She came round to a headache, a falling sensation and a voice in her ears speaking a language she should not be able to understand.

"Wie heisst Du?"

"Ich heisse Auger...Verity Auger." The words slipped out of her mouth with ridiculous ease.

"Good" the voice continued, in English this time. "Excellent, in fact. That's taken very nicely." It was Maurya Skellsgard speaking, sitting to her left in the confined s.p.a.ce of what she guessed must be the

hyperweb transport. On Auger's other side, in the third of the three seats, was Aveling.

They were in free fall.

"What's happening?" Auger asked.

"What's happening," Aveling said, "is that you were speaking German. Niagara's little machines

rewired your language centre."

"You have French as well," Skellsgard added.

"I already had French," Auger replied huffily.

"You had an academic understanding of written French skewed to towards the later years of the Void

Century," Skellsgard corrected. "But now you can really speak it."

Auger's headache intensified, as if someone had just tapped a very small tuning fork against her skull and made it ring. "I wouldn't have agreed to have this..." She wanted to say "s.h.i.t," but the word stalled

somewhere between her brain and her voice box. "This horrid stuff in me." Where the h.e.l.l had "horrid"

come from, she wondered?

"It was either have it or forfeit the mission," Aveling said. "In thirty hours you'll be in Paris, acting

alone, with only your wits to help you. No weapons, no comms, no AI a.s.sistance. The only help we can give you is language."

"I don't want machines in my head."

"In which case," Skellsgard said, "it's your lucky day. They've already been flushed out, leaving only the neural structures they created. The downside is that those structures won't last for ever-two, maybe three days once you get to Paris. Then they'll start eroding."

Curiosity got the better of Auger. "Why not leave the machines in, if it makes so much difference?"

"Same reason Niagara can't come with us," Skellsgard replied. "The censor wouldn't let them through."

"The censor?"

"You'll see it soon enough," Aveling said, "so don't worry your pretty little head about it. That's our

job."

Auger felt the buzzing, slightly brittle alertness that came with too much coffee and too much intense

study. Once, about fifteen years earlier, she had studied mathematics so furiously that after an evening manipulating complex bracketed equations, simplifying forms and extracting common terms, her brain had actually started to apply the same rules to spoken language, as if a sentence could be bracketed and simplified like some quadratic formula for radioisotope decay. That was how she felt now. She only had to look at a colour or shape and her new language structures would gleefully shriek the corresponding word into her skull, in a mixed cacophony of German, French and English.

"I could get very angry about this-"

"Or you could just get over it and accept that it had to be done," Skellsgard said bluntly. "I promise you there'll be no side effects."

Auger knew that it was senseless to protest any further. The machines had already come in and done their worst. The simple fact was that had this ever been presented to her as a rational choice, she would still have chosen it over the tribunal.

If that made her a hypocrite, ready to accept Slasher science when it suited her, so be it.

"I'm sorry if all this seems abrupt," Skellsgard said sympathetically. "It's just that we really didn't have time to sit around and debate things. We need that lost property back in safe hands as soon as possible."

Auger forced a sort of calm upon herself. "I take it we're on our way?"

"It was a successful insertion," Aveling said.

They were sitting three abreast, surrounded by instruments, controls and fold-down panels. The technology was a curious mixture of the very robust and the very fragile-looking modern, including some equipment that had obviously come straight from Slasher sources. Holding things together were bolts, nylon tie-lines and spitlike swabs of heavy-duty epoxy. Aveling had one hand on a joystick mounted on a fold-down panel in front of him. Above the panel was a flat screen displaying a series of irregular concentric lines, like a drunkenly fashioned cobweb, with the lines slowly oozing out towards the edge of the screen. Some kind of navigation system, Auger guessed, representing their flight through the hyperweb. Of the outside view nothing could be seen, since the ship's armoured shutters were locked tight.

It was about as exciting as a ride in an elevator.

"Well, now that we're all in this together," she said, "I presume you can tell me what it's all about."

"What we generally find," Skellsgard said, "is that it's easier if we show you. That way we skip the whole 'you can't expect me to believe this s.h.i.t' stage."

"What if I promise not to doubt a word that you say? After all, I've already seen the artefacts in Caliskan's office. I'm pretty sure they weren't faked."

"No, they were all real."

"Which means they must have originated somewhere. Caliskan said they hadn't been preserved, and yet they appeared to come from somewhere around nineteen fifty-nine."

"Which would tend to imply..." Skellsgard prompted.

"That you've found a way back to nineteen fifty-nine." She paused, choosing her next words with care.

"Or at least something that looks a lot like nineteen fifty-nine, even if it isn't exactly right in all the details. Is that far from the mark?"

"No, it's pretty close, actually."

"And this version of nineteen fifty-nine is inside the ALS object that Peter talked about. The one he said

you'd found a way into."

"They told us you were good," Skellsgard said.

"So where does Paris come into it?"

"At the end of this hyperweb is something very like Paris. You'll enter it and make contact with an

individual named Blanchard."

Auger kept her voice calm, taking this one step at a time. "Someone else from the team, like White?"

"No," Skellsgard said, glancing at Aveling. "Blanchard's E2 indigenous."

"Meaning what?"

"Meaning he grew up inside it. Meaning he has no idea he isn't living in the real Paris, on the real Earth,

in the real twentieth century."

Something like ice pa.s.sed through Auger. "How many are there like him?"

"About three billion. But don't let that put you off."

"All you have to do," Aveling said, "is find Blanchard and recover the item that Susan White pa.s.sed to

him for safekeeping. It won't be difficult. We'll give you an address, which will be within easy reach of

your point of entry. Blanchard will be expecting you."

"I thought you said-"

Aveling cut her off. "You'll pose as Susan White's sister. She'll already have told him to hand over the

goods to you if you show up. Aside from anything else, that's why we needed a woman."

Auger thought for a moment, trying to a.s.similate all this new and puzzling information. Her mind was

full of questions, but she quickly decided that as much as she wanted to know every detail of the task, she had best begin with the basics.

"And the nature of this lost property?"

"Just some papers in a tin," Aveling said. "They'll mean nothing to Blanchard, but everything to us. You

persuade Blanchard to give you the tin. You make sure the papers are inside. Then you return to us- with the papers-and we put you on the first transport home."

"You make it sound so simple."

"It is."

"Then why do I have the nagging suspicion that there must be a catch?"

"Because there is," Skellsgard said. "We don't know for sure what happened to Susan, but we do know that she felt threatened, and that she gave those papers to Blanchard for safekeeping. There's a chance she was murdered."

Aveling withdrew his attention from the oozing lines of the navigational display and sent Skellsgard an irritated look. "She didn't need to know it was murder," he said. "If it was murder."

"I felt she did," Skellsgard replied, shrugging.

"Well," Auger said, "was it murder or not?"

"She fell," Aveling said. "That's all we know."

"Or was pushed," Skellsgard said darkly.

"I'd really like to know which it was," Auger insisted.