«I see. Well, thanks for filling me in on the basics. And if you do remember anything relevant . . .»

«Eden will remember anyone she ever argued with.» He shrugged, his hands splaying wide. «You really will have to get a symbiont implant.»

«Right.»

• • •

I drove myself back to the station, sticking to a steady twenty kilometres an hour. The main road of naked polyp which ran through the centre of the town was clogged with bicycle traffic.

Rolf Kümmel had set up an incident room on the ground floor. I didn't even have to tell him; like me he'd been a policeman at one time, four years in a Munich arcology. I walked in to a quiet bustle of activity. And I do mean quiet, I could only hear a few excitable murmurs above the whirr of the air conditioning. It was eerie. Uniformed officers moved round constantly between the desks, carrying fat files and cases of bubble cubes; maintenance techs were still installing computer terminals on some desks, their chimps standing to attention beside them, holding toolboxes and various electronic test rigs. Seven shirtsleeved junior detectives were loading data into working terminals under Shannon Kershaw's direction. A big hologram screen on the rear wall displayed a map of Eden's parkland. Two narrow lines—one red, one blue—were snaking across the countryside like newborn neon streams. They both originated at the Lincoln lake, which was about a kilometre south of town.

Rolf was standing in front of the screen, hands on hips, watching attentively as the lines lengthened.

«Is that showing Penny Maowkavitz's movements?» I enquired.

«Yes, sir,» Rolf said. «She's the blue line. And the servitor chimp is red. Eden is interfaced with the computer; this is a raw memory plot downloaded straight from its neural strata. It should be able to tell us everyone who came near the servitor in the last thirty hours.»

«Why thirty hours?»

«That's the neural strata's short-term memory capacity.»

«Right.» I was feeling redundant and unappreciated again. «What was the servitor chimp's assigned task?»

«It was allotted to habitat botanical maintenance, covering a square area roughly two hundred and fifty metres to a side, with the lake as one border. It pruned trees, tended plants, that kind of thing.»

I watched the red line lengthening, a child's crayon-squiggle keeping within the boundary of its designated area. «How often does it . . . go back to base?»

«The servitor chimps are given full physiological checks every six months in the veterinary centre. The ones allotted to domestic duties have a communal wash-house in town where they go to eat, and keep themselves clean. But one like this . . . it wouldn't leave its area unless it was ordered to. They eat the fruit, their crap is good fertilizer. If they get very muddy they'll wash it off in a stream. They even sleep out there.»

I gave the screen a thoughtful look. «Did Penny Maowkavitz take a walk through the habitat parkland very often?»