The Marriott is not a Marriott; it's a Revolutionary Progress Hostel. (There are real hotels elsewhere in Tripoli, but they all charge real hotel bills, and the government is trying to run the tech jury service on the cheap.) Huw's djinn spiels a little rantlet about King Ghadaffi's critique of trademarks, and explains that this is the People's Marriott, where the depredations of servile labor have been eliminated in favor of automated conveniences, the maintenance and disposition of which is managed by a Resident's Committee, and primly admonishes him for being twenty minutes late to his first Committee meeting, which is to run for another two hours and forty minutes.

"Can't I just go to my room and have a wash?" Huw asks. "I'm filthy."

"Ah! One thousand pardons, Madame! Would that our world was a perfect one and the needs of the flesh could come before the commonweal! It is, however, a requirement of residence at the People's Marriott. You need to attend and be assigned a maintenance detail, and be trained in the chores you are to perform. The common room is wonderfully comfortable, though, and your fellow committee members will be delighted to make you most very welcome indeed!"

"Crap," Huw says.

"Yes," the djinn says, "of course. You'll find a WC to your left after you pass through the main doors."

Huw stalks through both sets of automatic doors, which judder and groan open and creak shut. The lobby is a grandiose atrium with grimy spun diamond panes fifteen meters above his head through which streams gray light that feeds a riotous garden of root-vegetables and xeroscaped desert scrub. His vision clouds over, then a double row of shaky blinkenlights appear before him, strobing the way to the common room. Huw heaves a put-upon sigh and shambles along their path.

The common-room is hostel chic, filled with sagging sofas, a sad and splintery gamesurface, and a collection of a half-dozen morose international travelers clutching at their teapots and scrawling desultorily on a virtual whiteboard. The collaborative space is cluttered with torn-off sheets of whiteboard, covering every surface. Doc Björk has beaten him here, and she is already in the center of the group, animatedly negotiating for the lightest detail possible.

"Huw!" she calls as he plants himself in the most remote sofa, which coughs up a cloud of dust and stale farts smelling of the world's variegated cuisines.

He lifts one hand weakly and waves. The other committee members are staring at him coldly, with a glint of feral calculation in their eyes, and Huw has a feeling he's about to get the shittiest job in the place. Mitigate the risk, he thinks.

"Hi there, I'm Huw. I'm here on jury duty, so I'm not going to be available during the days. I'm also a little, uh, toxic at the moment, so I'll need to stay away from anything health-related. Something in the early evening, not involving food or waste systems would be ideal, really. What fits the bill?" He waits a moment while the teapots chatter translations from all over the room. Huw hears Arabic, Farsi, Hindi, Spanish, French, and American.

Various whiteboards are reshuffled from around the room, and finally a heroically ugly ancient Frenchman who looks like an albino chimp squeaks some dependencies across the various boards with a stylus. He coughs out a rapid and hostile stream of French, which the teapot presently translates. "You'll be on comms patrol. There's a transceiver every three meters. You take spare parts around to each of them, reboot them, watch the Power-On Self-Test and swap out any dead parts. Even numbered floors tonight, odd floors tomorrow, guest rooms the day after." He tosses a whiteboard at Huw, and it snaps to centimeters from his nose, a-crawl with floorplans and schematics for broadband relay transceivers.

"Well, that's done," Huw says. "Thanks."

Björk laughs. "You're not even close to done. That's your tentative assignment—you need to get checked out on every job, in case you're reassigned due to illness or misadventure."

"You're kidding," he says, rolling his eyes.

"I am not. My assignment is training new committee members. Now, come and sit next to me, the Training and Skills-Assessment sub-committee is convening here."

Huw's room is surprisingly posh, but he can't appreciate it. He looks at the oversized sleep-surface and sees the maintenance regimen for its control and feedback mechanism. He spins slowly in the spa-sized loo and all he can think about is the poxy little bots that patrol the plumbing and polish the tile. The media center is a dismal reminder of his responsibility to patrol the endless miles of empty corridor, rebooting little silver mushrooms and watching their blinkenlights for telltale reds.

