‘Oh no,’ she croaked, laughing. ‘Don’t stop; that’s a fine way to say good morning.’

‘Nearly afternoon,’ the young man breathed. He was called Otiel. He was tall and very dark-skinned and he had fabulously blond hair and a voice that could raise bumps on your skin at a hundred metres, or, better still, millimetres. Metaphysics student. Swam a lot and free-climbed. The one she’d set her heart on the previous evening. The leg-liker. Long, sensitive fingers.

‘Hmm . . . Really? Well . . . you know . . . maybe you can say that later, but meantime you just keep right on - WHAT?’

Ulver Seich jerked to a sitting position, eyes wide open. She slapped the young man’s hand away and stared wildly around. She was in what she thought of as her Romantic bed. It was more of a chamber, really; a ruched, pavilion-ceilinged five-metre crimson hemisphere filled with billowy bolsters and slinky sheets which blended into puffy paddings forming the single wall of the chamber and which swelled out in places to form various projections, shelves, straps and little seat-like things. She had other beds; her childhood bed, still stuffed with toys; her Just Sleep bed, comfy and surrounded by nocturne plants; a huge grandly formal and terribly old-fashioned canopied Reception bed, for when she wanted to receive friends, and an oil bed, which was basically a four-metre sphere of warm oils; you had to put little nose-plug things in and the air was Displaced into you. Not to everybody’s taste, sadly, but very erotic.

Her neural lace had woken up already with the adrenaline rush. It told her it was half an hour to noon. Shit. She’d thought she’d set an alarm to wake her an hour ago. She’d meant to. Must have slipped her mind due to the fun; hormonal re-prioritisation. Well, it happened.

‘What . . . ?’ Otiel said, smiling. He was looking at her oddly. Like he was wondering whether this was part of some game. Twinkle in the eye. He reached out for her.

Damn, the gravity was still on. She commanded the bed controls to switch to one-tenth G. ‘Sorry!’ she said, blowing him a kiss as the apparent gravity cut by ninety per cent. The padding beneath their bodies suddenly had a lot less weight to support; the effect was to produce a very gentle, padded pat on the bottom which was enough to send them both floating fractionally upwards. He looked surprised; it was such a sweet, boyish, innocent expression she almost stayed.