn branch bent double and a V of twig to peg the thorn to the ground.

"That's it?" Tris had asked.

"Sure," said Luca, "it's enough."

He'd already discarded his leather satchel and was unbuckling his cloak at the time, fussing with a silver knot on its left shoulder. "It used to untie itself," he said. The cloak was already large enough but when Luca unfolded it once and then twice it became very big indeed.

"Find me a long stick," he said.

Tris almost said, Find one yourself. But she restrained herself and after setting the trap outside, she helped Luca make a bivouac from his cloak, the stick she'd found and a dozen small rocks arranged around the edge. Since the cave-like overhang already kept out the worst of the wind Tris wasn't sure this was necessary.

It was when she was putting the last of the stones into place that Luca came back with the hare. "Here," he said, "kill this."

"You do it," said Tris.

Luca shook his head and offered her the animal, which he had by the ears. "I'm not allowed to."

"But you eat meat?"

A nod, quick and totally unashamed.

"That doesn't make sense."

"Maybe not," said Luca, "but that's the way it is."

"Why?" Tris demanded, but she took hold of the hare, only just avoiding one of its back legs which raked towards her wrist. "Tell me--"

"Do you always ask too many questions?"

"Yeah," said Tris, "always."

Luca sighed. "The thing is," he said, crouching down to sit on his heels, "if I started killing I'm not sure I'd be able to stop. You wouldn't like that. So why don't you kill it, I'll cook it and we'll both eat the thing?"

"You're not human, are you?" Tris said, realizing as she said it that this might be a tactless question.

"Nor are you," said Luca, his voice matter-of-fact. "Actually, most people aren't. Not in any sense humans would understand…Now hurry up and kill the hare, anything else is cruel."

"We could let it go," Tris said. "That wouldn't be cruel."

"You need to eat," said Luca. "That's one point. The second is that the animal's half dead with fright so you have a duty to kill it." He nodded towards the small rock she'd only just put into place around the edge of his bivouac.

"Use that," he said. "And hold it the other way up or its ears will come off in your hands when you hit it."

Grabbing the hare by its back legs, Tris hung the animal upside down and thumped it hard with a stone on the back of its head without giving herself time to think. Shitting black raisins at her feet, the animal turned from something living to meat.

"You do the rest," Tris said.

Fifteen billion people watched her toss the dead hare at Luca's feet, although Tris didn't know this. Which was just as well, because the first thing she did after stalking from the camp and dry-vomiting away her disgust, was drop her silk trousers and raise the hem of her padded jacket, letting rivers of steam melt frosted blades of grass.

"Moron," she said.

And all the while, buzzards circled overhead and a lizard clung to rock, either dead or too catatonic with cold to move. There was no single camera watching Tris and Luca. Indeed, the concept "camera" meant nothing to Tris. If she'd stopped to wonder how feeds were fed she'd have decided by magic.

The truth was far stranger. Every living thing on Rapture watched everything else, from the cat that slunk across the yellow roof of the Emperor's pavilion to the single butterfly delivering a message as it touched his wrist. And the Library drew together these threads and, from them, created a seamless feed that was life in the Forbidden City.

Ripping a leg from the roasted body of the hare, Luca held it out as an offering. "Try it," he suggested.

They ate in silence.

It sleeted that night and again the next morning. What had started as sleet became hail, driven on a chill wind that roared down a valley into their faces. They had to set their next bivouac quickly and break it down just as fast, Luca converting their crude tent back into his cloak with a sleight of hand that Tris somehow always missed.

"You sure this is the right way?"

"No," said Luca, "I'm not."

"We should have brought a map."

Luca stared at the hail and sleet breaking up the world around them. "No point," he said. "Coordinates have zero meaning at this level." It was the last thing he said that day.

And Tris was ready to believe he'd forgotten her existence, except that once she slipped while stepping from rock to rock and Luca grabbed her so fast she barely saw his hands move. She slept in his arms that night as snow piled up against one side of the bivouac, although there was nothing sexual in his stroking of her hair and both retained their clothes.

"No," Luca had told her, when Tris first knelt to scrape snow from the hillside, making space for their bivouac. "Don't dig."

"Why not?"

"Sleeping on snow is warmer," he told her. "Here…"

Tris caught his knife.

"Stab the ground."

Shock echoed up Tris's arm and only the fact Luca's knife had a crossbar stopped Tris slicing her hand on the blade.

"That little sword of yours could break stabbing this stuff," said Luca. "It's permafrost. You need to know these things."

He read the question in her face.

"Because," Luca said, "you're meant to be doing this on your own."

The dreams were worse that night. So terrible that when she woke Tris would not allow herself to remember a thing. All she could feel was their numbness, as if the permafrost over which she slept had entered her soul. Having eaten the last scraps of roast hare without tasting, Tris reached for Luca and pulled him close.

"I'm not sure this is wise," said Luca, opening one eye.

Tris reached down with her hand. "You know what?" she said. "I'm not sure I care."

Afterwards, Luca scrambled out from under the cloak and disappeared behind a low strand of bushes. "Now you," he said on his return.

"It'll hold."

"No." The Baron shook his head. "It won't…From here on when we climb we're tied together. You want a piss, I'm this far away." He held his hands so, indicating distance.

