He laughed, shook his head, and bowed as he backed off, hoisting his hold-all over his shoulder.

Genar-Hofoen had arrived a few days after the end of Tier's annual Festival. There was an air of autumnal desuetude mixed with high-summer torpor about the place when he arrived; people were cleaning up, calming down, getting back to normal and generally behaving themselves. He'd signalled ahead and succeeded in booking the services of an erotroupe as well as reserving a garden penthouse in the View, the best hotel on Level Three.

All in all, entirely worth passing up the rather too obvious advances of his perfect woman for (well, no it wasn't… except it was when your perfect woman was almost certainly a Special Circumstances agent altered to look like the creature of your fantasies and sent to look after you, keep you happy and safe, when what you actually wanted was a bit of variety, some excitement and some un-Culture-like danger; his perfect partner certainly looked like the very splendid Verlioef Schung, but she was even more positively not SC, not Contact, and probably not even Culture either. It was that desire for strangeness, for apartness, for alienness they probably couldn't understand).

He lay in bed, pleasantly exhausted, the odd muscle quivering now and again of its own accord, surrounded by sleeping pulchritude, his head buzzing with the after-effects of some serious glanding and watched the Tier news (Culture bias) channel on a screen hanging in the air in front of the nearest tree. An ear-pip relayed the sound.

Still leading with the Blitteringueh-Deluger saga. Then came a feature on the increase in Fleeting in Culture ships. Fleeting was when two or more ship Minds decided they were fed up being all by themselves and only being able to exchange the equivalent of letters; instead they got together, keeping physically close to each other so that they could converse. Operationally most inefficient. Some older Minds were worried it represented their more recently built comrades going soft and wanted the premise-states of Minds which would be constructed in the future to be altered to deal with this weak, overly chummy decadence.

Local news; there was a brief follow-up report basically saying that the mysterious explosion which had happened in dock 807b on the third day of the Festival was still a mystery; the Affronter cruiser Furious Purpose had been lightly damaged by a small, pure energy detonation which had done nothing more than locally burn off a layer of its scar-hull. An over-enthusiastic Festival prank was suspected.

Not quite so locally, the arguments were still going on about the creation of a new Hintersphere a few kiloyears anti-spinward. A Hintersphere was a volume of space in which FTL flights were banned except in the direst of emergencies, and life generally moved at a slower pace than elsewhere in the Culture. Genar-Hofoen shook his head at that one. Pretentious rusticism.

Nearer home again, back-up craft were only a day away from the location of the possible anomaly near Esperi. The discovering GCU was still reporting no change in the artifact. Despite requests from Contact section, various other Involved civilisations had sent or were sending ships to the general volume, but Tier itself had forgone dispatching a craft. To the surprise of most observers, the Affront had criticised the reaction of those who had decided to be nosy and had stayed severely away from the anomaly, though there were unconfirmed reports of increased Affront activity in the Upper Leaf Swirl, and just today four ships-

"Off," Genar-Hofoen said quietly, and the screen duly vanished. One of the erotroupe stirred against him. He looked at her.

The girl's face was the very image of that belonging to Zreyn Tramow, one-time captain of the good ship Problem Child. Her body was different from the original, altered in the direction of Genar-Hofoen's tastes, but subtly. There were two like her and three who looked exactly like famous personalities — an actress, a musician and a lifestyler. Zreyn and Enhoff, Shpel, Py and Gidinley. They had all been perfectly charming as well as being quite plausible impersonators, but Genar-Hofoen thought you had to wonder at the mentality of people who actually chose to alter their appearance and behaviour every few days just to suit the tastes — usually though not always sexual — of others. But maybe he was just being a bit fuddy-duddyish. Perhaps they were slightly boring people otherwise, or perhaps they just liked a deal more variety in such matters than other people.

Whatever their motivations, all five had fallen politely asleep on the AG bed after the fun, which had been preceded by a meal and a party. The troupe's Exemplary Couple, Gakic and Leleeril were asleep too, lying in each other's arms on the carpet-like lawn between the bed platform and the stream which threaded its way from the tinkling waterfall and the pool. Detumesced, the man's prick was almost normal looking. Genar-Hofoen felt slightly sleepy himself, but he was determined to stay awake for the whole holiday; he brushed the sleepiness back under the edges of his mind with a glandular release of gain. Doing this for three days solid would leave him needing lots of sleep, but there would be a week on the Grey Area/Meat fucker; plenty of time to recover. The buzz of gain coursed through him, clearing his head and ridding his body of the effects of fatigue. Gradually a feeling of rested, ready peacefulness washed over and through him.

He clasped his hands behind his neck and gazed happily upwards past the fronds of a couple of overhanging trees at the blue, cloud-strewn sky. Just that movement, performed in the gravity of Tier's standard-G level, gave him a good, light, almost childishly enjoyable sensation. Affronter standard gravity was more than twice the Culture-promoted human norm, and he supposed it was a sign of how well and how easily his body had adapted to conditions on God'shole habitat that he had quickly and long since stopped noticing how much heavier he had felt from day to day.

A thought occurred to him. He closed his eyes briefly, going quickly into the semi-trance that the average Culture adult employed, when they needed to and could be bothered, to check on their physiological settings. He dug around inside various images of his body until he saw himself standing on a small sphere. The sphere was set at one standard gravity; his subconscious had registered the fact that he had been in a steady, reduced gravity field for longer than a few hours and had re-set itself. Left to its own devices, his body would now start to lose bone and muscle mass, thin the walls of his blood vessels and perform a hundred other tiny but consequential alterations the better to suit his frame, tissues and organs to that reduced severity of weight. Well, his subconscious was only doing its job, and it didn't know he would be back in Affronter gravity again in a month or so. He increased the size of the sphere his image stood upon until it was back to the two point one gravities his body would have to readjust itself to once he returned to God'shole. There, that should do it. He cast a quick look round his internal states while he was here, not that there ought to be anything amiss; warning signs made themselves obvious automatically. Sure enough, all was well; fatigue being dealt with, presence of gain noted, blood sugar returning to normal, hormones generally being gathered back to optimum levels.

He came out of the semi-trance, opened his eyes and looked over at where the pen terminal lay on a sculpted, smoothly varnished tree stump at the bedside. So far he had mostly used it to check up on the replies from his Contact contacts, confirming what they could concerning this — so far — pleasantly undemanding mission. The terminal was supposed to blink a little light if it had a message stored for him. He was still waiting to hear from the GSV Not Invented Here, the Incident Coordinator for the Excession. The terminal lay where he'd left it, dull. No new messages. Oh well.