Part Praesep Dand
Teniec/Safni/Iskurahi
- 1.3E10

The Hilashel

        The Eonmern now has available a simultaneous translator device which allows people from different Worlds or different lingual backgrounds on the same World to communicate verbally with each other. This `Hilashel' takes the form of a flexible tubular insert individually molded to the shape of a person's ear canal. Nothing is visible externally apart from a visually unobtrusive tab which allows its easy removal.

        Hilashels operate in the following way. Each unit contains the language of its owner; lexicons, rules of grammar, pronunciation, even colloquialisms, in the form of a translation table between it and Jemma. When two or more people come into sufficiently close proximity, their hilashels automatically read and store each other's translation tables via Jemma in a short burst of low-power wireless transmission. Simultaneous translation of any spoken statement can then proceed via the microphone and speaker each Hilashel contains. The translation will be presented in aural tones sufficiently different from those of the speaker to allow a listener to follow it simultaneously with little risk of error. A little practice may however be necessary for first time users of the device.

        Hilashels do however have limitations. Firstly, a listener using a Hilashel is unlikely to be able to translate the facial expressions of a speaker from another world. The listener can only do so through previous study of those typical of the speaker's Home World via the Teklanmeh, or if he obtains the speaker's permission to allow their simultaneous translation via an Otinda. Neither of these methods however can guarantee that a listener will be able to detect deliberate lies or misrepresentations.

        A second limitation relates to intonation. In many languages this can be the only means of determining which meaning of a word is intended if it should possess several. Hilashels will automatically take such vocal inflections into account when translating such words. Intonation can also indicate where the meanings of entire statements differ from those they superficially proclaim. Hilashels can only translate these into a brief passage of music derived from that of a listener's culture that reflects the expressed mood. With practice, most people will become able to distinguish underlying emotions from simple anger to subtle ones such as wryness or disquiet.

        A third limitation of Hilashels is that most cultures contain concepts that are wholly or partly untranslatable into those of others. Scientific concepts are usually easily translatable since most cultures develop them convergently; `gravitation', `space' or `time' for instance. Dimensional units of these phenomena however are less easy to translate. While the time or distance units of one world or culture can be translated exactly into those of another, this will seldom be appropriate in anything other than a purely scientific context. In non-scientific instances, quantities in one language will be translated into the nearest whole units of the other unless a statement contains words such as `exactly' or `precisely'. Colloquialisms will be translated into those of the other language if both are within the degree of approximation implied by the colloquialisms themselves.

        Concepts that are more culture-specific are correspondingly less easy to translate. Most Cultures undergo `Information Ages', `Industrial Ages', or `Religious Ages', and these can be translated as such. The infinitude of variants on these themes however, especially with regard to nomenclature, are most unlikely to be translatable. This is especially the case with economic and political systems, Socialism and Capitalism for example. Most worlds in reality develop political systems that are some mixture or another of these polar opposites.

        Where a word or concept cannot be translated, a Hilashel will indicate this with a simple chime or other aural indicator of a person's choice. If it can translate a word only approximately, its translation will be accompanied by a similar indicator. These indicators, like many of the Hilashel's user controls, can be altered by vocal command. Training in the operation of these controls and in the use of the Hilashel in general (Hilashels can also be used as `aural Otindas' to access the Teklanmeh, for instance) will be given when the device is issued to a person for the first time.

        Hilashels can be used as a source of entertainment as well as language translators. They can receive audio transmissions from any source as vocally commanded by the user; two hilashels will however be required for stereo reception. Since some forms of aural entertainment can be addictive to some persons, Hilashels can, like many of the devices issued by the Iskurahi for personal use, carry the risk of inducing addictive behavior. Behavioral training to reduce the risk of this occurring is therefore recommended for very young people who are to be issued with Hilashels. Hilashels are also able to detect their own overuse in this respect, and will notify the branch of the Iskurahi who issued the device so that it can determine if some form of intervention is necessary.

        One might ask which is the better form of cross-language speech capability for a person to acquire, a Hilashel or Aural Jemma? Aural Jemma is the human speech version of the universal `electronic' language with which all sentient machines created by the Torsyne communicate with each other. Hilashels are efficient, effective and reliable, but no lingual prosthesis can completely substitute for a language understood in common by all who seek to converse. Aural Jemma however has the disadvantage that it takes a significant portion of a person's lifetime to learn a usefully large amount of the language. It has a very large lexicon compared to most Worlds' languages, its structure differs substantially from many, its written version must also be learnt, and a person must learn the standard pronunciation, set of facial expressions, and body language as far as he or she is physiologically able. It is therefore best learned as a compulsory part of an educational curriculum for young people.

        The Iskurahi has observed that few of the worlds they Contact are in possession of a worldwide common language. Aural Jemma offers all such worlds a second chance to review this situation. People who speak Aural Jemma are more likely to feel freer to travel widely throughout the Universe compared to those restricted to Hilashels. This in turn suggests a greater benefit both to themselves and their societies.
 

Raoul Porline
England/Earth
+ 2016

Should We Sign Up?

        The Iskurahi have, as a part of its Contact Information Campaign, invited vast numbers of people from a variety of professions to make a random tour of the Human Universe so that we can see how the organization operates. These people include all sorts of `opinion leaders', from politicians and diplomats to the better-known science fiction writers, from top surgeons to policemen and soldiers. I was one of several science journalists lucky enough to have been included.

        Although I have now visited several such Worlds over the last two weeks, this can never be more than the tiniest sampling from around ten trillion, the actual figure can vary by two orders or magnitude as Worlds Contact and Close Out. And that only includes the Human Worlds, there are 9326 Alien Universes, most of which contain comparable numbers of Worlds to our Human Universe (and what these are like will have to be another story).

        The Byzantine-sounding name of the Iskurahi, like the names of all else that is now so new under our sun, is in fact a semi-randomly generated word assigned to the organization from the `language of all machines', Jemma, created by the Torsyne themselves. Some people on Earth quite naturally suppose the Iskurahi is some vast intergalactic version of Earth's United Nations, but this is not entirely the case. In a Universe where all a people's needs can be supplied by automated factories presumed to be located somewhere in Deep Space, there is no need for large-scale political systems such as alliances, federations, unions, or indeed economic systems. However a newly-Contacted world is not expected to abandon these things overnight. A Contact Team's initial goal in fact is to try and preserve most of them so that they can eventually become integrated into the Iskurahi's various Divisions; our medical professions into the Diursuel for instance, and police and rescue services into the Adjoahsno. All this is expected to happen over our assigned `Transition' period to Emergence, when our Contact is considered complete. Transition is defined, perhaps a little bloodlessly, as the time it takes the dominant species on a World to replace itself, in other words a generation, and the Iskurahi has already accepted the U.N's figure of twenty-five years. As it was explained to me, children can then grow up with the new situation and help their parents adapt to it. From what I saw on my visits, this does appear to be the best way to ensure our cultural, social and religious needs continue to be met with the minimum of disruption. Problems usually only arise where rigid belief systems clash with what the rest of a world comes to accept as the new, final, version of Reality.

        Perhaps I can best arrive at the question of whether we should Sign Up or not by first looking at the Iskurahi's various Divisions one by one:

        ADJOAHSNO: This embraces assistance services of the kind we are already familiar with such as police, fire, and land-sea-air rescue. It initially consists of the personnel a world already has when it Contacts, working in consultation with people who have managed such services on older Emerged Worlds. This allows the introduction to the obviously quite different equipment the Adjoahsno provides and the procedures found useful over billenia (even now that word sounds weird in such a familiar context, but I guess we'll get used to it). With some services, many of the people on the ground are gradually displaced by Tinsla. This is especially the case with dangerous services, fire fighting for example. Although many structures can be made fire-resistant, things like large areas of natural bush cannot be. The Adjoahsno uses extinguishers that look like fire hose nozzles; these contain their own Nessiks through which an endless supply of foam is passed. The foam is special too, it evaporates and decomposes into harmless nitrogen a few seconds after it has done its work. A bush fire can be swarmed over by hundreds of these flying ersatz firemen and put out in minutes. People in this service are retained mostly to provide the human touch, comfort any people injured in the initial outbreak of a fire, and aid all those who suffer other losses.

