DaveLand lightly covered about ninety acres of hillside, with new outcrops already beginning to appear on nearby hills. Beautiful homes. Much more beautiful than any of the ones that his imaginary St. Clive would have sold or even understood. None of your split-level ranch-style crap with stupid conversation pits that anyone with half a brain would probably kill themselves rather than converse in. Dave’s houses were of a different kind altogether.

Apart from anything else, they were smart houses. Just simple stuff, like they faced the right way. They had glass in the right places, stone in the right places, water in the right places, plants in the right places, so the air moved through them properly and was warm where you wanted it and cool where you wanted it. It was just physics. Most architects didn’t know any physics, he decided. They just knew dumb stuff. In Dave’s houses, prisms and fibres moved sunlight where you wanted it. Heat exchangers took heat from the food in the fridge and gave it to the food in the oven. Simple. People went into Dave’s houses and would say, “Hey! This is really neat! How come other people don’t build houses like this?” Answer? Because they’re dumb.

And telephones. Dave had given people here much neater, smarter, altogether more fabulous telephones than they’d ever had before. Now they wanted television as well, which Dave thought was pretty dumb in the first place, and monumentally dumb in the circumstances; but that in turn had been a pretty interesting problem and Dave, of course, had solved it. But Dave had solved so many problems that he had inadvertently created a new one. DaveLand was now a community of nearly a thousand people, which made him kind of responsible. He hadn’t expected to be responsible.

He pulled up a bunch of long grass and swished it around fretfully. The early-morning sunlight glinted off Dave’s Place. Dave’s Place was easily the largest and most gracious of all the buildings in, well, in the world. It ringed the summit of the hill opposite with elegant sweeping white stone walls and seeming acres of glass. The summit itself was laid out as a Japanese garden. Streams ran down through the house from it.

Just beneath Dave’s Place, on the same hillside and contained within the same security compound (he couldn’t believe he had to have stuff like security compounds now; and forty—forty—of the nine-hundred-plus inhabitants of DaveLand were now lawyers) was The Way of the Nostril.