In fact the gap between Luca and Tris as they climbed the first snow bank was greater than Luca had said it would be, if not by much. And Tris wore the stolen blade across her back, because Luca had insisted she take a long stick of thorn in each hand, so that if Tris missed her step she could jab her sticks into the snow and avoid sliding back the way she came. He also made her walk first, on the grounds that if she did slip he might be able to catch her.

The dreams haunted her again that night and followed her into the day. All Tris got were glimpses from the side of one eye. Patches of snow that kept pace, stalking the edge of her vision where endless flakes of falling snow lost themselves in a perpetual half glow that ice fields seemed to bring with them.

Once she saw something stranger.

Amber eyes like Luca's, but staring from the face of a huge cat. She told Luca about this and in return he told her about snow blindness, hypothermia, oxygen starvation and their collective responsibility for her hallucinations. He left out the pain, Tris noticed, and after a few minutes she zoned him out and concentrated on climbing the icy slope in front of her.

Every now and then, Tris would thrust one hand inside the front of her padded jacket and nestle it under her armpit in an attempt to thaw out her fingers and once, when Luca was looking at something else, she thrust both hands between her legs. The pain of her fingers unfreezing hurt so much that tears crystallized on her cheeks like pearls.

Around midday they stopped climbing, the snow underfoot levelled out and then began, very gently, to dip in the opposite direction.

"That was it?" said Tris as she unknotted Luca's rope and dropped her end in the snow. "That was your cliff?"

Luca frowned. "Tristesse," he said heavily, "we've barely started."

He wouldn't look at her for the rest of that afternoon and, come evening, he just scooped out a shallow dip in a snowdrift, did whatever he did to his cloak and buried the edges of the newly created bivouac beneath the snow to keep them secure. He made no attempt to start a fire, nor did he invite Tris inside when finally he crawled under the cloth.

After a few minutes, Tris clambered inside anyway.

They slept like husband and wife, back to back, not touching. It was an old, sour joke from her grandmother. One she'd failed to understand until that night, the night the snow tigers came.

When the first animal padded silently out of the darkness, Tris was restless and already awake. The tiger came in a gap between falls of snow. A handful of white shadow and smoke-grey stripes, paws the size of plates carrying it over a skim of frozen crust, its tail brushing the snow as it loped out of the darkness and halted outside Luca's make-shift tent.

The others came in the seconds which followed.

It was their breathing Tris heard first. "Me?" she asked, in case there was some mistake. And the biggest of the tigers nodded, fat strands of spittle drooling onto pale snow.

"Malika," it said when Tris stayed where she was.

"I'm Tris," said Tris. She wasn't too sure they'd got that bit.

"Malika," repeated the tiger.

She went to it anyway, crawling from beneath Luca's bivouac and walking barefoot over the snow crust, leaving lonely footprints behind her. All three were beautiful, elegant beyond anything life had let Tris imagine. Their eyes amber and their claws tallow, like ancient ivory.

"You're beautiful," she said.

The biggest tiger's casual nod seemed to suggest that this was obvious.

"Can I feel?" Reaching out Tris tangled her cold fingers into warm fur. And as soon as her hand gripped the tiger's mane, the beast began to move, slowly but decisively.

"She's going," said a voice.

"Not much we can do about it now." That voice was different. Come to that, so was the voice before. Rougher, speaking words Tris barely understood.

"Doesn't matter," the first voice said. "We've got enough."

The snow had stopped burning Tris's feet. Her fingers felt normal. She no longer felt the need to clamp her hands between her legs or across her chest, hiding them in the darkness of her underarms. Even her smell was gone, that stink of bruised flesh and ripped pain.

"Damn," said a voice.

"You tell me," Luca said. He was sitting outside his bivouac, cupping his hands around a flame that leapt between his thumbs, like electricity arcing between points. Tris had just asked him why she was standing bootless in the snow.

He didn't seem that surprised to see her or that pleased either. "Knew you'd be back," he said, stuffing his hands in his pockets. "Where else could you go?"

Tris knew this was untrue and wanted to explain how difficult it had been to leave the tigers, how painful wrenching her hands from the flame of their fur, but she was too busy looking at Luca's face.

Someone had clawed ragged lines across his cheek, four gashes that ran from near his ear to the side of his chin. And to judge from the holes in the snow and the discarded pink-streaked, compacted handfuls of ice around his feet, Luca had been trying for some time to staunch the bleeding.

"The tigers attacked you?"

The Baron stared at her. He looked thinner than yesterday, which was thinner than the day before. His eyes were huge and his mouth twisted into something between anger and disgust. He seemed to be waiting for something.

"An apology would be good," he said at last.

"For what?"

"Oh." Luca shrugged. "I don't know…How about for trying to rip off half my face and disappearing into the wilderness for two hours?"

"Me?"

"Yeah," said Luca, "you." One hand went up to touch his face.

"It can't have been me," said Tris. "I wasn't even here."

"Yes, you were," said Luca. "And it was." Scooping up snow, he held it to his cheek and then tossed away the soiled handful. "You want to tell me why you did it?"

"I…wasn't…here." Tris left a gap between each word, just in case Luca needed time to digest their sense. "And," Tris added, speeding up, "if I wasn't here, then I couldn't have done it, could I?"

