Part Praesep Dand
Teniec/Safni/Iskurahi
- 1.3E10

Otindas

        The Iskurahi now has available a device which enables people to communicate both visually and aurally with each other, or with groups that specialize in public communications. The Otinda, as it is called, may be obtained in virtually any requested size and configuration. Smaller units may be more convenient for personal communications, receiving news broadcasts, capturing sounds and images, accessing the Tecklanmeh, or ordering items from the Eonmern. They may also be useful for courses of self-instruction, including the operation of the devices themselves. Larger units may be more useful for receiving entertainment broadcasts or for playing the many games contained in the Teklanmeh. Very large units may be of use in presenting information to large audiences. While all units respond to verbal command, some users may prefer other means of data input and output. Such alternative configurations may include keyboards, pointing devices, pressure-sensitive styli for drawing directly onto the screen, and printing devices that can place images on virtually any surface.

        Otindas can be used in conjunction with many other Iskurahi-originated machines. For instance, while an Otinda can record sound and 3D images on its own, a Rhondo may be found more convenient for this purpose because of its very small size; this data can then be transferred to an Otinda or any other device. An Otinda can also be used in association with a Hilashel to translate the facial and bodily expressions of a person from another Culture with whom one may be conversing. An Otinda can also be used in place of a Hilashel if required, though simultaneous translation becomes less convenient for the user. It is also subject to the same lingual translation limitations as a Hilashel.

        Since some forms of audiovisual entertainment can be addictive to some persons, Otindas can, like many of the devices issued by the Eonmern for personal use, carry the risk of inducing addictive behavior. Behavioral training to reduce the risk of this occurring is therefore recommended for any young people who are either issued with or allowed access to Otindas. Otindas are also able to detect their own overuse in this respect, and will notify the Lalleldil Division. They will then determine if some form of intervention is necessary.

Orral Luy Seeides
Pralls/Tulsat
- 127

The Inspiration of The Democratic Representatives of the People To Their God

           If anything marked the real begining of our Industrial Era on our world of Tulsat, it was the completion of theTranscontinental Railroad from one distant side of our largest continent of Tiffoonafrea to the other that had cost so much in time, money, and lives. To celebrate the event, a Great Exposition had been prepared  at its easternmost terminal, in the city of Pralls. The Opening Ceremony, both of the Railroad and the Exposition itself, was thought likely to be the biggest social gathering ever held in the history of Tulsat.

        The Exposition was almost entirely contained within a spectacularly immense glass hall built from the winning design in an architectural competition. Reflecting the newly-found engineering confidence of that era, the Exposition Hall's inordinately radical and daring design was based on geodesic structures, which had been invented barely a year before.

        But that vast piece of static engineering housed in one of its wings an equally impressive dynamic one, the `Gardens of The Dawn'. An animated tableau that people could walk through, it was made up of nearly full-size and very life-like figures going through the motions of kindling the first fire, making the first wheel, smelting the first metals, building the first machines. And all would culminate as it had done in reality with the finishing touches being applied to a replica of one of the Railroad's huge articulated tank locomotives. Two of these locomotives would draw special trains each way from the two coastal cities on the Great Day of the Opening Ceremony.

        The overall design of the tableau had been overseen by one of the most celebrated artists of the day, Errul Lindsip. He had long captured the imagination of his fellow countrymen with the wit and charm of his Frestruern-like haboshra portraying the life of the common roloi and the simple machinery they used, from their weather-beaten plowshares to the miniature distilleries of their drinking houses that produced their reilla. Powered by a single steam engine through a system of rods and pulleys underneath those ersatz industrial landscapes, it had been built under Lindsip's supervision by teams of clock makers, most of whom had specialized in making the various automata in vogue amongst the rich of that time to entertain their friends.
 
 

        The Opening Ceremony proved to be just as much a celebration of the Capitalism that had financed the building of the Railroad as of the Railroad itself. Mendil Suffra, who had been its Engineering Architect as well as one of its major financiers, was the first to speak. In what what was afterwards agreed to have been much the most inspiring of the Opening Speeches, he proclaimed to a wildly cheering crowd that "God's Divine Domain might be brought to Tulsat itself by amply rewarding those who show the diligence and enterprise to launch new and great ventures upon our world. We can only hope to do this by preserving, indeed, encouraging those essential freedoms which allow such God-given talents to rise to the surface and express themselves for the benefit of all."

