It wouldn’t get out of the way. She balled her fists again and beat at its snout, stamping her feet. She hiccuped.

‘Ulver, Ulver,’ the drone said, gently taking her hands in its fields. She stuck her head forward and frowned as hard as she could at the machine’s front sensory band. ‘Ulver,’ it said again. ‘Please. Please listen; this is--’

‘What is it, anyway?’ she cried.

‘I told you; something you have to see; a signal.’

‘Well, why can’t you show it to me here?’ She looked round the hallway, at the softly lit portraits and the variegated fronds, creepers and parasols of the urn plants. ‘There isn’t even anybody else around!’

‘Because it just doesn’t work that way,’ Churt Lyne said, sounding exasperated. ‘Ulver, please; this is important. You still want to join Contact?’

She sighed. ‘I suppose so,’ she said, rolling her eyes. ‘Join Contact and go exploring . . .’

‘Well, this is your invitation.’ It let go of her hands.

She stuck her head forward at it again. Her hair was an artful tangle of massed black curls studded with tiny helium-filled globes of gold, platinum and emerald. It brushed against the drone’s snout like a particularly decorative thundercloud.

‘Will it let me go exploring on that young man?’ she asked, trying to keep her face straight.

‘Ulver, if you will just do as I ask there is every chance Contact will happily provide you with entire ships full of gorgeous young men. Now, please turn round.’

She snorted derisively and went on tip-toes to look wobblingly over the machine’s casing in the direction of the ballroom. She could still hear the music of the dance she’d left. ‘Yeah, but it was that one I was interested in . . .’

The drone took her hands again in fields coloured yellow green with calm friendliness, bringing her down off her toes. ‘Young lady,’ it said. ‘I shall never say anything more truthful to you than these two things. One; there will be plenty more gorgeous young men in your life. Two; you will never have a better chance of getting into Contact, even Special Circumstances, and with them owing you a favour; or two. Do you understand? This is your big chance, girl.’

‘Don’t you “girl” me,’ she told it sniffily. The drone Churt Lyne had been a family friend for nearly a millennium and parts of its personality were supposed to date back to when they’d been programs in a house-systems computer nine thousand years earlier. It wasn’t in the habit of pulling age on her like this and reminding her that she was a mere day-fly to its creakingly venerable antiquity, but it wasn’t above doing so when it thought the situation demanded it, either. She closed one eye and looked closely at the machine. ‘Did you say “Special Circumstances” just there?’

‘Yes.’

She drew back. ‘Hmm,’ she said, her eyes narrowing.