‘Folks like Hope think that conservatives want to frack the ground under our feet, dance on Nature’s grave and celebrate the rise of dictatorships, but we’re not going to work this thing out if we turn everybody into a cartoon.’

‘Maybe that’s a cartoon of how she thinks about you.’

‘Probably is,’ said Jim. ‘I have a cartoon in my head about her Tantric conferences.’

‘A lot of people have to change their minds before they can change their actions.’

‘And a lot of people seem to change their minds about how they’re going to change their minds and never get around to taking any action at all,’ said Jim, ‘and while they’re doing that, I’m having the CEO of a big oil company to stay and saying, “You need to switch from being a fossil industry to being an energy business.” He may be more inclined to listen to me than some protester chained to the company gates.’

‘He may need both,’ said Francis, ‘as you were saying about the tree-huggers and the hunters—’

‘This is the lower edge of the ranch,’ Jim interrupted him, ‘and we’ve planted five thousand redwoods that are going to extend the forest from the state park on to Titan land.’

‘That’s Apocalypse land over there, isn’t it?’ said Francis.

‘Yup.’

‘So, we could extend the forest even further along.’

‘That’s right,’ said Jim. ‘Nesting sites for more birds. We’ve had a pretty successful programme of reintroducing condors to Big Sur.’

‘Quail, wild turkey …’ Francis speculated. ‘And then you could invite some oil men over to shoot.’

‘A virtuous circle,’ said Jim, ‘as long as we don’t give them birds that are too hard to hit.’

‘In the White House reading Brainwashed!’ was the answer Olivia received when she texted Lucy to find out where she was in Hunter’s multifaceted compound. Olivia sat on the side of the bed and leant over carefully to pull on her shoes. She hadn’t been to the White House yet but had been told that it was below the main garden, a few hundred yards down the slope, embedded in a bamboo copse. Like Apocalypse Now and Plein Soleil, it was inspired by cinema; in this case, by the exquisite white hut with wide windows in Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon, surrounded by pale green pillars of bamboo. It was there that she and Lucy would meet, like Shu Lien and Li Mu Bai, but not in their case to discuss the wilder shores of self-mastery, honour and disappointed love – at least, not as far as she knew.