Without really talking about it, they walked in the general direction of the place where she had been living for the last few years, on the top of Capitol Hill. She had moved back up there after she’d become bored of the houseboat on the lake. The whole point of the boat had been to provide her with a flat walk to work, after her knees had gone bust. But the modern Fronk had no difficulty with hills and she had felt like getting a place with more of a view. So she had moved to a huge old mansion up on the crest of the hill, a thing built in the early 1900s for a ten-child family with a full complement of servants. It had been sitting empty for a while. She had acquired similar properties to either side of it, knocked the houses down, and converted their lots to gardens. It had amused her to populate these with small creatures, and so they now supported a carefully tended fake ecosystem of chickens, peacocks, goats, alpacas, and a pair of big mellow dogs. It was being looked after by a couple of young people who had been staying in her house for the last few months. She had forgotten their names. Having children was now an eccentric activity, so it was a good bet that their parents were what they had used to call hippies, or at least artists. Anyway they liked animals and enjoyed looking after them and had nothing else to do.

As they ascended, she fancied for a moment that something had gone awry with her vision system, for everything began to look soft, and she couldn’t see as far. She drew air into her lungs. One of those was the original, the other had gone on the blink some while ago and been replaced with a brand-new printed substitute. Anyway, when she drew the cool air into her new and her old lung, she sensed it was heavy and humid. Then she understood that up on the heights where the air was cold, it was foggy. Or, to put it another way, she and Enoch had, in a quite literal and technical sense, ascended into the clouds.