Galactic Milieu - Diamond Mask Part 16

10.

FROM THE MEMOIRS OF ROGATIEN REMILLARD.

Like most other ordinary people during those immediate post-Proctors.h.i.+p years of the mid-twenty-first century, I had become extremely curious about the Lylmiks' wonderful artificial world called Concilium Orb and the activities going on inside it. From Orb came the laws and major public policy decisions that shaped the long-term course of human racial destiny ... but people like me had no say whatsoever in the process. We did not elect the Human Magnates of the Concilium, much less the exotic magnates who greatly outnumbered them. The whole crowd was appointed by the Lylmik, and ordinary citizens-operant and non-knew very little about Conciliar operations.

No official policy of secrecy prevailed. There were plaque-books and Tri-D doc.u.mentaries galore that seemed to describe in detail the way that the central galactic government functioned. Everyone knew that magnates were individually skimmed from the creme de la creme of human operants by the Lylmik Supervisory Quincunx itself, those five demiG.o.dly paragons of wisdom and virtue. Magnates conducted their Conciliar business mentally, with open minds. It was therefore supposedly impossible for them to lie, dissemble, or otherwise betray the public trust.

Human and exotic magnates went to Orb about once every 334 Earth days to partic.i.p.ate in plenary Concilium sessions. Magnates also attended single-Polity sessions and committee and Directorate meetings whenever these were deemed necessary.

No law held that the deliberations of the magnates were secret. Nevertheless, human news-gathering organizations were barred from having offices in Orb or otherwise attempting to cover the Concilium proceedings in any systematic way. Sympathetic human magnates (especially those belonging to the Rebel faction) leaked the occasional piece of hot p.o.o.p, and privileged visitors, nonoperant human service employees who worked in the Orb enclaves, and even friendly exotics spilled what beans they could. But most news from Orb consisted of canned material disseminated from the Information Directorate of the Human Polity.

Humanity was unique in fretting over a star-chamber Concilium. The other five Milieu races, secure in a tranquil Unified state that seemed to preclude outright contention or even serious dispute (making it automatically suspect to free-spirited Earth-lings), would never have dreamed of questioning the activities of their magnates. The perseverant b.u.mptiousness of humans struck them as strange, immature, and disquieting.

More than once the very admission of humanity into the Milieu was called into question by the other races; but the almighty Lylmik had insisted that our acceptance was necessary. They had gone to ingenious lengths to bring us into the confederation in the first place, and as time pa.s.sed and the Metapsychic Rebellion seemed more and more inevitable, they used means both fair and foul to prevent us from getting chucked out. Only in hindsight can we understand why.

Since the ent.i.ty reading these memoirs (like all too many busy people) may not have been a keen student of Milieu governmental structure, I will do a fast overview in the hope of rendering this account of mine a trifle less opaque. Those who are already familiar with it may want to skip ahead directly to the raunchy bits and the violence.

The thousands of individual planets of the Galactic Milieu are not governed on a day-to-day basis by the Concilium, but by republican Intendant a.s.semblies made up of elected representatives of the populace. On human worlds, the Intendant a.s.sociates include both metapsychic operants and nonoperants, and the legislation they debate and decide upon encompa.s.ses most of the nuts and bolts of local planetary law and has minimal impact upon the vaster tapestry of interstellar civilization. Intendant a.s.semblies may discuss high matters of public policy, but only in order to pa.s.s recommendations on to the Planetary Dirigent, the highest authority and ultimate local arbiter on each world, who in turn may forward the matter to the Concilium.

The Dirigent, who is always an extremely powerful operant and an influential magnate, is appointed by the Lylmik. She-or more rarely he, for human females have shown a special talent for this arduous job-serves as the princ.i.p.al channel for Milieu policy on each planet and guardian of the Milieu's rights. She may summarily and even secretly overrule any action of the local a.s.sembly deemed contrary to the best interests of the confederation.

