“So, Tefwe,” he began, speaking Marain, his voice little more than a croak. He coughed, cleared his throat, started again, voice louder and assured. “So, Tefwe, let me guess. You just happened to be in the neighbourhood.”

“Hello, Ngaroe. It’s good to see you again. How are you?”

“I’m well.” He smiled. It was hard for her to read his expression behind the slatted glasses, but she reckoned it was a genuine smile. “You?”

“Also well, though it’s complicated.” She looked around the bare little cell. “What is it that you do here, Ngaroe?”

His eyebrows went up a little at this. “Isn’t it obvious?” he asked mildly. “I listen.”

“You listen?”

“Yes. That’s … that’s all I do. I sit here and … well,” he said, smiling – this was, Tefwe was already thinking, the most smiley and un-prickly she could remember seeing the man – “calling it ‘listening’ doesn’t really do it justice. I sit here and … absorb the Sound. It becomes part of me, I become part of it. It is … magisterial, bliss-making, overwhelming. I am … transported by it, Tefwe. Here, the locals treat it as a religious experience. I don’t, of course, but I’d still claim it is as important to me as it is to them. As … profound.” He gave a small laugh. “You’re lucky, you know. It comes and goes. Right now I am like a sleeper near the shallowest part of a sleep-cycle, so I can come out of the trance of listening and talk to you. I … I almost welcome the break. A week from now, though, and I’d refuse even to talk to anybody, no matter who they might be, how far they’d come or how urgently they needed to see me, and in two weeks I would be so far under I’d be incapable even of acknowledging the presence of one of the helpers come to tell me I had a visitor. That’s when they have to feed me water with a sponge and try to get me to swallow crumbs of cake.” He smiled his beatific smile again. “But you said that ‘it’ – that is, how you are – was complicated. In what way?”

“It’s complicated because in a sense I’m not really here, Ngaroe,” she told him. “I’m still Stored – technically, basically – on a ship called the You Call This Clean? a long, long way from here. What you see in front of you is a copy; I feel entirely like me inside here, but the truth is I’m embodied inside a ship’s blank-body, appropriately customised.”

“Hmm. So, let me see, I think only Hassipura knew where I’d hidden myself this time. Have you been to see it?”