"So where were you?"

"With the snow tigers," said Tris. "I heard them breathing. And when I looked outside they were waiting for me. They were beautiful," she said. Tris wanted to say more but sadness had tightened her throat. She should have stayed with them, she knew that now.

The tigers were right.

Luca sighed. "Maybe you were having nightmares," he said.

Moss spiralled along the main cables where fat cords had been twisted together and weather-bleached ropes hummed in the wind that whistled along the canyon, keeping the suspension bridge mostly clear of snow.

Two rusting iron rings had been set into a rock-face behind Tris. What happened at the other end was impossible to say because everything but the first ten paces of the bridge was lost in a flurry of snow.

"I've heard of this," Luca told Tris.

It occurred in a story his father had told him. About the first ambassador from Luca's people to set out for the Forbidden City. He began the trip without permission from the Tsungli Yamen, the Bureau of Foreign Affairs. And having packed his family gods into a lacquer trunk and commanded his servants to carry himself and his wife in separate sedan chairs, he set out for the capital of the 2023 worlds, leaving Luca's father in charge of his affairs.

Luca's father never told his son exactly what happened, but over the years Luca came to understand that it was a disaster. The sedan chairs were found ripped apart in a ravine near the start of the plateau. A silk changfu belonging to the ambassador's wife was discovered two days later, tied to a pole like a flag and rammed into the snow.

That was all Luca's father ever said.

The original Baron Pacioli had hated the 2023 worlds. No one in the worlds did what they were told, because there was no one but the Library to tell them what to do and the Library never told, it merely suggested.

This had taken Luca's father most of his life to understand. No families were bound to other families. No groups depended for employment or shelter on the obligation of others. Indeed, Luca's father wasn't sure the concept of family even existed on most of the 2023 worlds in any sense he understood.

People lived, they were fed by the Library and they died when they wanted. No codes enforced dress or behaviour. Names, sexes, body shapes and relationships were fluid and all could be changed without attracting approbation.

And in the middle of this chaotic fluidity lived the Chuang Tzu, his every move subject not just to age-old rules and regulations but to intense interest and speculation from the 148 billion individuals Luca's father assumed the Emperor existed to govern.

Because there was the other problem. So far as Baron Pacioli could work out, the Emperor issued no laws and delivered no judgements, no one needed his permission to do anything. The throne was powerless, his importance apparently token. Unless, of course, that stuff about the weather was true and chaos was what the Emperor required from his subjects.

"Which world?" Luca asked, suddenly turning back to face Tris.

"What?"

They were at the edge of the chasm and the rope bridge disappeared into the blizzard ahead of them. Luca and Tris had been standing like this for some time.

"Which world are you from?" said Luca. "They all have names, don't they?" He'd known those names once, as a small child.

"We've been through this." The girl's voice was entirely matter-of-fact. "I don't come from a world."

"You must," Luca said. "Where else could you be from?"

"Heliconid," said Tris. "You won't have heard of it."

In the end it was Tris who stepped onto the bridge. She had Luca's rope tied around her waist and both thorn sticks strapped across her back. She had her blade drawn and held in her right hand. For some reason Luca found this hysterically funny, although he wouldn't tell her why.

Testing each plank before putting her weight on it meant it took Tris the best part of an hour to cover a distance she could have walked in five minutes at her normal speed. And when the blizzard cleared and the far end of the bridge remained resolutely out of sight, Tris agreed with Luca that they'd have to do it differently.

"Okay," she said, as she untied the rope knotted around her waist and handed it to Luca. "I need you to lengthen this." Tris didn't know how Luca would do it, she only knew he could.

"Much better," said Tris, when he returned the end to her.

Retying the rope around her waist, Tris tested the knot by yanking it as hard as she could. "We don't have time to check every step," Tris said, sounding more sure than she felt. "So I'm going to walk normally and you'll save me if I fall through. And if you fall through then I'll save you…Although that's not as likely."

Afterwards Tris came to believe that she'd walked the bridge for weeks, maybe months, suspended over a nothingness so deep that, even on the afternoons the snow cleared, she never saw the bottom.

In fact, it took less than three days. Seventy-two hours during which a final figure of ninety-eight billion people watched Tris slip into a mental state little higher than stupefaction. It was during the last of these days that Tris decided she would burn the Chuang Tzu's precious pavilions around his ears.

She didn't remember telling Luca this, although she remembered his answer. Which was that the idea probably acquired its all-encompassing appeal from the fact that she was dying of cold.

The sheer strangeness of Tris's journey was enough to make even those who scorned the feeds decide to make an exception. Rumour in the 2023 worlds was a strange beast, widely recognized and little understood, except by a few ancient mememagicians who studied more for the sake of study than from hope of surpassing the early masters.

Somehow, during those seventy-two hours, the idea that watching a girl from a non-world walk a bridge might be culturally required reached tipping point, jumping from those who would watch anything rather than live themselves to those who treated all external input with suspicion. From here, the tale of her ridiculous quest passed to the cold immortals, who found meaning not in her intention to kill an emperor who waited impatiently for her arrival but in the sheer innocence of her battle against his weather.

She became, without knowing it, the container for a billion conflicting interpretations of what it meant to be alive.

