Cossont was acknowledged as a gifted instrumentalist with a particular feeling for ancient string instruments – she had been one of the top five Volupt players in all Gzilt, and was now the single greatest, though admittedly only because the other four were all Stored, awaiting the Sublime – but she was beginning to despair of accomplishing her self-assumed life-task before her whole civilisation simply ceased to be in the Real and she and everyone she knew and loved took, rejoicing, to the metaphorical skies of the Sublime. Playing the Hydrogen Sonata once, note perfect, straight through, without a break save for the few seconds between individual movements; that was Vyr’s chosen life-task. It only sounded easy if you knew nothing of either the Sonata or the elevenstring. As far as she was concerned, the Subliming couldn’t come fast enough.

Twenty-three days to the big moment now. Twenty-three days to do all the other things she might want to do before the Ultimate Enfold or whatever people were calling it these days and still get this appallingly long, complicated and player-unfriendly piece nailed to her own satisfaction, never mind anybody else’s.

She doubted she’d make it. She had even started thinking of giving up entirely, beginning to agree with those who held that life-tasks weren’t really about accomplishing anything beyond the passing of time before all such tasks, ambitions, goals and aspirations became – supposedly – laughably irrelevant and petty.

“Flier,” she said, inspecting the end of one finger, flicking it to remove what was on the tip, then rubbing her back with the same hand, “is Pyan with those birds?” She pointed.

The two-seat flier, a chunky little aircraft with stubby wings, made a show of waking up, turning lights on in the hinged-open cockpit. “Yes,” it told her, through her earbud. “Do you want me to summon it?”

“Not yet,” she said, sighing again. “Can you send up that – you know – your … that little—”

“My minidrone.”

“That’s the fella. Keep an eye on it. In case it’s not listening when we …” Her voice trailed off as she swayed from side to side, stretching. She shook a couple of her hands again, tucked the instrument bows under one arm and started trying to push the loosened strands of her hair back into its band. “Weather?” she asked, as a small hatch opened along the flier’s dorsal bulge and a tiny version of the machine buzzed into the air, turning and zipping off towards where she’d seen the distant flock of birds. The minidrone was visible for just a few seconds, illuminated mostly by the hazy light reflecting from the Girdlecity’s upper reaches, the nearest few hundred horizontal kilometres of which still shone in the sunlight like some vast tracery of silver and gold wrapped across the sky.

“Cooling at a degree every fifty minutes,” the flier told her. “Wind variable but increasing to an average of 18 km/h, gusting twenty-five, backing west-north-west.”