It gave him a rather pleasant feeling. There was a communication from a GCU which claimed to have discovered a world on which there was a game based on the precise topography of individual snowflakes; a game which, for that reason, was never played on the same board twice. Gurgeh had never heard of such a game, and could find no mention of it in the usually up-to-date files Contact collated for people like him. He suspected the game was a fake — GCUs were notoriously mischievous — but sent a considered and germain (if also rather ironic) reply, because the joke, if it was a joke, appealed to him.

He watched a gliding competition over the mountains and cliffs on the far side of the fjord.

He turned on the house holoscreen and watched a recently made entertainment he'd heard people talking about. It concerned a planet whose intelligent inhabitants were sentient glaciers and their iceberg children. He had expected to despise its preposterousness, but found it quite amusing. He sketched out a glacier game, based on what sort of minerals could be gouged from rocks, what mountains destroyed, rivers dammed, landscapes created and bays blocked if — as in the entertainment — glaciers could liquefy and re-freeze parts of themselves at will. The game was diverting enough, but contained nothing original; he abandoned it after an hour or so.

He spent much of the next day swimming in Ikroh's basement pool; when doing the backstroke, he dictated as well, his pocket terminal tracking up and down the pool with him, just overhead.

In the late afternoon a woman and her young daughter came riding through the forest and stopped off at Ikroh. Neither of them showed any sign of having heard of him; they just happened to be passing. He invited them to stay for a drink, and made them a late lunch; they tethered their tall, panting mounts in the shade at the side of the house, where the drones gave them water. He advised the woman on the most scenic route to take when she and her daughter resumed their journey, and gave the child a piece from a highly ornamented Bataos set she'd admired.