        DIURSUEL: This is organized and operates in essentially the same way as the Adjoahsno. An injured or ill person can call a doctor through an Hilashel or an Otinda, or even by simple shouting, this will usually work for rather unnerving reasons I'll come back to shortly. The doctor can treat a person on the spot with an extraordinary array of miniaturized equipment in his `black bag', or can fold out a portable Nessik to move a person into a Diursuel Facility - hospital - for treatment. That sounds reassuringly nice and normal except that the doctor might drop the Nessik over the patient rather than attempt to manhandle him through it, and the `hospital' might for all we know be uncountable light-years away in another galaxy.

        The Diursuel also carries out much research not only into medical matters, but into the broader aspects of science, which may include just about anything. It works closely here with the below-mentioned Ghelfina.

        LALLELDIL: This Division looks after those people diagnosed through the Diursuel or the Cahoctor as having mental, emotional, or social disorders. The Division operates quite differently from anything we are used to, so I can't say too much in just a few lines. In essence, most people, those with temporary psychiatric conditions, brought about through stress or grief for example, can usually be cured  within mere days using direct sensory experience transferred directly into their brain, something like living in a movie rather than just watching one. Those with more deep-rooted conditions are sent to Lalleldil Communities, some with entire worlds to themselves, that specialize in looking after such people according to their condition. People with severe conditions must be cured within eighteen weeks otherwise they are euthanased; those who are adjudged criminally insane (by the below-mentioned Cahocor) are euthanased immediately.

        Needless to say, most of Earth's psychiatrists may have difficulties adapting to these `therapies', such as they are. I suspect this will be one professional area which will require the careful introduction of Lalleldil personnel right from the start.

        GHELFINA: This is perhaps the least obtrusive of the Iskurahi's divisions since Education is almost entirely left to a world's existing authorities. This is because a World's history and cultures are likely to be of interest only to that World's people. Science on the other hand is universal, but obviously after umpteen billion years, there is rather a lot of it. The Ghelfina's role here is mostly therefore to introduce a World's educational authorities to its science curriculum and consult with them about how it may be taught in their institutions. Nothing is compulsory incidentally, even the language of Aural Jemma which they also handle and which would also no doubt be useful for everybody to learn. I would imagine though that the usual people will still accuse the Ghelfina of cultural imperialism.

        Since education need no longer serve as a meal-ticket in this Universe, it now not only becomes important for its own sake (as the purists have always told us) but for leisure and the finding of `meaningful' pursuits in life. The Lalleldil can provide a person with a Personality Assessment on request which is apparently fairly useful. This can not only be used to determine what kind of education a person may be best suited to, but the specialist training required for one or other of the various Divisions.   If successfully completed, your name then goes onto a `Preferred List' maintained in the Teklanmeh. You then wait until an Iskurahi Division matches your capabilities to whatever Assignment becomes available - for what could well be the rest of your life. I guess that in a Universe in which everybody is Idle Rich, the only worthwhile cure for boredom the Idle Rich has ever invented anywhere, helping others, has long superseded social trinkets as a precious commodity. The Prefered List is therefore a very, very long one.

        EONMERN: This Division works rather like a Military Supply Corps except that it manufactures everything itself in automated factories believed to lie in deep interstellar space. Small items can be delivered through the Doanadar, little more than a microwave oven-like box with a Nessik in the back, though variants will apparently `be made available'. Larger items are delivered `personally' by a Tinsla through the nearest Nessik, very large ones by arrangement. Placing one's orders can be done through Hilashels, Otindas, or Tinsla. Most Eonmern items regulate their own use to prevent waste, damage, or injury, those powerful battery-like Lotsus for instance cannot be short-circuited.

        Like the Adjoahsno, the Eonmern requires close cooperation between people and Tinsla soon after Contact, something the actual people involved might find hard to get used to. All Earth-specific items for which a demand is expected to continue, from food items to favorite toys, continue to be made on Earth in our factories in the normal way until the human workers are, if they so choose, displaced by Tinsla. These are trained just as if they were ordinary human beings. Once all the intricate manufacturing details are learnt, manufacture can then be transferred off-world and the Earth factory shut down, dismantled and, believe it or not, its bits recycled. Even with its infinite resources, the Iskurahi abhors waste (perhaps that's just as well, who needs to live in a Universe full of junk?).

        TOUZIEL: The Touziel has nothing to do with Contacted Worlds at all except when they - or any other world in fact - destroys itself through thermonuclear war or some other means, bacteria for instance (and the Teklanmeh contains more horror stories here than you can imagine). The Touziel resettles any survivors onto a Holding World which is basically a planet-size holiday resort, then sets about renewing their old world using some pretty spectacular technology to allow their return.

        The bad news here is that only survivors who are healthy or whose health can be restored are accommodated in this way. All others, those with irreversible radiation poisoning for instance, are euthanased.

        ISKURAHI: You would think of the Ishkurahi more as the central `glue' that binds all the various Divisions together, but in a way it operates as a Division itself. For it is they who determine if a world is ready for Contact. It sends in agents to gather as much information as possible, then trains and prepares Contact Teams for the actual Contact itself and the Transition and Emergence that follow. It also prepares the ground for the other Divisions to make their `contact' with the world's relevant authorities. In our case that actually began with the United Nations who, incredibly, have actually been prepared for the possibility of `alien contact' for decades. 

        Along with the Ghelfina, the Iskurhi then begins the process of educating a world in the ways of a Universe it probably never could have imagined. Strangely enough they don't use people as much as you might expect but, where possible, Tinsla. You might say that the Tinsla are like the human-like robots we might have finished up making ourselves one day, with consciousness and intelligence rivalling our own. In their case however they behave more like the professional servants and concierges of a world long gone. In fact the ones I've encountered so far remind me of the nice solid middle-aged technician who used to fix all my electronic gear for me. So what better way than for them to show us how to adapt to the new technology of our new Universe? For instance, most people dream of taking wing when they're kids (I never actually stopped...), so now we can, with the aid of a Pasovir. Learning to fly under Tinsla tutelage gives you the incentive to learn to like them, though since theirs are built in, it can be a little unnerving to see one flying alongside you with no visible means of support.

        The Iskurahi draws the human personnel it does recruit mostly from a New World's politicians, business and scientific leaders. With no economic matters to concern themselves with, governments find that most of their functions disappear. Death may still be certain (life is not prolonged, incidentally), but not taxes, they die a very sudden death. The only significant matters that remain are of `social infrastructure', like law, immigration, international politics, and of course, elections, democratic or otherwise. What usually happens is that all political parties try to adapt their policies to the new situation with the Guidance and Advice (which has caused a few snide remarks from my colleagues) of the Iskurahi. All other administrative procedures continue in the meantime until they too can adapt. In this way a country's political system can gradually become integrated with the Iskurahi in the most painless possible way.

        The Iskurahi also performs another vital function. In a reality in which economic forces can provide none, the incentive to acquire an education or a satisfying way of life has to be inculcated by other means. People who achieve things considered by the Iskurahi to be of value to others find themselves offered entry to special Worlds not accessible to ordinary people, worlds so beautiful but so delicate perhaps that they cannot tolerate more than a few thousand visitors at a time. Or they may find themselves welcomed into communities that specialize in giving such achievers a good time.

        By far the most welcome reward however is being placed on the Preferred List for a Position as I mentioned earlier, or a more temporary Assignment. If a person can demonstrate a `Particular Talent' as they call it, then whatever their educational background may be, he or she can look forward to a Position or of receiving periodic Assignments for the rest of their lives. Such people are often nominated by popular vote within those Divisions, and are usually highly regarded by all.

        Call it the Iskurahi equivalent of the New Year's Honours List if you must. 

