amongst a company of purple men whose heaven is an indoor jungle, strutting naked in the mirror-Eden of this lapsing world. On those occasions when the great unfolded garnet of a sun is visible beyond the mile-wide nets of creeper covering the stupefying avenue, the solar orb seems larger than it did. May thinks that this is caused by higher levels of particulates in the slowly transforming atmosphere resulting in an increased scattering of light, rather than by an actual amplification of the star’s dimensions. Riding high on her grandfather’s bony shoulders she is borne aloft through massively expanded bottle-trees, pregnant with hyperwater, and amidst the timid press of violet pygmies like a baby queen. The fatal marmalade from Sundews of big-top diameter is hers to taste, so that she shortly has a motorcade of monster dragonflies trailed iridescent and suspended in her wake, sharp iris or sour jade, darting to lap her sticky chin. Strolling in the arboreal centuries with gaping, fascinated future-humans in their shrill mauve entourage they are the giant ghosts of an earlier paradise, chalk-white and prehistoric, by some means arrived along the Attics of the Breath from an unreachably far latitude that is no longer even legendary. In gradual increments they come to understand a little of the native spectres’ trilling speech that rings and shivers in the dripping, crystalline delay; in the exploded echo. One word at a time they piece together something of the antic history that has informed these bald and embossed after-people, foraging their wild Elysium: a changing climate and depleted ozone-belt have, it seems, relatively swiftly compensated for the temporary arctic chill caused by the failure of the Gulf Stream, in a mere few hundred years. The current era is a tropic intermediary stage, when all the planet’s lingering rain and vegetation is restricted to the warming Polar Regions that are thus a last abode of earthly life. With dwindling resources and a limited habitable environment, even a much-diminished human population cannot be sustained without severe modifications. These have been accomplished by re-engineering in some fashion the essential mortal blueprint, with mankind as a result much smaller and possessing cells imbued with photo-active chlorophyll. The lustrous eggplant colouration and the intricately corrugated skin designed to thereby maximise its surface area are features bred into this new strain of humanity, who supplement declining rations of available organic sustenance by gorging upon the abundant sunlight. Snowy and his infant charge eventually deduce, from such fragments of anecdote as they are able to translate, that these whorled and embellished near-indigo miniatures have a truncated life expectancy of less than thirty years before ascending to the higher pastures, to the ultrasonic flutter that is their term for Mansoul. This strikes the sinewy old man as woefully curtailed and his juvenile passenger as more than generous, a minor argument between them while they wander further down the fern-defeated promenade with its viridian dapple and extended perfumes. They pass on through blood-burst dawns afire with parakeets and bullion sunsets that electroplate the pair in liquid gold, pausing at last to make camp in the rustling midnight furlongs where a faceted extravagance that May identifies as Hyper-Sirius is visible against pitch black beyond the vine-macramé overhead. Their bivouac consists of monstrous bottle-green leaves bent across a mossy hollow and secured by thick black thorns, there in the metaphysic tropics after man. On rising, after the short walk to morning, they discover what appears to be a growth of Puck’s Hats sprouting from an unidentifiable corroded mass which Snowy thinks might be a fallen ceiling-girder. Once again the astral fungi would appear to have adapted to their changed environment, developing new features so as better to entice the altered humanoids of these sun-flooded purlieus. This latest variety is, in the pair’s opinion, the most thoroughly unappetising yet. The overlapping succulent and pale feminine forms that typified the earlier displays have been replaced here by a similar arrangement of abnormally large insects, lamp black and yet iridescent if they’re turned against the light. The eye-pips are now faceted, and an experimental nibble at a snapped-off thorax has both of them spitting and complaining for some several time-miles at the vinegary flavour, near impossible to rinse away. At their next rest-stop, in the umbra of a towering and dilapidated kettle-drum construction, they unfurl their wolfskin sack to feast on the albino ‘snow queen’ blooms that they’ve collected a few centuries back up the track. At May’s suggestion they spit the pink seeds into the undergrowth about them, so that there might be a colony of fungi that are edible established here for the return trip, when the two of them are heading back this way from the far end of time. Invigorated by their breakfast of anaemic beauties they resume the journey once the little girl is set again upon the bronzing saddle of her grandsire’s shoulders. Blurring down the arcade of forever, May remarks that they are passing fewer huge masks and gasometer-sized bongos, fewer purple people. She recalls