        Unfortunately, amongst the many rewards Lindsip received for his diligence and enterprise, was an awful penalty. On the very night after the Grand Opening, he experienced an horrendously apocalyptic dream that was to completely rob him of the joys any artist feels after a job well executed. As a child, he had read an obscure passage in our Founding Religious Text, the Panil, about how `sleeping Steua of the soil would one day wake and rise up from the ground to enslave mankind for all eternity, unless he turned his back upon the clever illusions they would create before his eyes so that they might usurp his very substance'. And that night Lindsip saw "row upon row of huge clanking metal Steua marching across the landscape in which my beloved roloi were wresting their minerals from the soil. The Steua just smashed those people aside and trampled them down, then poured in even greater numbers from factories now bursting out of the ground like obscene cancers, belching their poisonous fumes into the sky. And even more Steua came down from the heavens on huge gossamer wings, they quickly blotted out the Sun with their numbers. They swooped and tore at what few remained of my roloi with long metal claws. When none were left, they drove themselves into our very world itself, gobbling it up with obscene clackings and grindings. When nothing even of this remained, those without wings then grew them, and they all fluttered, gorged, towards the stars."

        "And all I was left with in all my blackness was an insane pounding in my heart, and I awoke in a sweating, helpless torment."

        Lindsip's paransur was summarily dismissed as the `rantings and ravings' of an overstrained mind. But the sensation it caused brought such a frenzy of visitors to The Gardens of The Dawn none had any hope of entry for weeks. This helped the ideal of Progress the Gardens represented to embed itself so completely in the public imagination that the nation of Tiffoonafrea, helped by its new Railroad, went on to overcome all `Ungodly' opposition and colonize our globe. Alternative systems to Capitalism simply never stood a chance. Although a little Socialism would eventually come to ameliorate its worst excesses, this "Besmirching of God's Will," as Suffra had described it in his Opening Speech which had now gone down as marking a turning point in Tulsat's History, "would only be tolerated in order to help the most destitute of those who, in the Lottery of Life, have failed through no obvious fault of their own to acquire those values of diligence and enterprise."

        Indeed, almost as if to celebrate them, the Gardens were extended as the decades passed and new technologies were discovered. By the time of Contact itself, long after the railroad had sprouted its numerous branch lines and closed them all down again, they came to completely fill that Great Exposition Hall with its cute roloi figures all busily living out their mechanical existences in their vast technological steam-driven Paradise.
 

        All that Lindsip would go on to achieve after the Gardens however was the founding of a community called the Racift Comradehood on a well-wooded estate in another continent big enough for him and his group not to be harassed. Built obsessively around the Teachings of the Panil, they renounced all machines which `could not be built using the products of simple Nature'. Lindsip continued to paint his haboshra, but his style changed to reflect his obsessions with the Afterlives of Heaven and Hell in every possible sense with Judgment overriding All. Although still sought after by the more eccentric collectors, his new works did not appear in public places. People felt more comfortable with his old ones.
 
 

        When computers were finally invented and came into widespread use halfway through Tulsat's Twentieth Century Equivalent, a clever young journalist embraced an instant career and a premature old age when he wrote a book `examining Lindsip's ideas in the light of these new machines' in somewhat lurid prose. Shortly after its publication, the symbolism of the Gardens of The Dawn changed overnight when somebody tampered with the governor of the steam engine that still powered it so that it ran at near treble its normal speed. The paradise turned into the slave labor factory many critics believed Tulsat itself had now become. Worse was to happen: an alert member of its maintenance crew discovered soon after that the Garden's walkways had been seeded with miniature antipersonnel mines.
 

        With much fewer of the wars and insurrections that usually accompany the adjustments of any world's advanced societies to their new technological prowess, the shockwaves from the horror of the Gardens would soon cause Tulsat to make up for lost time. Ideological, religious and philosophical authorities around the globe examined their various Writings and Teachings for Guidance towards the Question of Machines. Not surprisingly, this turned out to be non-existent. Since Tulsat had not, unlike most others, split globally into two superpowers, several nations now began to fragment into pro-tech and anti-tech factions. From that point on all Tulsat's wars would be civil ones.

        These factions did however eventually sort themselves into two `superfactions' within each of Tulsat's nations. During the process both groups acquired the names, mostly via the media, of the two men who were historically most associated with the philosophies each espoused. The `Lindsips' maintained that `anything that had been done by man should always be done by man, we should use only simple machines that can never substitute their purposes for our own'. The `Suffras' on the other hand, backed by the Capitalists and the Governments who supported them, proclaimed that computers `can never have a purpose of their own no matter how complex they might become. We should show some commonsense and realize that they point the way to a greater Prosperity for All."

