Genar-Hofoen looked back, to where things were getting noisy. The giant animal he’d noticed earlier - a sexipedal pondrosaur - was advancing slowly down the avenue in the midst of a retinue and a crowd of spectators. The shaggy, brown-furred animal was six metres tall, splendidly liveried with long, gaudy banners and ribbons and commanded by a garishly uniformed mahout brandishing a fiery mace. The beast was surmounted by a glitteringly black and silver cupola whose bulbously filigreed windows gave no hint of who or what might be inside; similarly ornamented bowls covered the great animal’s eyes. It was attended by five loping kliestrithrals, each black tusked creature pawing at the street surface and snorting and held on a tight lead by a burly hire guard. A knot of people held the procession up; the pondrosaur paused and put its long head back to let out a surprisingly soft, subdued roar, then it adjusted its eye-cups with its two leg-thick fore-limbs and bobbed its head to either side. The gaggle of promenaders began to disperse and the great beast and its escorts moved forward again.

‘Hmm, yes,’ Genar-Hofoen said. ‘Perhaps we’d better move out the way.’ He finished the 9050 and looked round for a place to deposit the empty container.

‘Please; allow me.’ The Sublimer girl took the field-goblet from him as though it was some sort of holy object. Genar-Hofoen followed her onto the sidewalk; she put an arm through his and they proceeded slowly towards the entrance to the sekos, where the woman was still standing talking to the other two Sublimers with her look of ironic curiosity.

‘Have you heard of Sublimers before?’ the girl on his arm asked.

‘Oh, yes,’ he said, watching the other woman’s face as they approached. They stopped on the pavement outside the Sublimer building, entering a hushfield in which the only sound was gently tinkling music and a background of waves on a beach. ‘You believe everybody should just sort of disappear up their own arses, don’t you?’ he asked with every appearance of innocence. He was only a few metres from the woman in the shadowrobe, though the compartmented hushfield meant he couldn’t hear what she was saying. Her face was much like he remembered it; the eyes and mouth were the same. She had never worn her hair up like that, but even its shade of black-blue was the same.

‘Oh, no!’ the Sublimer girl said, her expression terribly serious. ‘What we believe in takes one completely away from such bodily concerns . . .’

Out of the corner of his eye he could see up the street, where the pondrosaur was shuffling forwards through a thick crowd of admirers. He smiled at the Sublimer girl as she talked on. He shifted a little so that he could see the other woman better.