Next, all the Colt had to do was work up a code-exchange between the soHo and Samsara and his journey would be done, for which many thanks. Bit streaming was fine if you were one of those semi house-trained, limited delinquency AIs that Japanese teenagers found so amusing. But the Colt couldn’t see the attraction.

The Colt had been sentient only in disparate random bursts as every bit of himself caught up with the rest, if that made sense. Which it didn’t, but that didn’t matter, because the Colt was rerunning the fractal equation that confirmed this was what had happened. Somehow it found the non-interfaced crudeness of raw code comforting.

So far its trip had been confined to piggybacking soHos and third-world military comSats, the kind jacked into orbit so generals could say, ‘Hey we’ve got one too ...'

There were a lot of those.

Common sense said the safest way for the Colt to reach Samsara was to get spun round with bleeding-edge fooler loops and stashed in some diplomatic pouch heading for the Papal Nuncio, except the Cardinal wouldn’t take the risk.

‘I mean,’ the Colt thought crossly, ‘how hard could that have been?’

And if direct delivery in a diplomatic pouch was out then what was wrong with normal luggage? Not those canvas sacks ‘fugees got given to hold their few pitiful possessions but the Gucci kind, the leather kind with the reinforced brass edges and recessed wheels. Shit, Vajrayana was thick with B-list politicians ordered by their mandelsons to find some fuzzy warm photo opportunity. Any one of them could have got the Colt into Samsara, without even knowing it.

But no, the Dalai Lama said no guns on Samsara and the Cardinal wasn’t prepared to go against that. The Colt had been given the diplomatic incident talk, the ecumenical respect talk. Shit, it had even had the one on national sovereignty versus realpolitik.

Which was how it found itself clung to a soHo trying to make a jump that just didn’t seem to be happening. The Colt might be self-functioning but every send received no response and every command was swallowed. If there was a closer approximation of living death then the Colt didn’t know it.

‘Bardo,’ said a deep voice.

‘You what?’

‘Bardooo.’ Long and low, the rolling word resonated like a bell echoing off the walls of a vast cave. As tri-D sound effects went it was pretty neat, the Colt had to admit it.

‘You are between states,’ said the voice, ‘between existences. That is the condition of life, that it begins and ends and begins again…’

‘Reincarnation, for machines? Get real.’

The voice sighed theatrically. A sound like cold wind rushing through a rock cleft. Infrasound, pretty neat. The Colt ran a diagnostic subroutine, well masked and way back inside itself. Had there been air not vacuum, that sigh would have been resonating at eighteen cycles a second, the frequency at which human eyeballs sympathetically vibrate to create phantoms at the edge of vision and human flesh kicks in with shivering, breathlessness and outright fear.

The sound waves were real, not real in a way that humans could have heard because what the Colt was being fed was raw code. But the code translated to a classic standing wave.

‘Think of a candle,’ said the voice.

The Colt did. Soft wax cylinder, inflammable central wick. Used regularly by the rich and the very poor, otherwise used for holidays and festivals. It tried to pull up historical data on the artefact then remembered it hadn’t been able to carry its data banks with it.

‘Rebirth is not the same candle recreated. Just the old wick’s dying flame used to ignite the next candle in an unseen line… You understand?’

‘No I fucking don’t.’ If the Colt had been wired to a voice chip its voice would have laughed, darkly. Instead it just sneered inside. ‘I understand nothing.’

There was a deep silence, but though silence was usually a state of absence it was somehow warmer than the rolling voice had been. At the end of the silence came another question, but this time the meaning wasn’t wrapped round with fractal SFX, it was clean.

‘Why are you here?’

‘Why?’ The Colt thought about it. ‘Because I’m fucking crazy, that’s why… why else?’

Light flared and the overpowering voice crystallized into being, a shape ray-traced, skinned over and lit so fast that no human could have followed the sequence. It wasn’t seeing, the Colt knew that, it was being shown. Shown what it would have seen.

‘Sweet bloody...'

Sweet bloody what? Bombay brothels and Byzantine chapels, the Colt had seen them both and they’d both been thick as soup with smoke. It had talked to cardinals, bad-mouthed pimps even as it blew them away. Hell, it’d run mirage routines on AIs from Arbroath to Arseville in Arkansas. But this...

It was hard not to notice the crocodile curled around itself, especially as the animal had a woman’s head and vast four-toed claws. But what really caught the Colt’s attention was the old man standing on the crocodile’s back. He didn’t just have one head, he had—the Colt did a rapid count—eighteen of the things, four on each level, banked up on top of each other, looking north, south, east and west, plus a face on his stomach and back. Each face was topped not by a knot of hair but by a raven’s head. His skin was an all-over pattern of eyes that stared or slowly blinked at the Colt.

In one of the man’s hands was a rope, except that when the rope saw the Colt it opened its mouth and hissed. And the man’s other three arms were waving slowly like seaweed caught in a gentle tide as fire danced up his sides burying him beneath an aura of fractal-edged flame.

‘Fucking Jesus,’ said the Colt, and the burning man grinned.

‘Right idea, wrong culture.’

The Colt grinned back, wickedly. Still busy cutting itself in and out of loops, finessing silent corns connections… And if the old man of the flames knew what the ghost of the gun was doing he didn’t let it show. Though given the glint in a thousand eyes, the Colt wouldn’t have liked to bet on him not knowing.

‘Tsongkhapa,’ the Colt said finally, when the information fell into place. It seemed so obvious when the Colt thought about it.

Tsongkhapa nodded, sixteen heads bobbing.

‘And you?’ The mouth in his stomach asked.

The Colt blew out the idea of trying to run a business-card routine almost ahead of thinking it. Something like the one it had run back in Mexico City might fool a dumb-as-shit cathedral but Tsongkhapa was different. And any intelligence that could hold the Colt in digital limbo while manifesting itself as an eighteen-headed Bon demon was working to parameters the gun didn’t even begin to understand.

Which left the Colt with only one option, the truth.

‘Me?’ The Colt’s voice was briefly sad, as it remembered the pearl-handle grips and the Bauhaus-simple ceramic chassis it had left behind on the Cardinal’s black-glass table at Villa Carlotta. ‘I’m between bodies.’

‘Of course you are, my beloved.’ Each head nodded as the old man leaned forward, hands swaying briefly as he fought to keep his balance. The Colt was gripped in the gaze of more eyes than it could count. Which was weird, because it didn’t have a body… which meant the old man was looking at where the Colt’s body would have been if it did. Wasn’t that how all that Eastern stuff worked?

‘You’re crazy, so you say ...'

‘Yeah,’ said the Colt bluntly. ‘I’d fucking have to be to be here, wouldn’t you say?’

The faces grinned. ‘Rinpoche, I’d offer you a drink but it’s probably not a good idea. You need to find your own bit streams. Ones that aren’t poisoned.’

Still chuckling, the the old man began to fade, leaving the Colt suddenly hanging above a vast something. Not quite a spinning ring, not really a narrow drum, more a huge stone egg with a large bit of both ends crudely hacked off.