        The damage caused by hot-headed Lindsip fanatics whose `simple machines' consisted of blades, bullets and bombs could be bad enough. But it was their colder-eyed brethren with their more extreme interpretations of Lindsip's principles who were the most effective. They saw infiltration and sabotage as being the only realistic way of stopping their opponents. Many of them actually became as highly proficient in the digital arts as their Suffra counterparts. This enabled them to insert themselves into positions of authority not just within major computer using groups such as business and government organizations, but in the computer and software manufacturing industries. More and more programs and even operating systems came to contain code that, when examined after the event, looked like the `simple' coding errors no large program can avoid. A plane might spiral out of the sky or a train run off the end of a line, but `malicious intent' could seldom ever be proved.

        Tulsat quickly became a confused and jumpy world. The Suffras ensured, so far as they could, that all new technology, computer-related or not, was designed by teams of trusted individuals in carefully separated workshops, as if in digital munitions factories. State Authorities wired towns and cities with eavesdropping devices   linked to computers that could pick out key words and alert their human monitors. The Lindsips retaliated by blackmailing legitimate designers and programmers to do their work for them and by using codes and scramblers for their communications. The Suffras then countered this by building comparators that could learn through experience not only how to crack the ciphers involved and sift out important information from the trivial, but recognize voices as well no matter how well these might be disguised. If any machine received instructions they assessed as inappropriate or from people not contained on their registers, they could take a range of actions from silently alerting the Authorities to quietly locking doors until a suspect could be interviewed.

        Meanwhile the Lindsip `primitives' with their bombs, kidnappings and other such methods of winning support and convincing people had not stood still. Their tactical and logistical skills had improved to the point where their devices had become simple in terms of ingenuity rather than crudity. They increasingly often hit the new nerve-centers of the cities with a skill and accuracy that could paralyze these for days, even weeks. The Suffras responded by pouring thousands of increasingly sophisticated Surveillance Androids into them. The most advanced were psychologically designed to evoke images of the Steua from the Panil, with their huge gossamer-thin wings they didn't really need since they were capable of flight using the then newly-discovered Taurnal Surfaces...
 

        And it was only then that it began to dawn on both sides that the ancient prophecy was rapidly fulfilling itself and that the whole planet was now in real trouble.

        Meanwhile the Iskurahi, as usual, had been watching all this and biding its time.
 
 

        To the surprise and joy of its mostly out-of-town clientele, an outrageously voluptuous and kueris comedienne nobody had ever seen or heard of before stepped out onto the floor at Ouswedan Rastle, the top Nightclub-Equivalent in Pralls.

        "What do you get when you cross a Lindsip with a Suffrist?" she actually asked her audience, "but a little natural-born intelligence?"

        They were slow to catch on at first, but when they did, it sounded like nobody had laughed for a very long time.

        "I knew a young scientist who spent all his nights and all his days trying to create artificial life in his laboratory. Just when he had all its nutrients flowing properly and it looked as if it would uncross its eyes and take its big toe out of its mouth, his four-year old daughter prodded him in the backside and said: "Daddy, please can I have my dinner now?"

        Judealovne was short and buxom with the thighs and buttocks of those secret dreams of every man who watched her in that fetidly opulent room. Long wavy tresses of auburn hair flounced around her shoulders, sparkly green eyes, a light dusting of freckles brightened her face along with a touch of the currently fashionable pink obref powder. Her forearms and calves shone like burnished bronze and the thin tight green chemise she wore seemed barely able to contain her extraordinarily erotic body.

        Nor was Judealovne's intelligence wasted on her audience. Most were in town to informally discuss the ground rules for the Conference of Reconciliation due to take place in a week's time in the Great Exposition Hall.

        "And now my misty-eyed little roloi from the Gardens of The Dawn..." she cooed lightly. With a deliciously cool arpeggio on her Oppriateen that sent shivers down the spine to every male coccyx in the room, she broke into the simple ballad she had sung when she had first presented herself to the club's owner just a few days before. Once again his eyes glazed over with feelings of Opportunity he hadn't felt in years:
 

        "Let me tell you the story of an artificial man,
        Whose loving was such a legend mere mortals up and ran,
        One day he found the woman he could truly love,
        But alas, she loved another who believed in God Above..."
 

