“It happens I know why,” Ander said, and then the crowd drowned us out. Administration and Structure swirled together; Entertainment saw a chance and arrowed into the dance behind its dolphin. The depleted fourth team, Police, hung back in a nervous arc. All the teams looked to be milling without purpose, and from listening to Sharrol I could guess why.

So I said, “Prey submerged.” The last of the prey turtles must have escaped into the sand. For the next few minutes I watched the game with a concentration that would have surprised Sharrol.

This was the story I was telling Ander: If I hadn’t been led here by a woman, why was I here? I must love the game! “There! Yellow prey!” I shouted as sand stirred. An instant later the glowing mock turtle emerged outside the melee and flapped clownishly toward safety. A Police swimmer dove to capture it, his dolphin keeping station to block for him, and everyone converged too late: he was swimming like mad, and so was the prey; he was through the yellow arch at the point of a great angry cloud—

And that was the end. I bellowed over the crowd’s roar: “Dinner!”

“Oh?”

“I missed brunch. I’m starving.”

I didn’t want to fight the crowds trying to leave. We crossed the slidebridge instead, this time in comparative quiet. The booths lined below us were whirlpools in a surging sea of escapees.

Ander’s hand was above my elbow, companionably. I was a prisoner, and that was hard to ignore. Make conversation? I asked, “Did you know there’s an ice age going on Earth?”

“Sure.”

“Well, I never even wondered. I did wonder why Cuba wasn’t much hotter than Nome.”

Ander said, “The whole planet’s a web of superconductor cable. We had to restart the Gulf Stream five hundred years ago, and it just went from there. Nome imports heat; Cuba imports cold. Even so, Earth would be pretty cold if we weren’t getting so much power from the orbiting satellites.”

“Uh huh. What are you going to do when the ice age turns off?”

“Move.” Ander grinned. “Where did you go after the antimatter system?”

“I moved in with Sharrol in Nome.”

He looked at me. “You? Settled down like a Grog on a rock?”

Maybe he had the right to sneer. Ander and I had toured singles nodes together on two worlds, blowing off steam after marathon work sessions. I held my temper and said, “You can spend a lifetime seeing Earth.”

“Where do you want to eat?”

I said, “The Pequod Grill is good.” Good and expensive, and an offworlder would have heard of it. Just the place a destitute B. Shaeffer might pick if someone else was paying. And nobody would ask me where Sharrol was.