After a few minutes, standing near her, talking, occasionally moving a little closer, he was whispering into her ear, and once or twice he reached round behind her, to run his fingers down her spine through the silky dress she wore.

"I said I'd go on with the others," she told him quietly, looking down, biting her lip, and putting her hand behind her, holding his where it rubbed at the small of her back.

"Some boring band, some singer, performing for everybody?" he chided gently, taking his hand away, smiling. "You deserve more individual attention, Ren."

She laughed quietly, nudging him.

Eventually she left the room, and didn't return. Gurgeh strolled over to where Yay was gesticulating wildly and extolling the virtues of life on floating magnetic islands, then saw Chamlis in the corner, studiously ignoring the three-legged pet, which was staring up at the machine and trying to scratch one of its bulges without falling over. He shooed the beast away and talked to Chamlis for a while.

Finally the crowd of people left, clutching bottles and a few raided trays of sweetmeats. The aircraft hissed into the night.

Gurgeh, Yay and Chamlis finished their card-game; Gurgeh won.

"Well, I have to go," Yay said, standing and stretching. "Chamlis?"

"Also. I'll come with you; we can share a car."

Gurgeh saw them to the house elevator. Yay buttoned her cloak. Chamlis turned to Gurgeh. "Want me to say anything to Contact?" Gurgeh, who'd been absently looking up the stairs leading to the main house, looked puzzledly at Chamlis. So did Yay. "Oh, yes," Gurgeh said, smiling. He shrugged. "Why not? See what our betters can come up with. What have I got to lose?" He laughed.

"I love to see you happy," Yay said, kissing him lightly. She stepped into the elevator; Chamlis followed her. Yay winked at Gurgeh as the door closed. "My regards to Ren," she grinned.

Gurgeh stared at the closed door for a moment, then shook his head, smiling to himself. He went back to the lounge, where a couple of the house remote-drones were tidying up; everything seemed back in place, as it should be. He went over to the game-board set between the dark couches, and adjusted one of the Deploy pieces so that it sat in the centre of its starting hexagon, then looked at the couch where Yay had sat after she'd come back from her run. There was a fading patch of dampness there, dark on dark. He put his hand out hesitantly, touched it, sniffed his fingers, then laughed at himself. He took an umbrella and went out to inspect the damage done to the lawn by the aircraft, before returning to the house, where a light in the squat main tower told that Ren was waiting for him.

The elevator dropped two hundred metres through the mountain, then through the bedrock underneath; it slowed to cycle through a rotate-lock and gently lowered itself through the metre of ultradense base material to stop underneath the Orbital Plate in a transit gallery, where a couple of underground cars waited and the outside screens showed sunlight blazing up on to the Plate base. Yay and Chamlis got into a car, told it where they wanted to go, and sat down as it unlocked itself, turned and accelerated away.

"Contact?" Yay said to Chamlis. The floor of the small car hid the sun, and beyond the sidescreens stars shone sharply. The car whizzed by some of the arrays of the vital but generally indecipherably obscure equipment that hung beneath every Plate. "Did I hear the name of the great benign bogy being mentioned?"

"I suggested Gurgeh might contact Contact," Chamlis said. It floated to a screen. The screen detached itself, still showing the view outside, and floated up the car wall until the decimetre of space its thickness had occupied in the skin of the vehicle was revealed. Where the screen had pretended to be a window was now a real window; a slab of transparent crystal with hard vacuum and the rest of the universe on the other side. Chamlis looked out at the stars. "It occurred to me they might have some ideas; something to occupy him. .

"I thought you were wary of Contact?"

"I am, generally, but I know a few of the Minds; I still have some connections… I'd trust them to help, I think."

"I don't know," Yay said. "We're all taking this awful seriously; he'll come out of it. He's got friends. Nothing too terrible's going to happen to him as long as his pals are around."

"Hmm," the drone said. The car stopped at one of the elevator tubes serving the village where Charnlis Amalk-ney lived. "Will we see you in Tronze?" the drone asked.

"No, I've a site conference that evening," Yay said. "And then there's a young fellow I saw at the shoot the other day… I've arranged to bump into him that night." She grinned.

"I see," Chamlis said. "Lapsing into predatory mode, eh? Well, enjoy your bumping."

"I'll try," Yay laughed. She and the drone bade each other goodnight, then Charnlis went through the car's lock — its ancient, minutely battered casing suddenly bright in the blast of sunlight from underneath — and went straight up the elevator tube, without waiting for a lift. Yay smiled and shook her head at such geriatric precocity, as the car pulled away again.

Ren slept on, half covered by a sheet. Her black hair spilled across the top of the bed. Gurgeh sat at his occasional desk near the balcony windows, looking out at the night. The rain had passed, the clouds thinned and separated, and now the light of the stars and the four Plates on the far, balancing side of the Chiark Orbital — three million kilometres away and with their inner faces in daylight — cast a silvery sheen on the passing clouds and made the dark fjord waters glitter.

He turned on the deskpad, pressed its calibrated margin a few times until he found the relevant publications, then read for a while; papers on game-theory by other respected players, reviews of some of their games, analyses of new games and promising players.

He opened the windows later and stepped out on to the circular balcony, shivering a little as the cool night air touched his nakedness. He'd taken his pocket terminal with him, and braved the cold for a while, talking to the dark trees and the silent fjord, dictating a new paper on old games.

When he went back in, Ren Myglan was still asleep, but breathing quickly and erratically. Intrigued, he went over to her and crouched down by the side of the bed, looking intently at her face as it twitched and contorted in her sleep. Her breath laboured in her throat and down her delicate nose, and her nostrils flared.

Gurgeh squatted like that for some minutes, with an odd expression on his face, somewhere between a sneer and a sad smile, wondering — with a sense of vague frustration, even regret — what sort of nightmares the young woman must be having, to make her quiver and pant and whimper so.

The next two days passed relatively uneventfully. He spent most of the time reading papers by other players and theorists, and finished a paper of his own which he'd started the night Ren Myglan stayed. Ren had left during breakfast the next morning, after an argument; he liked to work during breakfast, she'd wanted to talk. He'd suspected she was just tetchy after not sleeping well.

He caught up on some correspondence. Mostly it was in the form of requests; to visit other worlds, take part in great tournaments, write papers, comment on new games, become a teacher/lecturer/ professor in various educational establishments, be a guest on any one of several GSVs, take on such-and-such a child prodigy… it was a long list.

He turned them all down. It gave him a rather pleasant feeling. There was a communication from a GCU which claimed to have discovered a world on which there was a game based on the precise topography of individual snowflakes; a game which, for that reason, was never played on the same board twice. Gurgeh had never heard of such a game, and could find no mention of it in the usually up-to-date files Contact collated for people like him. He suspected the game was a fake — GCUs were notoriously mischievous — but sent a considered and germain (if also rather ironic) reply, because the joke, if it was a joke, appealed to him.