Oddly, the Dirigent is also required to act as a World Ombudsman. The most humble nonoperant citizen may pet.i.tion Dirigent House and have a point of law adjudicated on the spot if simple justice seems to demand it. Most often, pet.i.tioners are directed by the Dirigent's staff to the appropriate government officer having the authority to deal with their problem. But on rare occasions (as I myself can testify), the Dirigent may personally intervene, with the result that all h.e.l.l breaks loose and heads- even those of the most exalted and Magnified kind-may threaten to roll.

Some Dirigents are revered and even loved by their const.i.tuents. Greater numbers are feared, despised, or endured as a necessary evil.

The Concilium is the princ.i.p.al executive, legislative, and judicial body of what is officially termed the Coadunate Galactic Milieu, a federation consisting at the present time of six racial Polities having significant numbers of metapsychic operants among their population. Magnates of the Concilium are presumably selected from among the most exceptional minds of their Polity-although some of the human contingent strike one as odd choices indeed. They are all operants and may come from any walk of life, including their planet's Intendant a.s.sembly. While some magnates are full-time bureaucrats, the majority devote only part of their time to the Concilium and work at other occupations as well. Magnates serve terms of indefinite length, according to the whim of the Lylmik. Unlike the Planetary Dirigent appointees, who are required to accept the office whether they want it or not, magnates-designate may decline the honor if they feel they do not wish to serve in the Concilium.

When the Human Polity was first enfranchised, the members.h.i.+p of the Concilium was as follows:

Lylmik21 [with veto power]

Krondaku3460 Gi430 Poltroyans2741 Simbiari503 Humans100

TOTAL7255.

Human representation grew steadily as we pulled our act together, until there were nearly 400 humans serving on the Concilium around the time of the Metapsychic Rebellion in 2083.

One doesn't simply drop in at the legislative center of the galaxy as part of a grand tour. Concilium Orb is strictly off limits to casual travelers, with only the magnates of the six Polities and their immediate families and administrative staff permitted unlimited access. (Humanity's unique cultural requirement for living, not robotic, service workers has been accommodated by hiring nonoperant personnel for limited terms of employment and restricting them to the human enclaves most of the time.) Other citizens of the Milieu may come to Orb only when invited by a magnate, and even then only on very special occasions.

I would have been eligible, along with Denis and Lucille and the Remillard Dynasty spouses and children, to attend the inaugural session in 2052, when the founding magnates of the Human Polity first took their Concilium seats. Unfortunately, I was unavailable at the time, being on the lam in the British Columbia wilderness abetting the felonious pregnancy of the Human First Magnate's late wife.

The next opportunity for me to visit Orb did not take place until the unforgettable session of 2063, when my great-grandnephew Marc Remillard became a magnate and a galactic celebrity to be reckoned with in one fell swoop, and when the world-cla.s.s randan between Paul Remillard and Rory Muldowney marred (or enhanced, depending upon one's point of view) the festivities at the Poltroyans' party.

On that occasion I happened to travel to Orb on the CSS Skykomish River, the same stars.h.i.+p that carried Marc's four young operant friends Alexis Manion, Guy Laroche, Peter Dalembert, and s.h.i.+geru Morita. Like me, they had been invited to be Marc's honored guests at his accession to the Concilium.

I was already fairly well acquainted with these worthies, who frequented my bookshop in Hanover, New Hamps.h.i.+re, and called me Uncle Rogi, as most of my customers did. They were all around Marc's age, all outstanding minds, and all destined to become magnates themselves someday. Manion, Dalembert, and Laroche were Hanover natives who had attended Brebeuf Academy along with Marc, and they had known one another since early boyhood. s.h.i.+g Morita had joined the gang when they all roomed together at the Mu Psi Omega operant fraternity at Dartmouth College.

Alexis Manion was Marc's best friend in his younger years, and I had once enjoyed a brief affair with his widowed mother, Perdita, when she worked in my bookshop. During the Metapsychic Rebellion, Alex was Marc's closest advisor and confidant; and if Cloud and Hagen are to be believed, he also became Marc's most implacable enemy long after the Rebellion ended ... or aeons before it began, if you want to be nitpicky.