        Within barely a week Jedealovne had built a reputation with her looks and her bizarre humor others of her `profession' could never have achieved in years.

        But then the Iskurahi had a very long List to choose from and the most efficient means possible of choosing well.

        All this, however, was merely Act One Scene One of the carefully designed `tragedy' that was about to unfold. In her `private life' which she conducted with such an absolute sense of `helpless purity' as to drive all the men who knew her equally helpless with less than pure anxieties, she began to have paransurs. At first she only communicated these `confidentially' to the two men she had allowed to come `close' to her because she knew from her Contact Team they headed huge confidential social networks of their own. She soon `relented' however, and these groups soon became the nuclei of select gatherings she held in the buffad of her boarding house with her landlady who, after initial doubts, was to become a very enthusiastic and useful chaperone. She then allowed these people to `encourage' her to describe her paransurs of `other worlds beyond our own' to the much larger confidential networks of their friends, and before long she had a sizable if as yet largely invisible second audience who were now receiving vivid though essentially accurate descriptions of many real Worlds and their histories, along with the `humane network' that linked them all.

        However, when she began to incorporate some of these paransurs into her stage act, the people who all `knew' her began to worry:

        "Just imagine, my sweet little roloi. Some other world much closer to the beginning of Time may have built androids of their own that took over the entire Universe long, long ago. Perhaps if you could build your talents for sabotage and religion into your androids, they might take them over and make the Universe fit for God once more."

        Yet so sweet, so pure was she still in her off-stage behavior that few, even hardened media writers, had any real doubts that they had some kind of naeth on their hands whose soul was being tortured by the illusions of her mind. Her chemise was now actually beginning to hang a little shabbily on a body visibly being consumed alive by her `mania'. As her very worried landlady observed with a greater accuracy than she knew: "I'm sure Judealovne really wants her food, but she seems somehow prevented from taking more than the tiniest morsels by a Higher Will."

        On the night she was to `tragically disappear', lumps rose into throats all over the room when she announced in her now beautifully clear, soft voice that "at noon tomorrow, in front of the Great Exposition Hall here in Pralls itself, you will at last be able to see for yourselves that what I have been saying to you about people just like you and me living on other worlds is true. It is true, for I am one of them. I was sent her to tell you of our coming. Please, treat my friends well, for we are not monsters..."

        And she ran from the stage, her voice choking with sobs that may have been quite real.
 
 

        The following morning, egged on by the popular media who were themselves only sparsely represented, Invesek Square began to fill with people all ready for The Big Event. Coming or no Coming, few really cared, even the police wore smiles. Bands, dancers, brightly costumed street sellers all made their appearances. Half a dozen aircars belonging to the very wealthy circled lazily round the single flying platform with its television crew. By the time Noon finally arrived, the great Square was packed solid with all sorts of people seemingly from every town and village in the land. And they talked of nothing else but The Tragic Judealovne. They retold some of her old jokes, wondered again about her new.

        " - Look..!" somebody shouted, pointing up into the sky.

        But most of the people who did look saw nothing.

        Then what looked like a huge balloon, the same bright nuretear blue of the midsummer sky itself, gradually whitened into visibility as it drifted gently down towards the Square. At a height of fifty meters it slowed, then finally came to rest.

        But even though it was twenty meters across, it still did not appear to be an example of advanced technology to most of the people there. One man even thought it was a practical joke and shouted "Get it off!" to roars of laughter from the people around him.

        Then little sepia-colored letters and calligraphic symbols from all the alphabets of Tulsat began to swirl over its surface like autumn leaves. After a few moments they began to take on brighter colors, then appeared to make their way towards the equator. There they assembled themselves into that simple ordinary word in the local alphabet which in that context seemed bizarre:

        "Greetings."

        Other letters then began to form into place behind it to spell out the same word in another of Tulsat's major languages. Then a third and a fourth word fell in behind those until a whole line of translations of that word "Greetings" followed each other from left to right round the balloon's equator like an old-time advertising sign. After making two such circumnavigations, each word vanished the same way it came until once more the sphere's surface was a clear pearly white.

        Meanwhile, all the Delegates from the Conference of Reconciliation, begun earlier that day, were quickly emptying themselves onto the wide ramp that led up to the Great Hall. A half-humorous shout of `it's not ours' came from one of the better-known Suffras.

