Once I was home from my four-day trip to Dearth I relished the return to my normal daily life, seeing Jo again, catching up with news and gossip, sitting at my desk and browsing online at the sites I visited most frequently. I was always surrounded by books, not just the ones on the shelves, but the loose and unstable stacks that stood on the floor near where I worked. Every few weeks I would tidy these up, transferring them to shelves or to another room, but the stacks would soon rebuild themselves with new titles.

On the evening of my first day back Jo and I drove into Raba City and indulged ourselves in an expensive dinner and a movie. She told me then that she had come across a few possible mentions of the case Frejah had described – she had put the books on the floor next to my desk, with paper markers tucked in. A new, lower stack. I had noticed these, and guessed what they were, but not yet looked at them.

The next morning I slept late – Jo had already been up for two hours before I was awake. She was due to visit a stage designer in Chor, a town on the other side of the island, and had her own preparations to make for a trip. I pottered around slowly, feeling tired, listless in my body. People who invite you away to a function where you are to appear or speak, or to take part in a workshop, or simply to be a guest at some celebration or other, do not realize the collateral loss of time and energy that is involved.

My trip to Dearth, for instance. I more or less stopped work on my current novel about three days before I departed. I was distracted then by the thought of the long journeys ahead, the unknown venue and what would be expected of me. My speech too was a problem. I kept looking at it, fiddling about with details, worrying about what it would sound like. And the mail-order company from which I had ordered my arctic outer wear alarmingly delayed the delivery. It all worked out in the end, but in essence those three extra days were lost to me.

Then came the four days on Dearth – closer to five, in fact. They made me feel like an alien, a visitor, someone who did not understand and therefore had to have everything explained or translated. I met a senior cop. I was calmly reminded of my serfdom.

Now I was home, but I was dragging around in memory a large shadow. All that stuff I had heard about crime-not-actually-crime, the weirdness of the mutability effect, the serf-loathing cop who had befriended me. It had left me feeling vague and undirected, but I was relieved it was not happening any more and that I was at home. Two more days had slipped uselessly into nowhere.