She was on an improving tour from her home Orbital, cruising and learning with a party of friends on a semi-Eccentric ship that would be here as long as the Festival lasted. One of her aunts had some Contact contacts and had swung an invitation to the ambassador’s celebration; her friends were so jealous. He guessed she was still in her teens, though she moved with the easy grace of somebody older and her conversation was more intelligent and even shrewder than he’d have expected. He was used to being able to almost switch off talking to most teenagers but he was having to race after her meanings and allusions at time. Were teenagers getting even smarter? Maybe he was just getting old! No matter; she obviously liked the wings. She asked to stroke them.

He told her he was a resident of Tier, Culture or ex-Culture depending how you wanted to look at it; it wasn’t something he bothered about, though he supposed if forced he felt more loyalty to Tier, where he’d lived for twenty years, than to the Culture, where he’d lived for the rest of his life. In the AhForgetIt Tendency, that was, not the Culture proper, which the Tendency regarded as being far too serious and not nearly as dedicated to hedonistic pursuits as it ought to be. He’d first come here as part of a Tendency cultural mission, but stayed when the rest returned back to their home Orbital. (He’d thought about saying, Well, actually I was in the Tendency’s equivalent of Special Circumstances, kind of a spy, really, and I know lots of secret codes and stuff . . . but that probably wasn’t the sort of line that would work with a sophisticated girl like this.)

Oh, much older than her; quite middle-aged, at one hundred and forty. Well, that was kind of her to say so. Yes, the wings worked, in anything less than 50% standard gravity. Had them since he was thirty. He lived on an air level here with 30% gravity. Huge web-trees up there. Some people lived in their hollowed-out fruit husks, though he preferred a sort of wispy house-thing made from sheets of chaltressor silk stretched over hi-pressure thinbooms. Oh yes, she’d be very welcome to see it.

Had she seen much of Tier? Arrived yesterday? Such good timing for the Festival! He’d love to be her guide. Why not now? Why not. They could hire a yacht. First though they would go and make their apologies to the Ambassador. Of course; he and she were old pals. Something to tell that aunt of hers. And they’d call by the cruise ship; bring the others? Oh, just a little camera drone? Well why not? Yes, Tier’s rules could be tiresome at times, couldn’t they?

‘Yes! Yes! Yeeehhhsss . . .’