It seemed to drift away. Smoke from the grav sandals streamed around him. Something else had caught him, something which was always waiting, beyond the light. He wondered, dimly, through layers of pain, what it was touched him almost pleasantly, freezing his breath in his throat and making a pattern of crystals across his blistered skin.

Widdershine are agile. Among the fishers the awkward, the clumsy soon lost all their lives, and something of this rubbed off among the Board families. And so Dom landed on his feet, hard, and fell forward into the snow.

He knew what snow was. Keja had sent him a preserved snowflake from one of the colder regions of Laoth, and it looked something like the thin frost that briefly mantled the polar swamps of his own world, in the coldest winters. But Keja had not said that there could be so many of them.

7

On Widdershins it was Hogswatchnight, which coincided with Small Gods in the greater Sadhimist calendar. It usually meant a larger klatch meeting, or a number of klatches would join together in celebration, but by midnight every group would be split so that each member watched the dawn alone. But as the older Sadhimist averred darkly, one was never fully alone at Hogswatch. By dawn, perhaps, some men would be poets or prophets or even be possessed of a new minor talent, like being able to play the thumb-flute. And one or two would be mad.

The ground underneath him was warm.

Dom lay in the tepid water for some time before he realized it. He was spreadeagled in a large, steaming puddle. Beyond it the snowdrifts started.

He heard the distant air scream. Something hurled across the stars, trailing a sonic boom. It turned in a tight, gravity-squeezing circle, returned slowly and slammed neatly to a halt on the edge of the puddle. Except that it didn't work. The water was freezing again. The ship danced drunkenly between the drifts and returned, a few minutes later, under very low power.

Isaac opened the hatch.

'Now, are we getting out of this place or aren't we?' he cried.

'Mint soda, chief?'

Dom took the glass. Ice tinkled. Frost was forming on the sides. It tasted like a dive into a snowbank.

There was fresh green skin on his arms and legs and the back of his neck, where the googoo had reformed itself to his body memory.

Isaac pressed the memory button on the ship's workshop and slid the soles back on the sandals. He tossed them across to Dom.

'Short-circuited in the heat,' he said. 'They should be okay now.'

Dom stared out at the starlit surface of the Bank. The warm pool had already frozen over. It made a glittering circle in the snow. He had been lucky, at that. On the sunny side of the Bank water boiled in the shade. He raised the Bank on the ship's radio.

Hrsh-Hgn had been taken aboard the Drunk, destination unknown. The Bank knew nothing about the man with the gold collar, or the whereabouts of Ig. It had warmed the surface and sent Isaac out because—because deaths on the Bank were rare and he disliked the subsequent investigations.

Dom switched off, and drummed his fingers on the console. His face was reflected in the empty screen.

It was dark green, mottled with leaf-green, because body memory took no account of tanning. He was naked in the stable ship temperature. The memory of recent pain still showed in his eyes, but he was thinking of a man in a gold collar, a smiling man who had haunted his dreams.

'No one notices him,' he said out loud. 'He's just a face in the crowd. He's trying to kill me.'

Idly he picked up Korodore's gift. He'd already experimented with it, putting the memory-sword through its repertoire, and now he watched as the atoms reprogrammed themselves. A twitch, and it was a needle sword ... a short knife . . . a gun, that froze bullets out of atmospheric water and could fire them through steel hullmetal... another gun, a sonic . . .

'I don't know how Grandmother chased me here,' he said. 'Though it is the logical place. But I know where the Drunk is heading now.'

'Widdershins?' asked Isaac.

'Band. She'll get the information out of Hrsh. I imagine she'll threaten him with repatriation to Phnobis.'

'That doesn't sound like a threat, chief.'

'To a phnobe it is. If he goes back to Phnobis he'll be in swift conjunction with a ceremonial tshuri whatever happens. No, he'll talk.'

Isaac slipped into the pilot seat.

'You could go back to Widdershins. Your grandmother has your best interests at heart.'

'I've got to go on. I can't describe it, I just haven't got a choice. Do you understand?'

'No, boss. Band, then? I've calibrated the matrix computer. It should work. '

'You'd better believe it.'

He hefted the memory sword. If someone else was waiting at Band...

Glowing walls. Ghostly, half-melting visions. The miniature stars and claustrophobic feel of a ship in interspace. And the visions.

'Chel, what was that?'

'It looked like a dinosaur, boss. Striped.'

He fingered the collar at his neck, and showed no anger. Anger clouded the faculties, and so he lived in a state of constant disassociation. But sometimes he thought, not angry thoughts, but little cold statements about what he would do if the collar was removed.

What he would do to Asman, in particular. And to the misguided genius who invented the collar circuitry.

The door opened.

Asman looked up, and froze. Behind him the long room became silent, just for a second. It usually happened like this. And Asman would point the gun...

Asman pointed the gun, and nodded towards the three dice in their cup. The gun was a stripper, with every safety device removed and a hair trigger. He knew that Asman would fire by reflex action if necessary.

He threw three sixes.

'Again.' He threw three sixes.

'Again?' he asked mildly. Asman smiled weakly, got up and shook his hand.

'I'm sorry,' he said. 'You know how it is.'

'One day I'll make a mistake. Have you thought of that?'

'Ways, the day you make a mistake like that you won't be Ways any more, and you know I'll fire, because you'll be an imposter.'

Asman rounded the table and clapped him on the shoulder.

'You've been doing well,' he said.

'How else?'

Ways had seen his own specification, just once. He had been halfway down an inspection shaft at the time, one that was flooded with chlorine gas when not in official use, and gaining illegal access to personnel files was not official. He had never bothered to remember the precise purpose of his visit - it was just one of the many assignments that filtered down to him via Asman's office - but while the little inspection screen was warming up his specification had appeared among the random images. He had memorized it instantly, even through the chlorine haze.

It was a standard requisition for a Class Five robot, with certain important modifications concerning concealed weapons, communicators, and appearance. Designing a completely humanoid robot was twice as complex as building even a high-grade Class Five. It involved intricate machinery for tear ducts and the growth of facial hair - and, if the robot was designed as a spy and might be faced with every eventuality, an intriguing range of other equipment also...

But most of Ways' specifications had been in probability math. It took him some time to realize why. Class Five robots were legally human. They had been designed to be everything a man could be, and Ways had been designed to be lucky.