Jude gave Fixx the tri-D, passing it across reluctantly, turning it face down before she gave it to him. Fixx didn’t bother to turn it face up again before slipping the Kodak of LizAlec into his back pocket.

“You see the kid, you give her that back, you understand?”

Fixx nodded. He was picking salted almonds out of a blue dish and swallowing them without really tasting. Eating from habit and embarrassment. They both knew it was dangerously close to goodbye.

Jude smiled wryly at Fixx and looked past his shoulder at the hole in the wall. Through the gap they could both see the metal wall and the door set into it. There was a panel of diodes, touch-sensitive switches and read-outs set in the middle of the wall, but it was so covered with dust that it just looked like a grey square. Above it was a larger grey square, which would turn into a triple-glazed glass window when anyone bothered to wipe it down. At the moment there was only a small smudge of black where one of the regulars had cleared off enough of the dust to peer through at the vast cavern behind,

“Ice,” Jude said. “Not your kind, my kind. Water.” She looked at Fixx. “You got any idea how much that amount of fresh ice is worth?”

He didn’t. He wasn’t even enough of a tourist to know about the ice reserves that had supposedly been found back at the beginning. A few of the guides said the water was brought to the Moon, the rest said it was chemically manufactured. But street rumour, deep rumour said the water had always been there as ice, right from the very start. Hidden at the bottom of the deepest craters, protected by the shadows.

“The next time you come back here, Strat’s going to be a rich town. We’ll have a market, electrics, fresh water...” Jude’s rough voice trailed away at the thought of the possibilities. “You know, I could sell that and go Earthside. Live like a queen.”

She couldn’t, of course. Her augmentations were for Luna, not Earth. And it didn’t matter that she worked out regularly in a full-gravity gym. The permanent sixfold increase in Earth gravity would burn out her metabolism within months and grind her calcium-starved bones to fragments, starting at her hips. What credit she began with would be swallowed up by medical care.

But Fixx wasn’t about to say that, and besides, he knew that Jude already knew.

“You see it all, when you come back. Sweedak?”

Fixx nodded again and Jude gave him her best twisted smile. She wasn’t stupid and nor was he: both knew he had more chance of surviving naked in a vacuum than walking back through that door. All the same...

Fixx scooped the last of the almonds out of the bowl and turned to go.

“Hey, you...” Jude’s voice was loud.

For a second, Fixx thought she was going to do something stupid like suggest he stay, but she didn’t. Instead Jude just pointed to the first clone, slumped unconscious against a cracked polycrete table.

“Take your trash with you...”

Chapter Twenty-Four

Shanghai

Gamblers need luck. General Que had it. Luck followed him like his own shadow: that was what his own officers had said — and they were right. But General Que worked hard for his luck, in ways so old that most Shanghai families had forgotten them...

Unlucky days were as important as lucky days, he knew that. When the gods smiled, he’d put his entire estate on one single turn of baccarat. On other days he wouldn’t have bet the loose chips in his pocket on remembering his dead wife’s name.

His house had exactly the right number of rooms, his site of fortune was placed where good feng shui demanded it should be: panelled walls had been taken down and others erected to make sure this was true. He never stayed in hotels that had a thirteenth floor and only took suites with names that were lucky. His limousine was red, with red leather seats and red carpet.

Not once in his life had he placed a bet in a room that contained an old-fashioned printed hardback. (In a different context, the word for book could also mean failure.)

Although the most important guest in Shanghai’s Imperial Casino, he never walked brazenly in through the vast revolving glass doors at the front, preferring to slip in through a discreet side door from Upgrade Alley. He knew, just as his father before him had known, that sometimes ill luck will be hiding in the foyer, waiting to mug you...

And yet, despite the large blue china lion dogs that guarded his study, the gold lucky symbol hanging from his red-painted wall and his elegant, perfectly carved chop seal made from mutton-fat jade, General Que was having a bad-luck day. A very, very bad-luck day.

In fact, the General hadn’t had such a bad-luck day since two very young, very scared military policemen had ransacked his house three weeks before, looking for something they realized soon enough wasn’t there. It wasn’t there because the General had given the shrine to his daughter as security against just such a visit. Both of the police officers had since killed themselves, thus saving him the effort of arranging their deaths himself. Though whether they had committed suicide out of fear of his retribution or terror at having failed Beijing, the General didn’t know or even care.

The man sat at his desk and frowned at the tiny monitor in front of him. These days he wasn’t a general, of course. He was Mr Que — owner not just of Shanghai, that Los Angeles of the Pacific, but of most of the newly ploughed-over countryside surrounding it. Still as thin as he’d been at eighteen and with hair that was only just beginning to grey at the temples, he wore sober suits cut from Thai silk and patterned on an illustration he’d once seen in an American magazine. Esquire or GQ. He wasn’t good with foreign names.

Eighteen was how old he’d been when first conscripted. At twenty-two he was a full colonel, alternating his dress between the gold braid and white silk of ceremonial and a combat suit of self-sealing, earth-hued Kevlar. By twenty-three he’d commanded the Army of the East as senior general, brokering its peace with the old men in Beijing.

Beijing would have made him a field marshal — one of theirs — but the General was a gambler and, like all good gamblers, could taste luck in the back of his throat. For three years it had been rich and clear, almost oil-like in its smoothness. But in Beijing his luck had developed a sour aftertaste, like a burgundy just beginning to oxidize. From wine to vinegar was a single fall of the dice... it always had been so.

The General turned down their offer. And so avoided responsibility for not preventing the Lhasa uprising that finally ripped Buddhism’s navel out of China’s body politic. The old men hated him for it, but there was nothing they could do. Que turned his back on the Forbidden City and the concrete wastes of Beijing that surrounded it and moved himself and his pregnant wife to Shanghai, buying the whole Flatiron building and taking the top floor for himself.

In the West, the rich might like to live at ground level and keep the poor in towers, but this was China. And besides, he needed to be able to see the sky.

“Replay the St Lucius e-vid...” General Que demanded.

Mencius, his house AI, knew exactly which e-vid the General meant. The man had watched it five times already that morning while most of Shanghai still slept, fucked or thought of breakfast. It showed the General talking to Ms Gwyneth.

The AI didn’t feel guilty about not notifying the General about the original message. Mistakes it understood, logged and coded into its fractal web to avoid repetition, but guilt was something else. Programming guilt into an AI was technically possible, but wastefully self-destructive. The last thing any user needed was a machine that put every other task on hold while it considered the implications of its own actions.