“I don’t know about then,” said Judy. “But I’m starting to think they’re doing something now. Frances, the AI that interrogated Peter left his signature on the report: serial ident, VRep, image, and nomenclature. Frances, it was that stealth robot, Chris. It was Chris who interrogated him after he was rescued from the Enemy Domain.”

Frances paused, accessing the records herself.

“I see,” she said. “Judy, this is not about the Private Network, is it? We’re being deliberately led along a trail.”

“And it’s all to do with this man Justinian. The man the Watcher murdered-supposedly murdered.” Judy looked up at the cruel spike of the cannon on the roof of the nearby building. It reminded her of the imminent demise of her own section of the Shawl. “Maybe it’s the pill,” she said, “but I can’t help feeling that events seem to be converging. I’m suffused in Blue, Frances. The world looks like a whirlpool and we’re caught in the outermost currents. I can see a funnel and it’s leading down to somewhere we don’t want to go.” Judy shook her head; she wasn’t making a lot of sense, even to herself.

Frances spoke. “You’re overdoing the MTPH, Judy. You need to give yourself time to come down. You’re getting feedback on your own neuroses.”

Judy took hold of Frances’ arm for support and allowed herself a moment of weakness. She blinked. Grey buildings marched in ranks into the distance. A pastel violet wall stood behind her.

“It’s passing, Frances,” she said. “The geometry of these buildings doesn’t help. This doesn’t make sense. Why should Chris be leading us down a path to Justinian when he knows that the Watcher must be able to see our every move? Anyway, I thought Chris was working for the Watcher.”

“He never actually said that,” the robot said, obviously replaying the conversation in her head. “Maybe he just let us believe that.”

The dizziness was passing. For the moment.

“Maybe the best thing for now is to keep following the path. But with caution. There was nothing about Peter Onethirteen being marooned in Judy Three’s report. Didn’t she check up on all the other instances of Peter Onethirteen’s consciousness?”

Judy took a deep breath and straightened up and gazed at nothing in particular.

“That’s Judy Three,” she said. “It would be just like her to get caught up in observing the PC in front of her and not think to check on all the others. I wonder about her sometimes, Frances. She shows no emotion, even to herself. She’s locked herself up so completely that only her eyes move as she looks out into the world.” She reeled a little. “Did I say that?” She shook her head. “Look, I’m ready. Let’s go inside.”

She was lying, and they both knew it. She felt terrible. MTPH had never been like this before.

Under the influence of blue MTPH, the world suddenly seemed very big to Judy. Big and anthropomorphic. The doorway to Peter’s apartment block opened like a mouth to allow her in. She walked along a corridor where the doors throbbed in their frames, almost too big to be contained, held in place by the pressure of the emotions that were welling up in the enclosed apartments beyond. Judy waded through the yellow and red mist that seeped into the corridor from the living spaces, sending eddies of it spinning with her bare feet. The gravity tube that connected to other floors was a hungry throat opened up, ready to gulp them down; the descending ramp that curved through ninety degrees to merge with the exotically hooped tunnel was a memory of a summer’s day. And now she was getting her emotions and memories mixed. This wasn’t right: what was in that little blue pill? Judy was suffering total synaesthesia.

She was following Peter and Frances down into the earth, her bare feet pulling up bubbles of cosmic force as she lifted them from the rubbery surface of the gravity tube. No. That wasn’t real; that was an imagined sensation. She could tell the real ones. See the way that Peter was looking at Frances. That was real. The robot was drawing his eyes, just like this tube was pulling Judy’s feet to its perpendicular surface. They had put exotic material on spaceships, on the Shawl, and now they put it in apartment blocks so they could fit more people into their exotic geometries.

Two joggers ran past; she felt their glow of sweat and exertion as they raced for the surface. That was real. Now they were turning through ninety degrees again until they were hanging like flies from the ceiling of the world. That was real.

Frances surreptitiously took Judy’s arm as they entered Peter’s living room. The robot guided her unsteady friend to a chair and helped her to sit down.

“That’s interesting,” Frances said, pointing to the dark cinder of a fir cone that stood in the center of the room.

Peter smiled.

“It’s a venumb from the Enemy Domain,” he explained.

“It looks dead to me,” Frances said.

“It would.” Peter smiled. “That venumb spread itself right through the Enemy Domain. I’ve got no idea how it got its seeds into space, but once they did, those little cones could survive the burn of reentry.”

Judy stared at the dark cinder. A ghost of a life flickered inside it as Peter spoke. She wanted to ask him a question, but she felt too sick. That venumb came from another planet? It fell to Earth from space?

Frances was turning something up: not the volume of her speech, but something in its modulation. “How did you find it?” The words seemed to float across the room in shimmering vermilion letters… How did you find it…

“Deductive reasoning,” Peter replied. “I guessed that if those venumbs could spread themselves unnoticed through the Enemy Domain, they could make it down to Earth. After that it was just a question of interrogating the public databases.”

“That would take an elegant search routine.”

Frances wasn’t actually speaking to Peter, Judy realized. She was calibrating herself to him, adjusting her outputs to the optimum levels to appeal to him. Judy could read the feedback loop between Peter and the robot as Frances’ intentions converged with Peter’s fascination.

“It worked,” Peter said.

“You’re interested in other forms of life?” Frances teased.

From her viewpoint on the couch, Peter was standing still, but the room rotated ninety degrees around him. That made sense to Judy’s drug-altered perceptions; after all, wasn’t Peter the center of their little world at the moment? If his feelings realigned, then Judy and Frances would realign themselves around him.

“I want to know where they come from,” Peter said. There was a motor running inside him, driving him forward. Judy could see it: silver pistons and black rods. It ran on redcurrant jelly. She shook her head. Peter was speaking. “Those spider bushes we saw, they come from the Russian Free States. What is driving the world to evolve in those new directions? Have you heard the rumors of the origin of the Watcher? The Watcher believes itself to be of extraterrestrial origin. It thinks it is the product of an intergalactic computer virus that settled in the computers of Earth in the early twenty-first century.”

“I have heard that,” Frances said. The buttons between her legs seemed to be protruding a little further than normal. Peter had noticed that; his gaze was leading Judy’s there.

“There are venumbs all through the Enemy Domain. And if you look to the edge of the galaxy and what lurks there…”

The room was a whirlpool, and the cinder was at its center, and they were all whirling towards the dark center; the seam in Peter’s brain where the EA had mended his mind was threatening to break. Judy could see it-it was stretching-but she had to know…

“What’s at the edge of the galaxy, Peter? What is out there?”

Frances put her hand on Peter’s shoulder. “I think you should sit down, Peter,” she said. “Tell me about the cinder. Has it shown any sign of germinating?”