Like Marc, Manion was a towering genius with an IQ cla.s.sed as "unmeasurable." His field of expertise was dynamic-field research, and he became an authority on the relations.h.i.+p of the mental lattices to the Larger Reality. Manion did his postdoc work at Princeton in New Jersey but spent most of his mature years on the faculty of the IDFS at Cambridge, England, where he was a colleague of the famous Annushka Gawrys. In 2080 he was on the short list for the n.o.bel Prize in physics when his denunciation of Unity and public conversion to the Rebellion put him beyond the pale.

Alex possessed grandmastercla.s.s creativity, masterly coercion and PK, and adequate fa.r.s.ensing. He was a rather awkward individual physically, of medium height, with a jaw like a concrete block. An air of preoccupation gave his rugged features an incongruously dreamy look. Alex had a fine light baritone voice and was especially fond of Gilbert and Sullivan. He was much more contemplative than Marc, resisting nomination to the Concilium for ten years until irresistible pressure was put on him by his peers at IDFS.

Guy "Boom-Boom" Laroche had much the same blue-collar Franco-American heritage as the ancestral Remillards and seemed less of an egghead than Marc's other close friends. He was a powerfully built young man, an enthusiastic skier, fisherman, and skirt-chaser, who favored T-s.h.i.+rts even in winter so that he could show off his gorgeous pecs and 55-cent biceps. The face topping that magnificent body was so ugly it was splendid-joli-laid, as we Froggies express it. In later life he had himself resculpted into more conventional handsomeness, but I'll always remember him as he was in his youth. When Boom-Boom grinned with his pearly whites, flummoxed with his long eyelashes, and let loose a blast of winning metacoercivity, strong men would trust him with their lives and strong women would go gooey as chocolate eclairs. p.i.s.s Boom-Boom off, on the other hand, and you either got out of town at escape velocity or ended up knitting your bones in a regen-tank.

Laroche's only grandmasterly functions were creativity and coercion. He studied Milieu jurisprudence and law enforcement, and in 2063, fresh out of college, he was an inspector-intern for the New England Zone Police. In time he joined the Human Division of the Galactic Magistratum, where he quickly made his mark and was appointed to the Concilium. He was in line for the top cop position and would undoubtedly have become Human Evaluator General had not circ.u.mstances led him in a completely different direction.

Peter Paul Dalembert, Jr., was the great-grandson of the late Glenn Dalembert and Colette Roy, both of whom had been part of Denis Remillard's original "coterie" at Dartmouth long before the Great Intervention. His father, Peter Paul, Sr., became the Chief Executive Officer of Remco Industries when Philip Remillard retired from the family business to become a Magnate of the Concilium and head of the Human Commerce Directorate. Young Pete's Aunt Aurelie married Philip, and his late Aunt Jeanne was Maurice Remillard's first wife.

Pete was one of those hyper little guys who had his life organized down to the last byte. When he and Marc and Alex and Boom-Boom were kids, it was always Pete who took care of the logistic details for their fis.h.i.+ng and camping trips, or rustled up the makings for the outrageous gadgets they built, or knew how to manipulate the system and do a fix whenever one of them got into trouble. Another creator-coercer, Pete was probably the most skillful bulls.h.i.+t artist I have ever known. Women thought he was sensitive and adorable. He studied computer science at Dartmouth and took an MBA at the Amos Tuck School of Business Administration. Pete Dalembert might have become a hotshot executive just like his father if Marc had not convinced him early on to apply his talents elsewhere.

s.h.i.+geru Morita was born in j.a.pan and educated at Dartmouth, Johns Hopkins, and Cambridge. His metapsychic talents included grandmastercla.s.s redaction and creativity. He was a quiet, scholarly youth who grew up to be an outstanding biophysicist, and his hobbies included piano jazz and fly-tying. In person, s.h.i.+g was slyly witty, modest, and seemingly unaware that he was very good-looking. His area of professional interest was the microanatomy and electrochemical functioning of the human brain, and he shared Marc's and Alex's interest in cerebroenergetic enhancement.

It was s.h.i.+g Morita who eventually demonstrated how the infamous Mental Man project might progress from theory to practical application. Without his a.s.sistance, Marc would never have become the leader of the Rebellion, never brought about the deaths of four billion people, and never metamorphosed into my Family Ghost.

