“You presume a lot.”

“No need to presume anything, dear boy. I just tapped into the net and accessed the last few thousand news reports.” He craned his neck to survey the stateroom. “Nice pad you’ve got here. How are the eyes, by the way?”

“They’re functioning as well as can be expected.”

Calvin nodded. “Resolution’s not up to much, but that was the best I could do with the tools I was forced to work with. I probably only reconnected forty per cent of your optic nerve channels, so putting in better cameras would have been pointless. Now if you had halfway decent surgical equipment lying around on this planet, I could perhaps begin to do something. But you wouldn’t give Michelangelo a toothbrush and expect a great Sistine Chapel.”

“Rub it in.”

“I wouldn’t dream of it,” Calvin said, all innocence. “I’m just saying that if you had to let her take the Lorean, couldn’t you at least have persuaded Alicia to leave us some medical equipment?”

His wife had led the mutiny against him twenty years earlier; a fact Calvin never allowed Sylveste to forget.

“So I made a kind of self-sacrifice.” Sylveste waved an arm to silence the image. “Sorry, but I didn’t invoke you for a fireside chat, Cal.”

“I do wish you’d call me Father.”

Sylveste ignored him. “Do you know where we are?”

“A dig, I presume.” Calvin closed his eyes briefly and touched his fingers against his temples, affecting concentration. “Yes. Let me see. Two expeditionary crawlers out of Mantell, near the Ptero Steppes… a Wheeler grid… how inordinately quaint! Though I suppose it suits your purpose well enough. And what’s this? High-res gravitometer sections… seismograms… you’ve actually found something, haven’t you?”

At that moment the escritoire popped up a status fairy to tell him there was an incoming call from Mantell. Sylveste held a hand up to Calvin while he debated whether or not to accept the call.