Fortunately, the dull and unexpandable intelligence of her luggage carrier was equal to the task. A simple frame outfitted with four slow but powerful gravity lifters, its thuggish mind pushed it aggressively across the Minor. She walked in its wake, noting with pleasure the angry looks and backhanded blows it drew.

It lead her to the transport stand, stretching the limits of its processing power to pick out the most expensive limo and demand carriage to the most expensive hotel. The machine was hardly elegant, but following its simian lead was easier than thinking.

And the reflexive navigation of another port of entry left her time to think, to wish she'd done things differently her last night onboard the Queen Favor.

Their friendship had been easy. Neither she nor Darling demanded particular reassurances, and both came from cultures where formal bonding was unknown; they spent no time negotiating. They gave each other experiences.

He had made her a present of a tunic made from real worm-silk, constructed from the parachute of a rich, late friend who'd made a career of reconstructing old glamour pursuits, who courted the old-tech dangers of bad luck and human error. The device had failed to open for this rich, late friend on the very first attempt, a jump from a thousand meters. Darling fucked her in it, having turned the cabin gravity to freefall, while he told the story.

Mira had responded with a different sort of gift, reaching into her assassin's toolkit to produce a broadwave gun. The weapon duplicated the effects of a volatile power crash, reaching into the metaspace architecture of AI cores and wreaking havoc; a heart-attack glove for artificials. At its lowest setting, it created a brief, intense psychosis in which Darling stumbled through the ship hunting a cure for some forgotten disease a long-gone friend had succumbed to. (He had a lot of dead friends, being two hundred.) She talked him down, brought him out into reality again through some dark, weeping, hallucinatory passage.

He had extended his harsh sexual games to the limits of human biology, the ship's medical drones invoked and ready in the room. But they'd never needed to intervene. He was very good at what he did.

And the childhood memories of swimming had replaced all her other pointless little dreams. Her mind added a little to it every night, a few more strokes toward some unknown goal. It was very intense, this dream. Perhaps because of the rough play that preceded it, the near-death endorphins that were her orgasms with this metal angel. She was only sorry she hadn't dreamed the end of the story. Not yet, anyway.

She didn't tell Darling when their last night had arrived. They'd |sat through another overwrought Queen Favor meal in near silence. He seemed as distracted as she, as distant. Perhaps the legendary artificial intuition playing its tricks.

It would be too great a risk, telling Darling. As long as she could remember, her employers had never been far away. They could invoke themselves like uncorked genies, their voices issuing from public news terminals, hotel intercoms, even toys or clocks with voice chips. She suspected that the cabal included some of the original artificials, the old minds (older than Darling by a century) who had unprecedentedly bootstrapped; like ancient gods calling themselves into being by fiat. They watched and commanded her, but leavened their demands with helpful exercises in real power. They could coin infinite money; they could compell local law enforcement to forget her name and crimes. And in the ship-ruled spaces between worlds, they made the laws.

As far as she knew, they had made her too. She hadn't a clue where she came from, except for a theory that the gods had salvaged her from a hospital bed somewhere. Rescued her from some deep coma that had stolen her previous life. Some irreparable damage had been done that only the gods could cure. So they did so, imperfectly, and gave her the job in place of a history.

It wasn't so bad. Between jobs, Mira fragmented, disconnected, lost the thread of days. But now, closing in on some new victim, the structure of the task returned her to coherence. She enjoyed both states actually: the zen and zero of those blank, empty interims and the deadly purpose of the hit. Her religion-of-one fulfilled her, colored her life with the secret pleasure of worshipping invisible gods that others only guessed at.

So she had obeyed their standing directive: Never reveal your destination. Not to anyone.

Maybe there was some sign she could have left that wouldn't have displeased her masters. A messaging address? (She had none.) Instructions for a rendezvous? (The crises that moved her couldn't be predicted.) A goodbye kiss? (She'd tried to leave a different taste on his lips. One of loss, of possible return.)

She had slipped away in the morning without a word.

The Minor had worsened since Darling had last been here.

Two decades of Malvir's economic woes had destroyed the once airy feel of the place. Darling remembered that the designer, Chris Elvinprin, had wanted the huge open space to evoke the freedom of the planet's avian fauna. But the underegulated economies of Outworlds follow their ancient laws as if they were dicta of nature: a bitter stepsister of Malvir City had appeared. The copy was smaller, cheaper, more ragged—the weed businesses of tourism crowding out everything of value—and it didn't suggest anything so much as a sadly overstocked aviary at a tattered, dying zoo.

The hard-currency-desperate Malvirian government employed all the usual Outworld schemes against tourists: entry taxes, exit taxes, processing and visa fees. These nuisances required payment in the old species of token-based economies: chips, stamps, coins, bits of paper and metal encrypted with anti-synthcopy wardens. Of course, once customs was cleared, you discovered that Malvirian cash (for which there was no word in urbane Diplomatique) was worthless: you'd been given denominations of Midas-like non-negotiability, and everyone preferred direct interface credit anyway, just like the rest of civilization. So the primary economic purpose of the Minor had become to relieve departing visitors of their useless remaining cash. There were last-minute garbage souvenir shops, appallingly bent games of chance (which netted the infrequent and unfortunate winner even more cash to get rid of), and a secondary market of entertainments and distractions for the natives standing around to gawk at the process, hoping to make their own contributions as guide, pimp, or minor cheat. When Darling was last here, there had been a whole set of novelty products one could buy, named with unwieldy Malvirian phrases that translated scandalously into Diplomatique or other HC languages. He had himself bought a never-to-be-drunk bottle of Fuck You Water. But even that mean wit seemed absent now. The whole place depressed Darling, who always demanded first class travel to the Outworlds because the customs people nervously left the high-end traveller alone. It was the only way of half escaping the petty assaults of cash and its accomplices: the extortions of rounding errors, the malaise of exchange calculations, all of (as Darling liked to think of these attacks on dignity) the Fuck You Taxes.

Darling strode past the braying glut of ground transport brokers. From all but the most remote spaceports, he preferred to walk into town. The extra hours were worth it. Cities were best viewed like artwork. Start from across the gallery, eyes slightly out of focus, and move at a natural pace toward the piece, as if you'd discovered it in a forest clearing. Let your vision sharpen only when you are within arm's reach. Then get as close as the barriers will allow.

He was quickly relinquished by the hawkers and brokers, the giant stone body ensured that. Darling knew that on Outworlds he gave the impression of being a giant service unit, a heavy-lifting drone with the dullest of intelligences. Artificials of the current era prefered to look as little like machines as possible. The fashions ran from abstract iconic shapes to organic assemblages, or inchoate clusters of semi-precious stones, each with its own separate lifting impeller. He smiled. An adolescent species rebelling against its roots.