He fills the pool-sized tub with steaming, lavender- and eucalyptus-scented water, then climbs in, burka and all. The djinn's lamp perches on the tub's edge getting soaked in oversloshes as he shifts his weight, watching the folds of cloth flutter in aquatic slomo as its osmotic layers convect gentle streams of water over his many nooks and (especially) crannies.

"Esteemed sir," the djinn says, its voice echoing off the painted tile.

"Figured that one out, huh?" Huw says. "No more Madame?"

"My infinite pardons," it says. "I have received your jury assignment. You are to report to Fifth People's Technology Court at 0800 tomorrow. You will be supplied with a delicious breakfast of fruits and semolina, and a cold lunch of local delicacies. You should be well-rested and prepared for a deliberation of at least four days."

"Sure thing," Huw says, dunking his head and letting the water rush into his ears. He resurfaces and shakes his head, spattering the walls with water that's slightly gray with bodily ick. "How far's the courthouse?"

"A mere two kilometers. The walk through the colorful and ancient Tripoli streets is both bracing and elevating. You will arrive in a most pleasant and serene state of mind."

Huw kicks at the drain control and the tub gurgles itself empty, reminding him of the great water-reclamation facilities in the sub-basement and their various osmotic tissues and dams. He stands and the burka steams for a moment as every drop of moisture is instantly wrung loose from its weave. "Pleasant and serene. Yeah, right." He climbs tiredly out of the tub and slouches towards the bedroom. "What time is it?"

"It is two-fifteen, esteemed sir," says the djinn. "Would sir care for a sleeping draught?"

"Sir would care for a real hotel," Huw grunts, then lies down on the enormous white rectangle that occupies the center of the bedroom. He doesn't hear the djinn's reply. He's asleep as soon as his head touches the pillow.

The djinn doesn't answer: it's prostrate on the bedside table as if hiding from an invisible overhead axe blade. The noise gets louder, if anything, then modulates into chickens drowning in their own blood, with a side-order of Van Halen guitar riffs. "Make it stop!" shouts Huw, stuffing his fingers in his ears.

The noise dies to a distant wail. A minute later it stops and the djinn flickers upright. "My apologies, esteemed sir," it says dejectedly. "I did not with the room sound system mixer volume control interface correctly. That was the most blessed Imam Anwar Mohammed calling the faithful to prayer, or it would have been if not for the feedback."

Huw rolls over and grabs the teapot. "Djinn."

"Yes, oh esteemed sirrah?"

Huw pauses. "You keep calling me that," he says slowly. "Do you realize just how rude that is?"

"Eep! Rude? You appear to be squeezing—"

"Listen." Huw is breathing heavily. He sits up and looks out of the window at the sleeping city. Somewhere, a hundred gigameters beyond the horizon, the sun might be thinking about the faint possibility of rising. "I am a patient man. But. If you keep provoking me like this—"

"—Like what?"

"This hostel. The fucking alarm clock. Talking down to me. Repeatedly insulting my intelligence -

"—I'm not insulting!—"

"Shut up." Huw blows out a deep breath. "Unless you want me to give you a guided tour of the hotel waste compactor and heavy metal reclamation subsystem. From the inside."

"Ulp." The djinn shuts up.

"That's better. Now. Breakfast. I want, let's see … fried eggs. Bacon rashers. Pork sausages. Toast with butter on it, piles of butter. Don't argue, I've had a grey-market LDL anti-cholesterol hack. Oh yeah. Black pudding. Tell your little friends in the canteen to have it waiting for me. There is no 'or else' for you to grasp at, you horrible little robot, you're going to do this my way or you're not going to do very much at all, ever again."

Huw stands up and stretches. A plink with the pinky remote and his bicycle unlocks and stretches too, folding itself into shopping-mall mode. Memory metal frames are one of the few benefits of high technology, in Huw's opinion—along with the ability to eat seven different flavors of grease for breakfast and not die of a heart attack before lunchtime.

"Got that?"

"I told them, but they say these Turkish food processors, they don't like working with non-Halal—"

The djinn shuts up at Huw's snarl. Huw picks up the teapot, hangs it from his bike's handle-bars, and pedals off down the hotel corridor with blood in his eye.