A few million bet on her survival, others set out for Rapture to offer their help or to attempt to duplicate her journey, but most just watched from the corner of their minds, not letting Tris's journey take up too much of their thoughts but never forgetting it either.

In a civilisation once described by one of its oldest minds as an endless dinner party at which no one knew who were guests and who the waiters, what occasion was being celebrated or who was paying for the meal, Tris's battle with herself engrained itself into the conversation.

It helped, of course, that no one knew who the girl was or why she talked to a companion no one else could see. There were no eight degrees of separation, nor sixteen, thirty-two or sixty-four…She was tabula rasa, which was interesting and in its own way quite terrifying to worlds in which everyone knew each other, even if they didn't.

CHAPTER 44

Marrakech, Summer 1977

The deal offered to Jake was simple.

Exile.

Jake would leave Marrakech, taking Celia with him. Riad al-Razor would be sold, within the month if possible and certainly by the end of that summer. As it turned out, Major Abbas was able to recommend a discreet and trustworthy agent who could be relied on both to find a suitable buyer and handle any legal matters that might arise.

And it would be best if their Peugeot was included in the price of the sale. Did Jake have any problems with the suggestions so far?

De Greuze said nothing during all of this. The revelation about Jake's family had shifted his priorities and he wasn't about to mess with the grandson of a known philanthropist with the direct ear of the American President. All the same, he'd already palmed one of the nude photographs of that boy which Jake had dealt so casually from the pile with his thumb, leaving a really rather beautiful fingerprint.

Jake and Celia were sitting on the pink-painted wicker sofa, de Greuze had pulled up the largest chair without being asked and Major Abbas had announced that he preferred to stand. Moz had been sent to the kitchen to make mint tea.

"Here," he said, banging his tray onto the table.

Celia smiled. "I'll have mine unsweetened. You'd better check with the others." When the tea was poured into glasses, she made him go back for a plate of pastries, mostly chopped pistachio mixed with honey and variations on baklava.

Moz was preparing himself to be furious when he noticed that de Greuze and Major Abbas were more furious still. It was like a card game in which everyone but him knew the rules.

"Give me your bank details," said the Major to Jake. "I'll have the money sent on." They were still discussing the finer points of the deal.

"No." Celia shook her head. "Arrange a dollar bank draft and have it sent to these people." The card she pulled from her leather satchel gave the address of a New York attorney who specialized in handling the more difficult kind of celebrity client. "I'll tell them to expect the money."

Jake only made the grade with that firm because of his family, his musical career to date not being enough to rate him client status. A fact both the attorney and Celia had been careful never to point out.

When Major Abbas made the mistake of looking doubtful Celia told him in painstaking and patronising detail which Marrakchi bank could act as go-between, what kind of commission they would expect and how long it would take to organize. "I'm sure the agent you have in mind can handle it."

If Jake were going to lose the riad and be banished from Marrakech, which effectively was what had just happened, then Celia wasn't about to retire without leaving a few scars.

"So we just leave?" Jake said. He didn't seem to be asking the question of anyone in particular. "And take Moz with us."

"That wasn't what I said," the Major replied, dipping his hand into a pocket and removing a packet of small cigars. Smoke spiralled towards the sky as he looked from Jake to Moz, noticing the similarity of their haircuts, jeans and general slouch. He should have seen it before.

"This boy is under-age," Major Abbas told Jake. "He also lacks a passport. Anyone attempting to take him out of Morocco would be breaking the law. You understand me?"

Jake nodded.

"Good. Were such a thing to happen…It would be very inadvisable for that person to come back to Marrakech again."

Jake assumed that the land agent was in the Major's pay and would organize matters so that Riad al-Razor was sold cheaply to a member of the Major's immediate family. This assumption was untrue. Being unmarried and an only son, the Major had no family.

The agent Major Abbas had in mind was actually a brother of his deputy who would probably sell the house to a cousin of his own. The money would then be split into three sums, with the first and largest going to the American bank mentioned by Celia, a second and smaller amount going into the agent's own account and a third and equivalent sum going to the Major.

Had Celia been Moroccan or even au fait with the etiquette of buying houses in North Africa, there would have been a fourth sum, made by splitting the largest sum two thirds–one third. The second of those sums would have been declared to the authorities as the price of the riad, becoming liable to any taxes that might be appropriate, and the first would have gone straight into Jake's pocket.

Nobody shook hands when the Major and de Greuze left. Instead Jake stood under the arch of the front door and watched the petite taxi pull away from where it had been parked against the wall of a mosque.

"I reckon we've got till the end of the week," he told Celia. "I'll go buy a VW. You find the kid some new clothes…" And that was when Moz finally realized a deal had been struck and that, at no point, had anyone let him have the slightest say in the matter.

He would be leaving Marrakech with the others. Jake and Celia had known from the beginning that Malika was beyond saving.

"No," said Moz, tears in his eyes. "I won't."

"Won't what?" Celia sounded puzzled.

"I'm not leaving," Moz said. "You can't make me. And it was a lie. I wasn't here. I was with--"

Malika's name was lost in the sound of Jake backhanding the boy across his face, swearing loudly and stamping inside, slamming the front door behind him.

"Fuckwit," said Moz.

Celia sighed. "That wasn't clever," she said. Moz thought she was talking about Jake but he might have been wrong. She might well have been talking about him.