        But if they fail in their set task for some reason, a Cahoctor Inquiry will be held. If found `innocent', because external events moved in directions that could not be reasonably expected for instance, the person will suffer no penalty. More often however, some responibility will be attached, and while again there may be no direct penalty, such people may be less likely to be given another Assignment. For many, even that possibility is a fate worse than death, indeed more than a few subsequently elect exactly that. Which raises an issue which will disturb many, especially the religious: Life is entirely voluntary in the Torsyne Universe, anybody who has lived longer than a generational time span (i.e. 25 years in our case) can simply ask a Nessik to allow him or her to step into a Terminal World. After several minutes you pass away, pleasantly, painlessly, quietly. Now you would at least think that this `Voluntary Life', as it's called, would be under Lalleldil control so that you would have to accept counseling first. But not at all. I have to say that I found that aspect on its own somewhat disconcerting, so I asked somebody from the Lalleldil about it as soon as I could. She said that worlds that develop counseled euthanasia on their own prior to their Contact have just as many issues with it as those who don't. The most popular theory in theTeklanmeh though is that it is basically another Torsyne Population Control measure since the Nessiks, though monitored by the Iskurahi, operate solely according to Torsyne policy.

        CAHOCTOR: If the Iskurahi dishes out the carrots, the Cahoctor wields the stick. It is the Iskurahi's judicial system, or `Division of Regrettable Necessities' as one of my colleagues so eloquently put it. Again a World's judicial systems carry on as before, only now in most cases the evidence against an accused is almost always so overwhelming that an Earth-style jury trial now proceeds much as a Cahoctor one would anyway. As I said before, if anyone is in distress, all they need do is shout. That is because once a World Signs Up, it is from then on constantly monitored everywhere, both aurally and visually by all manner of devices that can be hidden anywhere (or this is what they say, I would think all worlds are monitored long before that). Tinsla can also see, hear and record.  In short, the Cahoctor is a police force, a `special intelligence' unit , a court, and a `department of corrections' (pardon the euphemism) all rolled into one.

    Shades of 1984, you might think. Yet there is no evidence that the system is used for any other purpose than rescue or crime deterrence and detection when it does occur. Apart perhaps from the Torsyne, who could use it to their own ends? This means Cahoctor trials are seldom held to determine guilt, for this is usually a matter of record. Their function (and that of the police component of the Adjoahsno, mostly human rather than Tinsla) is to establish whether the guilty party is sane or not. For this reason, jury trials are usually abandoned after a few years so that, by the time of Emergence a court is made up of just four people, a judge, a Prosecutor, a Defender, and the Defendant. They can all call witnesses, and all have access to a special section of the Teklanmeh which, as we'll see in a moment, operates as a precedent-based expert system.

        If a Defendant is found guilty but is adjudged not sane, he goes into a Lalleldil Community. If he is declared sane, he goes into a prison system called `Holliswald' (another story I'll have to leave to some other time). The first conviction brings a short sharp stay in the Holliswald system of anything from a day to a week. A second conviction brings four to eighteen weeks, a third brings eighteen weeks then execution via euthanasia in a Terminal Cell.

        But there's more. Certain crimes do not even go to the Cahoctor at all but are dealt with on the spot by Stromlos, and when I say `dealt with', I mean the miscreant is executed there and then. Once you have a Stromlo after you that's absolutely it. There's no negotiation. The crimes dealt with in this way are hard narcotics distribution, slavery, and those crimes involving bargaining with people's lives such as kidnapping and terrorism. We mightn't like it, but that's the price we have to pay for the new technology otherwise criminals can use its immense power to their own ends, then vanish onto any one of ten trillion Human Worlds. Needless to say crime of any kind in the New Universe is rare, and the only time most people will ever see a Stromlo is when they look one up in the Teklanmeh. Not something I'd recommend.

        If the Stromlos aren't controlled by the Cahoctor, then who does control them? The best guess (that is, the one with the highest number of votes in the Teklanmeh) is that they are controlled solely by the way the Torsyne themselves structured their consciousness and intelligence. Other parts of the Universe are controlled in the same `intelligently automated' way. Nessiks for instance won't allow people off their Home World who have fathered more than three children, though they may do so with certain restrictions during Transition. With infinite resources, populations could also become infinite. These Population Control measures (along with Non-prolongation and Voluntary Life) mean that the average World loses between 10 and 15 percent of its population during its average lifetime.

        Such `automation' may also answer the question of why Emerged Worlds only last on average 256 years, but the Iskurahi and its various Divisions apparently go on forever. Another answer may lie in the Teklanmeh, for it is even cleverer than it appears. Most people think of it as some sort of infinite Universe-spanning Internet (with which our `local'  much-beloved Internet is already beginning to merge). But it is also a gigantic semi-conscious expert system that is able to deal with all possible kinds of information. In this role it can even act as a sort of counselor that allows people to ask questions of the deepest nature such as `what is the nature of reality'. They will then receive a set of answers voted as the eight `most plausible' down through the billenia and be encouraged to research them in greater detail. (Yes, I have, I have...)

        But it can do even more; it can itself consult any person it `wishes' to on any matter. After ten billion years it must have built up a staggering amount of information this way, which suggests it must not only have immense `wisdom' (if I can use that word), but sufficient even to advise and guide the Iskurahi itself. It must therefore be an artificial consciousness, as well as an artificial intelligence, comparable in capability to the Torsyne themselves. And that of course begs a certain question: is it the closest contact we have with the Torsyne and they with us? As one of my colleagues whom I was discussing all this with said, `those incredibly ancient guys make you feel they come from beyond the grave'.

        There could be a risk therefore that people might come to view the Teklanmeh in a paranoid way, perhaps accuse it of recording all the requests one ever makes of it, or of being able to act as a lie detector by detecting changes in a person's skin (some have made similar such dumb accusations against Google). But let's face it, if you want to get all paranoid in this weird new Universe there are any number of ways you can go. As I've said, walls, trees, flowers, anything else you might imagine could have eyes and noses as well as ears. But then as that lady who made that eloquent comment about the Cahoctor suggested, `mightn't it actually be worse if we weren't being watched, for that would mean there's nothing we humans can do that is worth watching'.

        Indeed, when people on Earth begin to realize just what becoming a part of the new Universe means, many will naturally say no. Although 1984 is long gone, George Orwell's book of the same name lives on in the bedrock of European cultural memory.  Civil Rights people are going to expire of apoplexy (though how many of them did something to stop the ever-growing menace of illicit drugs). Yet what would happen if the Earth - or some major part of it - did decide to reject Contact? How could we go on, knowing there was nowhere to turn but inwards? No frontiers for any of our people to explore since we will never be allowed to build interstellar spacecraft? Or Nessiks (if we could ever figure out the technology), since they too are Not Allowed. A world or a nation might devote its time to tidying itself up, curing it's ills, righting its social injustices, Making Things Perfect if that is possible, but what then? What is life without the company of others?

        And then there are the religious fundamentalists, who are going to have a real problem adjusting to the new godless reality. The Iskurahi have no religious division. I would assume though their Contact team would be somewhat experienced in managing such issues since most worlds evolve religions of one sort or another. They are going to find our lot, the Muslim and Christian Fundamentalists especially, a real challenge though. If these people can believe so implacably in `creationism' and `intelligent design',  a Torsyne godhead is going to be completely beyond them.

        But then if we do Sign Up and join all the other Worlds in a Universe Nation, would we come to wonder, as so many people from other Worlds apparently do, what difference it ultimately makes? Would we too come to feel that all the agonies and joys of thousands of years of civilizations rising and falling only adds up in the end to a half-life of 256 years of mayfly joy? For that is, as I say, how long the average Emerged World lasts before it degenerates into savagery and the Iskurahi `Closes it Out', as it so delicately puts it, by removing all its Nessiks and other advanced technology. Is it really surprising that one in every ten Worlds turns and revolts against a choice that is really no choice since we finish up the same way anyway?

        Whichever way we decide to go, there is one thing we must realize with absolute certainty, and that is that we are all ultimately under the control of the Torsyne, whether we like it or not, and probably right through to the end of time. Rebellion simply isn't possible; I understand all sorts of ingenious schemes have been tried ever since their Advent.

        And if there is one thing I must do (along with the now hundreds of other Things I Must Do) is study the history of this fascinating `new' Universe in detail and find out how it all really got started. How the Torsyne came into being and brought us all to this. 