The CSS Skykomish River had a df of 180, which was a whole lot brisker than I liked, but by scarfing anodyne pills and lubricating myself with frequent coups de gnole in between hops I kept discomfort at bay. My well-basted condition had an additional advantage. When Marc's four buddies judged that I was safely hors de combat from overindulgence, they did not bother to screen me out when I happened to be in a position to overhear their telepathic bull sessions. The s.h.i.+p's swimming pool, solarium, gym, and garden-bar provided me with many a diverting hour's worth of entertainment as I pretended to nap with a Wild Turkey highball close at hand, all the while secretly eavesdropping on what the metapsychic Jeunesse Doree-including Marc himself-was getting up to. A lot of their conversations involved s.e.x, with Boom-Boom and Pete regaling their comrades with the number of notches added to the handles of their six-shooters, while s.h.i.+g and Alex stressed quality over quant.i.ty.

And then there was the s.e.x life of their glorious leader ...

At this period in his life, Marc was still fairly close to me, sharing accounts of his running battles with the Dartmouth trustees and his squabbles with Paul, who kept trying unsuccessfully to steer his oldest son into more politically acceptable areas of research and away from left-wing Dynasty members such as his Uncle Severin and Uncle Adrien.

But even though Marc kept me informed about his work, he was reticent about his private affairs. Far from being a loner, he attended parties, dances, and other social events regularly, often squiring lively females of high metapsychic quotient. As far as I knew, he had never had any deep romantic involvement with any of them, but I had naturally a.s.sumed that the invincible Franco hormones had done their stuff.

I a.s.sumed wrong.

My eavesdropping during that voyage revealed that Marc was still a technical virgin at the age of twenty-five and intended to remain so indefinitely. He had told his incredulous friends that he considered s.e.xual activity a monumental waste of time and energy that dulled the mind's keen edge.

I suppose I should not have been so surprised. I was a rather late bloomer myself, and Denis had told me years ago that he probably would have remained celibate if his eyes had not been opened to his "procreational duty" by an old mentor. s.e.x being the ultimate in addictive behavior, Denis had gone on to fulfill his obligations with zest, siring the seven stalwarts of the Dynasty and writing, together with his wife Lucille, a brief but cogent monograph on the s.e.xology of operants. (I was a bit disappointed not to be credited as the pioneer of doing it in midair.) Denis's most brilliant offspring, Paul, had also been s.e.xually inhibited until the grand-opera superstar Teresa Kendall ignited his pa.s.sion. When their love died, Paul seemed to compensate by f.u.c.king every presentable operant woman in sight until he settled into a stable liaison with Laura Tremblay. The fact that she was already married to an Irish magnate named Rory Muldowney, later the Planetary Dirigent of Hibernia, seemed not to bother either of them. Poor old Rory apparently bore his cuckoldry with old-fas.h.i.+oned complaisance. After Laura's strange death, Paul played the field again, ultimately siring thirty-eight natural children in addition to Marc, Marie, Madeleine, Luc, and Jack.

When Marc was very young he told me about his impatience with what he called "the inherent limitations of the human body." p.u.b.erty was a considerable shock, but he claimed that he had found ways to conquer the worst of the distractions inherent in being an inefficiently engineered male human.

I had tried to talk some sense into him, had told him that it was dangerous to mess with hormones and other precious bodily fluids, had even warned him that human nature was likely to nail him in the end no matter how successfully he thought he had repressed it. But he only gave me that maddening one-sided smile of his and suggested that I mind my own business and get my own ashes hauled whenever necessary. I knew all too well what his abhorrence of his father's promiscuity must have done to his unconscious mind, but I could not believe that he was genuinely as.e.xual.

When the right woman came around, I rea.s.sured myself, Marc would happily discover that he was human after all.

As it happened, the wrongest woman possible would shortly prove me mistaken, and Marc would have to wait seventeen more years for the redemptive love of the right one to cancel out the effects of the disaster.

