“Well, we’ve changed the place a bit,” Ximenyr said, walking in front of the reporter arbite with its camera eyes. He was granting an exclusive interview, letting just one media representative in initially before the airship was opened up to everybody else. “The last eight days have been very busy with restructuring. Quite radical restructuring, involving pretty much everybody on board, which has been one reason for keeping people away, though mostly it’s just to make it a more exciting reveal.” He smiled at the arbite. Ximenyr was dressed in a plain white shift. Five of his fellow party-goers, similarly clad, accompanied him and the arbite along the dark, broad, gently downward-curving corridor. “Many of us have been doing our own personal restructuring too,” he said. Ximenyr waved one hand. “I had all sorts of weird shit going on with my body, but I’ve brought myself back to something much more standard, much more pure, even.”

“Do you regret your early excesses?” the arbite asked. It was taking instructions from a panel of bio-journalists spread across Xown and beyond. An AI was collating their queries and producing representative questions.

“Oh no,” Ximenyr said, looking almost serious. “One should never regret one’s excesses, only one’s failures of nerve.”

“Is it true your body was covered in over a hundred penises?”

“No. I think the most I ever had was about sixty, but that was slightly too many. I settled on fifty-three as the maximum. Even then it was very difficult maintaining an erection in all of them at the same time, even with four hearts. And most of them had to remain dry, or produce only, well, sort of sweat-gland quantities of ejaculate. Though it was very nice ejaculate; sort of slightly oily perfume, and not in the least icky. Unless you thought about it, of course.”

“Do you feel you are a more serious artist now?”

“No. I have claimed to be an artist in the past, but really all I’ve ever been is a sort of glorified surgeon. I would like to think I’ve been artistic at times and shown artistic flare and so on, but I think that, especially now that we’re nearly at the end of things, it’s all right to abandon claims and pretensions and just relax a bit. Maybe I’ve inspired artistry and artisticness in others; that’d be a happy assessment.”

“What is the greatest number of people you’ve had sex with at the same time?”