       So, for those of you who like scales: If distopia is 0 and uptopia 10, then maybe we are looking at a 6 here, perhaps even 6.5 if Contact turns out to be a better solution to global warming than nuclear power. Or a final end to the interminable financial crisis we are still stuck in. We'll see.

        To end on a brighter note, I have been able to uncover the real story behind our own initial Contact. Some of you may remember that a year ago - if one can remember anything that far back after this past year's events - that a remarkable ten year-old Austrian girl named Heidi Coates wrote a letter to NASA. In it she asked `if extraterrestrial beings wanted to leave a present for us, wouldn't they leave it at one or other of the Moon's Poles since they are easily located, the logical place to look, and do not shift over geological time?' NASA responded by announcing that the upcoming `Return to the Moon' expedition would be diverted to the South Lunar Pole, but unfortunately the United States Congress responded to that by cutting NASA's budget allocation so that it had to defer the Return yet again. As I understand it, a Tinsla would have been waiting at the South Pole - or the North if NASA had decided to go there instead. Iskurahi finds a little spectacle doesn't go amiss when it first Contacts a world. In the event it had to rely on the `emergency standby' of simply having that same Tinsla present herself to a doctor in New York with the now-famous words "Please, I have a pain in my chest." On that day, the 13th of August, 2015, the U.S. Medical Establishment did the rest.

        One question I would quite like an answer to though: could somebody else have left something for us at either of the Moon's Poles? Might go and have a look myself one day, as soon as I 've mastered the art of flying in Space. 
 

Iacotus Mafan Enuiti
Hocatof/Balnek
+ 2021

Solciessa Today

        Solciessa is one of those very few worlds that manage to hold out against the odds and reach the far end of the two hundred and fifty six year half-life Normal Curve of humanity. Only one World in nine hundred survives more than two thousand years beyond Contact, as Solciessa has.

        This long life however has come at a stiff price. Contact did not come for Solciessa until ten years after its people found their way into their Unknown Region of Space. During the last four of those years they became involved in a war with six other worlds in its celestial neighborhood that was even more vicious, if such a thing is possible, than the Sumal Wars themselves. Only two hundred thousand of their number survived, and in memory of those they have lost they have not allowed the size of their population to vary from this figure over the entire two thousand year period since.

        Most of the Solciesse live in six completely windowless pyramidal buildings some 100 meters high. These `Neselat', as they call them, have narrow stairways reaching to their summits cut into the middle of their four faces. But the inhabitants may well have forgotten that fact, for they have never stepped outside their Neselat in their own living memory. Nor do they receive more than a very few visitors into them, they only do so if a visitor's Lalleldil Psychological Profiles show him or her to be very timid, something which guarantee that very few will apply. I have to say that I come within that category, but I also badly wanted to meet the Solciesse. Theirs was the most mysterious world in the Human Mansion I had ever come across in the Teklanmeh.

        In appearance, the Solciesse resemble humans from tropical climes of many worlds in that they are of small stature, slender, and brown skinned with dark brown eyes and hair. Their manner however is of that `stiff' variety that goes with unusually complex and rigid sets of social rituals and inhibitions. They conduct their diplomatically negotiated lives in huge dimly lit rooms of a splendor even the most ornately religious of societies would find hard to outdo, yet they have absolutely no religion at all. Perhaps the best clue to their nature is revealed by the fact that none of the richly colored tapestries covering every square meter of their walls portray anything of the extraordinary World outside of their Neselat. Screaming windblown deserts or fetid rotting swamps might be out there for all they know. But all they apparently want to see are those tapestries, every one of which takes the form of a historical tableau featuring their immense and graceful four legged riding animals around which their society once centered. It is as if all that followed the extinction of these animals, which occurred as a result of those deadly interplanetary wars, had never happened.

        And nor are children to be seen anywhere. But then it is not hard to imagine that the Solciesse reproduce themselves by some carefully impersonal means I was completely unable to discover.

        There are a few screaming deserts and fetid swamps on Solciessa of course, but it is predominantly made up of forests, grasslands, mountains, and river deltas like most other human Worlds. Here too these are looked after by Solciessa's `other citizens', its Tinsla, but on this world their numbers exceed its human population by at least ten to one. They also run the factories in the Industrial Parks. These produce all manner of `souvenir' products from prehistoric counting frames to jewelry made exclusively of zircons and platinum which, because of the uniqueness of their design, achieve the status of handcrafts. They are not available through the Teklanmeh in the normal way however, they are only given to those who visit Solciessa in person.

        And visitors there are. For although the Neselat may be bereft of them, the planet itself is not. It might well have become one of the most popular Worlds in the Universe if numbers weren't limited to those being Rewarded for service to the Iskurahi as I also most fortunately had been. They come to experience the huge collection of archaic vehicles the Solciesse produced prior to their Contact, most quite bizarre even in this Universe. But most important, anybody who wishes can operate them. Everything imaginable is represented here, from ancient biplanes to submarines capable of negotiating the deepest of ocean trenches, from big old V12 petrol-driven groundcars to helium and hot-air balloons. One can even take a trip around Solciessa's solar system in what may well be the largest collection of ancient spacecraft left in the Human Universe. Even the various means of railroad travel are numerous beyond description, from frailly-clattering `first experiments' to enormous speed leviathans that can roar straight as an arrow through the vaster stretches of Solciessa's desert at hundreds of kilometers an hour.

        And all have been made, courtesy of the Iskurahi, as idiot proof as its own machines. There are collision-avoidance systems, excess speed-avoidance systems, excess stress-avoidance systems and all the other misuse-avoidance systems one can think of and then some. Nor can any vehicle ever run out of fuel, each carries its own Doanadar which can supply it as quickly as the vehicle can use it. And of course there are the two million-strong friendly, helpful Tinsla as the ultimate backstop to assist you if something does go wrong.

        But breakdowns of any kind are all but unheard of.

        There are a few machines however which can only simulate operationality rather than be operational. The various items of military hardware for instance that have been unprejudicially preserved come into this category. It also includes the few tens of period-piece rocket ships scattered around the World. These will stand forever on their launch pads like clumsy fingers that once proudly pointed the way towards what was, initially at least, Solciessa's bright new venture into Space.

        One suspects that most of Solciessa's visitors come unashamedly to act out the roles they imagined their own ancestors played in the pre-Contact `Golden Ages' they suppose their Home Worlds luxuriated in. Back when most of those people had to struggle and sometimes even fight each other to earn a living. If the Solciesse ever do one day look beyond their walls, they would see a very busy and, if one might use the word, industrious world.

        In fact this entire World could be seen to be a gigantic, if rather spurious, toy box. Although it gives much joy to others, to its builders it is clearly no more than a tomb  full of skeletons carved out of a chunk of Time they cannot bring themselves to emerge from. It is perhaps too bad that it is they who are inside the box while their old toys are on the outside having all the fun.
 
 

        It was all just as superbly beautiful as the Teklanmeh promised it would be. But then that extraordinary monolith of Counsel wasn't intended to serve as an Old Earth-style advertising brochure.

        Barkworth could feel the Jiotextrot line up on its new bearing as Quincey moved the quadrant-mounted tiller a little to the left. A slight wind change had caused the recommended revision to appear on the navigation panel in front of her. The pink and white mountain ice caps ahead would now be at least three quarters of an hour away. But it was not as if they and their two guests, as they had now apparently become, were in any hurry. If it hadn't been for them he might well have dozed off.

        "What's our altitude, Quince?" he asked her, more to revive himself than anything else.

        Quincey peered at what looked like a miniaturized Nineteenth Century meteorological observatory with its finely detailed brass fittings.

        "Ah - high enough I think..." she replied languidly, clearly not wanting to be precise in those exquisite surroundings.

        Indeed the entire airship seemed straight out of the Edwardian Era on Earth rather than the Solciesse equivalent, whatever that might have been. The only real differences were that its diesel engines were clustered around its stern, their throbbing could only be felt rather than heard. And although the instruments had ivory labels that looked engraved, touch revealed them to be nothing more than miniature graphic display panels. They were also apparently keyed to the lexicons in Quincey's Hilashel, for they were written in Portuguese.

