“Your livestock’s unhappy about something,” Tony told me. “Can you quieten it down?”

“It’s not the plants,” I told him. “Can’t be.”

The sound mounted in intensity, scraping the edges off my occipital bones. I was about to go down to the shop when Harry and Tony leapt out of their chairs and dived back against the wall.

“Steve, look out!” Tony yelled at me. He pointed wildly at the table I was leaning on, picked up a chair and smashed it down on the glass top.

I stood up and brushed the fragments out of my hair.

“What the hell’s the matter?”

Tony was looking down at the tangle of wickerwork tied round the metal struts of the table. Harry came forward and took my arm gingerly.

“That was close. You all right?”

“It’s gone,” Tony said flatly. He looked carefully over the balcony floor and down over the rail into the street.

“What was it?” I asked.

Harry peered at me closely. “Didn’t you see it? It was about three inches from you. Emperor scorpion, big as a lobster.” He sat down weakly on a beer crate. “Must have been a sonic one. The noise has gone now.”

After they’d left I cleared up the mess and had a quiet beer to myself. I could have sworn nothing had got on to the table.

On the balcony opposite, wearing a gown of ionized fibre, the golden woman was watching me.

I found out who she was the next morning. Tony and Harry were down at the beach with their wives, probably enlarging on the scorpion, and I was in the shop tuning up a Khan-Arachnid orchid with the UV lamp. It was a difficult bloom, with a normal full range of twenty-four octaves, but unless it got a lot of exercise it tended to relapse into neurotic minor-key transpositions which were the devil to break. And as the senior bloom in the shop it naturally affected all the others. Invariably when I opened the shop in the mornings, it sounded like a madhouse, but as soon as I’d fed the Arachnid and straightened out one or two pH gradients the rest promptly took their cues from it and dimmed down quietly in their control tanks, two-time, three-four, the multi-tones, all in perfect harmony.