'You OK? You look half dead.'

Apposite - so very apposite. Cormac couldn't remember what his reply had been, something trivial, something unassured, verbal. There had been other exchanges, each trailing away into banality until he was glad of cold-sleep's oblivion. Now, two hours since thaw-up, feeling was really returning. He looked down at his hands, concentrated until the quiver stilled, and wondered. Was he feeling embarrassment now or some aspect of link withdrawal? Truly, how fucked up was he that he could not identify his own emotions? He lowered his hands to his sides. It was recorded somewhere. It had to be. He turned from the portal and studied the touch-console in the corner of his room. Yes, he did feel embarrassment. He recalled the look Chaline, the science officer in charge of re-establishing the runcible link, had given him when he had asked for instruction on the console's use. For thirty years he had been out of phase. Having instant access to information had stunted his ability to learn. He again lived through her patronizing explanation, then went over and studied the console. The touch-controls were stacked and very complicated, but there was always an easier way for less complex access.

'Hubris, display anything you have on gridlink withdrawal… please,' he said.

The screen flickered and one word appeared: Searching…

In a couple of seconds a number of file headings appeared. He sat down at the console and with unpractised fingers began to work through each file. What he read there only confirmed things he already knew: long-term linking was much like drug addiction, and like drug addiction it could be broken with willpower, with inner strength. The situation as it stood was unacceptable, and Cormac intended to rectify it. He sat with his fists clenched until there was a knock at the door. It might have been only a few seconds; it might have been for minutes. He unclenched his fists, wiped the screen and stood.

'Enter,' he said.

The woman who came through was tall and classically beautiful. She had luxuriant black hair, skin that seemed unnaturally white, a ripe and muscular figure only just covered with clinging body suit, thin but perfect features and striking green eyes. Only she was not a human woman.

'You are NG2765?' Cormac asked.

'I am Jane.'

'My apologies, I did not know your name… but you are a Golem Twenty-seven?'

Jane smiled evenly, and then looked with a raised eyebrow at the lurid pot plant Cormac had shoved behind the sofa. Cormac swallowed annoyance: the Golem series was too damned good. In a way he preferred the other makes; the ones that appeared less human and less than perfect.

'Yes, I am.'

'I require assistance. It was the science officer's suggestion that you be assigned to me.'

Damn it! Why did he feel so uncomfortable? He had to remember she was an Al-run machine, albeit an extremely sophisticated one.

'What kind of assistance do you require?'

Cormac took a slow breath and wondered if his hands were shaking again. He did not look. 'I wish you to accompany me to the surface. I am without information access and there are many questions…' He realized, even as he was saying it, that it was wrong.

'Have you considered an aug? Mika could fit you one.'

Cormac clamped down on a sudden surge of longing. No, an augmentation would be no good. It would be like having alcohol instead of heroin. He had to beat this. 'I will not have an aug,' he said.

Jane nodded thoughtfully, then said, 'You will be going down with the investigative team, I presume?'

'Yes.'

'Well, any questions you may wish to ask me might as easily be addressed to them. Many of them have augs, and Chaline has recently been gridlinked.'

Cormac shook his head. Chaline gridlinked? He did not want to get anywhere near how that made him feel. He focused on the problem at hand. How could he tell this… woman that without information access he found it difficult to talk to people? To real live people. He did not feel… superior. He had wanted a thinking machine, yet the only ones on the Hubris were the ship's AI and the Golem androids. There wasn't a lowly drone robot or metal-skinned android in sight. They were all stored away for emergency use.

'Please, hold yourself in readiness,' he said, his jaw locking up. "That will be all.'

Jane smiled, nodded, and left him. He stood there feeling gauche and confused. He had expected something else. She was too human.

Beyond the angled windows of the shuttle bay, Samarkand was a yellow onyx marble wrapped in filaments of white cloud and Andellan burned with a distant cold light. Thus would Sol appear from an orbit just beyond Jupiter. Only because this was a very uncrowded area of the galaxy could the sun be distinguished from the other faint stars. This was a remote place: a place where help would always come too late.

Cormac pulled on his coldsuit and wondered if he would find anything unexpected down there. Survivors, for example. Even from here the brownish ring of the ground-zero was visible at the centre of the planet - a cankerous iris - Hubris being poised over it, geostationary. He turned as Chaline came up beside him.

'For our initial study we're putting down outside the accident site. There's an undamaged heat-sink station on the edge of New Sea. We might be able to get some information from the submind there, though we get no response from it on the usual channels.'

She looked at him warily with wide green eyes as she tied back her curly black hair. Her features were very fine and her skin black as obsidian. When he first saw her, he thought her black skin a cosmetic effect or alteration. It came as a great surprise for him to discover it was natural, not even an extraterrestrial adaptation. It made a change from the olive-brown of the run of humanity, or the luridly dyed skins of members of the runcible culture, and it was unusual to come across any of the old-Earth racial types this far out. Blegg was an exception, in every area.

'Yes, OK,' he said, his thoughts still on the subject of 'race' and groping after answers from a link that was no longer there.

With the explosion of the human population across the stars, the gene pool had been thoroughly stirred. There had been a song, something about 'chocolate-coloured people by the score'. Really ancient. Cormac had not understood it until he had learnt from his link what a 'score' was, and that chocolate had once come in only one colour. The song had been right in one sense: the 'melting pot' had occurred, but now, with adaptation and alteration, skin colour was spread across the spectrum and was the least of differences between human kinds.

'We can't bring down the runcible until we find out what happened to the one here. Your concern is who. My concern is how, as my command area is mostly runcible installation,' she said, studying him dubiously.

'Of course,' he said, and turned back to the window. He sensed her standing at his shoulder for a moment, then turning away to rejoin the others. Was he so short with her because she was linked? Was he that petty? Christ, where was his self-control?

Two of the group behind him were Earth Central soldiers. He could assume command of them whenever he needed, but for the moment he left them to operate independently. They had the training. Crisis would stratify the command structure. He wondered if the setup had been Blegg's idea: to give him time to readjust. He turned and surveyed them all as they fixed and clipped up their coldsuits, and he noted how the two women avoided his gaze. The soldiers seemed oblivious to his attention.

As the last seal was closed and hoods were pulled up, Jane entered the shuttle bay. She still wore her clinging bodysuit. For a moment Cormac had thought she might not be coming. Then he remembered: what need did she have of thermal protection? He strapped on his face-mask and put up his hood before joining her and the others. He felt more comfortable that way. People, damned people. He noticed Chaline give Jane a strange look.