        The sun, very low on the horizon, now streamed into the open cockpit cantilevered out from the bow of the gondola just that more intensely. Barkworth, gazing down through the open metal lattice decking at the white capped seas a hundred meters below, thought he could hear the new wind swishing across them. But since the Taurnal Surface which protected them from the cold air wasn't a perfect transmitter of sound, he realized it was probably only his imagination.

        He peered up at the silver ribbed fabric of the airship itself. Huge, somehow actually leaden against the brilliant hazed white and gold of the sky, its surface led his eyes up and around curves that were just as impossible for his mind to follow...
 

        That horrendous crematorium had kept on climbing into the sky instead of raising itself just high enough to hedge-hop as it was supposed to when trying to dodge artillery fire. When its engines shut down in mid-air, Barkworth's bowels had strained to empty themselves yet again, but when the crash didn't happen he knew the Adjoahsno had come at last. The grin on Polson's face confirmed it. The delay had been caused by the Iskurahi not wanting any rescue attempts themselves triggering a Terminal War, even if that meant losing some of its own people. After all, what were the lives of so few balanced against the life of an entire world? But once the war did go Terminal that was no longer an issue, so a giant Nessik was quickly lowered over the entire crematorium as it rose from the ground. This deposited it gently and safely into an Diursuel Aid Facility doubtless uncountable light-years away from Jarra.

        The Third Level Prime Responsible, as his rank had turned out to be, had still been aboard the vessel when it was rescued. When he discovered what had happened he quite literally didn't know whether to be grateful or incensed, and began to gyrate wildly between the two states. Barkworth suspected his first few days in Paradise would have to be spent in a Lalleldil.

        Shortly after their return to their own spacecraft, Eve, the Iskurahi notified them that they could select any reward they wished from the special section of the Teklanmeh that would now be opened to them. As expected, this did not include any job offers. They selected Solciessa at random from the impossibly wide choice of Worlds available. When they then saw the Jiotextrot, they joined in the lottery to fly aboard her at once. To their amazement considering the colossal odds they suspected they were up against, they won the last section of its route, the delivery from Diehol to Tonteen, about an hour's flight. The entire route began at the Neselat of Slilslone eighteen hundred kilometers further south, it had been deliberately broken up to allow her lucky pilots from one to three hours at the controls each.

         Even better, they were going to be pilots rather than mere passengers. They used their Otindas to conduct their own little lottery to determine who was going to be `skipper' for the first half of their journey; Quincey won that.

        In Solciessa's pre-Space days Tonteen had been an arctic research station, but during the wars it had moved underground and grew to the size of a city. It was retained with the six other cities after the rest had been demolished only because, like them, it had been left fully intact. Although its main needs were now supplied through Nessiks, the ship's three-weekly arrival schedule when she had been the sole means of supply was a tradition even the System Wars had not made Tonteen's citizens forget. So she had been assigned to carrying `luxury goods' only, though Barkworth suspected that these were defined as such mostly by the fact that she delivered them. If this was so, then the Jiotextrot would doubtless be secure in her role until the last days of Solciesse society itself.

        " - Tea, sir? Cafe, senhorita?" Barkworth heard the unctuous tones from behind him. He turned in his seat to find the Steward and Stewardess had entered the cockpit from the door behind and were smiling at them. These two Angels, in costumes that looked like something out of ancient Serbia, were the only `crew' the Jiotextrot had apart from the automatic systems that would take over if anything went wrong.

        "Thank you; cafe," Quincey replied..

        "Tea for me, thanks", he glanced up at the Steward.

         The Steward then asked Spad and Asta in their language what they preferred. They both apparently requested the same items, whatever they were, from what Barkworth could make of their raucous-sounding replies.

        But then these two, who had come out onto the flight deck uninvited from the passenger compartment, looked like identical twins except that one was slightly larger. Both reminded him strongly of Andrew Wyeth's 1967 portrait of Anna Christina that he had come across in the Teklanmeh last Christmas. He wondered if they had acquired their wall eyes phylogeneticaly, genetically, or experientially. The pair were dressed in what appeared to be faded light summer frocks that weren't too unlike Anna's. He only learned which was husband and which was wife through their subsequent conversation. Though Asta had turned out to be the male and the larger, Barkworth had not been sure because his voice was higher pitched. He could now also see that although both had barrel chests, Spad's appeared to contain a stiff shield-like undergarment of some sort. Barkworth suspected that, like ten percent of the women in Paradise, she had more than one pair of breasts.

        His and Quincey's relationship with the couple had not been a comfortable one from the start. Though the two pilot's chairs could swivel round to allow conversation, Quincey needed to see what was out in front of the ship, and Barkworth wanted to be able to. That's what front seats were for.

        Then there was the fact that they had to use Hilashels. This would not have been necessary if they had been on their own since Quincey's English was as good as her Portuguese. Their guest's rather raucous voices made simultaneous translations rather hard to follow.

        But perhaps worst of all was that Spad and Asta both loved Paradise. They loved it as if they had worked all their lives for it and had not found it wanting. This just added to Quincey's annoyance and frustration. But since they seemed such a kindly pair, even she couldn't tell them to get lost.
 

        The customary few minutes wait was usually half the flavor with tea, for superb as Eonmern food preparation was, it didn't always do a good cuppa. Occasionally though it would actually come up with a better cup, and that was just what the Jiotextrot's Angel had delivered, it was excellent. The biscuits that accompanied it were `default plain' as they always were when he didn't specify a particular kind, but at least they were more to his taste than the dark, dank-looking carrot cake that had been coming with Quincey's coffee lately.

        The brew Spad and Asta received in their tapered clear glass mugs looked and smelt like hot steaming beer. They received no solid refreshments, instead the Steward poured a small jug of thick yellow fluid into each which turned the beverages cloudy and appeared to thicken it into a near porridge. The pair seemed very pleased with what they received, although Barkworth had had no time to consult his Otinda to translate their expressions. Nor did he feel particularly inclined to.

        But how on Earth were they going to spend the next hour or so with these two?

        "Do you think the Torsyne have a social life something like the Solciesse?" Quincey asked them. "After all, if the hardware that supports their consciousness operates at speeds millions of times faster than our own, then they will in effect have lived through millions of billenia by now. Yet the Universe has not changed one iota since their Advent."

        The two interlopers looked at each other. What was Quincey up too? These two were clearly not the kind of folk who would have given much thought to such notions.

        "And that's in spite of the fact that the Torsyne have probably become by now the most fantastic social game players the Universe has ever seen, even more so than the Solciesse here," Quincey continued. "And there has to be more than one individual Torsyne for the same reason you can't build just the one conscious machine. Like trying to clap with one hand."

        "What extraordinary ideas!" Spad shouted enthusiastically. "But what can we possibly hope to guess about the lives of beings so superior to us in every way?".

        If Barkworth was surprised, Quincey was visibly shocked and annoyed. Were these two brighter than they looked, or just so good at being polite as to be infuriating? If Quincey was trying to use that sharp brain of hers as a weapon to get rid of them, as he now suspected, either way the old folk had a formidable shield.

        This could only end in tears.

        "Bodies!" she all but shouted at them. "Do the Torsyne have any? It must be wonderful not to have to scratch itches in impossible places!"

        She then actually began to scratch the crotch of her jeans.

        Barkworth was delighted to see that Spad and Asta could only stare at her.

        "We can't imagine how any form of consciousness can exist without some kind of matter for it to exist in," she went on. "But for us humans the reverse seems to be true. It's best for us to keep our bodies but throw away our minds. Become like the primitive tribes most Worlds have, or eventually turn into. We are all now as irrelevant to Evolution as dumb animals. There is nothing we can say to each other that can mean more than a mere song carried over the vast and ever-widening gulfs between us. Even the meaning of Meaning itself has become nothing more than a figment of our collective imagination."

        "Careful, Quince. Thinking really isn't a good idea in a Paradise of Compulsory Fun," Barkworth tried not to laugh at her manic tirade.

