“The worst part’s the shame,” Sir Stephen tells him. “Getting through that. Then your next step—well, I talk like an old hand, but that’s really only as far as I’ve come, up through the shame. At the moment I’m involved with the ‘Nature of Freedom’ drill you know, wondering if any action of mine is truly my own, or if I always do only what They want me to do… regardless of what I believe, you see… I’ve been given the old Radio-Control-Implanted-In-The-Head-At-Birth problem to mull over—as a kind of koan, I suppose. It’s driving me really, clinically insane. I rather imagine that’s the whole point of it. And who knows what comes next? Good God. I don’t find out, of course, till I break through this one…. I don’t mean to discourage you so soon—”

“No, no, I’ve been wondering something else—are all you lot my Group or something? Have I been assigned here?”

“Yes. Are you beginning to see why?”

“I’m afraid I am.” With everything else, these are, after all, people who kill each other: and Pirate has always been one of them. “I’d been hoping for—oh, it’s foolish, a bit of mercy… but I was at the all-night cinema, around the corner from Gallaho Mews, the intersection with the extra street, the one you can’t always see because it comes in at such a strange angle… I had a bad stretch of time to get through, poison, metallic time… it smelled as sour as a burned pot… all I wanted was a place to sit for a while, and they don’t care who you are really, what you eat or how long you sleep or who—whom you get together with….”

“Prentice, really it’s all right,” it’s St.-Just Grossout, whom the others call “Sam Juiced” when they want to shout him down, during the passages in here when there is nothing for it but a spot of rowdyism.

“I… just can’t… I mean if it is true, then,” a laugh it hurts him, deep in his windpipe, to make, “then I defected for nothing, didn’t I? I mean, if I haven’t really defected at all….”