I didn’t speak to him again after that. The general drift of the party took him out of reach and I got pinned with Segesvar in a corner. He had a pale, cosmetically beautiful woman on each arm, identically draped in shimmering amber muslin like paired, life-size ventriloquist dolls. He seemed in an expansive mood.

“Enjoying the party?”

“Not yet.” I lifted a take cookie from a passing waiter’s tray and bit into it. “I’ll get there.”

He smiled faintly. “You’re a hard man to please, Tak. Want to go and gloat over your friends in the pens instead?”

“Not right now.”

Involuntarily, I looked out across the bubble-choked lagoon to where the swamp-panther fight pits were housed. I knew the way well enough, and I supposed no one would stop me going in, but at that moment I couldn’t make it matter enough. Besides, I’d discovered some time last year that once the priests were dead and re-sleeved in panther flesh, appreciation of their suffering receded to a cold and unsatisfyingly distant intellectual understanding. It was impossible to look at the huge, wetmaned creatures as they tore and bit at each other in the fight pits, and still see the men I had brought back from the dead to punish. Maybe, if the psychosurgeons were right, they weren’t there in any real sense any more.

Maybe the core of human consciousness was long gone, eaten out to a black and screaming insanity within a matter of days.

One stifling, heat-hazed afternoon, I stood in the steeply sloping seats above one of the pits, surrounded by a screaming, stamping crowd on its feet, and I felt retribution turning soaplike in my hands, dissolving and slipping away as I gripped at it.

I stopped going there after that. I just handed Segesvar the cortical stacks I stole and let him get on with it.

Now he raised an eyebrow at me in the light from the torches.

“Okay, then. Can I interest you in some teamsports, maybe? Like to come down to the grav gym with Ilja and Mayumi here?”

I glanced across the two confected women and collected a dutiful smile from each one. Neither seemed chemically assisted, but still it felt bizarrely as if Segesvar was working them through holes in the small of each smooth-skinned back, as if the hands he had resting on each perfectly curved hip were plastic and fake.

“Thanks, Rad. I’m getting kind of private in my old age. You go on and have a good time without me.”

He shrugged. “Certainly can’t expect to have a good time with you any more. Can’t remember doing that anytime in the last fifty years, in fact.

You really are turning northern, Tak.”

“Like I said—”