"Me too, if I'd thought it would've done any good. Was Teddy being serious about the PSP still being active in Walton?"

"Sure."

"Well, why doesn't the government do something?"

"Like what? We're living under a judicial system now. The rule of law is paramount. Being a member of a political party isn't an offence in this new, fair England. Being in the Trinities, doing what they do, now that is a crime."

She shook her head in wonder. "It's all so wrong. Stupid."

"Yeah. I know."

CHAPTER TWENTY

The lift halted with knee-bending suddenness, and chimed metallically as the door slid open. The corridor outside was narrow, its walls unpainted breeze blocks; a greening biolum strip ran down the length of the ceiling. Greg and Eleanor walked down to the end, and he knocked on the familiar panelboard door of 206. There was a brief flicker of guilt; he hadn't visited for weeks. Now he'd come because he wanted something.

Qoi opened the door. A thirteen-year-old Chinese girl dressed in a blue silk Mao suit with red and gold fantasy serpents embroidered on her sleeves. She bowed deeply. "He is expecting you," she said in a voice pitched as high as birdsong.

206 was a dole family's accommodation module, three rooms and a cupboard-sized hall. It was on the corner of the tower, which gave it two windows. Being a bachelor, Royan wasn't entitled to it; but as he wasn't listed on the council's occupancy register they were unlikely to insist he vacate it.

The door to Royan's room slid open and a gush of hot humid air, rich with the smell of humus, spilled out. The interior was a bastard offspring of a botanical garden and an experimental CAD-CAM shop.

Thirty blue-white solaris spots shone down on four rows of red clay troughs which grew clumps of orchids, fuchsias, cyclamen, African violets, gloxinias, and jasmine; tall standard hyacinths towered over them, giving off a thick cloying perfume.

A little wheeled robot scuttled along the alleys between the troughs. It was a patchwork of miscellaneous components, something a surrealist sculptor might've built in a fit of hallucinogenic dementia. A droopy flexible hose which ended in a copper watering-can spout hung out of one side, sprinkling milky water over the sphagnum moss that frothed across the surface of the troughs' loam.

One wall was covered from floor to ceiling in TV screens, not modern flatscreens but the antique glass vacuum-tubes of the last century. They'd been taken out of their casings and stacked edge-to-edge, like bricks, in a metal frame. Some were showing channel programmes, some relayed images from cameras dotted around the tower, others had reams of green script unfurling in a constant cascade from top to bottom.