Marc had described Orb to me and so had his sister Marie and his brother Luc. All three of them had served as pages and junior administrative a.s.sistants either for their father or for their Aunt Anne during their adolescence, earning poli-sci college credits as they performed what was basically prestigious dog-work during the weeks the Concilium was in session. The best kind of Orbicular fun was to be had after office hours, they told me, exploring or partic.i.p.ating in the recreational opportunities of the hundreds of residential enclaves of the planetoid where the six racial groups were housed in clever simulations of their home environments. There were thirty-two different human enclaves alone; and this session, for the first time, a Lylmik enclave would be open to visitors. We would also be able to attend some of the Concilium sessions-including the all-important seating of the new magnates and the appointment of the new Dirigents-watching the proceedings from the visitors' gallery.

Most of the operant pa.s.sengers on the CSS Skykomish River, myself included, crowded into the eight big observation lounges in order to catch a first eyeball glimpse of Orb and its unusual star, Telonis. Stupidly, I had decided to forgo the pills and the booze during this final pa.s.sage from hypers.p.a.ce into the vicinity of the artificial world so as not to miss anything. The abrupt zang-zung of the translation through the superficies felt like someone had hammered a couple of ninepenny nails through the top of my skull. Manfully, I refrained from howling out loud. Since my mind-screen is the only reliably powerful metafaculty I possess, I thought I could shriek all I pleased inside my head without making a spectacle of myself, but I must have shown some physical indication of distress perceptible to a keen redactor, because s.h.i.+g Morita put a solicitous hand on my shoulder.

"Are you all right, Uncle Rogi?"

The other three young men came over and hovered about me in the dimly lit observation chamber, looking anxious.

"Course I'm all right," I grumped. "Just a little twinge caught me by surprise there."

"At your age, you really should use anodyne pills," Alex Manion reproved me. "Or better yet, a knockout minidose for big hops like these."

The d.a.m.n kid had never forgiven me for boffing his mom. "I'm only a hundred and seventeen, and I've got the same immortality genes as the rest of the Remillards, and I'm doing just fine. Quit treating me like a basket case." Boom-Boom's bulk was blocking my view of the Telonis system so I shouldered past him, not wanting to miss what was said to be one of the scenic wonders of our galaxy.

But where was...o...b..and its star?

The sickmaking void of the gray limbo had given way to the usual jewel-strewn black velvet of deep s.p.a.ce, but there was no sun to be seen and no planetoid, either. I wasn't much of an interstellar traveler in those days but I'd already gone to the cosmop worlds of Avalon and Okanagon, the planet a.s.sawompsett (originally ethnic "American" but now grown so populous and important that it had been recently recla.s.sified cosmopolitan), the lovely "j.a.panese" world Ezo, and the inadvertently euonymous "French" planet of Blois. Like almost all of the worlds explored by Milieu scientists ages ago and designated suitable for human habitation, they were warmed by G-type yellow suns. I had known that Orb's sun Telonis was a peculiar dwarf, but nothing prepared me for the stellar object that Alex Manion now pointed out.

It seemed at first to be just another bright pinpoint star, presumably many lightyears distant. But as my eyes accommodated to the darkness and the window's polarization I saw that Telonis was golden, not pure white, and certainly close by, for I could perceive that its tiny disk was fringed by orange and red prominences that rippled with languid slowness, like the pseudopods of some fiery microorganism. A luminous double corona surrounded the dwarf sun. The inner halo was diminutive and pearl-colored, consisting of spiky rays at either pole that curved and eventually blended into a filmy donut-shaped gas cloud about the equatorial plane. More striking was an immense, very faint, almost perfectly spherical nebula that nearly filled the area of sky visible through the huge viewport. The glowing gas was mostly green, but there were dim filaments and diaphanous patches of crimson, violet, and blue as well. I can compare the vision only to a huge broken bubble of frozen, iridescent smoke with the ornately coiffured miniature sun at its center. The longer I stared at the stellar anomaly, the brighter and more beautiful it seemed.

"My G.o.d," s.h.i.+g Morita whispered. "What is it? Surely the Lylmik wouldn't have built their artificial world in a T Tauri system-"

"It's not a T Tauri," said Alex Manion. "It's been fairly stable for at least six million years. It's a conventional white dwarf star that the Lylmik meddled with. An artifact."