I wonder what my chances are of getting a hanging judge?

It's a good, old-fashioned throng. From his vantagepoint atop the saddle, it seems to writhe, a mass of variegated robes and business-attire, individuals lost in the teem. He studies it for a moment longer, and sees that for all its density it's moving rather quickly, though with little regard for personal space. He dismounts the bike and it extrudes its kickstand. Planting his hands on his hips, he belches up a haram gust of bacon-grease and ponders. He can always lock up the bike and proceed afoot, but nothing handy presents itself for locking. The djinn is manifesting a glowing countdown timer, ticking away the seconds before he will be late at court.

Just then, the crowd shits out a person, who makes a beeline for him.

"Hello, Adrian," Huw says, once the backpacker is within shouting distance—about sixty centimeters, given the din of footfalls and conversations. Huw is somehow unsurprised to see the backpacker again, clad in his travelwear and a rakish stubble, eyes red as a baboon's ass after a night's hashtaking.

"Well, fancy!" says Adrian. "Out for a bit of a ride?"

"No, actually," replies Huw. "On my way somewhere, and running late. Do you think I can ride around this crowd on another street?"

The backpacker snorts. "Sure, if you ride to Tunisia. That's not going to do you much good here, I'm afraid. And don't think about locking it up, mate, or it'll be nationalized by the Popular Low-Impact Transit Committee before you've gone three steps."

"Shit," grunts Huw. He gestures at the bike and it deflates and compacts itself into a carry-case. He hefts it—the fucking thing weighs a ton.

"Yup," Adrian agrees, cheerily. "Nice to have if you want to go on a tour of the ruins or get somewhere at three A.M.—not much good otherwise, though. Want to sell it to me? I met a pair of sisters last night who're going to take me off to the countryside for a couple days of indoctrination and heavy petting. I'd love to have some personal transport."

"Fuck," says Huw. He's had the bike for seven years; it's an old friend, jealously guarded. "How about I rent it to you?"

Adrian grins and produces a smokesaver from one of the many snap-pockets on his chest. A nugget of hash smolders inside the plastic tube, a barely visible coal in the thick smoke. He puts his mouth over the end and slurps down the smoke, holds it for a thoughtful moment, then expels it over Huw's head.

"Lovely. I'll return it in two days, three tops. Where're you staying?"

"The fucking Marriott."

"Wouldn't wish it on my worst enemy. Here, will this be enough?" He hands Huw a foil-wrapped brick of Assassin-brand hash, the size of a paving-stone. "The sisters're into hashishim-revival. Quite versatile minds, they have."

Huw is already copping a light buzz from the sidestream Adrian's blowing his way. This much hash will likely put him in a three-day incontinence coma. But someone might want it, he supposes. "Tell you what," he says. "Let's call this a deposit. You can have it back for the safe return of the bike in four days at the Marriott, all right?"

Adrian works his head from side to side. "Sure, mate. Works for me. Shame you don't trust me to return the bike on my own, but that's how it is, I suppose."

"Okay. But you'd better bloody look after it. That bike has sentimental value, we've come a long way together." Huw whispers into the bike's handlebars and hands it to Adrian. It interfaces with his PAN, accepts him as its new erstwhile owner, and unfolds. Adrian saddles up, waves once, and pedals off for points rural and lecherous.

Huw holds the djinn's lamp up and hisses at it. "Right," he says. "Get me to the court on time."

"With the utmost of pleasures, sirrah," it begins. Huw gives it a sharp shake. "All right, then," it says. "Let me teach you to say, 'Out of my bloody way,' and we'll be off."

As it turns out, it's an inflatable building, an outsized bounce-house made of metallic fabric and compressed air. The whole thing could be deflated and carted elsewhere on a flatbed truck in a morning, or simply attached to a dirigible and lifted to a new spot. A great safety-yellow rubbery gasket the size of a manhole cover sprouts from one side, hooked into power, bandwidth, sewage, and water, armored flex-hoses coursing with modcons.

It's shaped like a casino-owner's idea of the Parthenon, cartoonish columns and squishy frescoes depicting mankind's dominance over technology. Huw bounds up the rubbery steps and through the six-meter doors. A fourteen-year-old boy with a bad moustache confronts him as he passes into the lobby.

