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single word – 'Doctor.'
    'Hello, God,' said the Doctor.
    'You're supposed to inform me when you arrive.'
    'Am I?' said the Doctor in tones of clearly feigned innocence. 'There's nothing in the treaty about that.'
    'As a courtesy?'
     
    'Well, I didn't want to bother you,' said the Doctor. 'I know how busy you are. Running the world and everything. Let me just say how dazzling tonight's storm is. We're all enjoying it immensely.'
    'I'm so glad you think so,' said God. 'By the way, who are your friends?'
    'Silly me, forgetting my manners,' said the Doctor. 'God, this is Professor Bernice Summerfield, Adjudicator Secular Roslyn Inyathi Forrester and her Squire Christopher Cwej.'
    Roz twitched so hard at the word 'Inyathi' that Bernice felt it. The small woman glanced quickly at the Doctor, who raised his eyebrow in reply.
    'Pleased to meet you,' said God pleasantly. 'Any friend of the Doctor is hopefully a friend of mine.'
    We're on good terms with a deity, thought Bernice; that makes a nice change.
    'Do you control the sphere?' asked Chris.
    'Yep,' said God. 'Although "manage" is probably a better word.'
    'Where do you live?'
    'Quite a lot of me is on Whynot but I'm pretty well diffused. I've got nodes all over the place.'
    'So you're a computer?'
    'Are you a mollusc?' asked God.
    'Er, no,' said Chris.
    'Then I'm not a computer,' said God, with a discernible amount of smugness.
    Chris looked confused, his thoughts comically obvious on his face. 'What have molluscs got to do with anything?'
    Bernice leant to murmur in Roz's ear. 'Oh, great, machines with attitude.' The other woman smiled.
    'Ah,' said God. 'Prejudice.'
    They never did quite get to pin down how much of the storm was real. The Doctor and God got into a light-hearted philosophical argument about what reality was at a fundamental level. It escalated to the point where both resorted to logic symbols, glowing holographic tiles that got shunted around the living room at knee level.
    Roslyn fell asleep again, her head resting on Chris's shoulder. It was funny watching how he was so careful not to disturb her. Three-quarters of his body remained its normal expressive self while his shoulder never moved, not even when a tremendous flash of lightning lit the world from sea to sky, illuminating a limitless expanse of boiling waves. A clap of thunder big and loud enough made even the Doctor and God pause in mid argument.
    'Just a moment,' said God, and then resumed the conversation.
    Later Bernice asked herself whether she might not have seen something in the sudden darkness after the flash. Just a speck of something reflective far out to sea, falling.
    The storm abated, the popcorn was finished.
    Bernice was tired again. Why? She hadn't done anything strenuous that day, if you didn't count trying to have a bath in a suspensor pool. Perhaps you could get tired even without constant stress; it was certainly a thought. She hadn't had much opportunity to experiment in that direction recently.
    'This is the best bit,' said God.
    The clouds parted to reveal the fabulous nightscape of the sphere. Artistically framed in the upper left-hand corner of the picture window was a blue and white planet, complete with continents and swirling clouds. It was the same apparent size as Earth seen from the moon.
    Whynot. Home of most of God.
    It took a special kind of confidence to build a Dyson sphere and then orbit a planet inside . The Doctor said they were lucky it was so close; the orbit was designed in such a way that Whynot passed over every part of the sphere in turn. 'Like a three-dimensional spirograph pattern,' he said.
    Whatever a spirograph was.
    With no appreciable effort Chris picked Roz up and carried her upstairs. Bernice found herself yawning and decided to follow. She left the Doctor deep in his conversation with God.
     
    2
    Life's A Beach
    Wake up in the morning.
    Baked beans for breakfast.
    So that everyone can beef-head
    Ooh, ooh, my ears are alight.
    Chris