CHAPTER 47

Marrakech, Summer 1977

In the end, Malika's body found him.

"Moz, wait," Idries said. His face was strained, his fingers curled in on themselves, broken nails biting into his own flesh. His jellaba was filthy and his lips looked bitten.

"Fuck off," said Moz, not stopping.

"Hassan is looking for you."

"So?" Moz threw the comment over his shoulder. Already he was pushing his way through a crowd of nasrani tourists spilling from a coach onto a pavement outside a market in Gueliz.

"It's about Malika."

Moz stopped so abruptly that one of the foreigners ran into him. Whatever she saw in the eyes of the Marrakchi kid made her step back and take a sudden interest in a display of terracotta bowls.

"Malika?"

"You'd better come with me."

"Where is she?"

"Hassan will tell you," Idries said. Something like fear nictated across his eyes. Something dark, something adult.

"You tell me."

Idries shook his head. "Hassan will tell you," he insisted.

Between that market and their destination stood ten minutes of strained silence and whitewashed palm trees that flaked onto stone pavements built by the French and then abandoned along with the villas more than twenty years before. An Alsatian barked from behind a wrought-iron gate, the name on the post something European and strange. The streets became shabby as Idries led Moz away from Avenue Mohammed V towards the area around the Prison Civile, becoming smarter as Moz and Idries came out into a road that skirted Le Cimetière Européen.

To their left was a dark slant of rock jutting from the red earth as nakedly as broken bone. Jbel Gueliz, little more than a toy mountain.

Dogs howled, scrawny cats slunk against walls and doves fluttered around a tall, white-painted cote. They met carts laden with tomatoes and peppers and stepped aside for a farting three-wheeled truck over-crowded with sheep. A comforting smell of dung filled the air as they passed two donkeys tethered on a half-finished building plot, guarded by a boy barely half as tall as his animals.

Moz was saying goodbye to the city without knowing it and stacking his head with fragments when he thought his mind already numbed beyond caring. Although, mostly what Moz was to recall about that afternoon was Idries two steps in front of him, head down and walking so fast that Moz could barely keep up, despite being both taller than Idries and stronger.

The other boy was--almost literally--running away from Moz's questions. They both understood that. Idries's answers reduced to jagged breathing and an endless repetition of "Hassan will tell you." Moz knew he should stop asking, just as surely as Idries realized this wasn't going to happen. So Moz hurried along behind, his shoulders hunched and fear pressing in on him.

On any other day he'd have been wincing at the rawness of his split lip or stripping off his T-shirt to show Malika the blood-dark bruising all over his body, only Malika…

The physical pain Moz felt was nothing compared to his fear and both were subsumed beneath his need to arrive wherever it was Idries was taking him.

"How far?"

"Over there," Idries said, pointing to a gate in a wall. Moz could see the relief in his eyes. "Hassan's waiting inside. He'll explain."

"About time."

"Over there," repeated Idries and then sunk to his heels, grabbing oxygen from the hot air. Stains had blossomed under his sleeves and a dark patch spread from the centre of his chest, where sweat had soaked through the blue cotton of his cheap jellaba.

Moz knew it was bad when Hassan came to meet him. Quite how bad he only realized when the older boy put out his hand.

Absent-mindedly, Moz shook it and then watched Hassan step back to touch his hand to his own heart and then forehead, lifting his fingers away with a slight flick of the wrist. It was an old-fashioned, sadly formal gesture.

"I'm sorry," Hassan said. There was none of the usual bravado in his voice. He could have been Moz's friend, not one of his lifelong enemies and loser of their most recent fight. "I had no idea…"

"Where is she?"

"Behind the Jesu."

This was an old statue of the nasrani god draped in the robes of a Sufi and staring up to heaven. Heat, wind and a poor choice of sandstone meant that the figure was barely recognizable.

And the choice of location meant that whoever was responsible knew Malika's childhood secrets. Behind the Jesu was where Moz and Malika met as children, that summer they became friends. A circle of beaten earth in the middle of a thicket of thorns. A place, even then, of crushed beer cans, soiled tissues and peeling, piss-coloured filters from stolen cigarettes. That was how Moz thought of it, when he remembered the place at all.

"It's bad," Hassan said.

Moz looked at him.

"Whatever you're imagining," Hassan said, "it's worse." Without even thinking about it, the older boy made a sign against the evil eye. "You don't have to see her," Hassan added, as if he'd only just realized that. "I can ask my uncle to--"

"She was my friend."

The very flatness of Moz's voice told Hassan this was not an argument worth having, so instead he pointed to a gap between two bushes. "Through there," he said. "I'll be waiting. The debt is mine."

Settling himself against the trunk of a pine, Hassan reached into his pocket and found a packet of cigarettes. It took him three goes to get his fingers steady enough to light one of the things.

CHAPTER 49

Northern Mountains, CTzu 53/Year 20

As Tris and Luca headed towards the end of their bridge, Zaq sat under his willow in the walled garden, holding a peach and watching butterflies flicker in and out of sight, not yet warmed enough by the sun to do more than make small hops from one flower to another, wings beating lazily.

"Almost time," Zaq said.

