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count?'
'Yes. You know you could have said nothing there.'
'I wouldn't want to deceive you, Ziller. That too would be dishonourable.'
'Then it sounds like I'm not going to that concert.'
'I will still hope that you might, and work towards it.'
'Never mind. You could always hold another competition; the winner gets to
conduct.'
'Let me think about this. I'll release the sound field. Let's watch the dune
riders.'
The avatar and the Chelgrian turned from facing each other to stand with the
others by the parapet of the trundling feast hall's viewing platform. It was
night, and cloudy. Knowing the weather would be so, people had come to the
dune slides of Efilziveiz-Regneant to watch the biolume boarding.
The dunes were not normal dunes; they were titanic spills of sand forming a
three-kilometre-high slope from one Plate to another, marking where the
sands from one of the Great River's sandbank spurnings were blown across
towards the Plate's spinward edge to slip down to the desert regions of the
sunken continent below.
People ran, rolled, boarded, ski'd, skiffed or boated down the dunes all the
time, but on a dark night there was something special to be seen. Tiny
creatures lived in the sands, arid cousins of the plankton that created
bioluminescence at sea, and when it was very dark you could see the tracks
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left by people as they tumbled, twisted or carved their way down the vast
slope.
It had become a tradition that on such nights the freeform chaos of
individuals pleasing only themselves and the occasional watching admirer
was turned into something more organised, and so - once it was dark enough
and sufficient numbers of spectators had turned up on the crawler-mounted
viewing platforms, bars and restaurants - teams of boarders and skiers set off
from the top of the dunes in choreographed waves, triggering sand-slip
cascades in broad lines and vees of scintillating light descending like slow,
ghostly surf and weaving gently sparkling trails of soft blue, green and
crimson tracks across the sighing sands, myriad necklaces of enchanted dust
glowing like linear galaxies in the night.
Ziller watched for a while. Then he sighed and said, 'He's here, isn't he?'
'A kilometre away,' the avatar replied. 'Higher up on the other side of the run.
I'm monitoring the situation. Another one of me is with him. You are quite
safe.'
'This is as close as I ever want to get to him, unless you can do something.'
'I understand.'
A Defeat of Echoes
~ So unterritorial.
~ I suppose when you have this much territory you can afford to be.
~ Do you think I'm old-fashioned to be disturbed by it?
~ No. I think it's quite natural.
~ They have too much of everything.
~ With the possible exception of suspicion.
~ We can't be sure of that.
~ I know. Still; so far, so good.
Quilan closed the lockless door to his apartment. He turned and looked out at
the floor of the gallery, thirty metres below. Groups of humans strolled
amongst the plants and pools, between the stalls and bars, the restaurants
and - well; shops, exhibitions? It was hard to know what to call them.
The apartment they had given him was near the roof level of one of Aquime
City's central galleries. One set of rooms looked out across the city to the
inland sea. The other side of the suite, like this glazed lobby outside, looked
down into the gallery itself.
Aquime's altitude and consequently cold winters meant that a lot of the life of
the city took place indoors rather than out, and as a result what would have
been ordinary streets in a more temperate city, open to the sky, here were
galleries, roofed-over streets vaulted with anything from antique glass to
force fields. It was possible to walk from one end of the city to the other under
cover and wearing summer clothes, even when, as now, there was a blizzard
blowing.
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Free of the driving snow that was bringing visibility down to a few metres, the
view from the apartment's exterior was delicately impressive. The city had
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