"They'll just hose it down," Katie told him.

This was untrue. Master Sergeant Saez had wanted to hose down the cage the moment he saw it, but the Colonel had other ideas, which boiled down to making Prisoner Zero live in his own mess. An approach that fitted Katie's perceptions of the man far better than his familiarity with Fermat.

Katie was expected to issue preliminary findings soon and had little enough to go on. Of course, put another way, she had more than enough to make her case. Sitting naked in a shit-smeared cell was not normal, even for those who made up most of her patients.

All Prisoner Zero had to do was start obsessively jacking off and she could leak to the papers that the man was mentally unfit to stand trial, never mind be executed. Meanwhile, she was stuck in the same shit-smeared cage, so what did that make her?

Pulling a cell phone from her pocket, Katie dialled Master Sergeant Saez. It took five minutes for him to send someone down to the weights room and only then did Specialist Stone discover the Sergeant had given her the wrong keys for the room.

"You finished in here, ma'am?"

Katie shook her head. "I just want to get some cigarettes."

"Good luck," said Specialist Stone. "You planning to walk into Lampedusa?"

"Can't I get some from the bar?"

"All gone and the PX doesn't stock cigarettes anymore."

"There's that vending machine in the lobby."

"Empty."

"Great," said Katie.

"You need them for work, ma'am?"

"Work?"

Specialist Stone nodded at the naked prisoner. "Something to do with him?"

Katie started to shake her head and then stopped when the woman standing in the doorway began to do the same.

"Is it to do with him?"

Katie nodded.

"Okay," said Specialist Stone. "I'm off in ten minutes. I'll take a ride down to the village." That was what the marines called the town, which most of the islanders called their capital. But it was hard for people grown up in Los Angeles and Philadelphia to take seriously a town with an area smaller than some of their malls.

"Not a big deal," said the woman, when Katie started to thank her. "I need some fresh air anyway."

The tobacco was black and the brand nothing that Katie recognized. All the same, she dragged the acrid smoke into her mouth, deadening the faecal stink of Prisoner Zero's cage. Into her mouth and out of her nose, familiar as breathing and almost as welcome.

Katie should have been cross with herself for cracking after five months, but all she felt was relief as nicotine broke the blood-brain barrier and her pulse began to settle. It wasn't that Katie had an addictive personality, she just liked the things.

"Isn't that Fermat?" Katie nodded at the cell wall.

A part of her had been working on the theory that the naked prisoner might react to a Western woman invading his space and perching on the edge of his mattress, openly chain-smoking cigarettes. A wiser part understood that he was unlikely to react to such crude provocation.

After all, Prisoner Zero was a ruthless killer busy playing games with authority. At least he was according to a file she'd just been given by a singularly unhappy Miles Alsdorf. Katie had known the Pentagon had their own choice of psychiatrist examining Prisoner Zero, she just hadn't expected him to reach his conclusion quite so quickly.

And the report made much of Prisoner Zero having tendencies, mostly sociopathic. Nowhere did the report suggest that he was an actual sociopath, because that might posit a degree of non-culpability on the part of the convicted. And anyway, how could she or the Pentagon's tame psychiatrist assert anything but generalities about the prisoner's internal state when he refused to talk?

It all came down to the confession.

"Shit," she said, not caring if the weights room was bugged. "How could you be so fucking stupid?"

Dark eyes held hers and then, as Katie sat frozen, Prisoner Zero reached across and stole her cigarette. Dragging deep, he rolled the smoke from between half-scabbed lips into flaring nostrils and handed the thing back to her.

"That confession," said Katie. "It makes things more difficult."

She knew exactly how stupid a comment this was. If she'd have been Prisoner Zero she'd have said whatever came into her mind as well. She'd seen the report of his injuries, written up carefully by the marine who first examined Prisoner Zero on his arrival on Lampedusa. All those unexplained burns, the torn fingernails and split lip, the lacerated tongue.

"Yeah," said Katie. "I know." Her smile was bitter. "Everyone confesses in the end."

CHAPTER 25

Darkness, CTzu 53/Year 1 [The Future]

Let me out, please...

His name was also Chuang Tzu. So said the butterfly.

Obviously enough, this was not Zaq's original name because that had been given up during the ceremony of rebirth. The fifty-third Chuang Tzu wore the very first on his cloak as a diamond buckle. Every emperor became a diamond eventually. It was one of the few advantages of living as a carbon-based life form.

All that was needed was death, cremation at fifteen hundred degrees and enough pressure to replicate geophysical forces found in the transmutation of soft carbon to intricate lattice.

There was a circular elegance to this solution which appealed to the Library on several levels, although it could explain its thoughts to Zaq on only three, the others being beyond the understanding of a small child.

The Library still used "darkness" when considering itself, because this was how the very first Chuang Tzu had thought of it. Now, however, it went by a number of names. The most obvious being "the Library." "My Librarian" had been the choice of an emperor, centuries before, who could not quite grasp that there was no Turk inside his mechanical box.

Zaq had little trouble imagining the darkness. So little trouble that he sometimes borrowed the name for himself, putting it on and taking it off like a cloak.

His mind had been full of monsters for as long as he could remember. And though his mother referred to the menagerie inside his head as imaginary friends, this was wrong on so many counts that Zaq merely smiled.

The butterfly who came in the night was just pretend. That's what his mother said and his brother Eli agreed. As for being the new emperor...

Breakfast was withheld, then lunch and supper. Three days later, with the boy protesting bitterly and frozen to his bones with hunger, Maria gave up being cross and went to see Dr. Joyce again, letting Eli guide her down through the levels until she reached Razor's Edge. In a moment of unusual charity the elderly splice merchant suggested Maria prepare herself for the possibility that Zaq's claim was true.

One of the first things Zaq learnt after rebirth was how the very first Chuang Tzu awoke. With darkness and cold, small voices and words spoken without being understood.

Let me out, please...

CTzu 1/Year 127.

He woke once when he died and again when he was reborn. Neither time did the young Chinese navigator understand what had happened to him, though what had happened was that the recently promoted Major Commissar was decanted into memory by the darkness and held there while his body was recreated.

The recreation of his physical self was an idea the darkness took from the young navigator. An interesting idea and not one which the darkness had encountered before because the darkness was immortal, at least in terms that the Chinese officer might understand and Chuang Tzu was only the second sentient being the darkness had encountered.

It being the first.