“Ah ha.”

“Whereas nowadays what we call holidays, or core time, is when you all stay home, because otherwise there’d be no period when you could all meet up. You wouldn’t know who your neighbours were.”

“Actually I’m not sure that I do.”

“Because we’re just so flighty.”

“One big holiday.”

“In the old sense.”

“And hedonistic.”

“Itchy feet.”

“Itchy feet, itchy paws, itchy flippers, itchy barbels—”

“Hub, can I eat this?”

“—itchy gas sacs, itchy ribs, itchy wings, itchy pads—”

“Okay, I think we get the idea.”

“Hub? Hello?”

“—itchy grippers, itchy slime cusps, itchy motile envelopes—”

“Will you shut up?”

“Hub? Come in? Hub? Shit, my terminal’s not working. Or Hub’s not answering.”

“Maybe it’s on holiday.”

“—itchy swim bladders, itchy muscle frills, itchy—mmph! What? Was there something stuck in my teeth?”

“Yes, your foot.”

“I think that’s where we kicked off.”

“Appropriate.”

“Hub? Hub? Wow, this has never happened to me before…”

“Ar Ischloear?”

“Hmm?” His name had been spoken. Kabe discovered that he must have gone into one of those strange, trance-like states he sometimes experienced at gatherings like this, when the conversation—or rather when several conversations at once—went zinging to and fro in a dizzying, alienly human sort of way and seemed to wash over him so that he found it difficult to follow who was saying what to whom and why.

He’d found that later he could often remember exactly the words that had been said, but he still had to work to determine the sense behind them. At the time he would just feel oddly detached. Until the spell was broken, as now, and he was awakened by his name.

He was in the upper ballroom of the ceremonial barge Soliton with a few hundred other people, most of them human though not all in human form. The recital by the composer Ziller—on an antique Chelgrian mosaikey—had finished half an hour earlier. It had been a restrained, solemn piece, in keeping with the mood of the evening, though its performance had still been greeted with rapturous applause. Now people were eating and drinking. And talking.