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His heart seemed to congeal. She had sent to him the symbol of her death. No speech could be so final or so essentially pathetic. Like men drowning in some galley, casting their jewels from them, signets of their lives and office, to be swallowed by fish, perhaps, and discovered again a year later at the dinner table. His mother, when he was six years old, had recounted how his father’s seal-ring had come back to her that way, from the sea battle at Mentum. But even then, somehow, he had known she lied, that the ring was a copy. That nothing, not even the glory of a name, could absolutely survive death.

In a minute cell of the scalding house, its walls painted with blue lotuses and red fruits, a girl the colour of amber took the wooden combs from her hair and the garish clothes from her body. They lay down on the pallet and made something, not love, between them. Fire, perhaps.

His heart hitting his breastbone, the sound of blood in his ears like the sea, he thought, Why did I never meet you on some marble avenue in Remusa, why did I never see you in some litter on the shoulders of slaves, going by, easy to follow? Why did I never meet you in the whorehouse at Tynt, easy to buy? Why not on the road to Mareuna, all those months kicking my heels, waiting for transport? Twenty, thirty girls, not one of them you. Why not that officer’s wife at Samaia—I could have killed him. Easy, easy. But this. Why now? […] In Remine, concisely, a declaration she had learned, she murmured, “I have consented. To die. I will it.”

A year before, on such a throbbing, voluptuous, platitudinous, subtropical night, we had been walking down one of these shady streets together, in and out of the shadows of the willow trees, looking for somewhere to make love. Morning glories climbed the lattices which screened the low, wooden houses, but the darkness hid the tender colours of these flowers, which the Japanese prize because they fade so quickly. He soon found a hotel, for the city is hospitable to lovers. We were shown into a room like a paper box. It contained nothing but a mattress spread on the floor. We lay down immediately and began to kiss one another. Then a maid soundlessly opened the sliding door and, stepping out of her slippers, crept in on stockinged feet, breathing apologies. She carried a tray which contained two cups of tea and a plate of candies. She put the tray down on the matted floor beside us and backed, bowing and apologising, from the room whilst our uninterrupted kiss continued. He started to unfasten my shirt and then she came back again. This time, she carried an armful of towels. I was stripped stark naked when she returned for a third time to bring the receipt for his money. She was clearly a most respectable woman and, if she was embarrassed, she did not show it by a single word or gesture.

This country is situated at such a high altitude water never boils, no matter how deceptively it foams within the pan, so their boiled eggs are always raw. The executioner insists his breakfast omelette be prepared only from those eggs precisely on the point of blossoming into chicks and, prompt at eight, consumes with relish a yellow, feathered omelette subtly spiked with claw. Gretchen, his tender-hearted daughter, often jumps and starts to hear the thwarted cluck from a still gelid, scarcely calcified beak about to be choked with sizzling butter, but her father, whose word is law because he never doffs his leather mask, will eat no egg that does not contain within it a nascent bird.

Plants grew in pots along the edges of the pool, huge alien ferns and small alien trees, all leaning lovingly to the pool which had been minerally treated to resemble the liquids of their home. With a very little effort, Éstar might imagine it was his planet she saw before her, and that dark swift shape sheering through the water, just beneath its surface, that shape was the indigenous thing, not the alien thing at all. Indeed, she herself was the alien, at this instant.