The way she held herself said that I was supposed to take a look. I flickered my gaze across the Slavic boned cheeks, down to the décolletage and then to the tilt of her hips, the half shrouded lines of her thighs, all the time affecting a detachment that neither I nor my recently roused sleeve had any right to.

“It’s very nice. A little young for my tastes, but as I said, I’m not from here. Can we get back to your husband please. He’d been to Osaka during the day, but he came back. I assume he didn’t go physically.”

“No, of course not. He has a transit clone on ice there. He was due back about six that evening, but—”

“Yes?”

She shifted her posture slightly, and opened a palm at me. I got the impression she was forcibly composing herself. “Well, he was late coming back. Laurens often stays out late after closing a deal.”

“And no one has any idea where he went on this occasion? Curtis, for example?”

The strain on her face was still there, like weathered rocks under a thin mantle of snow. “He didn’t send for Curtis. I assume he took a taxi from the sleeving station. I’m not his keeper, Mr. Kovacs.”

“This meeting was crucial? The one in Osaka?”

“Oh … no, I don’t think so. We’ve talked about it. Of course, he doesn’t remember, but we’ve been over the contracts and it’s something he’d had timetabled for a while. A marine development company called Pacificon, based in Japan. Leasing renewal, that kind of thing. It’s usually all taken care of here in Bay City, but there was some call for an extraordinary assessors’ meeting, and it’s always best to handle that sort of thing close to source.”

I nodded sagely, having no idea what a marine development assessor was. Noting Mrs. Bancroft’s strain seemed to be receding.

“Routine stuff, huh?”

“I would think so, yes.” She gave me a weary smile. “Mr. Kovacs, I’m sure the police have transcripts of this kind of information.”

“I’m sure they do as well, Mrs. Bancroft. But there’s no reason why they should share them with me. I have no jurisdiction here.”

“You seemed friendly enough with them when you arrived.” There was a sudden spike of malice in her voice. I looked steadily at her until she dropped her gaze. “Anyway, I’m sure Laurens can get you anything you need.”

This was going nowhere fast. I backed up.

“Perhaps I’d better speak to him about that.” I looked around the chart room. “All these maps. How long have you been collecting?”

Mrs. Bancroft must have sensed that the interview was drawing to a close, because the tension puddled out of her like oil from a cracked sump.

“Most of my life,” she said. “While Laurens was staring at the stars, some of us kept our eyes on the ground.”

For some reason I thought of the telescope abandoned on Bancroft’s sundeck. I saw it stranded in angular silhouette against the evening sky, a mute testimony to times and obsessions past and a relic no one wanted. I remembered the way it had wheezed back into alignment after I jarred it, faithful to programming maybe centuries old, briefly awakened the way Miriam Bancroft had stroked the Songspire awake in the hall.

Old.

With sudden and suffocating pressure, it was all around me, the reek of it pouring off the stones of Suntouch House like damp. Age. I even caught the waft of it from the impossibly young and beautiful woman in front of me and my throat locked up with a tiny click. Something in me wanted to nm, to get out and breathe fresh, new air, to be away from these creatures whose memories stretched back beyond every historical event I had been taught in school.

“Are you all right, Mr. Kovacs?”

Download dues.

I focused with an effort. “Yes, I’m fine.” I cleared my throat and looked into her eyes. “Well, I won’t keep you any longer, Mrs. Bancroft. Thank you for your time.”

She moved towards me. “Would you like—”

“No, it’s quite all right. I’ll see myself out.”

The walk out of the chart room seemed to take forever, and my footsteps had developed a sudden echo inside my skull. With every step, and with every displayed map that I passed I felt those ancient eyes on my spine, watching.

I badly needed a cigarette.

CHAPTER FIVE

The sky was the texture of old silver and the lights were coming on across Bay City by the time Bancroft’s chauffeur got me back to town. We spiralled in from the sea over an ancient suspension bridge the colour of rust, and in amongst the heaped-up buildings of a peninsula hill at more than advisable speed. Curtis the chauffeur was still smarting from his summary detainment by the police. He’d only been out of arrest a couple of hours when Bancroft asked him to run me back, and he’d been sullen and uncommunicative on the journey. He was a muscular young man whose boyish good looks lent themselves well to brooding. My guess was that employees of Laurens Bancroft were unused to government minions interrupting their duties.

I didn’t complain. My own mood wasn’t far off matching the chauffeur’s. Images of Sarah’s death kept creeping into my mind. It had only happened last night. Subjectively.

We braked in the sky over a wide thoroughfare, sharply enough for someone above us to broadcast an outraged proximity squawk into the limousine’s comset. Curtis cut off the signal with a slap of one hand across the console and his face tilted up to glower dangerously through the roof window. We settled down into the flow of ground traffic with a slight bump and immediately made a left into a narrower street. I started to take an interest in what was outside.

There’s a sameness to streetlife. On every world I’ve ever been, the same underlying patterns play out, flaunt and vaunt, buy and sell, like some distilled essence of human behaviour seeping out from under whatever clanking political machine has been dropped on it from above. Bay City, Earth, most ancient of civilised worlds, had won itself no exemptions. From the massive insubstantial holofronts along the antique buildings to the street traders with their catalogue broadcast sets nestling on shoulders like clumsy mechanical hawks or outsize tumours, everyone was selling something. Cars pulled in and out from the kerbside and supple bodies braced against them, leaning in to negotiate the way they’ve probably been doing as long as there’ve been cars to do it against. Shreds of steam and smoke drifted from food barrows. The limo was sound- and broadcast-proofed, but you could sense the noises through the glass, corner-pitch sales chants and modulated music carrying consumer-urge subsonics.

In the Envoy Corps, they reverse humanity. You see the sameness first, the underlying resonance that lets you get a handle on where you are, then you build up difference from the details.

The Harlan’s World ethnic mix is primarily Slavic and Japanese, although you can get any variant tank-grown at a price. Here, every face was a different cast and colour—I saw tall, angular-boned Africans, Mongols, pasty-skinned Nordics and, once, a girl that looked like Virginia Vidaura, but I lost her in the crowd. They all slid by like natives on the banks of a river.

Clumsy.

The impression skipped and flickered across my thoughts like the girl in the crowd. I frowned and caught at it.

On Harlan’s World, streetlife has a stripped-back elegance to it, an economy of motion and gesture that feels almost like choreography if you’re not used to it. I grew up with it, so the effect doesn’t register until it’s not there any more.

I wasn’t seeing it here. The ebb and flow of human commerce beyond the limo’s windows had a quality like choppy water in the space between boats. People pushed and shoved their way along, backing up abruptly to get round tighter knots in the crowd that they apparently hadn’t noticed until it was too late to manoeuvre. Obvious tensions broke out, necks craned, muscled bodies drew themselves up. Twice I saw the makings of a fight take stumbling shape, only to be swept away on the chop. It was as if the whole place had been sprayed with some pheromonal irritant