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around despondent on long benches. There were four generic faces in a row – the toy soldiers she mentioned – and then a gap, and then the simulacra of individuals. Alex introduced two of them. Father Huxley, priest and archaeologist, and Professor Collinson, attached to the 32nd Field Ambulance. Neither stirred with recognition when Alex mentioned their names. James sniffed Collinson: Pears soap, dust, coffee and the sea. Every hair of his moustache had been effortlessly and automatically rendered. To think that Omega John scorned Ruth for her instinctive worship of the Process, when it could replicate the bodies of the long dead!
    “These two men also survived the war,” said Alex. “Might be a pattern. Too early to say.”
    “Would Hector have served alongside them?”
    “Yes, Omega John said they were in the same ambulance. He’s very knowledgeable about the war. I wanted to send you away with all three of them but Omega John reckons you will struggle to control even one.”
    Dusk in the walled garden, the air soft and coarse-grained, the shaggy cascade of ornamental conifers beside a faintly luminescent chalk path. The orderlies laid blankets around the shoulders of the manufactured men, seated dutifully on benches gazing out of the windows of the Orangery. With their ounces of volition, the men drew the blankets close around themselves.
    He wondered about this gesture, a faint of echo of the way soldiers might behave, exhausted by battle and taking refuge. He turned to Alex.
    “How does the Process make men with such accuracy?”
    Alex was pouring tea into a china cup; she paused, studied him, one eye mute with blood, the other clear and questioning, and was about to answer when Omega John arrived, the wheels of his bath chair rattling over the paved entrance. His personal staff corrected his Russian fur hat, pulling it down over the bandages strung around his enlarged cranium. Amused by Alex’s hesitation, Omega John answered for her.
    “The men are made from sperm and blood. According to the alchemist Paracelsus, if sperm is left to putrefy in a horse’s womb for forty days, then nourished with the arcanum of human blood, it will grow into something like a man.”
    Omega John wore a sheepskin sleeping bag that covered him from nape to toe, with thick tartan sleeves, from which jaundiced wrists and hands protruded. His orderlies wheeled him to their table.
    The air in the Orangery cooled. Through the windows, evening stars appeared between darkening clouds. The orderlies waited at the periphery of the room. Drawn from the laypeople of Glynde, village life and the work of the Institute had been entwined for generations. They were protective of Omega John, as if servicing and prolonging his life imbued their existence with greater meaning.
    The authority in Omega John’s voice had been broken into many pieces and then reassembled. He talked like a man crossing a rock desert of fissures and cracks: with hesitation, dithering at each turn, then wearily leaping on the next point. The waxy sheen of his skin made him seem close to death, yet his teeth were much younger than his larynx, and new hair burst through the bandages here and there like strong gorse.
    “My colleague in the Institute, Sunny Wu, is a forger of flesh, an expert in the Chinese skill of the counterfeit.” He coughed violently, and accepted a handkerchief from his orderly. “Sunny Wu grew a living replica of his wife’s body, though I suspect it was not from his sperm; she would never have allowed that.”
    The old man’s laugh sounded like kernels being sieved.
    “It is from Sunny Wu that the Process acquired the design of a manufactured body.”
    “But their minds?”
    “Yes!” Omega John raised an index finger. “How to forge a mind? Impossible!”
    Alex demurred. “We’ve simulated people before.”
    “Using digital technology.” His pronunciation picked apart the bones of that phrase, leaving only his contempt for it.