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Daniel Carrington an obvious scapegoat... When he was attacked last year, he chose not to have the evidence of his mutilation repaired. He wears his wounds as the ultimate exhibition of defiant iconography.
    Devereaux thinks that Carrington might be the only person in all the Expansion capable of understanding him.
    He lays his glass aside and claps his hands.
    "Ladies and gentlemen, if you please. I beg your indulgence."
    Faces stare up at him.
    He begins by telling them the story of the benign dictator of Delta Pavonis III, who loved his people and whose people loved him; a man of wisdom, wit and charm, who was assassinated long before resurrection techniques became the plaything of the ultra-rich.
    "Tonight you will witness the tragedy of his demise."
    He leads them from the dome and out onto the deck of the split-level garden, into the balmy sub-tropical night. On the lower deck is a stage, and before it the holographic projection of a crowd. The guests look down on a scene long gone, something quaint and maybe even poignant in the odd architecture of the stage, the costumes and coiffures of the colonists.
    Devereaux descends to the lower deck, walks among the spectral crowd. They respond, cheer him. Something has happened to his appearance. He no longer resembles Jean-Philipe Devereaux. Projectors have transformed him into the double of the dictator. He mounts the stage and begins a speech. He recounts the life of the dictator, his theories and ideals.
    The social elite of Venus watch, entranced.
    Devereaux gestures.
    Seconds before he is flayed alive in the laser crossfire, he sees Daniel Carrington staring down at him in appalled fascination. Then all is light as a dozen laser bolts find their target.
    Purely as visual effect, his demise is beautiful to behold. His body is struck by the first laser; it drills his chest, turning him sideways. The second strikes laterally into his ribcage, compensating the turn and giving his already dying body the twitching vitality of a marionette. Then a dozen other bolts slam into him, taking the meat from his bones in a spectacular ejection of flesh and blood. For a fraction of a second, though it seems longer to the spectators, his skull remains suspended in mid-air — grotesquely connected to his flayed spinal cord — before it falls and rolls away.
    Then darkness, silence.
    After an initial pause, a period during which they are too shocked and stricken to move, the guests return inside. They are quiet, speaking barely in whispers as they try to evaluate the merit of the performance as a work of art.
    On the darkened deck below, the hired surgeons and their minions are conscientiously gathering together Devereaux's remains. Hovering vacuums inhale his atomised body fluids; robot-drones collect the shards of bone and flaps of flesh. His skull has come to rest in one corner, grinning inanely.
    From the circular orbit of the left eye socket, a silver ovoid the size of a swan's egg slowly emerges. A polished dome shows first, then pauses. Next, a long, jointed leg pulls itself free of the constriction, then another and another, until all eight are extricated. The Spider stands, straddling the ivory, grinning skull. Devereaux, with a three hundred and sixty degree view of the surrounding deck and the salvage work going on there, tests the Spider's spindly limbs one by one. When he has mastery of their movement, he hurries off towards the dome. The legs lift high and fast with an impression of mincing fastidiousness as he skitters through the bloody remains.
    Locked within the digitised sensorium of the Spider, Devereaux is a prisoner of the guilt that suffuses the analogue of his mind. At least, when he inhabits his physical self, the guilt shunts itself off into the storage of his subconscious for long periods. The memory of his sins, his remorse and regret, have no refuge in the Spider: they are all up front, demanding attention. He cries out in silence for the refuge of his