Irene drank. Antoyne fixed the fusion engines. Everyone was bored. Liv Hula walked restlessly around the da Luz hinterland, a few acres of heat-bleached scrub and building projects fallen into disuse before completion. Thin black and white cats hunted across it, concentrating minutely among the rubbish and broken glass. Liv felt unusually centred, unusually herself; yet at the same time unable to shake her sense of being haunted. North, in the port suburbs, a few New Men still lived, treating the single storey white houses like nodes in a warren. They bred happily, but – quiet and subdued, uncertain what to do next – kept to the old suburban boundaries. The population remained at replacement rate. The males lay on the patios all day, masturbating in the unrelenting sunlight, and at night scoured the well-planned streets, ranging ten or fifteen miles at a time at a steady loping pace. What they were looking for they were unsure. On Nova Swing’s fifth day in da Luz, a group of women appeared at the port itself, to stand patiently outside the terminal buildings as if waiting, Liv thought, for tourists who no longer came.

When she said this aloud, Irene smiled.‘We’re the tourists, hon,’ she said. She removed her sunglasses, looked around in satisfaction, then slid them back on to her nose again.

The women brought with them a boy, Liv thought six or seven years old, thin and white, with a large round head on which the features seemed too small and delicate. He had wide eyes and an expression somehow both inturned and outgoing. He pottered about in the landing field dust, then, picking up what seemed to be a dead bird, came and stood as close as he dared to L’Ange du Foyer.

‘Hello,’ Liv said. ‘What’s your name?’

‘Careful, hon,’ said Irene.

The boy sat down in front of them and played with the bird, looking up occasionally as if for approval. The bird was grey and desiccated, its beak fixed open in a pained little gape. Its head lolled eyeless. Extended, its wings revealed iridescent bars of colour, green and dark blue, over which could be seen crawling hundreds of minute parasites. ‘Jesus,’ said Irene. The women stood twenty yards from L’Ange du Foyer, listlessly watching this performance through the heat of the afternoon; then one of them came over suddenly, picked up the boy by his armpits and swung him away, saying something Liv didn’t understand. She seemed to be trying to take the bird from him. The boy struggled grimly to keep it and, being set down, ran off.

Later, they all left. ‘It’s cooler now,’ said Irene. ‘Why don’t we have an ice cream?’