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– why is she so worried?
    She smiled wanly. ‘It is always hard when one’s descendants make their way out into the world. Now you must come and meet people.’
    Lady Vian had walked slowly up, her face hidden in a heavy grey veil. She extended a white hand. Dom knelt and kissed it.
    ‘So,’ she said, ‘enter the master of the world. Who is your ferrous friend?’
    ‘Isaac, my lady,’ said Dom. ‘An uppity robot who doesn’t want his freedom.’
    ‘But of course,’ said Vian, ‘we are all of us in chains, even if they be only of chance and entropy. Have not the Jokers put even the stars in chains?’
    ‘You have a fine grasp of essentials,’ said Isaac, bowing.
    ‘And you are presumptuous, robot. But I thank you. Dom, I wish you would donate that swamp creature to a museum or a zoo or something. It is so animal .’
    Ig scratched himself and sniffed – then gave a long drawn-out hiss. Dom looked over his mother’s shoulder and caught the eye of a tall man in a long blue cloak, who wore a heavy gold collar at his neck. The man’s face was creased with laughter lines, and he winked at Dom and gestured upward with his glass. Dom followed his gaze and saw a flock of flamingoes wheeling high over the domes. For a moment they formed a circle. Then, with long slow wingbeats, they flew out to sea.
    Korodore sat back and breathed deeply. Short of poisoning the air – and a filter haze surrounded the lawn – the only way someone could attack Dom now was with bare hand or tentacle. At least, they could try, before concealed strippers separated them from their component molecules.
    There remained the official progress through Tau City. Dom would walk while the others rode, and would wear nothing but the lead and iron chain of office and seven invisible shields of various types, incorporated in the links. Most of the human worlds and one or two alien ones would have the route bugged, of course, and several had bribed Korodore. He …
    … leant forward. Someone had walked into the field of one pinhead and was looking at him. Korodore had an uneasy certainty that the man was laughing. He looked like a man who had laughed all his life.
    Korodore thumbed through the guest list. Blue cloak, tall … the man was a minor official at the Board of Earth’s agency in Tau City, newly appointed …
    The man in the screen had lifted one foot so that he was balancing on his right leg.
    ‘Madern, get a focus on the guy in the blue cloak. No, better – Gralle, can you get a beam on him?’
    ‘Got it, Ko. Shall I take him out?’
    Korodore considered. Earth was still powerful. Standing on one leg wasn’t a killing matter per se .
    ‘Hold it.’
    The figure had extended its left arm, pointing the first and fourth fingers directly towards, it appeared, the security room. He had closed one eye and was sighting along the extended arm like a weapon.
    Let’s see how you look without an optic nerve, thought Korodore.
    The explosion knocked him sideways. He landed at the crouch, stripper levelled in a reflex action, and dived again as a second explosion and the beginning of a scream marked the weapon control console’s transformation into a plume of incandescence.
    The guests applauded politely. Dom, at his grandmother’s nod, rose a few metres above the ground and said: ‘I thank you all. And I ask that the spirit of holy Sadhim and the small gods of all races give me – give me—’ He stopped.
    A low boom echoed from the home domes.
    Dom stared, and heard again in his inner ear the thin crack of a stripper shot in the transparent air around Jokers Tower. Images flooded into his mind, with fragments of speech that joined and became coherent, and the memory of the hot pain and the cool green relief of the swamp water …
    A dot in the air grew rapidly. He heard his mother cry out, a long way off.
    Korodore dived with his clothes smouldering. Raw blisters were his hands, blood was his face.
    He landed heavily by Dom and shouted