        But this only sent her into a fit of giggles. Quincey was the only woman Barkworth had ever met who could giggle with infinite sarcasm.

        He now began to feel a little worried.

        "And that's exactly right," she said, eyes shining brightly. "We can only get through life happily if we become talking animals. Then by the time our Worlds get Closed Out we become talking bacteria. Maybe the Torsyne just see us as walking, talking DNA."

        "We've never thought very deeply about the Torsyne, Quincey," Spad said. "But do you think we should? After all, as Barkworth has just said, what good does it do you?"

        "That sounds like good sound common sense, Spad," Barkworth glanced at him. "Why should we indeed, Quince?"

        "We should because we must!" she rounded on him. "To stay alive! It's the only way to stop the Torsyne from achieving complete victory. If anybody can ever get rid of them, it will be someone who can still bloody think!"

        "But why should anybody want to get rid of them?" Spad asked her. "They are so kind to us."

        Quincey just balled her fists, clenched her teeth, and screamed.

        Spad and Astra stared at her in what Barkworth suspected was genuine concern.

        Barkworth put a hand out to her to sweep a wisp of hair back in the way she usually liked, but now she glared at him as if ready to bite it. He quickly withdrew.

        Then he had an idea.

         "Do you have zoos and game parks on your Home World?" he asked Astra.

        The old couple indicated that they did, but were not sure they knew the difference.

        "Well, in a zoo, animals are put in pens so that the public can see what they look like up close. They are fed, watered, and looked after in enclosures that resemble their natural environments as closely as possible. But that also means the various species are kept separate from each other so they cannot interact, and with the more intelligent animals this can affect their health. A game park on the other hand is simply a piece of the natural territory many of those species have inhabited together for millennia. Here all the species can interact in the way they always have, which consists mostly of trying to eat each other. Here it's the humans who are penned to protected them from being eaten or trampling the place flat. - Are you with me so far?"

        "Yes," both the old people chorused eagerly.

        "So, okay, which is kindest to the animals, a zoo or a game park? - And which do you think Paradise - our Universe - most resembles?"

        The couple looked at each other.

        "Both, really, I think" Asta replied after what was apparently a great deal of thought.

        Quincey snickered.

.         "The Universe is a zoo, surely, isn't it?" Barkworth's own patience ebbed a little. "We never have to worry about food or shelter or anything like that. Sure we can interact with each other - within our Mansions, anyway, but only like neutered animals. But, really, the Torsyne would have been a lot kinder to let our old worlds continue as they were. We would have to find - or earn - our own food, look after each other, cope with our own criminals, keep our planet tidy. In other words, to be truly free we should have been allowed to keep our old jobs, our money, our politics - even our wars if that really had to be the price. Sure, no Nessiks, spacships and so on, but we could have lived without them."

        "Oh, come on, Barkworth," Quincey snapped at him. "Would we really have been happy doing all those things knowing there was a bunch of superior beings out there keeping a watch on us? That would have been just as pointless a bloody existence as we have now - worse, we would have playing `let's pretend' with what you know perfectly well were harsh realities for most people."

        "Perhaps the Torsyne could have altered the fundamental nature of the Universe in some way so that those things they banned wouldn't work. Then we wouldn't have known we weren't free."

        "Oh, don't be so bloody stupid," she screamed at him.

        But she must have seen the expression on his face, because she then burst out into a fit of giggles.

        "But why should the Torsyne keep people ignorant?" she did a fair imitation of Spad's voice. "Is ignorance bliss?"

        Barkworth had to laugh, it was hopeless. Quincey giggled again. Time to give it away.

        "Perhaps we'd better explain who we are," Barkworth looked at Spad and Astra. "Quincey and I are in fact Conversationalists, though that's not a formal group or anything - far from it," he grinned wryly at Quincey, even though she was really in no better mood. "We wander round the Universe trying to keep our brains alive, talking to anybody else who wants to do the same. We talk about any worthwhile-seeming subject we can think of. It's probably about as futile as trying to get back to the good old days when we'd never heard of the Torsyne, like some people do. But if we don't do it, we feel we are dying. And we don't want to do that before we have to."

        Barkworth didn't even look at the old couple to see what kind of reaction that had received. He gazed forward instead to the Arctic landscape already resolving itself into greater detail ahead of them. The map in the Teklanmeh had shown that the mountain chain running across their horizon and under which Tonteen was located was in fact a narrow peninsula, the first of five reaching out from a massif to grip the top of Solciessa's globe like the fingers of a huge hand. For a moment he thought he could see the strip of water between the first `finger' and the one behind through a gap in its high mountain peaks, but he doubted if the airship was anything like high enough. It was probably just a reflection from the sky.

        Suddenly, out of the corner of his eye, Barkworth saw a glint in the sky like sunlight on metal. It was too high to be a reflection from the ice and certainly too bright to be a flier, but when he looked in its direction it was gone.

        "What's up?" Quincey asked him.

        "Just thought I saw something, that's all. Probably nothing."

        She nodded.

        "What do you think the Tinsla are actually made of?" Spad asked him softly right out of the blue. "I've always wondered. They seem so human, but I've never seen any - blood."

        Barkworth couldn't be sure through his Hilashel, but he gained the eerie impression that Spad had carried this secret desire to know how Angels worked in the back of her mind ever since she was a little girl.

        "Truth is, nobody knows too much about how they are physically made," he replied. "They have so very few accidents, and none has so far presented itself for vivisection."

        "They are so very nice though, aren't they" Spad said. "They were there so quickly when Asta had that bad fall of his not so long ago." She looked at her husband with an odd expression Barkworth assumed was fondness.

        "They certainly are," Asta responded enthusiastically.

        Barkworth saw that little gleam come back into Quincey's eye.

        "So why didn't the Torsyne just kill us all off so their Tinsla could have the Universe all to themselves?" she asked. "After all, they are so much nicer than we are."

        "What about those other Tinsla?" Barkworth thought he'd better divert her away. "The ones we don't see? They aren't so warm and cuddly."

        "I'd certainly never want to see one of those Stromlos," Spad visibly shuddered.

        Barkworth shuddered a little himself. These things were normally only sent out to capture narcotic and other serious criminals. From the 3D he had seen of them it was as if they had been perceptually engineered to arouse sheer terror in anybody who saw one. They looked a little like mechanized ostriches. Their huge drumstick legs were fastened to a similar shaped body and moved with that same kind of prancing motion except that they somehow made it look infinitely obscene. Their chests though were more human in shape so that in this respect they resembled centaurs. Their arms were skinny, almost withered-looking, but their exceeding long and powerful looking fingers were able to arrest people, in the original sense of the word, on the spot.

        But if their bodies were horrifying, Stromlo heads were gut-churning. Although human in shape, they were very much smaller and looked as if they had been blow-molded in white plastic right down to the `hair' and `eyes'. Indeed they looked just like doll's heads from Earth mounted on very long, scrawny necks. But while the hair had at least some airbrushed-on color, the eyes had not and therefore appeared to lack irises. They were merely blank orbs with very tiny intensely dark spots in the middle where the pupils should have been.

        "Do you think the Tinsla could ever turn against us?" Spad asked Quincey worriedly, "if the Torsyne - "

        Barkworth jumped as suddenly a low intermittent buzzing sound came from the Jiotextrot's instrument panel; a large red translucent cube flashed in synchrony. A voice from it then announced:

        "We apologize for interrupting your command. The Jiotextrot has now placed itself under automatic control."

        Quincey quickly let go of the controls as if they had come alive. She didn't quite know where to put her hands at first, but then she just sat back, stretched within the confines of her chair, and let her arms dangle by her side.

        "Seems a little early to go automatic," Quincey looked at him. "I thought it was only supposed to happen when we were nearly there."

        Barkworth could only shrug his shoulders.

        "We weren't off course, were we?" he said.

        She shook her head.

        Although there was one mountain peak that the ship did seem to be headed for, it was still too early to say if it was to be their actual destination since sideways drift could only be guessed at. He certainly couldn't see the two mooring masts he knew to be above the city itself.