The others uttered awed obscenities. I, not having the least notion what s.h.i.+g and Alex had been talking about, asked the obvious question. "But why did the Lylmik do it? And how?"

"Apparently," Alex said, "they tinkered with this sun just to make it pretty. No one is sure how they managed it, not even the Krondaku, but Marc and I have been working on a theory that I won't bore you with now. Telonis itself is smaller than Earth. The radius of the outer sphere of nebulosity is roughly five hundred million kloms. Orb is the only planetary body in the system, another A.U. or so further out... and we're almost on top of it"

I strained my eyes-and sure enough, occulting the marvelous star-spangled colored veil near the bottom of the window was a fast-swelling circle of dead black. As we drew nearer it was transformed into the familiar dark sphere depicted in every schoolchild's first book-plaque about the Galactic Milieu. Concilium Orb is about 500 kilometers in diameter, spa.r.s.ely dotted with points of light. We swooped in smoothly toward one of them, which turned out to be the colossal entry portal of the Human Terminal. Our s.h.i.+p entered at a good rate of knots and we docked with a minimum of fuss and disembarked at the most important place in the Milky Way Galaxy.

Marc was waiting for us, wearing his old green Rangeley parka, jeans, and Bean boots, looking as sardonic and debonair as the Devil himself. Standing at his side was one of the most gorgeous women I have ever seen in my life. She was nearly as tall as Marc, with a marvelous long neck emphasized by her upswept hairstyle and scarlet polo jersey. Raven curls sprang like a dark fountain from an ornamental clasp at the crown of her head and fell nearly to her shoulders. The skin of her face was utterly flawless, the color of milk, making a startling contrast to jet-black brows and lashes and wide-set eyes of electrifying blue. A faint, charming dimple graced her chin, and her full lips were tinted a glossy coral pink. Her body in its simple black-and-white ski suit was that of a mannequin, willowy rather than voluptuous.

This exquisite creature projected no s.e.xually provocative vibes at all and her mind was hedged about by a grandmaster-cla.s.s s.h.i.+eld. Nevertheless I felt the hairs at the back of my neck p.r.i.c.kle and my blood pound as I goggled at her shamelessly, my three-piece set roused from torpor to a most embarra.s.sing bandaison. Tonnerre de dieu, but she was magnificent!

... But why was my understandable surge of l.u.s.tful admiration somehow tainted with aversion?

The G.o.ddess was having an effect upon my four young companions as well. You could almost smell the surging testosterone and hear the frantic slamming of mental barriers. Marc did not seem to notice as he presented us formally to her, and then introduced her to us.

"Citizen Lynelle Rogers is from Okanagon. She's a special a.s.sistant to that planet's Dirigent-Designate, and she has very kindly found time to help me out of a very tough spot. Be grateful to her."

The marvelous Lynelle lowered her dusky eyelids. "It's nothing at all, Marc. It would have been such a shame to disappoint your friends and your Uncle Rogi."

The five of us grinned like apes.

"Let's all get on the tube," Marc said, "and I'll explain as we ride. Your bags are being sent on ahead."

"This way," Citizen Rogers said sweetly. She and Marc led us onto the correct terminal walkway, and the conversation continued in colloquial farspeech.

Marc said: I ordered my accommodation here on Orb months ago, when I first received my nomination, and I specified the Alpenland enclave so we could all enjoy some winter sports when you came as my guests. Unfortunately, I got totally wrapped up in my CE work at Dartmouth because I wanted to have a working model of the E15 ready to bring with me to Orb. I left the finalization of the accommodation details to a departmental secretary-and he goofed. When I arrived here in Orb with Marie and Luc and Jack last week, I discovered that I'd been a.s.signed a chintzy little A-frame chalet that slept only one. And the billeting flunkies claimed there was no larger place available anywhere in Alpenland.

Lynelle Rogers said: This Concilium session marks the Fiftieth Anniversary of the Great Intervention on Earth. Over a hundred new human magnates have just been appointed. Most of them have brought along numbers of invited guests as well as operant staff members. The result is that facilities in the human enclaves are strained to the bursting point.

