As she walked down to the White House along meandering chipwood paths, Olivia felt exhilarated. She was no longer feeling sick, as she had done at the beginning, nor burdened, as she was bound to later on; the frightening tests were behind her and her energy had come back, along with the sense of being in a thrilling new relationship with a person no one else had yet met. Perhaps she would visit Karen one day with the baby. She hadn’t seen Karen for a few years, but if she dropped round with a child who was wanted and well, it might put an old sadness to rest. Or would it extend the sadness into another generation and deepen Karen’s sense of failure? Anyway, babies weren’t born to redeem or justify other people’s lives, they were born to have their own life.

Saul could hardly wait for the driverless car that would take over his repetitious journeys from Caltech to Apocalypse Now. Arrival was also less fun than it used to be, now that Hunter had cleaned up his act. Although the birdfeeder was empty, Saul still imagined it dangling brightly from the branch.

Even without a driverless car and the ultimate relief of surrendering his biological intelligence to an artificial one, the journey was now so routine that Saul felt he had achieved a semi-driverless state by burying many of his decisions in the parts of his brain that barely required him to be conscious. He had already droned north to San Luis Obispo and then peeled west and was now weaving his way along Big Sur’s legendary coast. The Madonna Inn, that Mecca of kitsch where he sometimes stopped, with its candy-pink allure and confoundingly cosy interior, lay behind him, as did the turning for Hearst Castle, which always provoked him into imagining the same scenes of disgruntled grandiosity and encroaching madness from Citizen Kane. He was well on his way to his destination, but no further along in resolving the moral conflict that agitated him constantly, like restless legs syndrome, bobbing up and down in his proleptically guilty mind.