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that you get a chance to play i-Go with a golden-skinned woman with insects for eyes, but never the less I was annoyed. Harry and Tony, of course, didn’t mind.
    ‘She’s charming,’ Harry said, after she’d left. ‘Who cares? It’s a stupid game anyway.’
    ‘I care,’ I said. ‘She cheats.’
     
    The next three or four days at the shop were an audio-vegetative armageddon. Jane came in every morning to look at the Arachnid, and her presence was more than the flower could bear. Unfortunately I couldn’t starve the plants below their thresholds. They needed exercise and they had to have the Arachnid to lead them. But instead of running through its harmonic scales the orchid only screeched and whined. It wasn’t the noise, which only a couple of dozen people complained about, but the damage being done to their vibratory chords that worried me. Those in the seventeenth century catalogues stood up well to the strain, and the moderns were immune, but the Romantics burst their calyxes by the score. By the third day after Jane’s arrival I’d lost two hundred dollars’ worth of Beethoven and more Mendelssohn and Schubert than I could bear to think about.
    Jane seemed oblivous to the trouble she was causing me.
    ‘What’s wrong with them all?’ she asked, surveying the chaos of gas cylinders and drip feeds spread across the floor.
    ‘I don’t think they like you,’ I told her. ‘At least the Arachnid doesnșt. Your voice may love men to strange and wonderful visions, but it throws that orchid into acute melancholia.’
    ‘Nonsense,’ she said, laughing at me. ‘Give it to me and I’ll show you how to look after it.’
    ’Are Tony and Harry keeping you happy?’ I asked her. I was annoyed that I couldn’t go down to the beach with them and instead had to spend my time draining tanks and titrating up norm solutions, none of which ever worked.
    ‘They’re very amusing,’ she said. ‘We play i-Go and I sing for them. But I wish you could come out more often.’
    After another two weeks I had to give up. I decided to close the plants down until Jane had left Vermilion Sands. I knew it would take me three months to rescore the stock, but I had no alternative.
    The next day I received a large order for mixed coloratura herbaceous from the Santiago Garden Choir. They wanted delivery in three weeks.
    ‘I’m sorry,’ Jane said, when she heard I wouldn’t be able to fill the order. ‘You must wish that I’d never come to Vermilion Sands.’
    She stared thoughtfully into one of the darkened tanks.
    ‘Couldn’t I score them for you?’ She suggested.
    ‘No thanks,’ I said, laughing. ‘I’ve had enough of that already.’
    ‘Don’t be silly, of course I could,’
    I shook my head.
     
    Tony and Harry told me I was crazy.
    ‘Her voice has a wide enough range,’ Tony said. ‘You admit it yourself.’
    ‘What have you got against her?’ Harry asked. ‘That she cheats at i-Go?’
    ‘It’s nothing to do with that,’ I said. ‘And her voice has a wider range than you think.’
    We played i-Go at Jane’s apartment. Jane won ten dollars from each of us.
    ‘I am lucky,’ she said, very pleased with herself. ‘I never seem to lose.’ She counted up the bills and put them away carefully in her bag, her golden skin glowing.
    Then Santiago sent me a repeat query.
    I found Jane down among the cafés, holding off a siege of admirers.
    ‘Have you given in yet?’ she asked me, smiling at the young men.
    ‘I don’t know what you’re doing to me,’ I said, ‘but anything is worth trying.’
    Back at the shop I raised a bank of perennials past their thresholds. Jane helped me attach the gas and fluid lines.
    ‘We’ll try these first,’ I said. ‘Frequencies 543–785. Here’s the score.’
    Jane took off her hat and began to ascend the scale, her voice clear and pure. At first the Columbine hesitated and Jane went down again and drew them along with her. They went up a couple of octaves