"Pizzpot," grunts the kid, hefting a curare-blower in Huw's direction. Huw skids to a stop on the yielding floor.

"Pardon?"

"Pizzpot," repeats the boy. He's wearing some kind of uniform, yellow semi-disposable coveralls tailored like a potato-sack and all abristle with insignia. It looks like the kind of thing that Biohazard Containment passes out when they quarantine a borough because it's dissolving into brightly colored machine parts.

"The People's Revolutionary Technology Court Guardsman wishes to see your passport, sirrah," his djinn explains. "Court will be in session in fifteen seconds."

Huw rolls up his sleeve and pressed his forearm against the grimy passport reader the Guardsman has pulled from his waistband. "Gaah. Show me the way." A faint glowing trail appears in front of Huw, snaking down the hall and up to a battered-looking door.

Huw stumbles up to the door and leans on it. It opens easily, sucking him through with a gust of dusty air, and he staggers into a brightly lit green room with a row of benches stretching round three walls. The center of the room is dominated by two boxes; a strangely menacing black cube a meter on a side, and a lectern, behind which hunches a somewhat moth-eaten vulture in a black robe.

Faces turn to watch Huw as he stumbles to a halt. "You're late," squawks the vulture—on second thoughts, Huw realizes she's not an uplifted avian, but a human being, wizened and twisted by age, her face dominated by a great hatchet of a nose.

"Terribly sorry," Huw pants apologetically. "Won't happen again."

"Better not." The judge harrumphed consumptively. "Dammit, I deserve some respect! Horrible children."

As the judge rants on about punctuality and the behavior of the dutiful and obedient juror (which, Huw is led to believe, had always been deplorable but has been in terminal decline ever since the abolition of capital punishment for contempt of court back in the eighteenth century) he takes stock of his fellow jurors. For the first time he has reason to be glad of his biohazard burka—and its ability to completely obscure his snarl of anger—because he knows at least half of them. The bastard pseudo-random number generators at the People's Magical Libyan Jamahiriya embassy must be on the blink, because besides Doc Björk—whom he kind-of expected—the jury service has summoned none other than Sandra Lal, and an ominously familiar guy with a blue forelock, and the irritating perpetually-drunk centenarian boomer from next door but one. There are a couple of native Libyans, but it looks as if the perennially booming Tripolitanian economy has turned jury service evasion into a national sport. Hence the need to import guest-jurors.

Fuck me, all I need is that turd Adrian to make it a clean sweep, thinks Huw. This must be some kind of set-up. He settles on a bench in a rustle of static-charged fabric and waits for proceedings to begin.

The Vulture stands up and hunches over the lectern. "Listen up!" She rasps, in a forty-a-day voice that sounds like she's about due for another pair of lungs. "I am doctor Rosa Giulliani—that's a doctor of law—and I have volunteered my services for the next two weeks to chair this court, or focus group, or three-ring circus. You are the jury, or potential consumers, or performing animals. Procedurally the PMLJ have given me total autonomy as long as I conduct this hearing in strict accordance within the bounds of international law as laid down by the Hague Tribunal on Trans-Human Manifestations and Magic. Some of you may not fully comprehend what this means. What it means is that you are here to decide whether a reasonable person would consider it safe to unleash Exhibit A on the world. If Exhibit A turns out to be a weapon of planetary destruction, we will probably all die. If Exhibit A turns out to be a widget that brings everlasting happiness to the whole of humanity, we will probably all get to benefit from the consequences. So I will enforce extreme measures against any rat-bastard who tries to smuggle a sample out of this room. I will also nail to the wall the hide of anyone who talks about Exhibit A outside this room, because there are hardware superweapons and there are software superweapons, and we don't know what Exhibit A is, yet. For all we know it's a piece of hardware that looks like a portable shower cubicle then turns round and installs antique Microsoft crashware in your thalamus. So."

Giulliani subsides in a fit of racking coughs. The person next to Huw, a young punk of indeterminate—or no—gender, turns and winks at him, then mutters something incomprehensible in Czech. "Cool, I wonder what she'll pay for a new set of Kurdish lungs, one careful owner?" Huw's tea-pot translates.