Marc's mind-tone was wry: We can blame Lylmik absent-mindedness for not antic.i.p.ating a crush. They've promised to triple the amount of human-enclave accommodation by next session-but that's no help now. I cast around among the other family members and got my three sibs beds in Papa's big apartment, but only Uncle Phil and Aunt Aurelie had any extra room for you. Somehow, I didn't think you'd appreciate bunking with their teenage kids over in Paliuli.

Lynelle flashed a radiant smile over her shoulder as we got off the moving walkway and went into the tube station. She said: Paliuli enclave is ever so twee if you like sunny tropical beaches jammed with boogie-boarding children. And slack-key guitar music coming out of the hibiscus bushes. And hordes of middle-aged Russian magnates sitting under coconut trees sipping Mai-Tais and banana daiquiris.

There was nervous laughter from the lot of us and once again I experienced that peculiar frisson. What was it about her that made her seem simultaneously desirable and menacing? Her beauty was unusual, but she had nothing of the cla.s.sic femme fatale about her; her manner was friendly, intelligent, almost modest for all that she was obviously an operant of the highest rank.

I dismissed my uneasiness as we entered an inertialess tube capsule. We were the only ones aboard and I had failed to note its posted destination. There was no sensation of speed as the windowless thing whizzed through Orb's guts. We relaxed in the comfortable seats and were able to indulge in verbal conversation again.

"I promised you some fun in the snow," Marc said, "and Paliuli didn't fill the bill. Of course I could have booked you into one of the big hotels in the central core, but they're so bland and cosmop that you might as well be in Boston. I'd just about resigned myself to building a large igloo in the front yard of my A-frame when I happened to meet Lynelle at a bash Davy MacGregor threw. She made a suggestion that solved our problem in the best way possible-as you'll see in just a minute or two."

And the pair of them exchanged glances.

I said to myself: Qu'est-ce que c'est que ce bordel?! Which may be roughly translated: What the f.u.c.k?

Not a single thought had escaped from behind either of their invincible mind-screens. I'm sure no one else noticed a thing. s.h.i.+g Morita was asking Marc some d.a.m.n fool technical question about Orb's weird sun, and Marc was answering with breezy aplomb.

Had I imagined that nanosec flash of mutual affinity between my cerebral great-grandnephew and the enigmatic smasher?

Before I could ruminate further on the topic a bell tone sounded, the door of the inertialess capsule opened, and Lynelle Rogers said, "Here we are, everybody!"

We emerged into another tube-station waiting room and were nearly blinded by the sudden razzle-dazzle. A silver-gilt sign on the wall gave the name of the place in ideographs and in more familiar Roman script: BIRITON ENCLAVE-AMALGAM OF POLTROY.

Boom-Boom Laroche looked around and said, "Holy flaming s.h.i.+t!"

s.h.i.+g Morita giggled.

Pete Dalembert murmured, "Welcome to the Arabian Nights!"

Alex Manion said, "Compared to Poltroyan homes, this is drab." He'd studied on the Poltroyan planet of Fomiron-su-Piton.

Even if one has had some experience with this charming race's mode of accommodation through Tri-D presentations or books, the first view of actual Poltroyal glitz is apt to bring on terminal flabbergast-to say nothing of scorched retinas.

Imagine a quaint little old nineteenth-century railway depot ... with a decor that blends Black-Forest-Disneyland kitsch with the dizzying jewelry-box extravagance of a Balinese temple. Imagine intricately carved woodwork picked out with gold and silver leaf, rafters tarted up with finicky curlicues and gem-encrusted gargoyles, gilt-leaded stained-gla.s.s windows, an unbelievably lovely ceramic stove glowing like a great plique-a-jour lantern, golden filigree benches with red leather cus.h.i.+ons set cosily near the source of heat, and an honest-to-G.o.d Chinese cloisonne floor. The Purple Folk love human fripperies. Everything from doork.n.o.bs to teleview cubicles in the tube station had been floridly embellished with las.h.i.+ngs of colored enamel doodads, precious sequins, inset tiny mirrors, and faceted gla.s.s rondelles. Glitter, s.h.i.+mmer, sparkle, blaze, flash-time out to reset the fuses. That's Poltroy, citizens! After a while you even get to like it.