If they want you, a youngish Quell had once written of the Harlan's World ruling elite, sooner or later they'll scoop you up off the globe, like specks of interesting dust off a Martian artefact. Cross the gulf between the stars, and they can come after you. Go into centuries of storage, and they'll be there waiting for you, clone-new, when you re-sleeve. They are what we once dreamed of as gods, mythical agents of destiny, as inescapable as Death, that poor old peasant labourer, bent over his scythe, no longer is. Poor Death, no match for the mighty altered carbon technologies of data storage and retrieval arrayed against him. Once -we lived in terror of his arrival. Now we flirt outrageously with his sombre dignity, and beings like these won't even let him in the tradesman's entrance.