"I do not know," Jongleur said at last. "I do not know what the boy is, although I have my suspicions. But my Avialle, when she died . . . all that was left were copies."

"Copies?" The word, although half-expected, chilled him.

"From earlier versions of the Grail process. Different mind-scans made at different times. None wholly satisfactory." He frowned as though about to send back an unimpressive wine.

"Like that Tinto from the Venetian simulation," Paul said. "I was right." Jongleur raised an eyebrow at the name but said nothing. "How did the . . . how did Ava—all those Avas—get into the system? Why did she keep appearing to me?"

Jongleur shrugged. "After she died, when I found that all the stored copies, even those made of Finney and Mudd, had been dumped, I thought there had been some malfunction in the Grail system. It is a huge and fearfully complex enterprise, after all." His eyes narrowed. "I did not realize that the Other—the operating system—had broken the bonds of its confinement, had made its way out of the strait-jacket of the network and into my own system. Even when I . . . saw her for the first time in one of my simulations, I did not understand how one of the copies could have made its way into the Grail network." His back straightened and his jaw set; Paul thought he looked like someone trying to mask either great pain or anger. "I was visiting my Elizabethan simworld. I saw her in Southwark, near the Globe Playhouse, being pursued by two cutthroats who looked like Mudd and Finney. I caught them and immobilized them for later study but she escaped. It was then I realized that all the missing copies must have somehow been dumped into the Grail network, but I still did not suspect the operating system."

"So . . . all the versions of the Twins are just copies?"

It was horrible having to cajole information out of this cruel man, this murderer, but the hunger for answers was too strong.

"No, Finney and Mudd still exist. After . . . what happened with Avialle they were punished—imprisoned, in a sense—but they still work for me. They are the ones that pursued you through the Grail network after your escape."

"But why, damn it?" For a moment the anger came back again in a surge of heat up his spine. It was all he could do to remain seated. "Why me? Why am I so damned important?"

"You? You are nothing. But to my Avialle you were something." The old man scowled and lowered his eyes. "The copies of her, all those ghosts—they were drawn to you. Not that I knew it at first. After Avialle was lost, I kept you imprisoned and unconscious. I still had many questions about what had happened. I implanted a neurocannula and brought you into one of my Grail network simulations so I could . . . investigate."

"So you could torture me," Paul spat.

Jongleur shrugged. "Call it what you will. I have almost no physical life anymore. I wanted you in my realm. But I soon noticed that you had attracted attention from . . . something. It was always fleeting, but I was able to capture traces. It was Avialle—or rather, the duplicate versions of Avialle. They were drawn to you, somehow. They could not keep away from you for long."

"She loved me," Paul said.

"Shut your mouth. You have no right to speak of her now."

"It's true. And my sin was that all I could truly offer her was pity. But that's still more than you can say, isn't it?"

Jongleur stood, pale with fury, and raised his clenched fists. "Pig. I should kill you."

Paul rose too. "You're welcome to try. Go on—you've done everything else to me that you could."

Paul's companions had turned as his argument with Jongleur grew louder. Azador hurried over to them. "Please, my friends, no more fighting. We have an enemy already—and he is enough for us all, eh?"

Paul shrugged his shoulders and sat down. Azador whispered something in Jongleur's ear, then went back to the group gathered around Orlando. Jongleur stared at Paul for a long moment before lowering himself back to the ground. "You will speak no more of that," he said coldly.

"I will speak of what I want. If you hadn't imprisoned her, treated her like something in a museum, none of this would have happened."

"You understand nothing," Jongleur said, but the fire was gone from his voice. "Nothing."

For a while Paul only listened to the distant hissing and popping of the fire, his companions' murmuring conversation. "So you stuck me in that simulation of the First World War," he said at last. "You staked me out. I was the bait,"

Jongleur looked at him as if from a great distance. "I hoped to bring her close enough to capture, yes. Perhaps eventually to gather enough of the copies to reconstitute something close to the real Avialle."

"Why? Was it anything so normal as a father's love? Or was it something less pleasant? Was it just because she was yours, and you wanted back what belonged to you?"

The old man was rigid. "What is in my heart . . . is for no man to know."

"Heart? You have a heart?" He expected anger, but this time Jongleur seemed too chilled and weary even to respond. "So what was it all about, then? All that madness, that bizarre museum of a house and grounds—what did you intend?"

Jongleur did not speak for a long time. "Do you know what an ushabti is?" he said at last.

Paul shook his head, puzzled. "I don't know the word."

"It does not matter," Jongleur said. "In fact, all this talk is worthless. We will both be dead soon. When the system collapses everyone here will die."

"Then if it doesn't matter, you might as well tell me the truth." Paul leaned forward. "You were going to kill me, weren't you? Ava was right about that. You were going to kill me—swat me like a fly. Weren't you?"

Felix Jongleur looked at him for a long, calculating second, then looked down at the fire. "Yes."

Paul sat back with a sick little feeling of triumph. "But why?"

Jongleur shook his head. "It was a mistake—a bad idea. A failed project. It was named for the ushabti of the Egyptian tombs, the tiny statuettes that were meant to wait for the dead Pharaoh in the afterlife."

"I'm not following you. You wanted me to work for you after you were dead?"

Jongleur showed a wintry smile. "Not you. You give yourself too much importance, Mr. Jonas. A common problem with the people of your small island."

Paul swallowed a retort. So the ancient Frenchman wanted to insult the Brits—let him. He had never imagined he would actually get the chance to speak to this man face-to-face. He could not waste the opportunity. "Then who? What?"

"I began the Ushabti Project several years ago, at a time when I felt quite certain that the Grail process was going to fail. The first results on the thalamic splitter were very bad and the Grail network's operating system—the Other, as some call it—was unstable." Jongleur frowned. "I was already very, very old. If the Grail Project did not succeed, I would die. But I did not want to die."

"Who does?"

"Few have the resources I do. Few have the courage to flout humanity's cowardly surrender to death."

Paul held in his impatience. "So . . . you started this . . . Ushakti Project?"

"Ushabti. Yes. If I could not perpetuate my actual self, I would do the next best thing. Like the pharaohs, I would keep my line alive. I would save the sacred blood. I would do this by creating a version of me that would survive my death."

"But you just said that the technology wasn't working. . . ."

"It was not. So I came up with the best alternative I could. I could not escape death, it seemed, so I created a clone."

A number of terrible thoughts began fizzing in Paul's head. "But that's . . . that doesn't make sense. A clone isn't you, it's just your genetics. It would grow up into a very different person, because its experiences . . . would be different. . . ."