She understood the reasoning, thanked me, then moved to one of her larger canvases, which depicted Gwendolyn IX on horseback, leading the troops. She never did such a thing in reality, but overdramatic portraits of the great woman were bread-and-butter for the jobbing artist – that, memento mori, still-lifes of flowers in a jar and prize cow-mammoths. She picked up a palette, dabbed her brush in some paint and then moved it absently around on the canvas. It was like I suddenly wasn’t there.

‘Well, okay,’ I said, ‘I’ll be off, then.’

She said nothing and I moved away, but she spoke again when I reached the door.

‘The wise money says not to leave the rocks.’

‘What rocks?’

‘The ones under the oak,’ she said without looking up, ‘near the blue Buick.’

‘You’ve had the dream?’

‘I’ve had scraps.’

‘I’ll be fine,’ I said, ‘I don’t have dreams.’

‘Everyone needs dreams,’ she said simply. ‘If you don’t have them, they can’t come true.’

I wanted to ask her more but she’d returned to her painting and begun to hum. The conversation was over, and I returned to my room.

With the fatigue now almost overpowering, I elected to turn in. I fully wound the phonograph, selected an ultra-long play of the Preludio Sinfonica, slipped it on the player and pressed Start & Repeat. This done, I placed my Bambi under the pillow, undressed, climbed into bed and pulled up the blankets to stare at the ceiling, hands behind my head, the calming strains of music wafting in from the next room.

The situation was not what I had intended. I was in a strange town in a fringe sector, about to hit the sack in the apartment of a woman who had suffered a fatal attack of Hibernational Narcosis mixed with night terrors. I’d lost my mentor and a much-respected Consul to boot, partly as a result of my own intransigence. Mind you, if Logan hadn’t paused when the lift doors had opened, then Aurora would be dead instead of him – but then probably me as well.

Conscious that I should only be night-napping and not tumbling down the slope to deep hibernation, I set my Taser-clock for an early rise the following morning and attached the electrode to my earlobe, then switched off the light. In the faint gloom I could just make out the shape of Clytemnestra: happy that she’d just murdered her husband. I thought of the artist, and what she asked me to think of when she took the picture, then my thoughts jumbled as grateful slumber bore down upon me. Thoughts of Aurora, the dead woman with the bouzouki, the Hugo Foulnap-who-wasn’t, Porter Lloyd, Jack Logan and finally Moody telling me that I would visit the blue Buick, and to not leave the rocks.

But I knew it would all be okay. I wasn’t going to dream.

But I did, of course.