Although he had only taken the most tentative sip of the smoke lingering in the stem of his glass pipe, Saul felt remarkably reinvigorated and eager to tie together the many strands of conversation that he and Hunter had initiated since forming their alliance a year ago. Fatigue was a delusion he could hardly believe he had been taken in by, now that everything seemed to be edged with vibrant light. Hunter, who had taken a more voracious approach to his pipe, was staring fixedly ahead, perhaps at Francis Bacon’s smear of warped human anguish hanging above the black marble fireplace, or perhaps into the infinite space of an unfocused gaze, Saul couldn’t tell, but he was determined to take advantage of the wave of lucidity that was breaking over him.

‘I guess the thing I’ve been trying to get across to you over the last year is that if science offered a unified vision of the world, it would be a pyramid, with consciousness at the apex, arising explicably from biology, and life arising smoothly from chemistry, and the Periodic Table, in all its variety, emerging inevitably from the fundamental forces and structures described by physics; but in reality, even physics isn’t unified, let alone unified with the rest of science. It’s not a pyramid; it’s an archipelago – scattered islands of knowledge, with bridges running between some of them, but with others relatively isolated from the rest.’

Hunter let out a long trail of thin smoke.

‘We should be backing the bridge-builders,’ Saul continued, ‘people like Enrico, who is organising the scan of the Blessed Fra Domenico in Assisi, so we can nail the Catholic market with our Capo Santo helmet—’

‘The guy I want to back is the guy who builds the fucking pyramid,’ Hunter interrupted.

‘What I’m telling you is that that’s not going to happen,’ said Saul, ‘some things are just not reducible to each other or built on each other. Nothing they discover at CERN is going to shed light on E. O. Wilson’s seminal account of life in an ant colony, let alone the other way around.’

Hunter gave Saul another pipe and lit it for him.

‘Hold it in,’ said Hunter.