Phage Rock’s rate of accretion had slowed after that, and it was now just over seventy kilometres long and home to one hundred and fifty million people. It looked like a collection of craggy rocks, smooth stones and still smoother shells brought from a beach and cemented into a rough cairn, all dotted with what looked like a museum collection of Culture Equipment Through the Ages: launch pads, radar pits, aerial frames, sensory arrays, telescope dishes, rail-gun pylons, crater-like rocket nozzles, clamshell hangar doors, iris apertures and a bewildering variety of domes large and small, intact and part-dismantled or just ruined.

As its size and its population had grown, so had the speeds Phage Rock was capable of. It had been successively fitted with ever-more efficient and powerful drives and engines, until eventually it was able to maintain a perfectly respectable velocity either warping along the fabric of space-time or creating its own induced-singularity pathway through hyperspace beneath or above it.

Ulver Seich’s had been one of the Rock’s Founding Families; she could trace her ancestry back through fifty-four generations on Phage itself and numbered amongst her ancestors at least two forebears who were inevitably mentioned in even one-volume Histories of the Culture, as well as being descended from - as the fashions of the intervening times had ordained - people who had resembled birds, fish, dirigible balloons, snakes, small clouds of cohesive smoke and animated bushes.

The tenor of the time had generally turned against such outlandishness and people had mostly returned to looking more like people over the last millennium, albeit assuredly pretty good-looking people, but still, some part of one’s appearance was initially at least left to luck and the random nature of genetic inheritance, and it was a matter of some pride to Ulver that she had never had any form of physical alteration carried out (well, apart from the neural lace of course, but that didn’t count). It would have been a brave or deranged human or machine who told Ulver Seich to her face that the give-or-take-a-bit human-basic form was not almost unimprovably graceful and alluring, especially in its female state, and even more especially when it was called Ulver Seich.

She looked round the room the drone had brought her to. It was semicircular and moderately big, shaped like an auditorium or a shallowly sloped lecture hall, but most of the steps or seats seemed to be filled with complicated-looking desks and pieces of equipment. A huge screen filled the far wall.

They’d entered the room through a long tunnel which she’d never seen before and which was blocked by a series of thick, mirror-coated doors which had rolled silently back into recesses as they’d approached, and revolved back into place behind them once they’d passed. Ulver had admired her reflection in every one of them, and drawn herself up even straighter in her spectacular violet gown.