Inside his head a boy stood over the broken body of a girl and Zaq knew, beyond doubt, that the boy had just died there in the dusty graveyard and the man who walked away was never more than a ghost. It was unfair, unjust and, for all Zaq knew, destined to produce only failure, but he still let it happen.

Sometimes the Chuang Tzu surprised even himself with his ability to make others cry. Wiping his eyes with the back of his hand, Zaq stared round at the mulberry bushes fat with purple fruit.

"Wait," he told a butterfly.

The way it was meant to work was that the Chuang Tzu would reach out his hand and the butterfly would alight, bringing its message. After delivering the message the butterfly would die. As would anyone else in the garden unwise enough to reach for a butterfly without being the Chuang Tzu.

Only the reborn could communicate in this fashion with the Library and live. Since Zaq refused to reach out and welcome the hovering butterfly it fluttered at the edge of his vision, puzzled but willing to wait.

It was a very small butterfly, presumably to reassure Zaq that the Librarian's question was not really that important, a mere trifle that Zaq could make disappear simply by answering.

If Zaq didn't reach out his hand soon the butterfly would die anyway and another would take its place. The creatures had very short life-spans. A point he was meant to ponder as all emperors had pondered before him; except that Zaq was busy refusing to be emperor, he was being Zaq.

Which was the cause of his original war against the Library. And maybe this was his last chance to be himself before everything changed.

The peach Zaq held was fresh, perfect in its plumpness and the bloom of its unmarked skin, so perfect, in fact, that it reminded him of the servitor girl whose name he'd now forgotten. There were a dozen peaches like it on a small tree so close to the willow that he could almost reach for fruit without moving and a dozen trees within easy walk if that tree would not do.

The garden held a strange place in the affections of the Library; Zaq could think of no other way to put it. Maybe it was because of the link between gardens and perfection, gardens and heaven, gardens and the afterlife. Actually, there was no maybe about it. Zaq knew this was true because he'd asked the Librarian.

When the Library first talked with Major Commissar Chuang Tzu, who was obviously not the original Chuang Tzu, merely the original for the purposes of the Library who'd never met Homo sapiens before and had not realized the universe was still inhabited, its creators having moved.

When it first trawled though the young Chinese officer's deepest memories it had noticed the single-minded importance put on a vegetable garden and the wild grasses growing on a hillside above a waterfall. A search through the AI and the memories of the cold eternals aboard the SZ Loyal Prince revealed that most faith systems on the world from which the ship originated bound heaven and gardens together.

So the darkness (as it then was) gave the Chinese officer the garden he'd known only in the abstract. A place of butterflies, messages and memories. Zaq didn't need to hear the message and he already knew what it would say, some riff on what General Ch'ao Kai had said yesterday.

He had time to change his mind. The situation was not irreversible. The best way to make peace with the Library was accept his role as Emperor and reinstate the imperial guard.

Let them kill this assassin.

All General Ch'ao Kai needed was permission to mobilize his troops.

Nothing Zaq hadn't already heard. And, more to the point, nothing he hadn't already refused to contemplate. Zaq wanted an end to this and his orders stood. He was to be regarded as invisible. All of those living within the Forbidden City were to go about their everyday business as if he had never been. He would remain in the garden and wait for his assassin.

Zaq smiled and a billion people wept at his sadness.

A moment or two later he changed his mind.

"Oh, come on then."

Holding out his hand, Zaq watched the butterfly make its short journey from mulberry leaf to Zaq's wrist, dying in a tiny flash of electricity.

"Back yourself up." The order was stark, except it wasn't an order. The Council of Ambassadors couldn't give orders, they could merely make suggestions. Ones that the Emperor was entirely free to ignore. Of all the suggestions they'd relayed to the Librarian, this was certainly the shortest.

"No," said Zaq, "I don't think so."

Backing himself up meant returning to Baohe Dian, the Hall of Preserving Harmony, to be examined by the imperial doctors. After which he would sign orders making General Ch'ao Kai regent for the eight minutes it would take Zaq to be read, found adequate and recorded. Maybe the Library had a host already prepared, a second Zaq blissfully sleeping away his non-life in a glass tank somewhere.

Zaq had in mind the pods originally found on the SZ Loyal Prince, which he'd visited. This was rare among emperors, who mostly sat quietly in the Butterfly Garden or retired to the silence of the Library to practice calligraphy, draw endless misty mountains or note down their carefully composed words of wisdom.

Of course, for them the SZ Loyal Prince was historical abstraction, not somewhere they'd called home for the first seven years of their lives. Zaq was aware that as Chuang Tzu he had been less than impressive. Rapture still existed and the 2023 worlds were healthy, true enough, their peoples no more bored or less happy than under the putative rule of any of the other, earlier emperors.

Only he'd intended to be so much more and would have been if he'd had the courage of the assassin who struggled so hard through the snow and storms Zaq sent against her. This small, cropped-haired figure wrapped in a cheap jacket and torn trousers, who talked to the air, slept oblivious and alone on a storm-tossed bridge and rose the next morning, equally oblivious as to why the storm now stilled. Zaq was exhausted from trying to live up to the assassin's expectations.

"Oh well," he said, climbing to his feet. Turning, Zaq hurled the peach he held against the grey up-stroke of a willow. It was a perfect shot and the fruit burst as it exploded against pale bark, staining the willow's trunk with a smear of darkness.