Huw stares back for a moment, then shrugs.

Judge Giulliani gathers herself, and Huw fiddles idly with the dialect gain on the djinn's translation engine control panel:

"We follow a set procedure. Y'all liss'n here. A statement is delivard by the dayum fool script kiddies who downloaded the memeplex from the metasphere an' who're applyin fer custodial riats ta it. This describes the prior backgroun' ta their actions. Ya reckon? Secondly, a preliminary activation of the device may be conducted in a closed environment. Thirdly, o buss dis. You rabble git to talk 'boutit. Foethly, you split into two teams: advocates an' prosecution. Yo taxe be to convince members uh de othuh team to join you. Sheeit! Finally, you deliver your majority verdict to me and I check it for procedural compliance. Then with any luck I get to hang the meddling kids. Ere-a zeere-a uny qooesshuns?"

Huw shakes his head, bemused. For some reason he can't get the teapot to give Judge Giulliani an authentic Neapolitan accent. But Doc Björk is already waving a hand in the air, eager to please. The judge turns a black gaze on her, one that reminds Huw of historical documentaries about the Ayatollah Khomeini, but Björk refuses to wilt.

"What," rasps Giulliani, "is it?"

"About this Exhibit, yah? Is it the box, in? And if so, how secure the containment is? I would hate for your worries to depart the abstract and concretize themselves, as it were."

"Huh." The judge stalks out from behind her lectern and kicks the box, hard. She must be wearing steel toe-caps, from the noise it makes. Huw whimpers faintly, envisaging imminent post-singularity grey goop catalyzed nano-annihilation, beyond any hope of resurrection. But the only terrible consequence is that the judge smiles, horribly. "It are being safe," she announces. "Box are being waste containment vessel left over from second French fast breeder program." This announcement brings an appreciative nod from a couple of members of the audience. The second French fast breeder program was nothing to do with nuclear reactors and everything to do with disaster-mitigation replicators bred to mop up the eight giga-Curies of plutonium the first program scattered all over Normandy. Even Huw is forced to admit that the alien memeplex is probably safe behind the Maginot line of nanotech containment widgets lining the diamond-reinforced tungsten carbide safe.

"So when do we get to see it?" asks Huw, tweaking his teapot back onto its original dialect setting.

Judge Giulliani turns her vicious gaze on him. "Right now!" She snarls, and thumps her fist on the lectern. The lights dim, and a multimedia presentation wobbles and firms up on top of her lectern. "Listen up! Let the following testimony entered under oath on placeholder-goes-here be entered in the court record under this-case-number. Go ahead, play, damn you."

The scene is much as Huw would have imagined it: a couple of pudgy nocturnal hackers holed up in a messy bedroom floored in discarded ready meal packs, air hazy with programmable utility foglets, are building a homebrew long baseline radio telescope array by reprogramming their smart wallpaper. They work quietly, exchanging occasional cryptic suggestions about how to improve their rig's resolving power and gain. About the only thing that surprises Huw is that they're both three years old—foreheads swollen before their time with premature brain bridges. A discarded pile of wooden alphabet blocks lies in one corner of the room. A forlorn teddy bear lies on the top bunk with its back to the camera viewpoint.

"Ooh, aren't they cute?" squeaks Sandra. "The one on the left is just like my younger brother was, before his little accident!"

"Silence in court, damn your eyes! What do you think this is, an adoption hearing? Behold, Abdul and Karim Bey. Their father is a waiter and their mother is a member of the presidential guard." (Brief clips of a waiter and a woman in green battle-dress with an improbably complicated gun drift to either side of the nursery scene.) "Their parents love them, which is why they paid for the very best prenatal brainbox upgrades. With predictable results."

Abdul and Karim are pounding away at their tower of rather goopy-looking foglets—like all artifacts exposed to small children, it has begun to turn gray and crinkly at the corners—but now they are receiving a signal, loud and clear. They're short on juice, but Karim has the bright idea of eviscerating Teddy and plugging his methanol-powered fuel cell into the tots' telescope. It briefly extrudes a maser, blats a signal up through the thin roof of their commodity housing, and collapses in exhaustion.

