“Some, still,” I said.

“And deletu?” A kind of singing firefly, now extinct, said my translatomat. I shook my head wistfully.

She shook her head wistfully.

“I never saw a butterfly or a deletu. Only pictures… The insecticidal clones got them… But the scientists learned nothing—nothing! They set about improving the animals. Improving us! Dogs that could talk, cats that could play chess! Human beings who were going to be all geniuses and never get sick and live five hundred years! They did all that, oh yes, they did all that. There are talking dogs all over the place, unbelievably boring they are, on and on and on about sex and shit and smells, and smells and shit and sex, and do you love me, do you love me, do you love me. I can’t stand talking dogs. My big poodle Rover, he never says a word, the dear good soul. And then the humans! We’ll never, ever get rid of the Premier. He’s a Healthy, a bloody GAPA. He’s ninety now and looks thirty and he’ll go on looking thirty and being premier for four more centuries. He’s a pious hypocrite and a greedy, petty, stupid, mean-minded crook. Just the kind of man who ought to be siring children for five centuries … The Ban doesn’t apply to him… But still, I’m not saying the Ban was wrong. They had to do something. Things were really awful, fifty years ago. When they realised that genetic hackers had infiltrated all the laboratories, and half the techs were Bioist fanatics, and the Godsone Church had all those secret factories in the eastern hemisphere deliberately turning out genetic melds… Of course most of those products weren’t viable. But a lot of them were… The hackers were so good at it. The chicken people, you’ve seen them?”

As soon as she asked, I realised that I had: short, squat people who ran around in intersections squawking, so that all the traffic gridlocked in an effort not to run them over. “They just make me want to cry,” Ai Li A Le said, looking as if she wanted to cry.