The drone broke from the water and began running across its surface, its paws occasionally clipping the wavetops—all for effect, of course, since it was grav-planing. I could see the machine entire now, probably because it was only 'ware-shielding itself from the satellites. It occurred to me that if any Fleet personnel saw or even recorded this, they would have a tough time convincing others of the reality. This was exactly the kind of technology Fleet commanders feared, yet were able to prevent from swamping the system only because Polity AIs allowed them to do so. An apt analogy would be that of a nation still only at the technological level of being able to launch biplanes, laying down the law to a neighbour geared up to fly stealthed Mach 10 jets and control orbital laser arrays. Yes, as I had told Duras, we genuinely did not want Sudoria turned into just another homogeneous addition to the Polity. Any more than we wanted to utterly destroy the pride of these people, or terrify them.

"How far to the shore?" I asked.

" 'Bout a hundred miles—we should be there in under an hour." As if to confirm this, the drone accelerated and the wind of its passage chilled my skin and forced me back from my seat. I leant forward and obligingly a curved bar oozed up from the metal of its neck for me to grip. I took hold, feeling slick cell-metal roughening to my touch. We ran through a squall and I observed how stained my soaking clothing had become, and that in places the cloth itself was parting. But all hoopers are aware that no clothing will ever be as durable as their own bodies.

"How far then to the nearest habitation?"

"Another fifty. Do you want me to drop you right there?"

"Get me within ten miles. I want to take a look at this place before I go underground. I take it you'll be hanging around?"

"Well," the amber tiger eyes peered back at me, "my instructions from Geronamid have been to keep a watch here in this system, but to make my prime focus Corisanthe Main, as it has been for the last twenty years. I do have some cams positioned there…"

"So you are following those instructions," I replied, thinking some about the patience of machines—twenty years! — and how even that wasn't limitless.

"Geronamid—"

"You know I've got carte blanche here, as the agent on the ground. I say I want your help, Geronamid can go suck on a black hole."

"I think I like you," said Tigger, facing forward again.

A while after that, land became visible as a lumpy purple-blue line separated from the sea by a line of mist. As we drew closer to shore I began to notice more life in the water below, and was reminded of home. The water remained a murky green but I began to see globular masses of something that might have been weed, and things swimming between them like foot-thick catfish: wormfish being the nearest translation.

"Herbivores," commented Tigger. "Nothing like on Spatterjay."

Further in, I observed low rolling hills cloaked in bluey green. The beach consisted of boulder slabs, and through crevices in these white fumaroles of spume stabbed up into the air. An acidic chemical factory smell choked me and made my eyes water. By now, that mythical normal human would probably have been drowning in the fluid inside his own lungs. Tigger thumped down on these stone slabs, took a couple of almighty leaps, and came down again in a sandy cove.

"Take a break?"

"Yeah, why not." Maybe my time schedule was tighter than I liked to admit, what with my viral problem, but I knew that ten years either way did not matter that much to Geronamid.

The two tongues of metal over my thighs withdrew and I stepped off Tigger's back down onto soft grey sand. Washed up in a tideline were numerous bones and mats of weed, though tides were rare here compared to Spatterjay or Earth, for this place possessed no moon. The tides only appeared during a few solstan months occurring three times every Brumallian year, when Sudoria passed close. As I recollected, such times were when many of the sea creatures bred. The wormfish then squirmed up onto beaches like these to bury their eggs in the sand. They hatched out between tides and the young headed inland, where they entered various pools and slow-moving rivers. By then they were carnivores, feeding on abundant pond and river life until attaining sufficient size to compete for mates in the ocean to which they eventually returned, transforming into weed-feeders on the way. No, not really like Spatterjay, for the only herbivores there were the land-based heirodonts, who were prey to just about every other life form they came into contact with. There seemed to be no predators feeding on these worms. As far as I knew they died of old age or from becoming loaded down with parasites. But the planetary almanac for this place was far from complete, so some as yet unknown predator might turn up.

"So, you're an Old Captain," said Tigger.

Always that. Throughout the Polity there existed what I can only describe as an unhealthy interest in Old Captains. This stemmed from the part Spatterjay had played in the Prador-human war and other significant events much later that brought my world to the attention of Polity citizens. For it was the only world in the Polity where it was possible to attain immortality without technological intervention, and some of the sea captains sailing its oceans were the oldest humans in existence. This whole obsessive interest in us struck me as rather silly.

"Yes, I was the captain of a ship on Spatterjay, but I was never one of Jay Hoop's captives, and I arrived there a good few years after the Polity put in an appearance."

"How old are you, then?"

"Old enough to be bored by that particular question."

"Probably about the same age as me."

"You don't even have to speculate, since the information must be available to you."

"Okay, you're about fifty years older than me."

The drone seated itself on the sand and began licking one of its paws. I gazed at it with renewed interest. On the whole, independent drones went out of fashion in the years after the Prador-human war. This was due to the rather lax quality control exercised then in the production of war drones, and because those that survived the war ranged from merely irritating and irascible to dangerously insane. They were not popular with either humans or the major AIs. After the war the big AIs no longer manufactured independent drones, but instead ones run by subminds recorded directly from themselves. However, over the years that changed as some of the subminds gained independence, and independent drones came back into vogue. There seemed almost to be a nostalgia for them, they being the product of a wild and raw time during Polity expansion. Many of the old ones achieved mythic status, like the war drone Sniper still resident on Spatterjay and still looking for trouble. Tigger was unusual in that he must have been made during the time when drones supposedly weren't being manufactured—some 200 years after the war.

"An unusual time for a drone to be made," I suggested.

Tigger returned his paw to the sand. "A drone is an AI, so when is an AI not a drone?"

"If language adhered to logical rules, it would constrain us."

Tigger grinned. "Now that's a quote from Gordon."

I trudged a little way up the beach and plumped myself down on a rock. "Okay, as we define it now, and probably not as we'll define it in fifty years…Those that we don't call drones are permanently sited in large structures, and though they interact with the world they don't change their position in it. But that description immediately falls down when you start talking about ship AIs. Drones are merely smaller more independent AIs, just like Golem androids are. Sildon created a more exact classification based on power usage, processing power and ability to move. I incline more to the idea that those generally called AIs, and nothing else, control the world and those defined as drones and Golem, and even haimans and humans, interact with it. What's your point, anyway?"