The hackers have only five minutes or so to wait—in which time Abdul speed-reads an illicit download of The Satanic Verses while Karim rolls on his back making googling noises as he tries to grab his feet—for they have apparently found the weakly godlike AIs of the metasphere in a receptive mood. As the bitstream comes in, Abdul whacks his twin brother upside the head with a purple velour giraffe. Karim responds by irritably uploading a correctly formatted patent application with the godvomit as an attachment.

"I hate smart-alec kids," mumbles the bald guy with the blue forelock, sitting across the room. The judge pretends to ignore him.

"These two miscreants are below the contractual age of consent," Huw hears himself muttering, "so how come their application is being accepted?"

"Here in the PMLJ, as you should well know seeing you're staying here," the judge croaks, "your civil rights are a function of your ability to demand them. Which is a bit annoying, because Karim demanded the vote six months ago, while Abdul is a second lieutenant in the People's Memetic Self-Defense Forces and a dab-hand at creating new meme viruses. In fact, there's some question over whether we shouldn't actually be dragging him up in front of a military tribunal instead."

Judge Giulliani seems to have forgotten to snarl; her commentary is becoming almost civilized as the presentation from the subpoenaed crib-cam fast-forwards to the terrible two's attempt to instantiate the bitstream in atoms. Using a ripped Teddy bear as a containment vessel.

"Ah, here, you see it here. The artifact is extremely flexible, but not so flexible that it can gestate in a pseudo-living toy. Abdul's own notes speculate that gestation may be supported in medium-sized dogs, goats, and camels." Over the lectern, the display zooms in on the teddy-bear's swollen gut. The bear is jerking spasmodically and ticcing like a Tourettic children's TV host, giggling and stuttering nonsensical self-worth affirmations. The gut distends further and the affirmations become more disjointed, and then a long, sharp blade pokes its way through the pseudoflesh and flame-retardant fur-analogue. "There are indications that the artifact floods its host organism with endorphins at metamorphosis-time," the judge says, and the rent in the bear's belly widens, and out climbs a shimmering thing.

It takes Huw a moment to understand what he's seeing. The artifact is a tall, metallic stalk, at first coiled like a cobra, but gradually roused to full erectness. Its glistening tip dips down towards the bear. "See how it sutures the exit wound?" the judge says, a breath of admiration in her rough voice. "So tidy. Jurors, take note, this is a considerate artifact." Indeed, the bear's fur has been closed with such cunning that it's almost impossible to see the exit wound. However, something has gone horribly awry inside of it, as it is now shaking harder than ever, shivering off its limbs and then its fur, and soon its flesh starts breaking away like the sections of a tangerine.

The artifact stands erect again, bounces experimentally a couple times, then collapses in a way that Huw can't make any sense of. He's not alone, either. The jurors let out a collective uncomprehending bleat. "Look closely, jurors!" the judge says, and the scene loops back on itself a couple times in slomo, from multiple angles, then again in wireframe. It makes Huw's mind hurt. The artifact's stalk bulges in some places, contracts in others, all the whole slipping through and around itself. His potmaker's eye tries to no avail to understand what's happening to the topology and volume.

"Fucking lovely," a voice nearby gasps. He recognizes it as Sandra Lal's. She's always had a thing about trompe l'oeil solid. "Nicest Klein bottle I've ever seen."

Klein bottle. Of course. Take a Moebius strip and extrude it one more dimension out and you get a vessel with only two dimensions, the inside and outside a single continuous plane. Glassblower shit. Fucking showoffs.

The young brothers are on hands and knees before the artifact now, staring in slack-jawed concentration, drool slipping between their patchworks of baby teeth and down their chins. The cam zooms in on the artifact, and it begins to fluoresce and pulse, as through it were digesting a radioactive hamster. The peristaltic throbbing gives it motion, and it begins to work its way toward the hamper in the corner of the room. It inches its way across the floor, trailed by the crawling brothers, and knocks over the hamper, and begins to burrow through the spilled, reeking linens.

"It's scat-tropic," Doc Björk says.

