Mukhtar brought out sheaves of paper. He did not like committing things to the great virtuality that was invisibly all around them. Not when it came to business. Instead he showed Sharif the blueprints he had drawn himself.

“You always bring me something curious . . .” Sharif said. She seemed engrossed in the blueprints. Mukhtar poured a second cup of coffee for them both.

“Are you asking hypothetically?” Sharif said at last. She raised her head and stared at him, and there was something discomfiting about her stare.

“No,” Mukhtar told her.

“You have seen this? With your own eyes?”

“The parts are in my emporium.”

Sharif shook her head.

“This is bad business,” she said.

“How so?”

“For one, a golden man was not meant to exist.”

“And yet it does,” Mukhtar said.

Sharif studied the blueprints. “Unless it doesn’t,” she said.

“What do you mean?”

“Does it work?” Sharif said.

“No.”

“It could be a fake,” she told him.

“I thought of that,” Mukhtar said. “But even fakes of this nature are valuable.”

“Why did you bring it to me?”

“Who else will I bring this to, Sharif? Your authority is undisputed.”

She stared at him some more.

“. . . True,” she allowed at last.

“I wonder,” Mukhtar said, almost apologetically, “if you could make it work.”

“Make it work?” She frowned. “I could put it together again, yes, if that is what you are asking. You ran a deep scan, of course?”

“Of course. But the results make no sense to me.”

“It uses wildtech,” she told him. “Nakaimas. If that’s intact then it could work, if it were genuine. And you have the head, the arms, the legs. Most of the parts.”

“Yes.”

“Where did you find it?” she said.

“Some old robot dug it out in the desert somewhere.”

“And do you trust it?” Sharif said.

“The robot? It does not seem the trustworthy sort,” Mukhtar said. “An old assassin from the war, if I am any judge. But it seems genuine in its desire to recover the object.”

“Object is not a word one should apply to something like this.”

“Is it alive, then? Sentient?”

Sharif drank coffee. She took her time. She said, “What it truly is I don’t know. It is just a story told sometimes, and then in quiet voices. A golden man. A weapon. Or perhaps a work of art. Do you remember New Punt? It was a freeport town between Mecca and Medina, after the age of oil and before the Exodus ships were built in Mars orbit. It was prosperous, a city of gold.”

“Like old Punt.”

“Yes. And like old Punt it is lost. It vanished off the records. Go there now and you will find nothing but desert where a city once was. Where people lived and died and traded. Not even ghosts remain.”