‘Hope you make it. Endit.’

The holo shrank to a point, was gone.

Mannequins. Carnival parades. First day of Lupus.

What am I doing here?

This was supposed to be the centre of learning, of leading intellectual activity. Instead, Alisha wanted him to hang around with a bunch of giggling people, working through the night to achieve nothing serious, just for the hell of it.

It’s stupid.

Or maybe he was the stupid one, brooding by himself about things that mattered only to him, while the world continued to flow around him, and people could enjoy or be miserable as they wished, none of it making a difference to anyone but themselves.

They worked in a bay designed to receive large transport vehicles. Roger turned up when the project was well underway, his friends hanging off a half-constructed silver skeleton, or dangling from the scaffolding around it. The mannequin’s joints were complex cogs. Once finished, it would be four times taller than a person.

‘Where does the engine go?’ asked Roger.

‘Hey, Rog,’ Stef called down from a precarious position five metres up. ‘Couldn’t stay away, then?’

Rick tapped Roger’s shoulder.

‘Glad you made it, my friend. And there’s no engine.’

‘With those joints and cable-inserts . . . isn’t it meant to walk?’

‘It certainly is.’

‘But—’

‘We’re using no artificial power. That’s the fun of it.’

‘So it is going to walk in the parade.’

‘Sure.’

‘And it doesn’t have an engine.’

‘Uh-huh.’

‘So you dangle it from a hovering flyer and work it like a puppet?’

‘That would be cheating.’

‘I give up. I can’t imagine—’

‘Sure you can.’ Rick turned him. ‘There’s your clue.’

Alisha and two people he didn’t know were assembling some hardware involving narrow chains and gears. Roger stared at them, then shook his head.

‘You have to be kidding. Pedals?’

‘There, you’ve got it.’

Roger tilted his head back, examining the shining skeleton, estimating its mass.

‘Sorry, Rick. It can’t be done. Are you sure you’ve done the calculations right?’

‘Feel those metal bones, my friend. They’re only half as dense as you think - rather like myself, ha, ha - and just because there’s no artificial power, that doesn’t stop us using superfluid bearings and a bit of smartmaterial.’

‘If you say so. Just don’t ask me to get inside that contraption. ’

‘I wouldn’t dream of it.’ Rick looked up into the scaffolding. ‘Stef, would you order this boy to get inside the mannequin and get to work?’

‘Hoy,’ shouted Stef. ‘Blackstone, get your arse up here and make yourself useful.’

‘You tell him, Stef,’ called Alisha.

Roger laughed. He wanted to talk to Alisha, but she had already turned back to the others. They were loosening a chain loop, trying to slip it off a cog; and one of them was swearing, a streak of blood on his finger.

‘We’re all nuts,’ Roger said.

‘Finally, the boy understands.’

‘Totally insane.’

He grabbed the scaffolding and swung himself up.

By lunchtime, a headless giant clothed mannequin with hands was ready to go. Cables and chains were its ligaments and muscles, counterbalanced tension holding it upright. When they took the scaffolding away, it swayed - Stef and Rick were inside the thing - but stayed upright. Then several others, Roger included, pulled back the diaphanous ‘skin’ and clambered into the skeleton, finding their saddles.

‘Mad, mad, mad.’

‘We know that, Roger.’

‘Everyone get ready,’ called Stef. ‘And . . . Now.’

They got to work, Stef giving orders, while Rick kept himself busy on levers, switching gears and touching brakes - and the whole thing lurched into motion. The first footfall rocked Roger, then the next, but soon they had the knack of it. The mannequin was walking.

‘Time to get a head,’ said Rick.

None of them had authorization to command the roof to open. Roger would have designed a mannequin that actually fitted inside the building - but that would have been too easy, clearly. Instead, they pedalled and Rick steered, and they clomped out through the big exit, made a quick left turn - almost on the spot - and came to a halt, standing next to the wall.

Up on the roof, some more of Stef’s friends - she had obviously been socializing outside the study group - were manoeuvring a large head into position.

‘Careful.’

A magnetic bolt dropped through the hollow interior, and bounced off some part of the skeleton with a clang.

‘Sorry.’

‘Not just mad,’ muttered Roger. ‘Suicidal.’

His eyes were sore and his muscles felt detached from his body; yet he seemed to have passed beyond the need for sleep.

‘Okay, people. Pedal and step. Here we go.’

That was the beginning of an hour-long session of pedalling inside the mannequin, not seeing where they were going. From outside there was the occasional cheer, but it was not until they reached the main parade that the volume grew, indicating that they were in fact part of Lupus Festival.

Alisha was one of the team walking outside, guiding Rick by constant comms. All Roger could do was concentrate on the pedalling, far harder than he had thought it would be. High up inside the mannequin, Stef working a secondary set of pedals, her buttocks moving inside tight trousers, and it was a while before Roger pulled his attention away.

In his tired head, he seemed to hear a voice.

—Will they really leave Berlin for Amsterdam? Oh, please . . .

It took a moment to decide that he was experiencing a neural resonance of words originally uttered in another language.

—Gavi, is that you?

But Rick called down: ‘Roger, sorry pal, but can you increase power?’

‘Got it.’

The auditory hallucination was gone.

I really need to sleep.

For now, he concentrated on the physical work.

Rick projected small holos down to Roger and the others: views from external public surveillance showing their own clanking progress amid a line of morphballoons, animated dancing flames (Roger kept changing his mind about how they did that), and hundreds of students in bright costumes and masks. Among the crowds on either side of the wide avenue, many wore half-masks around eyes and nose, some like butterflies and other exotica, many like wolves.

It made the pedalling easier, feeling they were part of something. But it was hard to focus on the holos when your eyes felt like dust-filled slits, and your stomach was bubbling with acid.

Finally, they stopped somewhere on Nexus Heptagon, a wide plaza where pink snow was falling among a hundred food vendors, musicians and jugglers. Crowds milled on all sides. Some of them offered congratulations as Roger and the others limped out of the mannequin. Rick and Stef were the last to exit, after double-checking the clamps and brakes, ensuring the abandoned mannequin would remain upright.

He looked for Alisha, but she was standing with her eyes focused on some virtual image, deep in conversation.

‘Let’s party,’ said Rick. ‘Everyone, meet back here in an hour.’

‘You’re kidding.’

‘What happens if we don’t pedal it back?’

‘The festival authorities will take it away to dismantle.’

‘And that’s bad because—?’

‘Look, if we’re all back and we want to pedal it home, fine. If not, that’s fine too. The main thing was to do it.’

Roger said: ‘Was that sentence semantically null, or was he just babbling?’

‘Babbling,’ said Stef. ‘Come on, everyone. Let’s find some drinks.’

She grabbed Rick and the others, pulling them into the crowd, with a wink at Roger to indicate that she was manoeuvring them deliberately, leaving Roger and Alisha behind.