Mona the clone also examined herself, frankly or anxiously according to her mood, in the mirrors. She was interested in her body and her face, but she was obsessed with her hair, which at the time they rescued Billy Anker from Redline was a long pinkish-blonde floss that smelled permanently of peppermint shampoo. She would pile it up this way and that on her head, looking at it from different angles until she let it fall with an expression of disgust and said, “I’m committing suicide.”

“Come away now dear and eat,” the shadow operators said listlessly.

“I mean it,” Mona threatened.

She and Billy Anker inhabited the human quarters like two species of animal in the same field. They had nothing to say to one another when it came to it. This became plain the first day he was aboard. Mona had the operators turn her out in a white leather battledress jacket with matching calf-length kick-pleat skirt, which they accessorised by adding a little gold belt, also block-heeled sandals in transparent urethane. She looked good and she knew it. She poached a sea bass with wild lemon grass, cuisine she had learned in the middle-management enclaves of Motel Splendido, and—over a dessert of fresh summer berries steeped in grappa—told him about herself. Her story was a simple one, she said. It was a story of success. At school she had excelled in synchronised swimming. Her place in the corporate order was affirmed by a real knack for working with others. She had never felt encumbered by her origins, never felt jealous of her sister-mother. Her life was on track, she confided, with the added ingredient that it had only just begun.

She asked him if he could fly the White Cat.

Billy Anker didn’t seem to catch that. He scratched the stubble under his jaw.

“What life’s that, kid?” he said vaguely.

Four feet away from one another, they looked as if they had been filmed in different rooms. “This is where I live,” Mona informed him the next day: “And this is where you live.”

She had the shadow operators make over her half of the human quarters to look like a breakfast bar or diner from Earth’s deep past, with a clean chequerboard floor and antique milkshake machines that didn’t need to work. Billy Anker left his half the way it was, and sat naked in the middle of the floor in the mornings, his unbuffed body running to a kind of scrawny middle age, doing the exercises of some complicated satori routine. Mona watched holograms in her room. Billy spent most of the day staring into space and farting. If he farted too loud, Mona came and stood in the communicating doorway and said, “Jesus!” in a disgusted voice, as if she was recommending him to the attention of a third party.