There are many strange characters in the ConSentiency universe – most grotesque perhaps being the Pan Spechi, who take the mythical Graeae (weird sisters who had to share one eye between the three of them) into even more bizarre realms, as the they come in groups of five who have one ego between them, a consciousness they must pass on, knowing what will become of them. A Pan Spechi who would bogart an ego would be a very bad being – such a being as would make a super-villainess a superb mojor-domo. It takes McKie time to realise that he has come across such a woman – she is the Lady Abnethe, and she has bound the universe’s last Caleban into a destructive but watertight contract. As McKie knows, the Calebans have been providing instantaneous transfers across the universe, and on the disappearance of each of the others every one of their sometime transferees has disappeared too. The fear is that with the end of the last Caleban the universe might also vanish.

While the constraints of intergalactic contract law are implicit in Herbert’s plotting, the attempts by speakers of two different languages to understand and be understood are the explicit strengths of this novel. For what McKie has not realised is that a being that could disregard space-time like a pan-galactic ferry substitute would probably have an attitude to existence so at variance to his own that they will scarcely understand one another. How they do – and how Herbert presents their conversation – is the heart of this book. Some of the other features – like the whip which appears to lash the Caleban, helpless under its contractual yoke – read like hack-work but readers will remember them only as part of something better.