        Along with many more citizens of Pralls, the police and the media now began to arrive in force. They quickly moved their equipment into position on the ground and in the sky as if each were trying to outdo the other in convincing the public they could mount a Professional Operation.

        The globe then took on the appearance of Tulsat from space. Mild cyclones became hurricanes in speeded up motion, rafts of cloud formed, swept over its surface, then dispersed as night followed day in quick succession. The details of continents, islands, archipelagos were so clear and sharp that the image looked less like some kind of back-projection in 3D than an actual miniaturization of the real thing. An undercurrent of murmur could be heard from the crowd as a few people began to wonder, though even the least technically informed of them knew that this display would still have been well within Tulsat's existing technology.

        But after a few moments it became noticeable that as day followed night around the globe the continents kept changing their shapes and that the normal deep atmospheric blue was sometimes tinted with greens and golds.

        Then a quiet male voice began to speak from the sphere in a perfectly smooth annunciation of the Local language.

        "As you have long suspected yourselves, this Universe is big enough to contain many, many worlds as beautiful as your own. We have come, as representatives of those Worlds, to show you, if you wish, how you may join with us..."

        The noise from the crowd built up into a uneasy mumble as doubts now really began to appear. People began to mill round, upsetting the odd camera and tripping over hastily-laid cables as those who wanted to get closer to the sphere tried to move against the current of others trying to get away from it. One or two people even ran down side streets, screaming.

        "Please..!" The voice from the sphere shouted. "Look at us! We are the same as you..!"

        New images then began to move in segments round the sphere, `snapshots' from those other Worlds that looked somewhat less likely to have been cut and pasted from Tulsat's own natural history documentaries.

        " - Look at us...!" the voice implored again as the snapshots came to life and really showed that no matter how exotic their surroundings might be or the buildings they lived in or the devices they used, the people on those other Worlds still loved, hated, caressed, bickered, kept pets, climbed trees, went on picnics, thumped each other, wandered alone and with nothing, threw wild parties, drank, piddled, lied, died.

        "Look at us..." the man's voice said more gently. A hush settled over the crowd as the globe, the last of its images sliding from view, began to clear as if made of mist. It also gently resumed its descent until it finally settled onto the Square. Fortunately hordes of police had managed to work their way through the crowd in case of such an event, there were enough of them to form a defensive circle around it.

        The mist now dissolved completely to reveal a young man and woman, completely nude, standing in the center of a featureless white circular platform three meters across and a third of a meter high.

        The man was of average build, darkly handsome in a conventional way in that he looked no more `foreign' to any member of the crowd than anybody in it might have looked to anybody else. His companion was tall, blonde and very slender however and extremely light skinned, beautiful but not in the way Judealovne had been.

        " - Where's Judealovne?" a short, brightly dressed young man with a strong provincial accent shouted from the crowd to the bemused smiles of many in the crowd.

        "She's resting now, but she will return in a few days if you would like to see her again," the man on the platform smiled back at him. "My name is Dof Sen Reuda by the way, and this is Cha Tay", he nodded towards her. "What is yours?"

        "Gengit," the man shouted back before the media dived on him.

        "I'm sure we'd all like to see Judealovne again," Cha Tay addressed the crowd for the first time in her surprisingly low but melodious voice. Many in the crowd murmured back their assent. "Perhaps we could begin our friendship by speaking to those of you taking part in your Conference of Reconciliation," she looked up towards the Great Hall and the Delegates assembled in front of it. "But there is one thing we must assure you all of from the beginning, and that is that we consider ourselves to be here as your guests. If you should decide that you wish to have nothing further to do with us and the people whom we represent, then we shall leave your world until such time as you may decide to change your minds in the future. Anytime in the future. We expect the Universe to be around for a very long time."

        And she smiled with a confidence which radiated right out through that crowd.
 
 

        Contact for our world would turn out to be far easier than it had been for most other worlds. But then the Conference of Reconciliation was tailor-made for discussing issues of the kind Contact usually involves. Indeed, one could almost say that by fighting the kind of wars we had before Contact, we had benefited in compensation. When the Delegates came to see that Judealovne had been correct and that the Universe was indeed run by `Steua', albeit benevolent ones called the Torsyne, they sought and got full authority to sign up the whole of our world.

