‘But look!’ the ghost said. ‘Look!’

She hacked with her heel at the shingle then bent down quickly and prised something loose. After the removal of a bit of seaweed it turned out to be an old round coin with a small square hole in the middle, still somehow bright and untarnished. ‘Down between the rocks,’ she said, ‘spiders make their webs. A foot or two from all that surf! They tremble every time a wave comes in, and we can’t express the sense of anxiety with which this fills us.’ A shrug. ‘Yet every year there are webs and spiders.’

The coin, flipped into the air, glittered briefly.

‘Heads or tails?’ enquired the ghost.

‘You were always the best arguer,’ Renoko acknowledged. ‘I know it’s wrong to say, “I think”. I should say, “I am thought”.’

She took his arm, and gave him her faint little oriental smile.

‘You should,’ she said. ‘I can’t stay long. Back to the circus? Or on to the diner?’

‘I’m ready to go anywhere.’

Beneath the cliffs half a mile distant, the ocean fumed and danced. No one knew why. It wasn’t a temperature thing. It was some less mundane kind of physics. Spray hung in thousand-foot prismatic curtains, full of strange colours: filmy pink, lime sherbert, weird metallic blue light through which seagulls could be seen diving and gyring ecstatically. On the very edge of the cliff above, placed to take advantage of the deep pre-human strangeness of the planet’s housekeeping, stood a sixty by sixteen foot O’Mahony-style diner called Mann Hill Tambourine but known to its habitués – edgy young middle managers from the rocket yards along the coast – simply as ‘the Tambourine’. By day, the gulls dived and gyred above its deco stainless steel and glass tile. Nightly, the Tambourine yearned towards the waves, just as if it ached to fall, and greet the sea with minty greens, deep flickering reds and fractured stainless steel glitters of its own. From seven o’ clock on, the tables were deserted. No one came to the Tambourine to eat. Instead they pressed themselves up against the seaward glass, where like called to like in that as-yet-unbettered phase of the universe.

‘On your own here,’ Renoko said, ‘you can hear voices in the tide.’

His weariness amazed him.

Shortly after these events, a strange scene took place on board the Nova Swing. The cabin lights flickered. The Dynaflow drivers ran rough, failed briefly, then came back up, inserting a blank space in the crew’s experience of their lives roughly equal to the effects of a transient ischemic attack.