But she didn’t; she jumped out of the bed, kicking up through the air and raising her arms above her head to dive through the loose gatherings of the chamber’s tented ceiling and out into the bedroom beyond, arcing out over the padded platform around the bed chamber and falling gently back into the clutches of its standard gravity. She ran down the curved steps to the bedroom floor and almost bumped into the drone Churt Lyne.

‘I know!’ she yelled, flapping one hand at it.

It lifted out of her way, then turned smoothly and followed her across the floor of the bedroom towards the bathroom, its fields formal blue but tinged with a rosy humour.

Ulver broke into a run. She’d always liked big rooms; the bedroom one was twenty metres square and five high. One wall was window. It looked out onto a tightly curved landscape of fields and wooded hills dotted with towers and ziggurats. This was Interior Space One, the central and longest cylinder of a cluster of independently revolving five-kilometre diameter tubes which formed the main living areas in the Rock.

‘Anything I can do?’ the drone asked as Ulver ran into the bathroom. Behind it, there was a shout and then a series of curses as the young man tried to exit the bed chamber in the same way Ulver had and got the gravity-transition wrong. The drone turned briefly towards the disturbance, then swivelled back as Ulver’s voice floated out through the noise of rushing fluids. ‘Well, you could throw him out . . . Nicely, mind.’

‘What?’ Ulver screamed. ‘You get me to ditch a luscious new guy after one night, you make me scrap all my engagements for a month and then you won’t even let me take a few pets? Or a couple of pals?’

‘Ulver, can I talk to you alone?’ Churt Lyne said calmly, rotating to point at a room off the main gallery.

‘No you can’t!’ she yelled, throwing down the cloak she’d been carrying. ‘Anything you have to say to me you can damn well say in front of my friends.’