The sky disappeared and the true ceiling of the penthouse suite was revealed; a slickly black surface studded with projectors, lights and miscellaneous bumps and indentations. The few gentle animal sounds faded away. In the View Hotel, every suite was a penthouse corner suite; there were four per floor, and the only floor which didn’t have four penthouse suites was the very top one, which, so that nobody in the lower floors would feel they were missing out on the real thing when it was available, was restricted to housing some of the hotel’s machinery and equipment. Genar-Hofoen’s was called a jungle suite, though it was entirely the most manicured, pest-free and temperately, temperature-controlled and generally civilised jungle he had ever heard of.

‘Night sky, on,’ he said quietly. The slick black ceiling was replaced by blackness scattered with sharply bright stars. Some animal noises resumed, sounding different compared to those heard in the daylight. They were real animals, not recordings; every now and again a bird would fly across the clearing where the bed was situated, or a fish would splash in the bathing pool or a chattering simian would swing across the forest canopy or a huge, glittering insect would burr delicately through the air.

It was all terribly tasteful and immaculate, and Genar-Hofoen was already starting to look forward to the evening, when he intended to dress in his best clothes and hit the town, which in this case was Night City, located one level almost straight down, where, traditionally, anything on Tier that could breathe a nitrogen-oxygen atmosphere and tolerate one standard gravity - and had any sort of taste for diversion and excitement - tended to congregate.

A night in Night City would be just the thing to complete this first mad rush of fun at the onset of his short holiday. Calling ahead and ordering up a fabulously expensive erotroupe to act out his every sexual fantasy was one thing - one extremely wonderful and deeply satisfying thing, beyond all doubt, he told himself with all due solemnity - but the idea of a chance meeting with somebody else, another free, independent soul with their own desires and demands, their own reservations and requirements; that, just because it was all up to chance and up to negotiation, just because it all might end in nothing, in rejection, in the failure to impress and connect, in being found wanting rather than being wanted, that was a more valuable thing, that was an enterprise well worthy of the risk of rebuff.

He glanded charge. That ought to do it.

Seconds later, filled to bursting with the love of action, movement and the blessed need to be doing something, he was bouncing out of bed, laughing to himself and apologising to the sleepily grumbling but still palatably comely cast of the erotroupe.