“I suppose you could stay with me tonight,” she said. She thought of the story of the king and the horse. Once upon a time a poor Bedouin raised the most fabulous racing horse in all of Arabia. Pure-blooded and swift like the wind, its fame spread throughout the peninsula, until the king decided he must see it for himself. He travelled to visit the Bedouin and, bound by the ancient rules of hospitality, the poor man welcomed him and made the king comfortable and fed him of the most delicious meat. After three days, when the sacred duty of hospitality was over, the king mentioned his true business. He had come, he said, to see the famous horse.

His host burst into tears, for he could no longer fulfil the king’s request. Being poor as he was, he had nothing to serve the king on with his visit, so he had slaughtered his horse for the feast.

“Come on, then,” she said. This was probably a mistake, she thought. She seldom allowed anyone into her home, let alone strangers. Only a moment before she’d been contemplating a rare instance of solitude and peace!

She looked at the jackal.

“I hope you’re house-trained,” she said.

“I won’t . . . pee on your cushions,” the jackal said. Its tongue lolled out in a grin.

“I don’t really have many cushions,” Mariam said.

“A . . . shame,” the jackal said.

Mariam was already regretting her offer.

15. The Visit

On the same ferry that carried Saleh and Anubis over from Egypt there was another passenger, though neither boy nor jackal noticed her.

She was good at going unnoticed about her business.

The woman who called herself Nasu at one time in her past stood on the deck and watched the foam as the ship cut through the water. It felt strange being back on Earth.

Gravity. That took some getting used to. She’d spent so long in free fall and then she had to find her land legs again. Which was a silly thing to think when you were on board a ship. Also ships were all wrong. They wobbled on the sea. The sort of ships she was used to were nothing like this old ferry. She thought of the Ibn Al-Farid again, flying out of Polyport, and the mystery of the things she first encountered on board there.

The Outer System. It had taken her nearly a century to get just as far as Jupiter. She was no longer in her original body, nor the one after that. She seemed to recall spending another century as a lotus eater in the virtuality, her physical body rotting in an unmarked pod as she tripped on pixelated fractals and waited for the world to forget her.

Was the original Nasu dead? And what was she, now? A copy, a clone, a revenant? It was a philosophical question, and Nasu never had much time for dead philosophy.