“Enough,” said Koi, and everyone shut up. Sierra Tres went to make some calls from one of the other rooms down the corridor, and the rest of us went back to the mapping construct. In the speeded-up virtual environment, Tres was gone for the rest of the day—real-time equivalence in the outside world about ten minutes. In a construct, you can use the time differential to make three or four simultaneous calls, switching from one to the other in the minutes-long gaps that a couple of seconds’ pause at the other end of the line will give you. When Tres came back, she had more than enough on Segesvar to confirm her original impression. He was old style haiduci, at least in his own eyes. We went back up to the hotel suite and I dialled the discreet coding on speaker phone with no visual.

It was a bad line. Segesvar came on amidst a lot of background noise, some of it real/virtual adjustment connection nutter, some of it not. The part that wasn’t sounded a lot like someone or something screaming.

“I’m kind of busy here, Tak. You want to call me later?”

“How’d you like me to clear my slate, Rad? Right now, direct transfer through discreet clearing. And then a similar amount again on top.”

The silence stretched into minutes in the virtuality. Maybe three seconds’ hesitation at the other end of the line.

“I’d be very interested. Show me the money, and we’ll talk.”

I glanced at Brasil, who held up splayed fingers and thumb and left the room without a word. I made a rapid calculation.

“Check the account,” I told Segesvar. “The money’ll be there inside ten seconds.”

“You’re calling from a construct?”

“Go check your cashflow, Rad. I’ll hold.”

The rest was easy.

In a short-stay virtuality, you don’t need sleep and most programmes don’t bother to include the sub-routines that would cause it. Long term, of course, this isn’t healthy. Hang around too long in your short-stay construct, and eventually your sanity will start to decay. Stay a few days, and the effects are merely … odd. Like bingeing simultaneously on tetrameth and a focus drug like Summit or Synagrip. From time to time your concentration freezes up like a seized engine, but there’s a trick to that.

You take the mental equivalent of a walk around the block, lubricate your thought processes with something unrelated, and then you’re fine. As with Summit and Synagrip, you can start to derive a manic kind of enjoyment from the building focal whine.