Asimova, as I’m sure it is not necessary for me to explain, is the child Sharon was carrying when our marriage broke up. Sharon’s confidence, as expressed to me through her lawyers, that she was, Tryphena-like, carrying a boy (a Hardy boy), turned out to be unfounded. Asimova – Asimova Wollstonecraft Ursula, to be exact – is a little girl, and not so little these days either, if my mother’s astonishment at the rate of her growth is anything to go by. Though why she thinks that her size will somehow endear her to me I don’t know. Towards Asimova I have, naturally, no feelings, except in so far as I am relieved for her sake that her mother was wrong and that she wasn’t a boy. Arthur C Ballard Pohl Fitzpiers – and that’s generously assuming that they’d resisted Moorcock – is not a blight I’d have wished on anyone, no, not even on Fitz and Sharon’s offspring.

That last phrase is not meant to be contentious. I am simply unable to think of Asimova as in any way belonging or connected to me. Sharon had assured me, as she has since forcibly assured my mother, that the child was mine; she just knew, she said – ‘A woman just knows these things.’ But she had claimed a similar mystic knowledge about the embryo’s sex, where she had a one in two chance of being right, and she hadn’t put up a good showing there. So there was no reason for me to trust her on the question of paternity where, on account of those SF wife-swapping parties, the odds were that much longer. My own bet was that the child was Fitz’s. Don’t ask me why – a man just knows these things. It’s true that Fitz’s first love was for other people’s babies, but he had so much else of mine already that I believed he was prepared to sacrifice his first passion to his second, that’s to say the supplanting of others to the perpetuation of himself. Indeed he was so keen for himself to continue, ad infinitum, in those last months the three of us spent together, that I think he would have impregnated me if it had been possible and if he could have been certain that I’d have let him see the baby.