Life on New Mars is tough for humans, but death's only a minor inconvenience. The machines know their place, and only the Abolitionists object. Until a young man walks into Ship City, a clone who remembers Jon Wilde's life as an anarchist with nuclear capability, who was accused of losing World War 3. He also remembers Dave Reid, the city's boss, who haunts Wilde's memory to the end ... a cold death in Kazakhstan. In Reid's cyborg concubine, Dee Model, both men see the image of their obsessions, and information that wants to be free. But she has ideas of her own ... THE STONE CANAL moves from the recent past into a distant future, where long lives and strange deaths await those who survive the wars and revolutions to come.