Some of the Lady’s Roseate Liqueur
Visiting partners across the many planets demands a clear head and an insensitive nose.
/ Descent
Sorkaii watched the sea of slums below, lapping the islands of impossibly lofty spires where the Purebred dwelt, separated by force barriers from the toiling masses whose compliance was maintained by labyrinthine mandates and armed automatons.
The waning light and the distant viewpoint aboard his flier could have painted an almost picturesque setting were it not for the foul odour in the twilight breeze emanating from the city as a whole and from the clusters of burning refuse heaps in particular.
The man from Outreach sighed. He had journeyed across half a galactic arm to this second moon of the uninhabited high-gravity planet that dominated the horizon.
And though he had visited much tawdrier vistas and locales than Helmsman’s Folly, as this metropolitan sprawl on the cusp of violent revolution was named, few celestial bodies with a breathable atmosphere had smelt worse.
/ The Lady and the Lesser
I land my flier on a raised oval dais inside the force barrier at the foot of the highest residential spire, and a metallic door slides open on the dreary-grey concrete wall of the building. A bronze-coloured hominoid with a translucent bubble extending upwards from its head beckons me to join it in the revealed interior of an elevator.
In the minutes of the ascend, I study the automaton from the corner of my eye, especially the faint shifting curls of evanescence in its ultra-cranium. However, I can only speculate that the latter contributes to its intellectual potentialities, as it is studiously quiet, seemingly ignoring my presence.
A vague tang of machine oil highlights the pretentiousness of the scent of a Nordic sea beach with a dense pine thicket seeping from the ceiling grilling. It disturbs me more than the raw olfactory emanations of Helmsman’s Folly I had experienced while dropping toward this city of extremes.
The chamber we enter is obviously at the very top of the pinnacle structure, and the overhead dome displays puffs of cloud indifferently gliding by.
The artefact walks to a grand table in the centre and positions itself arear a seated man and a woman, both swathed in long ivory robes. The man’s face is fully hidden behind his pale mask, while the raven-haired female seems content with concealing only the lower half of her visage.
The male speaks out in a surprisingly high register, inconsistent with the size of his frame, and chatters like the mythical magpie of Terra.
He notes that they received my credentials, studied them and perused my draft of the trading agreement. After the customary voting of the quarter million Purebred through their brain-implanted communicons, the 23 per cent that turned out overwhelmingly rejected any covenant with the merchants’ alliance I represented.
I was to depart their moon in four standard days on a commercial vessel, while my starship would be appropriated to cover the costs of balloting. Failure to evacuate would trigger immediate sanctioning by live skinning.
The man rises, and the mechanoid’s topmost transparency erupts in a snowstorm of hues. Whether or not they suspect that I represent a quite more ominous organisation than a mercantile cooperative is now a moot point.
I curse our Pre-ops Department while thinking the orders to my cloaked realship, not to the decoy I left at their spaceport.
“Distinguished hosts,” I proclaim, pointing out through one of the arched windows, ”would you kindly affix your gaze on the snow-covered peak yonder and count to ten?”
All the three heads of them turn, but I know better and close my eyes as the temporal tallying reaches its end. The white flash of an antimatter missile removing a mountaintop almost overcomes the polarisation protection of their panes.
The woman looks back at me with wide irises, the contempt forgotten. She raises her hand to the castrato beside her as he tries to squeak. She breaks the silence for the first time, her voice husky and promising yet overlaid with unaccustomed panic.
“Please, Esteemed Emissary, let us discourse.”
The bronze golem places goblets and a flask of roseate liqueur on the table.
The story above was first published on X (Twitter) and is © 2024 by David Pahor. No part of my stories should be used to train AI technology to generate text, imitating my writing style.
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