But now I wondered. If the Crawlies (and the Clackers and the Hardshells too) liked our quoins for some other reason than them being money – and what that reason was I couldn’t yet fathom – then it was all too handy that they’d ended up operating our banks. And it was all too handy that the Crawlies had shown up in the Congregations just before our own big banking crash.

Oh, Cap’n Rack, I said to myself. What have you set loose in my head? Then I started thinking back to Prozor, and what she’d said about the glowy making you think mean, suspicious thoughts, and I worked myself into such a tizzy I didn’t know what to think.

More days passed. There were robots on the ship as well as aliens. Some of the robots were just along to help their monkey owners, trundling after them with luggage and so on, if they had to move cabins. One or two of the robots didn’t seem to be with anybody at all. Now and then robots get to be considered citizens, and have rights and bank accounts and so on, but that only happens rarely, when a robot turns out to be a lot cleverer than the average kind. When they made robots, in the Occupation or two before ours, they made some of them stupid and some of them smart, and often from the outside you can’t tell which from which. But the smart ones have minds of their own, ideas and plans if you will. Paladin wasn’t like that. All Paladin ever did was what it was told. The whole time we were growing up I never knew it to question its place in things. That didn’t mean I wasn’t sad about what had happened to Paladin, but it was like feeling sad about a dog rather than a person.

The funny thing was that there was a robot just like Paladin, and it was busy going about its own business on the clipper like it owned the place. I watched it come and go for a day or two, before deciding I wanted a natter with it.

‘Excuse me, sir,’ I said, laying aside my book, and making sure Quindar wasn’t anywhere nearby. ‘Do you mind if I ask you something?’

‘Why should I mind?’

The robot had a voice like Paladin’s, deep and commanding, but whereas Paladin spoke like it was playing back snippets, this time I had the impression I was having an actual conversation.

‘I know a robot a bit like you, sir, only you’re not the same. Begging my pardon, but you don’t seem to belong to anyone.’

‘I belong to everyone and no one. What is your name, if I might ask?’

‘Fura, sir. Fura Ness.’

‘Are you some sort of prisoner? I detected the device on your wrist, and the transponder signal it emits.’