"Yes," the Judge says. "And scat-powered. Karim notes that its waste products are a kind of silt, similar to diatomaceous earth, and equally effective as a roach and beetle powder, as well as water and trace elements."

"A fractional-dimensional parasitic turd-gobbler from outer space?" Huw says. "Have I got that right?"

"That's right, ma'am," says the blue-forelocked joe. "And it's pretty, too. I'd gestate one, if only to eliminate the need for a bloody toilet. Quite a boon to your average WHO-standard pit-latrine, too, I imagine." The voice, he recognizes the voice. It belongs to Bonnie: the transhumanist she-he that Lal introduced to him at the party where he became patient zero for whatever GM crapola he is carrying. He wonders if she-he is fucking Lal: Sandra's neuter, although it's not as if that's stopped anyone in a decade.

"Of course you'd gestate one," Huw says. "Nothing to you if your body is dissolved into toxic tapioca. I imagine you're just about ready to join the Cloud anyroad."

Sandra casts him a poisonous glare. "Fuck you, and the goat you rode into town on," she hisses. "Who the hell are you, anyway?"

"Judge?" Doc Björk says, desperately trying to avoid a mass execution for contempt of court, "My co-juror raises an interesting point. What evidence do we have to support Adbul's assertion that the artifact can safely gestate in mammals, or more specifically primates?"

The Judge grunts irritably. "Only simulations, of course," she says. "Were you volunteering?" Doc Björk sits back hastily.

"Are you seated comfortably?" Giulliani asks pointedly. "Then I shall continue." She whacks her gavel on the lectern and the presentation rolls boringly on. "Here, near as we can tell, is the artifact's life-cycle." In fast-forward, the space monster digests the twins' nappy hamper then chows down on their bedding while Abdul—or maybe it's Karim—hastily jury-rigs an EMP gun out of animatronic toys and an air force surplus radar set. The twins back into a corner and wait, wide-eyed, as the thing sprouts a pink exoskeleton lined with throbbing veins, rabbit ears, and a set of six baby elephant legs with blue toenails. It squats in the middle of their room, hooting and pinging as it digests the pile of alphabet blocks. Karim—or maybe it's Abdul—improvises a blue goo attack using the roomful of utility fog, but the ad hoc nanoweaponry just slimes off the space monster like so much detergent.

"At this point, the manifestation estivated," announces the Judge.

"Duh, wassatmean?" asks one of the other jurors, one who Huw doesn't know—possibly a nationalist from the Neander valley.

"It went to sleep," explains Doc Björk. "Isn't that right, Judge?"

"Damn straight." The Judge whacks her gavel again. "But if I get any more lip out of you, sunshine, I'll have you flogged. This is my trial. Clear?"

Björk opens her mouth, closes it, then nods.

"Well," says Judge Giulliani, with some satisfaction, "that's that, then. The thing seems to have fallen deeply asleep. Just in case it wakes up, the PMLJ Neighborhood Sanitation Committee have packed it into a Class Four nanohazard containment vessel—which I'm standing on right now—and shipped it over here. We're going to try a directed revival after lunch, with full precautions. Then I'll have a think about it, you damned meddling baboons can enter my verdict, and we'll wrap up in time for tea. Court will adjourn! Make sure you're all back here in three hours time—or else."

In case the message isn't sufficiently clear, the bench Huw is perched on humps up into an uncomfortable ridge, forcing him to stand. The Vulture storms out the back of the courtroom in a flurry of black robes, leaving a pool of affronted jurors milling around a lectern containing a sleeping puddle of reified godvomit.

"All right, everyone," announces Doc Björk, clapping her hands together. "How about we go and find the refectory in this place? I could murder a baklava!"

Huw slouches off towards the entrance in a black humor, teapot clanking at his hip. This isn't going quite the way he'd imagined, and he'll be damned before he'll share a refectory table with that sanctimonious Swedish girl scout, much less Sandra and her genderbending (and disturbingly attractive) friend. Someone is quite clearly doing this in order to get under his skin, and he is deeply pissed off. On the other hand, it's a long time since breakfast—and there must be somewhere that serves a decent tofuburger in Tripoli.

Mustn't there?