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little.’ She offered me a green foil ten-strip of tablets.
    ‘No, thanks. My problem isn’t loosening up, it’s staying together.’
    ‘Together is for squilches. The real thing is what comes through the cracks when you fall apart.’
    ‘I don’t think I can handle that just yet.’
    ‘Yes, you can – you’ve handled it already or you wouldn’t be here. What we need to do is get it out in the open and see what’s what.’ Like Simkin she had an American accent but not from the same place: hers was suggestive of huge green breakers and shining people on surfboards. She took my hand again. ‘You’ve got the balls for it so let’s do it, yes?’
    ‘OK, but first tell me, are you related to H. P. Lovecraft?’
    ‘No. You like H. P. Lovecraft?’
    ‘Oh yes, I’ve been a heavy user for a long time.’
    ‘I can do Cthulhu-speak.’
    ‘Show me.’
    ‘“
Ph-nglui mglw’nafh Cthulhu R’lyeh wgah’nagl fhtagn
,”’ she said in a menacing alien voice that gave me goosepimples. ‘“In his house at R’lyeh dead Cthulhu waits dreaming.”’
    ‘I’m impressed. That stuff’s hard to memorise and it’s quite scary the way you do it.’
    ‘It’s my only accomplishment – I don’t tap-dance or play the piano.’
    You don’t have to, I thought – your accomplishment is being you. I closed my eyes and tried to hold her voice in my head where I waited for the rain with my face between my knees. Then I settled into my chair and looked around. Her office had the usual Hubble Straits revolving view of Mikhail’s Snack-dome, the flicker docks, the Hawking Threshold light, Ereshkigal, and so on. It was a large and busy-looking place containing a hurly-burly of professional impedimenta with knobs and dials, an overflowingness of books in shelves and stacks, a shadowy black-and-white drawing of a female nude on the wall, a platoon of file cabinets, a small jungle of plants, a big couch heavily burdened with books and papers, and a well-littered desk on which was a museum replica of a small head of a goddess, a thin shell of bronze with a dark green patina, almost a mask because there was no back to it, the edges of itsincompleteness following pleasingly the undulations of the hair.
    ‘Greek, second century B.C.,’ said Lovecraft, ‘found near Mersin, Cilicia. It’s only a replica.’
    ‘I know,’ I said. ‘I used to visit her at the British Museum.’ As on the original the whites of the eyes had been painted in and the wearing-away of the paint had been duplicated: the dark and light gave the impression of an upward seductive glance when viewed from above; when I brought my face down to the level of her eyes her look changed to one of fear and doubt. The card on the plinth said, HEAD OF A GODDESS.
    ‘She’s got to be Aphrodite,’ said Lovecraft. ‘She couldn’t be anyone else.’
    ‘I think you’re right. Sometimes it took four or five tries before I could walk away from her.’
    Lovecraft had been sorting through some videodiscs but now she paused, took off the horn-rims, and gave me a long look. ‘That’s how it is with Aphrodite,’ she said. She picked up several discs. ‘Let’s start with the automatic flicker-break transmission that came in to Traffic Control from
Clever Daughter
at 04:06:03 on 4 November.’ On her way to the video she passed close to me. The continually recycled air of Hubble Straits Station is moist and jungly; her smell was that of a strong healthy woman just out of the shower and sweating a little. She passed me again going back to her desk and I closed my eyes and felt the breeze of her on my face.
    FLICK, FLICK, FLICK AND FADE, JOHN, sang my head, ON THE PLANET WHERE YOU ARE.
    ‘… hear me?’ said Lovecraft.
    ‘What?’
    ‘Those green spirals and circles we’re seeing on the screen, what are they?’
    ‘I don’t know,’ I said as circles of bright emptiness expandedin my vision. The other circles, the ones on the screen, seemed strange but familiar.