The guilt comes from its all being an illusion: a full-immersion virtual reality which has her so spellbound that she understands exactly why this seductive subversion of the senses is so much frowned upon. The most decadent sybarite in the upper lofts of Ship City will sternly inform you that this kind of thing is unnatural, has rotted the moral fibre of great civilisations, and makes you go blind.
She’s a little guilty, too, that Ax can’t share it. He’s stuck out in the real world, mooching in the back of the truck. The half-tracked vehicle is like a gigantic, elongated version of Jay-Dub’s upper shell. Its brushed-aluminium skin conceals several centimetres of armour-plate. Its nuclear turbines can give it a top speed of a hundred kilometres an hour, with a flat surface and a clear run. In its stores are many fearsome and fascinating things, but VR immersion gear is not among them.
Dee’s in via a direct cortical jack, plugged in to a socket behind her ear. Ax could do this too, but there’s only one jack, and she needs it – or rather, it’s needed for her. Ax is (she has to assume) still sitting under the raised visor of the tailgate, with his legs dangling over the end of the truck, and applying his electronic version of telepathy to the dodgy reception of an old television. He’s also (she hopes) keeping a watchful eye out for predators, bounty-hunters, and dust-storms. The crawler’s systems, and Jay-Dub’s, are well prepared for all of them, but as Dee looks down the virtual valley, she suspects that they’re more than a little preoccupied. She knows a thing or two about CPU time, and from here she can see a lot of it being used.
And not only by Jay-Dub and the vehicle. One reason why she’s been sent off up the hill and instructed to do as little as possible is that her own systems are almost fully engaged. Her body, out in the real world, is lying in the back of the truck, limp as a rag-doll. All but two of the figures working on the skeletal tower, just below the long, low house whose graceful shape juts out of the slope like an overhang, are aspects of herself. Soldier is there, and Scientist, and Spy and Sys, helping two other entities with their strange work. Stores and Secrets don’t manifest themselves in VR as anything like people: instead, they’re tangled, almost impenetrable bundles of live wires and sharp thorns and equally discouraging objects. The dark figures dance and poke around them, and now and again snatch something from the thickets and carry it off triumphantly to add to the bristling tower.
The two other entities are the ones that inhabit Jay-Dub all the time. She met them after Jay-Dub had taken them in its boat up the Stone Canal, far out into the desert, last night. They are the old man and the young girl who spoke to her from the truck. (The truck, indeed, is a version of this vehicle, and she can understand the attraction of its illusory, cluttered cab.) Away from the cab, in the valley and in the house, Meg is a graceful, elegantly dressed woman, but in the cab she’s a slut. Her face and eyes are the same in both virtual environments; but her eyes always seem larger and darker, when her smile haunts your memory, than they are when you see them again.
Ax has been given the task of watching the news, and following the court case when it starts. Meanwhile Wilde, the old man in the robot’s mind, has harnessed all the resources of its mind and hers to crack the problem – as he puts it – independently of the outcome. He and Meg, and the spectral shapes of Dee’s separate selves, are running about like ants at a fire.
And Dee is up here, on the hillside, all by her Self.
Tamara caught Wilde’s elbow. His fists were clenched, his heels were off the ground. He was leaning forward, staring after Reid and Reid’s companions.
‘You can always kill him afterwards,’ she said. ‘If it comes to a fight.’
Wilde relaxed somewhat. Slowly his hands uncurled. He gave Tamara a smile to set her at her ease, and looked down at the cigarette Reid had given him. It was still smouldering, the filter tip flattened between his fingers. He took a last long drag of it, and threw it away.
‘He said I was a puppet, and Wilde was dead.’ He shook his head, then shivered. ‘If Jonathan Wilde is dead, who killed him, eh?’
‘NOT ADMISSIBLE,’ the MacKenzie adviser told him.
Wilde snorted, blinked away a floating footnote about rules of evidence, and sat down on one of the seats. He crushed his paper cup and stuffed it into the mug that Reid had left. He reached for Tamara’s hand and drew her to a seat. She sat down on it sidelong, facing him.
‘What was all that –’ her voice dropped ‘– about the fast folk?’
Wilde glanced around. Seats around them were filling up, as people settled down to await the beginning of the case: Reid’s supporters and theirs, as well as an increasing number of people who didn’t fit in either camp, and who were drifting in from the main gate. These visitors, as distinct from the litigant alliances, made a colourful showing, with their hacked genes, elective implants or biomech symbionts. News remotes prowled about, some on the ground, some – supported by small balloons or tiny haloes of rotor-blades – drifting or hovering overhead. Up at the front someone tested microphones, generating howls of feedback.
‘There’s no time,’ Wilde said. He sighed and repeated, as if to himself, ‘There’s no time.’ Then he clasped Tamara’s hand and said urgently, ‘Look, you’ve seen something of what Reid really thinks. I don’t know if he’ll try that in court – he can’t very well claim I’m human, and Jay-Dub’s owner, and then turn around and say what he just said. But there’s a lot more at issue than the matters before the court. If the outcome goes against him, there’s no way Reid will go along with it. And if it goes against us, there’s no way we can go along with it!’
‘We could challenge him to single combat,’ Tamara said, as if it were a good idea. Wilde laughed at her.
‘Do you really fancy my chances?’
Tamara thought it over, eyed him critically. ‘Nah. Not really. You’re bigger, but he’s faster.’ She brightened. ‘But I’d have a chance, or I could call on an ally. Shit. Wish Ax was with us.’
‘Forget it,’ Wilde said. ‘You’re fighting no battles for me.’
‘Battles…’ Tamara sat up straight. ‘You said there might be big trouble. I can tell the comrades to get ready. In Circle Square we’ve got a few good fighters, and people who’ve studied all the great anarchist battles – Paris, Kronstadt, Ukraine, Barcelona, Seoul, Norlonto…’
‘Yeah, right,’ said Wilde. ‘Well, I hate to break this to you at such a late date and all, but there’s one vital thing all the great anarchist battles of history have in common.’
‘Yes?’
Wilde stood up and got ready to move down to the front row. He grinned at Tamara’s eager enquiry.
‘They were all defeats,’ he said.
Wilde took his seat, with Tamara at his right and Ethan Miller at his left. The others who’d come with him filled the other seats on either side. Farther to the left, across a passage between the files of seats, Reid and his immediate supporters had positioned themselves. The rest of the hundred or so seats were occupied, and twice as many more people – human or otherwise – made shift to stand or sit on the grass. In front of all of them was the wooden dais with its simple furnishings, and an array of microphones and cameras. From the labels stuck on them they appeared to be from the news-services rather than part of the court’s arrangements, but some of them had been cabled to loudspeakers at the rear of the seats, the cobweb threads of the cables shining on the damp and now trampled grass. Ethan ostentatiously checked the mechanisms of his rifle.
At a minute before ten, the voices hushed, and the other sounds – of breathing, of shifting, of recording – seemed louder, as Eon Talgarth walked up the central aisle. Heads and cameras turned. Talgarth faced straight ahead.