        Many observers believed the path was also made smoother by the Iskurahi's graphic demonstration to our entire population through its Ghelfina that, once something of major importance becomes known to a society, it cannot become unknown unless that society suffers total collapse. Case history after case history poured from its virtually infinite files to show that when the rise of computers was fought tooth and nail even on worlds as politically monolithic as Tulsat, they would develop in some remote colony that eventually became too powerful to be kept in line, or in some underground society that is inevitably discovered and exploited by Capitalist or Military interests. Contact was seldom delayed by more than a few decades, and what in the end was the point of that?
 

        Even in those complex and fascinating times, a few cynical observers were able to note that the Lindsips may have gained far more than they lost by putting their names to the Signing. Even though the Torsyne had come into Existence billions of years before that `prophetic' passage in the Panil could have been written, there was some speculation about whether its author could have acquired `inside knowledge' of the Universe as the result of an illegal visitation rather than a Revelatory one. He might even have come from off-world himself.

        It had been hoped the question would be resolved when the Iskurahi presented its Rolodon, its record of Tulsat and its inhabitants from its birth nearly six billion years ago. This threw much light on the Veria's Era, and even showed Her Execution. It also showed however, to the Suffras at least, that the entire Era was no more than the product of a religious mania any primitive society can fall prey to and all too often did. Even the Prophesy itself had clearly been inspired by a hysterical dream, like Lindsip's, that just happened to resemble the Outside Universe in some of its details. Its author had even been identified as a physician who was born fifty years after the Veria's Era, and could therefore have had no direct connection with Her whatsoever apart from a passionate interest in Her Work Amongst the People. The only thing the Rolodon could not show was whether or not he was born on Tulsat.

        The Lindsips naturally refused to be perturbed by any of this. They continued to maintain that even if most of the Panil's stories were more allegory than fact, their religion still had a sounder basis of Truth than any other on Tulsat. And as for the Prophecy, it had come doubly true with Contact. This for them was a great source of comfort in the face of a new Prophecy the current leader of the Racift Comradehood made during that time, that Contact would soon bring a `Great Moral Readjustment'.

        A rather obvious prophecy though it may have been, it would still lead to the Iskurahi receiving one of the strangest requests it would receive from Tulsat during its Transition to a Known World of the Iskurahi.
 
 

        Over the decades prior to Contact, the Beliefs and Practices of the Racift Comradehood had, as all movements inevitably do, acquired too many idiosyncrasies to retain coherence and stability, and had sprouted many rebel offshoots as a result. One of these, the predominantly young "Democratic Representatives of the People to Their God", came together barely a decade before Contact under the leadership of Spiikels Tlatis, an ex-Suffra scientist. She had noticed this fundamental weakness of `all religion' and resolved to find a way to overcome it through the principle embedded in its then rather presumptuous-sounding name. But as she and her putative followers had to ask themselves right from the beginning, `what is the point of having Beliefs if these can be altered in any way at all, democratically or otherwise? Aren't religious beliefs, by definition, supposed to be fixed for all time?'

        Tlatis was able to point out that although all the theories of science were provisional, that is, they could be modified or discarded according to new evidence, in practice most had remained intact for decades and had become for all intents and purposes beliefs. These were then defended just as vigorously by people with reputations to uphold and positions to maintain as anybody defending Religious beliefs. Conflicting evidence might occasionally be hushed up, or altered to suit whatever view held dominance. It was rare, and one couldn't condone it, but one could understand. Truth was important, but so were those who adjudicated upon it.

        Could not religious beliefs be held in the same kind of way as scientific ones? They would seldom require adjustment, and would only need to be completely discarded if there was a real clash with reality that endangered life or sanity. She outlined an instance where one mercifully short-lived Racift offshoot had imposed absurd dietary restrictions which had made many of its most fervent followers go blind. To prevent such a monstrosity happening again, democracy must allow God-given wisdom to prevail over doctrinal assertion in any conflict between the two.
 

        In its first year the DRPTTG picked up only a few converts. But it steadily grew until, by the time Contact arrived, it had grown so large that democracy could no longer work directly within its membership. Representatives now had to be elected to a council, named as was customary for the Veria Herself, from smaller sub-memberships, most of them now spread out over wide geographic areas.