Zaq would have given anything for the peach to contain a maggot, to be bruised or rotten at the stone, but that would never happen. Perfection was required for the Emperor, even in the Butterfly Garden, and the Library was there to ensure perfection was what he got.

The maggot, the bruising and the rot were inside Zaq's head. He didn't think anyone had much doubt about that.

"Go back," Tris suggested.

The words popped out of her mouth in that way words sometimes do. A fleeting thought suddenly translated into speech with no filter betwen original thought and open mouth.

"Go…?" Luca looked amused, tired and almost dead on his feet, but very definitely amused. "Go where?" he asked.

"Home?" Tris didn't intend a question, that just happened to be the way it inflected. "You should go back," she added, more decisively. "You're exhausted. I can manage from here."

"Manage?" His smile became a sad grin. "Of course you can manage," Luca said. "I'm not here to help you."

"You're not?" demanded Tris.

Luca shook his head. "You're helping me," he said. And in that moment he sounded like an adult talking to a very small child. An intelligent, well-loved child, but a child all the same.

Moving Tris gently to one side, Luca stepped off the bridge and onto solid rock. "There's no way I could have escaped the village before you arrived."

"Why not?"

Luca's look was kind, if slightly exasperated. The look of someone who really didn't quite know where to begin. In the end, all Luca said was, "Rapture wouldn't let me."

"Why not?"

"The storms, the plateau, the ravine, the bridge…They're linked, you know." He glanced at her. "You do know that, don't you? That everything on Rapture is tied to everything else and all of it tied to the happiness of the Emperor."

"Really?" Tris said.

"At all levels," said Luca. It was obvious that this was news to Tris. "Didn't anyone ever explain quantum interdependence?"

Helping Tris onto the rock, Luca brushed snow from her blue jacket and peeled frost from her eyebrows. He did this without thinking, the way a father might do it for a daughter and Luca knew, at a theoretical level, that treating Tris this way made for problems because he'd already bedded her, creating the template for an entirely different if less complex relationship.

Luca knew this only at a theoretical level because he'd met very few people from the 2023 worlds. In fact, to be honest, the only person with whom he'd talked closely was Tris and he questioned whether she really represented that culture at all.

The girl certainly didn't fit his image of a hyper-educated, sexually sophisticated, slightly blasé member of the richest society yet existing, which was how the Always Knowledgeable and Correct Empire of the 2023 worlds sold itself, mostly to itself.

"Which world do you come from?" Luca was sure he'd asked Tris this question before and had memories of not understanding her answer.

A second snow-covered plateau extended for at least a day and maybe longer beyond the bridge. Because there were few hills and no actual valleys, the snow had spread evenly across the undulating surface and the flakes were so dry they barely stuck to Tris's and Luca's shoes, although this dryness meant the plateau's surface was forever sifted by the wind.

And yet even the wind seemed to be in their favour, shifting to the west to blow gently against their backs and coax them on their way.

"Something's changed," said Tris.

"No," Luca said. "Everything's changed. Take a look around you."

The sun was beating down on the snow and a billion diamonds of light flickered in its brightness. The whole thing looking like nothing so much as a crust of solidified foam.

"This is good, right?" Tris asked.

"Well." The Baron shrugged. "It's certainly different."

In the end the plateau didn't so much finish as fall away into a slope that got steeper and steeper until suddenly it stopped being a slope. This happened at a point where the crust over which they walked slipped over the horizon and vanished altogether from sight.

"Walk backwards," Luca suggested. "You'll find it easier if you know where you've come from." Gripping his sticks, Luca strode to the start of the steepness, turned to face Tris and then stepped back, jamming both thorn sticks deep into the snow. He would like to believe that what he hit was earth, but chances were it was compacted snow, ice or bare rock because the ends of his sticks slid slightly.

"And dig deep," he added.

Tris did as she was told, turning as Luca had done and stepping back, feeling for a foothold that seemed further away than it ought to be. Her sticks slipped a little and then locked into place.

"If you feel yourself slip," said Luca, "ram both sticks into the snow and keep hold." The twine from his trap was gone, lost along the way, and this was irritating because he'd have liked Tris's sticks to be lashed to her wrists and he lacked the strength to tear fresh strips from his cloak. Tris had almost no idea how tired Luca was and he hoped to keep it that way.

Afternoon slid into evening, the high cirrus having cleared to reveal the silver shimmer of a sky filled with worlds around the distant sun, as if some insane mosaicist had decorated the inside of a globe with tiny tesserae and then not bothered to fill in between the tiles.

"So many worlds," Tris said.

Luca smiled.

Somewhere stacked in the back of her brain, Tris had Doc Joyce's breakdown of how and why. Obviously not the deep physics, the stuff that allowed each tesserae to retain its position within the globe while replicating gravity and retaining a workable atmosphere. All who claimed to understand this lied, their explanations quick and dirty hack around what little was left of preZP physics.

She learnt quickly, Tris was proud of this fact. Unfortunately the speed at which Tris assimilated ideas was something her grandmother never quite seemed to grasp. Her childhood refrain, You just never learn, do you?, being so far from the truth that Tris had seen little merit in pointing out that actually she learnt everything until there was nothing left to learn.

