SQUIRT THE BYTES OVER. NO NO NO PROBLEM FOR ME

She pointed the cybofax at the module and keyed a squirt.

GOT IT I'LL START LOOKING FOR A WAY THROUGH. SHOULD HAVE AN ANSWER BY THIS AFTERNOON.

"Fine." Eleanor slipped the cybofax into her back pocket. "Can you also find out if any hotrod was contracted to supply this hypothetical burn virus?"

I'LL ASK. MIGHT NOT GET A HUNDRED %%%%%% ACCURATE ANSWER. IF IT WAS DONE, THE WRITER WON'T BE ADVERTISING.

"Have you heard of anyone asking for a virus like this?"

NO NO NO. CROSS HEART

"OK, final point; Greg thinks it would be useful to know what sort of rumours are floating about. Ask around the circuit, find out what people think Kitchener was working on for Julia, whether they even knew he was working for Julia; and also, did Kitchener owe money to anyone?"

HE WAS A MILLIONAIRE MULTI MULTI MULTI.

"He was a regular syntho user, and so were some of the students. He had his own vat at Launde, but the basic compounds still cost money. So it probably wouldn't be banks we're talking about."

GOTCHA. KITCHENER USED SYNTHO?

"Yes."

MAN LIKE THAT WOW WOW WOW.

She gave him a sad smile. "Yes, a man like that. Funny old world, isn't it. You wouldn't think he'd need it, a brain like his."

MAYBE BECAUSE HE HAD A BRAIN LIKE THAT. NOBODY ON THIS PLANET WAS HIS EQUAL. MAYBE HE WAS LONELY LONELY LONELY.

"Oh, no, not Kitchener, not lonely. One of the girl students is having his child."

There was no answer for a moment, the last LONELY remained splashed across the three right-hand screens. Then the word evaporated like morning dew. She heard the lens on the camera whirring softly, zooming in on her face.

HE WAS OLD.

"Sixty-seven, I think"

ALL THAT TIME. SO MANY YEARS.

"He accomplished an awful lot," she said, uncertain where Royan was leading. Not true, at the back of her mind she knew exactly. She just didn't want to acknowledge it.

DO YOU LIKE ME, ELEANOR?

That grin didn't have to be forced. "I keep coming back, don't I?"

YES YES YES. THANK YOU.

She stood up, straightening the creases out of her sweatshirt. "Now don't spend all your time working on the Abbey's security system. Teddy says he needs you for Trinities work."

BUGGER HIM… PARDON MY FRENCH. I DECIDE MY OWN PRIORITIES. ME ME ME.

"You'll get me into trouble."

NEVER. SAY HI TO GREG. TELL HIM HE HAD BETTER SHOW UP HIMSELF NEXT TIME.

"I will."

AND YOU. COME BACK. SEE ME.

"Yes." She gave him a last glance, non-human, shamed by the fact that she could never in a million years show so much bravery. There was no point in even asking him to come out to the farm. It could be done, physically, with stretchers and vans and plenty of advanced planning. But his inheritance tied him to Mucklands far tighter than the web of fibre-optic cables ever did. Him and Teddy, neither of them would leave; there was no point, they were Mucklands, it went with them wherever they were.

Qoi popped up out of the kitchen without being summoned, and showed her to the door.

CHAPTER TWELVE

"As always, the sylphlike Julia Evans remains resolutely wedded to her fallal dress sense," Jakki Coleman said. She was at her Mediterranean villa, lounging on a sunbed at the side of a kidney-shaped pool.

On the far side was a white stone balustrade, guarding the steep drop down to a muzzy blue sea. The palm trees were growing out of stone barrels, fronds stirring in a gentle breeze.

"Considering the perennial obsession which the Gothic cult has for the afterworld, this particular selection of garments worn for the Prior's Fen footings ceremony is highly appropriate. Because, let's face it, our poor dear Julia looks as if she's been exhumed after a few weeks residing in a grave."

"BITCH!" Julia shrieked.

Her tea cup hit the flatscreen in the centre, smashing into crescent fragments; it was the first object her searching hand could find, a big yellow and blue breakfast cup from the bedside tray. Sugary dregs began to trickle down the flat-screen, smearing the dark-haired young man who climbed out of the pool and began towelling himself off.

Patrick raised his head from the mounds of pillows which had accumulated on his side of the bed, blinking sleep from his eyes. "What?" he grunted blearily.

"Oh go back to sleep." Julia fired the remote at the flatscreen, imagining it was a laser pistol, beam scorching a hole through Jakki Coleman's head, her middle-aged head, and the shiny blue swimsuit showed her thighs were getting flabby too. She folded her arms below her breasts and glared at the blank rectangle.

Her bedroom was decorated in a soothing montage of pink and white tones, extremely feminine, with exquisite lacy frills on all the furniture, subdued lighting, a huge four-poster bed with a Romany canopy, ankle-deep pile carpet. It was the third redesign in four years; each time she edged closer to her ideal, the romantic French-château image she secretly treasured.

And what would Jakki Coleman have to say about it? Bitch!

"You're upset about something," Patrick said.

"Oh, ten out of ten, give it a banana."

"Was it me?"

"No," she said tightly.

"Ah, right." He subsided back into the pillows.

Well that ruined the morning mood, Julia thought, there would be no sex now.

She pointed the remote at the windows. The thick imperial-purple velour curtains swept aside to show her the balcony. Wisteria vines, gene-tailored against the heat of the new seasons, were wrapped round the wrought iron railings, producing a solid wall of delicate mauve flower clusters. Wilholm's rear lawns formed a splendid backdrop with their English country house formality, she could just see the long trout lake at the bottom, its fairytale waterfall tinged brown from the silt washed down the stream by the heavy rains.

Not even the garden's naturalistic perfection could break her ire. Bugger Jakki Coleman anyway. Who cared what she said?

Although that wasn't the half of it. She still felt guilty about asking Greg to look into the Kitchener murder. And the murder itself was a complication she could do without. Right now Morgan's security division was stretched pretty thinly defending the company from conventional threats—industrial sabotage, industrial espionage, crooked accountants, hotrod hackers infiltrating the datanet. Why would anybody feel strongly about something as weirdly abstract as superphysics wormholes? Surely it couldn't be an anti-Evans gesture? Not slaughtering a defenceless old man? She couldn't believe anyone was that sick and warped; besides, there had been no announcement. If any operational PSP remnants had killed Kitchener they would have been crowing about it all across the media by now.

At least there hadn't been much mention of Greg on the newscasts she had caught before flicking over to the Coleman trollop. Some jerky pictures taken from a shoulder-mounted camera, the operator running after the EMC Ranger as it drove out of the police station, Eleanor's tight-lipped anger, Greg impassive as always.

Patrick touched her shoulder. "You're very tense." His fingers slid down her arm to the elbow, then stroked her breast, circling the nipple.

She tilted her head back and sighed through clenched teeth. "No, Patrick."

His tongue nuzzled her ear, stubble scratching her collar bone. "I can massage all that tension away. You know I can."

It was very very tempting. There wasn't a chime in her head Patrick couldn't ring whenever he chose. But for all that ecstasy, he was a mechanical lover. She had begun to suspect a great deal of his excitement came from the way he controlled her body, almost a voyeur of his own performance.

"No," she said abruptly, and shoved her feet out of the bed.