        Then he jumped in his seat as an enormous racing seaplane shot from underneath them from behind with an ear-shattering roar straight out of the 1930's. It passed so fast and so close that by the time Barkworth had fully realized what had happened it had become a rapidly diminishing silhouette directly ahead of them. He felt the gondola heave and twist slightly as it was buffeted by the wash from the plane's slipstream. The controls in front of him moved in an attempt to compensate, but it was still several minutes before the motion had entirely dissipated.

        "Guess that's why we went auto," Quincey observed.

        But something niggled in Barkworth's mind as being slightly out of place.

        He watched the plane bank and turn in the distance. It looked as if it was going to come back.

        "Wonder where it came from?" he asked. "I wouldn't have thought Solciessa's Mechanical Entertainments Network extended this far north apart from the Jiotextrot."

        "There's something else a little strange too," Quincey said. "The collision avoidance systems of both of these machines should have made it impossible for that thing to come as close to us as that."

        And that, Barkworth realized, was what had been trying to think of. His stomach began to freeze.

        Meanwhile the plane was indeed flying back towards them. At first it seemed as if it would pass some distance away to their left, but suddenly it banked into a steep turn, leveled out, and roared across their path directly in front of them.

        "Here it comes again..!" Astra rose in his seat. Barkworth couldn't tell if he was overjoyed or petrified.

        This time Barkworth was able to get a good look at the plane. It really was a superb machine. The engines, each driving a pair of unusually large contra rotating propellers, were mounted in long sleek nacelles on the wings. Underneath the gleaming fuselage were slung two slender floats nearly as long as the plane itself. There was no paintwork nor anything ornamental of any description, it was a flying machine Howard Hughes himself might have been proud to build and fly. Indeed, Barkworth could swear he had seen the pilot in the bubble canopy raise what looked like a fedora with the same flourish that fabled multimillionaire himself might have used.

        " - Did you see that?" Spad shouted with ambiguous vigor .

        They all watched as the machine then swung up into the air in a half-loop. However it didn't roll back over into the straight and level as Barkworth expected, but three-quarter rolled into a tight right-hand turn that once more took it towards the mountains.

        Then it did the impossible. Engines shrieking, it pulled back up and over into another tight loop which it made no attempt to level out of. Instead that exquisitely beautiful machine dived vertically towards the sea in front of their very eyes.

        And slowed to an impossible halt, only meters above the waves as if gently grasped by a Hand from the Sky. It must have remaining suspended there in mid-air for several seconds until, engines still screaming, the tail swung down so that the machine was once more horizontal and pointing ahead of them. Then it began to pick up speed at to what even to Barkworth's eye seemed an astonishing rate, veering off to their left as it did so.

        It was only when the plane began to skitter across the water like a slow-motion pebble, rising briefly then diving again to the same wave top level at least three times, did Barkworth realize that it was probably not a malfunction of the plane but of its pilot. It was now all too clear what he was trying to do.

        He looked at Quincey. She had gone white, and only briefly managed to unlock her transfixed gaze to glance at him.

        And then they heard the plane's engines die.

        Quincey's sigh of relief was very audible in that stillness. They both watched its propellers came to rest at copybook crisscrosses as its Necker Surfaces took over. Once more gaining altitude, the plane turned towards their stern, then passed out of sight in complete silence behind them.

        "Deus Meo..." Quincey said softly.

        They all just sat there and gazed absently at the mountains ahead. One almost had to go out of one's way to die violently in Paradise. Indeed, most of those who did put a lot of effort into it, usually in protest against its inhumanity. Barkworth wondered if that was what the plane's pilot had had in mind.

        They heard a light footfall behind them.

        "Sir, Senhorita," the Steward said when they turned round to look at him. "You will be pleased to know that the young woman piloting the aircraft is now safe - "

        " - Woman?" Quincey said, uncharacteristically surprised.

        "Yes, Senhorita," the Steward affirmed. "At present however we have very few details as to what happened or who she is. All we know is that she made a deliberate but fortunately incompletely successful attempt to tamper with the aircraft."

        "Tamper..?" Quincey was even more surprised. "She must have been inordinately clever. Technically, anyway."

        "Yes, we believe so, senhorita. We would like to express our deepest regrets to both of you for what has happened. Incidents of this kind are, as you know, extremely rare. Should you wish to discontinue your journey with us, we do have a Nessik on board."

        Barkworth looked at Quincey.

        She shook her head. "No, thank you, that won't be necessary. I'm not going to let that woman ruin my trip. Why couldn't she have Nessiked to a Terminal World like anybody else?"

        "Thank you, senhorita," the Steward actually sounded as if he admired her attitude.

        "Is there anything else you require sir? Senhorita?"

        Barkworth glanced across to Quincey again. But she just sat staring straight ahead of her, coldly furious.

        "No, thank you," Barkworth nodded to him.

        The Steward then asked the same questions of Spad and Astra in their language. They also declined anything further or, to Barkworth's surprise, to leave the Jiotextrot. The Steward then bowed and withdrew.

        Barkworth didn't feel too much like talking either. He was just too shocked at what he had just seen. No doubt the Cahoctor would hold an inquiry; the full story would come out. It certainly would be interesting to learn why the woman had wanted to end her life in that particular way instead of the painless, pleasant means Paradise provided. Why did she also apparently want witnesses? Was she even somebody they knew?

        He tried to think of names...
 

        It was only the change in vibration in the Jiotextrot's engines that made Barkworth refocus his eyes on what was ahead. The two mooring masts turned out to be sited at the opposite ends of a ridge between two foothills, the ship was headed for the slightly nearer starboard one. Barkworth wasn't really surprised he hadn't seen them earlier, for some reason he had assumed they would be much higher up.

        " - Quince..?" he turned to look at her.

        But she still gazed straight ahead, as frozen as the landscape. All the fury had gone from her face, in fact she looked completely drained. As on Jarra her reaction had been a facade, she simply hadn't known how to handle what she had seen.

        Quincey was not the kind of lady who could be kissed or cuddled let alone talked out of a shock. He would just have to wait until she came out of it. And there was no way of guessing when that would be. This was the second nasty surprise she had suffered since their experience on Jarra, and he couldn't help but wonder if some sort of permanent harm had been done. She was such an emotionally fragile person. Beneath all the bile and sarcasm, she could be extraordinarily warm and close in that way he had come to love so much.
 

        The Jiotextrot's engines all but shut down as it coasted along on momentum. Barkworth noticed it was also shedding altitude relatively quickly, indeed he wondered if it wasn't too quickly. But he didn't really believe that, and sure enough, by the time they had approached within a hundred meters of the top of the mast, they had drawn nearly level with it. The motors revved again, and there was a definite feeling of deceleration as Barkworth saw a complex-looking mechanism emerge from a gap in the meter-wide sphere at the mast's top. Sliding down the slender, unstayed metal pole to the level of the probe he assumed now projected from the nose of the ship, it extended an arm-like drogue. He then heard the chung of a solid metal coupling.

        A very fine grinding vibration underlying that of the motors then passed through the ship. Barkworth suspected this had something to do with the sideways-facing propeller set in the Jiotextrot's lower vertical tailfin, and indeed the stern of the ship slowly drew round until before long he was able to look back out over the sea along the way they had come.

        Then, with the slightest of sideways jerks, the aft probe engaged, and the motors finally shut down. The Jiotextrot had docked.

        It now seemed to be almost supernaturally quiet, he could only hear the wind sighing gently around the mast. He had expected to see other structures and buildings dotted round the landscape, but there were none.

        Suddenly an extraordinary orange glow that must have covered an area as big as the airship itself appeared along the ridge deep beneath the snow.

        " - Quince!" He tried to draw her attention to it, but she still stared fixedly ahead. In any case it would have been too late, when he looked down again the glow had gone.

        The snow split along the ridge, then slid with a rush down both slopes. The slopes now revealed themselves to be a huge pair of Hindenburg-size metal doors, they glistened grayly in that golden polar light. With a cracking and banging of not fully unfrozen joints, the ridge the doors formed parted, then slowly and agonizingly began to open. As Barkworth tried to peer down into the void below, he heard the soft hum of an electric motor start up somewhere ahead of him and felt a slight downwards jerk. The doors juddered a little as they came into their fully open position, then the Jiotextrot began to move down into that immense yawning shaft like a giant elevator.

