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Jordan pointed upwards. ‘That’s his side.’

Catherin frowned for a moment, then nodded.

‘Space…yeah, he was always into that. What he really believes in is us getting into space – I mean, like the space movement wants to, getting out there past the Yanks – and for him the left and the right, the plan and the market, are just—’

‘Launch vehicles!’

They both laughed.

‘And what about you?’ Jordan asked.

Catherin was sitting facing him along the couch. She took her feet out of her shoes and curled her legs and gazed again into the peaty pool in her glass.

‘I never saw it,’ she said, looking up as if she’d found some answer. ‘The way it seemed to me was we were aiming for a better society here on earth, starting with here in Britain. Space – yeah, sure – but why make that the one and the zero? I like this planet, dammit! I was happy to side with the greens against the people who’re wrecking it, even if these people have something to do with getting a few more thousand of us off it.’ She smiled at herself. ‘I’m a party animal – in both senses.’

She jumped up and went over to the music deck and slid in a disk. The room filled with the folky, smoky melody of an old hit from a band called Whittling Driftwood. Catherin twirled and held out a hand to him.

‘Come on, you devil’s chaplain,’ she said. ‘Dance with me.’

Jordan had never danced before. He stood, and Catherin stepped up to him with her hands raised in front of her, fingers opened out. He lifted his hands in the same way and their fingers interlocked. He guessed the trick was to step lightly in time with the music, and to sort of move your hips to a different but mysteriously related time, fraction or multiple of the music’s rhythm, and to pull towards and away from your partner in yet another periodicity.

Oh, yes, and to maintain eye contact. He looked up from his and her feet.

After a couple of tracks the music changed, got slower, and there didn’t seem to be any provision for pulling away. He brought their arms down and let go of her fingers and slid his hands behind her, and his elbows to her waist, and she did the same with him. They turned slowly, feet more careful now. The track ended. He stood still and kissed her. Her tongue entered his mouth like an alien animal, a blindly urgent exploratory probe, and then drew his tongue back with it, a startled abductee. Her mouth tasted of whisky and water and something ranker, carnivorous. They swayed together for an interval, and suddenly they were both gasping in atmosphere again.

‘Catherin,’ he said. ‘Earth’s angel. Cat.’ His hands were moving on her flanks and waist, feeling the heat and shape of her through varying textures. He found a row of buttons and opened one, then another. Catherin dived a hand blatantly down the back of his jeans. A cool fingertip pressed his coccyx, traced up his lower spine. Then she took her hand out and caught his arms.

‘It’s easier from the top,’ she said.

‘So let’s go up.’

‘Yes.’

17

The Good Sorcerer

‘Relax, the man said.’ Moh kicked a pebble from the shingle out across the still water of the sea-loch. Janis was not surprised to see that it skipped several times before sinking. He did it again and the same thing happened. ‘This is worse than waiting for a US/UN deadline to pass.’

Janis caught his hand. ‘Walk,’ she said.

They continued on around the shoreline to where it curved out to a narrow spit of land that led to a peninsula about four hundred metres long and thirty or forty metres high. It was known locally – with what Janis considered a peculiarly Gaelic logic – as The Island. She squinted into a low morning sun that was lifting the dew and night-mist in the promise of another fine day.

Moh, though still tense and moody, looked a lot better than he’d done the previous afternoon when he’d come out of his encounter. They probably had MacLennan to thank for that. With an almost motherly admonition about Building Up Your Strength, the ANR cadre had treated them to a dinner