‘I’m not going in there,’ she repeated. Then – as if she had arrived on World X for this purpose alone; as if the logic of every journey she’d made, including the brief pointless dive into the photosphere of France Chance IV, led here – she pushed past him. Inside, steps led down from the lip of the jameo to the floor of a lava tube perhaps twenty feet in diameter. Looking up at her with his arms stretched wide was a New Man, tall and thin, with a shock of red hair standing up from a wedge-shaped head. His limbs had the characteristic articulation, wooden in one joint, pliable in another. He looked anxious, like someone trying to act, in all good faith, an emotion they have experienced only as a set of instructions.

‘Hello?’ she said.

‘Come down!’ the New Man said. ‘Come in!’ The wind closed the door behind her, opened it again. ‘If you have come for cock,’ he said, ‘you have come to the right place!’

He had it there, in his hand. Liv stared at it, then back up at his face, then around his house, the uneven walls of which, niched, limewashed and in places caulked with bundles of vegetable fibre, seemed clean and dry. He had used the old flow-ledges as shelves. There was a bare table with a white bowl and a ewer; some items of the sort the New Men collected, believing them to be from their lost home planet – perhaps art, perhaps just toys or ornaments. At one end a curtain, at the other a mattress, next to which he had laid out clean towels, candles, aromatic oils in handmade pots.

‘You’re the last of tourist trade,’ she said.

‘Yes,’ he said. ‘They come for our cock. Look, look. Our cocks are a little different than yours.’

‘They are,’ Liv Hula said.

‘But they work nicely. They work well for you.’

‘I’m sure.’

‘We can fuck you,’ he said, as if quoting from an advert.