Having dreamt of Orpe on consecutive nights, he’d used the relevant implants to stop himself dreaming over the last two, and had slept well, but now he was starting to feel that he had only displaced the problem, for he had the annoying, irrational and even very slightly frightening feeling– even though he was entirely awake and apparently well rested – that Orpe was just out of sight, just beyond the corner of his eye. It was disconcerting, troubling.

He most certainly did not believe in ghosts or any such nonsense, but – when it happened, catching him out, when he thought he glimpsed her, or thought he’d just missed seeing her, a moment earlier, just as he turned his head or blinked – he felt as terrified as he imagined people must have felt in the old days, when they had been superstitious. He knew it was his own mind, his own brain, acting against him, betraying him, deliberately troubling him, but it felt like something other, something supernatural, uncanny.

On a few occasions over the last few days he’d wanted just to scream, for no good reason. Especially at formal ceremonial events when it would have been absolutely the worst, most shocking and disrespectful thing to do. So many aliens arriving, so many different forms and types of creature, so many in exo-suits or things like tiny spacecraft it was like welcoming the contents of a toy cupboard, scaled for giants. How were you supposed to keep a straight face? That was when he most wanted to do it: to laugh hysterically in their faces or scream and shout and swear and thrash about on the floor and tear his hair out …

But: just a few more days. A few more days and it would all be over. They could all go to the happy land of good and plenty and never need to bother with horrible, messy, painful real life again.

He couldn’t wait. It was the only thing keeping him together.

“Please,” he said, smiling too broadly as he half turned to indicate the way through the variously smiling, grinning, tight-faced dignitaries behind him to the scarcely smaller and even more sumptuous room where President Int’yom waited – enthroned, enrobed, befuddled. “This way, please. The president is impatient to meet you.”

“Thank you,” the leading avatar said. The seven looked identical: tall, straight, dressed plainly but elegantly and their expressions radiating a kind of severe serenity. At their rear, Ziborlun, the Culture avatar the court had become used to, looked small, plain and homely in comparison.

Just as Banstegeyn turned more fully, to walk ahead of the Culture avatars, he caught a glimpse of – but, no, of course, it wasn’t really her at all.