Norton grinned mirthlessly. “Sure there was a reason. Seven months alone in deep space, and a diet of human flesh. I’d be feeling pretty edgy myself under the circumstances.”

“It’s not enough.”

“So you say. Ever consider you might be wrong about this? Maybe Merrin did crack. Maybe variant thirteen just isn’t as beyond human as everybody thinks.”

That got a sour smile out of Marsalis. “Thanks for the solidarity, Tom. It’s a nice thought, but I’m in no hurry to be assimilated. Variant thirteen is not human the way you are, and this guy Merrin isn’t going to be an exception. You judge what he does by normal human yardsticks, you’ll be making a big mistake. Meanwhile, you hired me to echo-profile the guy, so how about we get on and do that, starting with the last living thing to see him alive. You going to let me talk to the Horkan’s Pride n-djinn, or not?”

The night sky lay at his feet.

Not a night sky you could see from Earth or Mars, or anywhere else this far out on a galactic arm. Instead the black floor was densely splattered with incandescence. Stars crowded one another’s brilliance or studded the multicolored marble veins of nebulae. It might have been an accurately generated view from some hypothetical world at the core of the Milky Way; it might just have been a thousand different local night skies, overlaid one on top of the other and amped up to blazing. He took a couple of steps and stars crunched into white powder underfoot, smeared across the inky black. Over his head, the sky was a claustrophobic steel gray, daubed with ugly blob riveting in wide spiral runs.

Fucking ghosts in the machine.

No one knew why the shipboard djinns ran their virtual environments like this. Queries on the subject from human interface engineers met with vague responses that made no linguistic sense. Flown from it-will, cannot the heavy, there-at, through-at, slopeless and ripe was one of the famous ones. Carl had known an IF engineer on Mars who had it typed out and pasted above his bunk as a koan. The accompanying mathematics apparently made even less sense, though the guy insisted they had a certain insane elegance, whatever that was supposed to mean. He was planning a book, a collection of n-djinn haiku printed very small on expensive paper, with illustrations of the virtual formats on the facing pages.

It was Carl’s opinion, admittedly not founded on any actual evidence, that the n-djinns were making elaborate jokes at humanity’s dull-witted expense. He supposed that the book, if it ever saw print, could be seen as a punch line delivered.

In his darker moments, he wondered what might come after that. The joke over, the gloves off.

“Marsalis.”

The voice came first, then the ’face, almost as if the n-djinn had forgotten it should manifest a focus the human could address. Like someone asking for a contact number, and then groping about for a pen to write it down. The ’face shaded in. A blued, confetti-shredded androgynous body that stood as if being continually blown away in a wind tunnel. Long ragged hair, streaming back. Flesh like a million tiny fluttering wings, stirring on the bone. It was impossible to make out male or female features. Under the voice, there was a tiny rustling, crackling sound, like paper burning up.

It was a little like talking to an angel. Carl grimaced.

“That’s me. Been looking me up?”

“You feature in the flow.” The ’face lifted one arm, and a curtain of images cascaded from it to the star-strewn floor. He spotted induction photos from Osprey, media footage following the Felipe Souza rescue, other stuff that lit odd corners of memory in him and made them newly familiar. Somewhere in among it all he thought he saw Marisol’s face, but it was hard to tell. A defensive twinge went through him.

“Didn’t know they were letting you hook up so soon.”

It was a lie. Ertekin had shown him the release documentation from MIT—he knew to the hour when the n-djinn had been recalibrated and allowed back into the flow.

“It is potentially damaging for my systems to run without access to plentiful data,” the blue figure said gravely. “Re-enabling a nanolevel artificial consciousness engine necessitates reconnection to local dataflows.”

Unhumanly, the djinn had left the upheld arm where it was, and the downpour of images ran on.

Carl gestured toward the display. “Right. So what does the local dataflow have to say about me lately?”

“Many things. UNGLA currently defines you as a genetic licensing agent. The Miami Herald calls you a murderer. The Reverend Jessie Marshall of the Church of Human Purity calls you an abomination, but this is a generalized reference. News feeds abstracted from the Mars dataflow and currently held locally refer to you as this year’s luckiest man on Mars, though the year in question is of course 2099. The Frankfurter Allgemeine called y—”

“Yeah, fine. You can stop there.” Shipboard n-djinns were famously literal-minded. It was in the nature of the job they did. Minimal requirement for interface. Humans were deep-frozen freight. The djinns sat alone, sunk in black silence laced with star static, talking occasionally with other machines on Mars and Earth when docking or other logistics required it. “I came to ask you a couple of questions.”

The ’face waited.

“Do you recall Allen Merrin?”

“Yes.” Merrin’s gaunt, Christ-like features evolved in the air at the ’face’s shoulder. Standard ID likeness. “Occupant of crew section beta capsule, redesignated for human freight under COLIN interplanetary traffic directive c93-ep4652-21. Cryo-certified Bradbury November 5, 2106, protocol code 55528187.”

“Yeah, except he didn’t really occupy the beta capsule much, did he?”

“No. The system revived him at four hundred fourteen hours of trajectory time.”

“You’ve told the debriefing crew that you shut down voluntarily at three hundred seventy-eight hours, on suspicion of corruptive material in a navigational module.”

“Yes. I was concerned to prevent a possible viral agent from passing into the secondary navigational core. Quarantine measures were appropriate.”

“And Merrin wakes up thirty-six hours later. Is that a coincidence?”

The blue shredded figure hesitated, face expressionless, eyes fixed on him. Carl guessed it was trying to calibrate his perceptions of relatedness and event, gleaning it from a million tiny shreds of evidence laid down in the details the dataflow held about him. Was he superstitious, was he religious? What feelings did he have about the role of chance in human affairs? The n-djinn was running his specifications, the way a machine would check the interface topography on a new piece of software.

It took about twenty seconds.

“There is no systems evidence to indicate a relation between the two events. The revival appears to have been a capsule malfunction.”

“Were you aware of Merrin once he was awake?”

“To a limited extent, yes. As I said, it is potentially damaging for my systems to run without access to plentiful data. In a quarantine lockdown, the ship’s secondary systems continue to feed into my cores, though it is impossible for me to actively respond to them in any way. The traffic is one-way; an interrupt protocol prevents feedback. You might consider this similar to the data processed by a human mind during REM sleep.”

“So you dreamed Merrin.”

“That is one way of describing it, yes.”

“And in these dreams, did Merrin talk?”

The confetti-streaming figure shifted slightly in the grip of its invisible gale. There was an expression on its face that might have been curiosity. Might equally well have been mild pain, or restrained sexual ecstasy. It hadn’t really gotten the hang of human features.