He stepped inside and found a drone, fluent in Diplomatique, waiting to take him to his room.

A few feet from the elevator, having finally convinced the drone that there was no luggage to be carried and having waved off insistent offers to remove the birdshit, Darling stopped short. In a millisecond: the tertiary processors that handled the periphery of his 270-degree vision (when they had nothing better to do) sounded an alarm of recognition, medium probability. His secondaries responded, shunting a few thousand extra rods and cones into the corner of one eye, putting on hold for a moment one of the scheduled blinks Darling's eyes periodically engaged in to make him less intimidating and to perform nano-maintenance on his sensitive and expensive art-dealer's lenses. Confirming the recognition, the secondaries informed his primary processors of the event. Darling stopped moving, direct interfaced the elevator to hold, and turned.

Across the lobby, wearing the undersized suit in primary yellow for which he was famous (although he was known occasionally to don a blue or red version) was Duke Zimivic. A small valet drone hovered around the little man, breaking down a few splotches of birdshit with a whining spray.

Zimivic returned his gaze with a malevolent smile, and Darling's secondary processors allowed the delayed blink to proceed.

The man walked quickly over, the valet drone trailing him like a toy balloon strung to a child's wrist. Zimivic had always explained that his too-small suits were tailored to give the impression of an eager, healthy child, as if the tight fit were the result of a recent growth spurt. The last few decades had turned the conceit grotesque.

"My dear Darling," the little man shouted at a volume intended to embarrass. "What great luck meeting you!"

"Perhaps not luck. Perhaps not chance at all," Darling replied. Zimivic Gallery held the largest private collection of Vaddums. It was inconceivable that he was here for any reason except the new piece.

"Yes, yes," answered the man, rubbing his palms together. His valet drone reached its station again and resumed its work.

"I see you also neglected to bring an umbrella," noted Darling.

"They said it never rained! I believed them," Zimivic said sadly.

"One never knows what advice to take," Darling sympathized.

Questions and scenarios filled his mind: Had Zimivic also spotted the anachronism in the new piece? Did he too suspect that Vaddum was alive? It was possible that he had missed the anachronism, and thought the sculpture a posthumous discovery. Or perhaps Zimivic believed the piece was a fake, and was willing to broker it anyway. If the forgery were never discovered, he would make a huge profit. If a scandal resulted, he would suffer some embarrassment, but the value of his real Vaddums would benefit from the publicity. It was the sort of game the little man loved to play. It was long suspected in the art world that at least one of Zimivic's young proteges had died a dramatic, extraordinarily painful death (imagine one's nano immune-boosters rejecting every organ, from eyeballs to epidermus, all at once) not so much by accident as to increase her flagging sales. Of course, some of Darling's friends believed that Zimivic himself had started that rumor, the better to leverage the tragedy and to cement his own reputation as a twisted genius.

It had occurred to Darling that both versions of the old tale might be valid, Zimivic spreading a rumor that was the awful truth, making sure credit fell where it was due.

The little man nodded his head and smiled deviously, as if he were a mindreader.

"Perhaps you and I have some business to discuss," Zimivic said.

"We do," Darling said shortly. If there were two agents here, two bidders, there might be more. It would be better to share information than remain in the dark. Zimivic could never be called an ally, but he might make a useful foil.

"The Tower Bar, sixteen-thirty?"

Darling's direct interface (which was now under assault from the impatient elevator) informed him that this was the name of the hotel's loftiest, most expensive bar.

"See you there."

In his room, Darling composed a careful message-avatar for his employers, alerting them that Zimivic was here on Malvir. It would be a week before Leao and Fowdy received the avatar, another week in turnaround, so Darling fleshed it out with as much of his own thinking as possible. In addition to explaining the situation, it would be able to answer most of their likely questions, argue certain points, and demand specifics if their response were too vague. Of course, it was the crudest sort of AI, mere software: it didn't register on a Turing meter. But, as always, putting it through its paces gave him a vague feeling of discomfort. It was too much like arguing with himself as he prompted it with the sort of objections Leao would raise. Darling complained to the avatar (in Leao's voice) about money, and it answered with the familiar soothing tones he always used on her.

When he was finished, the process left the same bad taste in his mouth as a mediocre painting of himself he'd once been given, in the way that a shabby model always offends its subject.

Staring out the window at the reddening sky, he idly wondered if avatars would ever threaten the Turing barrier. Theoretically, code could never be complex or adaptable enough to engage in the concentric development process: to model itself (to model itself modelling itself [to model itself modelling itself modelling itself])…. Code simply lacked the recursive vitality of biological or metaspace structures. But if that barrier were one day crossed, imagine the confusion. A thinking entity constructed of mere code, a legal person, could make a copy of itself to handle some far-flung task, or to wait in reserve in case of death. But which would be real? At every crossroads in life (Take this job or that? Stay with this lover or leave?) such an intelligence might simply copy itself and choose both possibilities. If all versions of the code were given equal status, then the lives of such creatures would spread out across the universe like the ever-splitting branches of a chess decision matrix, splaying to meet all contingencies. The only limit to the propagation of new entities would be computing power. Perhaps wars would be fought over this precious resource, grand alliances of all the legacies of a single mind doing battle with those of other original minds, until finally only one extended family existed and inevitably turned upon itself.

A subtle itch, nothing so crude as an alarm, informed Darling that the time for such speculation was over. He turned and headed for his rendevous with Zimivic, having completely forgotten the birdshit on his arms and shoulders.

The limo lifted from the desolate edge of the blast zone silently. Mira looked down. The perfect circularity of the crater had begun to fray, the weakened crust of the circumference having slipped away in places. Vale's dormitory complex looked too close to the edge for comfort.

She took cold, professional note of the fact. With the smallest of seismic disturbances, Mr. Vale would slip quietly into oblivion.

For all his memory problems, he had recognized her voice. From their brief direct interface worlds away, when he was trapped in the blackbox, sensory-deprived, helpless. Somehow, that had stuck in his mind. This won't take a minute.

She spoke to the limo:

"Information."

The annoying wait of an Out-world comm system.

"Connected."

"Give me the address of Prometheus Body Works."

"Not listed."

"Try a global search, all parameters maxed out."

Another few interminable seconds.

"Prometheus Body Works was destroyed local date 01/01/00, the Blast Event. No current address."

"Fuck," she said.