        The brief glimpse Barkworth had of the shaft's walls before the bulk of the airship dimmed the light showed them to be a deep brown, as if the concrete-like material had picked up the color of the wooden formers it had been cast with as well as their grain. The effect was extraordinarily mediaeval, an impression that was only reinforced by the glowing three-pronged electroluminescent panels set into them in a diagonal pattern a meter or so apart. They looked eerily like softly-glowing fleur-de-lis.

        "How wonderful!" Spad intoned behind him; Barkworth had all but forgotten they were there.

        "Isn't it, dear," her husband agreed in the way all good husbands in Paradise respond to their wives.

        At long last Barkworth could see a long, narrow sliver of light beneath them. It seemed to grow wider faster than their rate of descent would allow, then he realized that another immense pair of doors was opening up at the bottom end of the shaft. He found it hard to estimate just how far down the ship was, but Tonteen had to be at least an entire kilometer below the surface, perhaps even two.
 

        The sight that greeted his eyes when they passed beyond the door into `daylight' was just so extraordinary he couldn't believe it. They were descending into the `sky' of an underground city much vaster than he and Quincey had imagined. And the sudden joyous shouts of welcome that rose into the air from what must have been thousands of young throats as the airship at last came to rest was little short of deafening. It then began to dawn on Barkworth what Tonteen really was. It was nothing less than the source of the monoculture that was Solciessa itself.

        Tonteen might have started off as an arctic research station, but had apparently ended up as a gigantic nursery. Indeed its buildings looked just like the multicolored wooden blocks he had played with when he was a child, except of course that they were several hundred times bigger and appeared to have been made of various kinds of painted terra cotta. Cylinders, disks, slabs, half-rounds, rods, blocks, blocks with half-circles cut out of them, all had been put together as if by a similarly huge artistic child to fill that vast underground space almost to its Sky. The tallest had a steeple-like tower that reached up close to the port side of the Jiotextrot's gondola, this was obviously the point from which her `luxury goods' (candy? toys?) would be unloaded.

        Barkworth only noticed now that neither Spad nor Astra had made a sound. Even they had been struck dumb by the spectacle.

        Most of the buildings were capped with pyramids, cones or spheres. But other rooftops, like the many other horizontal planes lower down including the `bridges' joining the buildings, were planted in gardens complete with shrubs and even trees. Nor were all the vertical planes unadorned, many had complex designs molded into them to charm the vision in a way that was almost tactile. Many windows could be seen, and they too were of all shapes, sizes and colors.

        It was from these windows and gardens that the infants, formed into lines or tidy rectangular groups, shouted their glee. The one group of older children he could see were being marched in a weirdly formal fashion from one building to another directly opposite. It crossed his mind that part of Jiotextrot's function might be to serve as a magic totem from the World of the Grown Ups, or perhaps even a much-loved figure from some vast equivalent of Earth's Punch and Judy show (Be a good boy Jontril, else we won't let you see The Big Kind Airship when it comes today).

        Yet when Barkworth looked down towards the streets and parks at ground level, there seemed to be something odd about the perspective which he couldn't quite fathom. It made him think of that strange `forced perspective' some movie makers had used a hundred years ago. Then he realized what it was. The buildings had been designed to the scale of their inhabitants. The heights of the doorways the children occasionally passed through gave the clue; they seemed to be about two-thirds `adult' size.

        One might have preferred such a place to be outside in the fresh air instead of under a Sky obviously made of some sort of electroluminescent material. But if that was part of the price the Solciesse felt they had to pay for their survival, then it seemed a small one when one looked at this extraordinarily attractive city. Perhaps it had even been built as a children's shelter as soon as the Wars began and the information carefully hidden, that might go some way to explain why the 3Ds had revealed nothing about its true nature. Normally there were stiff penalties for knowingly causing false or misleading 3Ds to be entered into the Teklanmeh, but the Iskurahi, knowing the nature of the Solciesse, may well have allowed them Compassionate Exception even though the danger had passed long, long ago.

        "Quincey," Barkworth got up and put his arm around her shoulder. "You've got to look at this. It has to be one of the most fascinating places we have ever seen."

        And much to his relief she did look.

        "Yes, it is beautiful," she agreed.

        "Sirs! Senhoritas! Welcome to Tonteen..!" the Steward bounced onto the deck arm in arm with the Stewardess as if their customers had just won the All-Solciessa Entertainments Jackpot for 2049.

        Even in a Paradise of Clockwork Angels, a Tinsla's face was capable of displaying more emotions than many humans could. And they could change so astonishingly realistically. The expression on the Steward's face became suffused on the spot with a Gentility, even a Cherishing. Even the Stewardess's became expectantly flushed, as if she was looking forward to that time that could never arrive when she too could give birth to a new inhabitant of Tonteen. There were times when Barkworth felt almost ashamed (almost ashamed...) of his occasional suspicion of Tinsla, when even that sardonic nickname of `Angels' they had acquired on Earth seemed misplaced.

        "I'm sorry, we simply had no idea." Barkworth said to them, spreading his hands.

        "We like to reserve this as a special surprise for our guests, sir," the Steward beamed with Confraternal Glee.

        Out of the corner of his eye Barkworth saw Quincey give an involuntary shudder. She had never particularly liked children, and especially hated the mawkish sentimentality lavished on them all over Paradise. Although he had always thought it unfortunate that this part of her character was missing, he found the relentless no-nonsense mind that replaced it infinitely preferable.

        Spad and Asta suddenly delivered a surprise. They jumped up and clutched each other, then appeared to neck furiously. Their faces pinched up, and they ululated loudly in an arab-like fashion.

        Barkworth had no doubt that they were crying in their particular way. Was it all this on top of the attempted suicide they had all just witnessed? Or had there been a tragedy with a child; had they lost one, or had Spad been unable to have one at all? Some women felt they could not bring children into a Paradise in which all humans were orphans, but he doubted Spad would be one of those.

        He just did not know what to do or say.

        The Steward however apparently did. He quickly stepped across to them and wrapped his arms around the couple. He then spoke a few words quietly to them in their own language. Barkworth saw Asta lower and raise his jaw briefly to signal what appeared to be an assent, for the Steward then gently maneuvered them through the door back into the passenger compartment.

        Quincey sighed with relief, but Barkworth could see she had not been entirely unmoved.

        "It's perhaps just as well they went when they did," she said in a low voice. "There's something here that might have made them cry even more loudly. I've been searching hard, but I can't see any teenagers down there."

        Barkworth's eye raced up and down the streets looking for the missing kids. "Perhaps they are all inside, studying or something. Or on another part of the planet. Why, what do you think might have happened to them?"

        "I've been thinking about how the Solciesse have managed to keep their society intact for so long as well as regulate their numbers to those particularly low levels. Could it be that kids get weeded out - culled - if they show behavioral problems? Like failing to please, or being mildly impolite?"

        "Oh, now, come on Quincey," Barkworth's concern for her returned. "There's no way they could do that. The planet would have been Closed Out in short order and all Iskurahi machines removed. Then they would have had to go back to their old methods of population control, whatever those might have been."

        "The Iskurahi really lay down the law with respect to very little," she said, "everything else is negotiation. It's hard to believe, but not impossible - in fact it makes you wonder why the Torsyne don't insist all Worlds do the same with their children." 

        "Well, we can check it out when we get back to Eve. It's only an idea, Quince, we'd better leave it at that for now." 

        Quincey remained silent at that. They just gazed out across the city as the Jiotextrot floated gently within her moorings, stirring occasionally in the brief gusts of artificial wind.

        Then they heard the Steward step back into the cockpit.

        "Sir? Senhorita? Would you care to retire to the lounge for refreshments before you return to your spacecraft? We can also take you down to Tonteen and present you to some of its young citizens if you wish."

        "Thank you, you have been most kind." Barkworth replied. "But I think under the circumstances we should return directly to Eve."