When Tris finally ran out of facts at home she went searching. No one ever thought to ask why and, if they had, Tris probably wouldn't have been able to answer. But the vanishing acts had grown in length, from missed afternoons through whole days to nights when she didn't come home and weeks that went by in a blur of cheap drugs, cheaper sex and bad conversation.

Translated, this meant reflex accelerators, fear inhibitors and a wide range of near opiates. Not to mention turning tricks against the wall at the back of Schwarzschilds for some tourist tom too blitzed to notice that Tris held him between her thighs instead of inside her.

The queens were cleaner, less animal, usually.

Many of those who put Tris up against a wall talked to her first, about their worlds and what made them come to one of the lowest levels of the Rip, a place most guides suggested they avoid. And once she even extracted a snatch of conversation from a gene splicer so silent even Doc Joyce had long since assumed the man was mute.

"Stop," said Luca and hands gripped her hips, halting Tris. "We're here."

Tris wanted to ask, where? There were so many things Luca assumed she knew when for most of this trip she'd merely been guessing. He was getting older and more tired, less happy to have her around. It was a look Tris knew well. One she'd seen each evening as a small child in the face of her mother, when the woman realized another day was gone and Tris's father had not returned. That, in all probability, he never would and she was left with a small child, a leaking shack and a mother-in-law who'd retreated into a world of her own.

And then one night, instead of looking resigned, Tris's mother had collected together the few things she actually owned and left. Tris wasn't even surprised.

"Keep staring ahead," said Luca. "You can't afford to turn round and you mustn't look down. Keep the moment close. And let everything else go."

Tris knew exactly what he meant. At least she hoped she did. "We're going to jump, right?"

"Not quite," said Luca, reaching into his satchel. For once the conditions were on their side. A whole strip of snow along the lip of the drop had slipped, exposing naked rock. This enabled Luca to find a flaw into which to ram the first of four steel pegs he produced from his bag.

"I'm going first," Luca told Tris. "And you're going to follow…The problem is I've only got a handful of these." He nodded to the spike. "So you're going to have to collect them as you go."

"How?"

"Easy," said Luca. "Just twist the top."

So Tris did, only too aware of the sheer drop towards which she shuffled, edging backwards so slowly she barely moved. Tris found the spike by dropping to a crouch and reaching behind her, fingers closing on cold metal.

It was stuck fast in the rock.

"Twist the top," Luca said again.

And Tris felt the spike slide free.

"We had hundreds once," said Luca, "thousands, maybe more." He sounded tired, old beyond his wish. "They were for building."

"You brought them with you?"

"It's possible," Luca admitted.

Holding the narrow spike in one hand, Tris twisted the top with her other.

"It's broken," she said.

Luca shook his head. Whatever was meant to happen took place at a level invisible to human eyes.

"It's working," he promised her.

She held a fortune in her hand, Tris realized, while another three fortunes lay at her feet. Doc Joyce would have restrung her entire body and thrown in new bones and buckytubes for her brain for one chance to work out what the spikes did and how.

Even fake tek was worth something. Certainly enough for the Doc to manufacture idiot-looking artifacts that tourists bought time and again, just in case they turned out to be real.

Tris grinned.

"What?" Luca said.

"Nothing that matters." Glancing back at the plateau, Tris was bemused both by the distance and the breath-catching beauty of a landscape she and Luca had crossed without really noticing. She was tired now. Almost as tired as Luca and the Baron was so tired that at times he seemed almost transparent.

"Focus," Luca said crossly. He nodded to the spike still gripped in her fingers. "And put that back."

Tris did, twisting the top to lock the spike in place.

"Right," said Luca. "Empty your head of everything but locating the next spike, reaching for it with one foot and letting the spike take your weight. You'll be roped to me and I'll be fixed to the cliff face with this." Luca pulled a final piece of climbing equipment from his bag. This spike had an eye at the top through which a rope could pass.

"One last thing," said the Baron. "You don't move until I tell you."

Tris understood that bit.

"A little to the right." Luca was doing his best not to sound worried. "Left a bit. That's it. The next spike's below your foot."

They'd been hanging on the edge of the drop for almost fifteen minutes and hardly made any progress at all. In fact, the lip over which they'd climbed was barely out of Tris's reach. All Tris had to do to follow Luca was remove the first and original spike, tuck it into her waistband and shift her weight so she could hang from a second spike, while using one foot to feel for a third that Luca had already fixed into the cliff.

"I know where it is," said Tris.

"Then use it."

Darkness was coming in faster than either had expected and Luca was running out of reassuring clichés about the first step being the most difficult, things getting easier, it just being a matter of practice…

"I thought you did this all the time in the Rip," Luca said, irritation winning out over tact.

"That's jumping," said Tris. "It's different."

Give her a rope long enough and she'd have been halfway down the cliff before Luca had finished fixing his wretched spikes.

"You must have climbed on Rip," said Luca.

"Of course I did," Tris said. "That was up, though. This is down…" All the same she twisted the spike, slid it from the rock and pushed it into the waistband of her thin trousers. She was climbing in her rope sandals, Luca having insisted that this would be better than bare toes.

"Well done," said Luca.

"Yeah," Tris said, "and you can fuck off too." But she said it too quietly for Luca to hear.