        Contact itself brought many more converts still, most from other religions that had begun to founder beneath them. Amongst these converts was one who would change all their lives completely. Like Tlatis, Bon Sartoril was another refugee from the `completely shattered Authority of Science' as he himself put it. Before he had had enough of the enormous amounts of information then streaming into Tulsat from the Outside Universe and the Teklanmeh however, he had learned of a world in a neighboring star system called `Ko', just ten light-years away. It was a very strange world indeed, consisting entirely of ocean apart from a single huge rock covered in buildings left by literally thousands of previous occupying populations. Its most recent tenants had been an atmospheric, geologic and oceanic research community. Sartoril suggested that Ko allowed the DRPTTG the opportunity to `rebirth the church' there if the Iskurahi permitted since it would be `isolated from Tulsat and its fate, yet not be too far away in case its people should ever have spiritual need of us'.

        And much to their surprise, and that of many cynics on Tulsat, the Iskurahi agreed to consider their request provided a `sensible' Agreement could be drawn up that incorporated certain `Understandings'. Sartoril suggested himself how this might be done without compromising too many of the DRPTTG's Beliefs. "One of the Foundation Concepts of The Democratic Representatives of the People To Their God is that `principles taken to extremes can become perversions'. That, surely, is what our democracy is also intended to prevent." He also reminded them that "The Veria Herself created the Concept of the Leass, where a person promises to God that if she cannot for some good reason carry out God's Will, then it is God's Will that prevents her from doing so. She may be performing some task necessary to her family's basic survival for example, or they may all be forced to eat a forbidden food because a famine gives them no other choice." Sartoril suggested both these Concepts would allow the DRPTTG to make any changes necessary to any of their customary practices in accordance with the Understandings "by democratically agreeing on any adjustments necessary to our Beliefs and Practices where this is absolutely necessary in order to achieve our longer-term goals of `Service to Our God'."

        He also pointed out that if they didn't agree on some of them very soon, they risked losing out to a group of ex-Suffra scientists who were also preparing a claim.

        The Veria agreed to the Understandings very quickly indeed and Ko became theirs.

        The DRPTTG immediately renamed both the planet and its only land mass `Rock of Ages' in accordance with the feeling the Panil had always engendered amongst its followers. In return for that, they made the solemn and, so far as the Iskurahi was concerned, totally unnecessary promise that once they had established themselves on Rock of Ages, they would find a way of `paying their way'.

        Perhaps the oddest concession the Iskurahi made however, apart from the actual granting of `the Rock' as it quickly became known, was its waiving of its otherwise cast iron Restriction on those of the DRPTTG's adherents with two or more children leaving Tulsat for the Rock. It would still apply however to anybody born on the Rock, or wishing to leave it for other Worlds. The DRPTTG had never believed in birth control anymore than they had believed in any other form of `intervention in the affairs of God by man' through science or even scientific medicine. Perhaps the Iskurahi believed that the size of the Rock would force it on them soon enough anyway, even with the arrangements for medical care the Iskurahi insisted upon and the Rock's virtually infinite food supply. The miffed Suffra claimants quickly made a `prophecy' of their own, that this would inevitably result in much pain and misery for the Rock's inhabitants in the not too distant future.
 
 

        Now that virtually all the Science that can be done by man over the billenia has been done and probably done better again by the Torsyne, the entire scientific community of Tulsat saw the DRPTTG's acquisition of the Rock as yet another nail in the coffin of Science. They felt `their' research group should have had first priority to inherit its research complexes at least. For a little while it looked as if some of the old wounds were beginning to reopen. But as the Iskurahi pointed out, Rock of Ages had already been researched ad infinitum, and records of this and the histories of the people who had carried it out could be found in the Teklanmeh. However if any scientists did wish to continue that research then, assuming the DRPTTG agreed to it, the Eonmern could make any amount of scientific equipment available to them of whatever design they cared to specify. They also suggested that the best research would be done from flying, floating or submersible platforms, and the Nessiks made the Rock instantly accessible anyway. In any case, now that ten light years or ten million, the entire Universe, could be crossed as quickly and easily as ten light years, there were many other worlds they might feel were even more deserving of research if they cared to consult the Teklanmeh.

        The steam went out of the scientist's arguments as it really began to dawn on them just what kind of Universe they were now living in.

        And with that smugness peculiar to those who are Right for all the wrong reasons, diehard Lindsips saw a sweet justice in that. As Tlaxil had pointed out, scientists had allowed themselves to believe in their work as if it were a Religion. But now that error had left them feeling high and dry with nowhere to go. The Lindsips however could continue to Believe because ultimately the physical world, Torsyne and all, was of no consequence whatsoever. Only the spiritual world counted now. The role of Science would at last be at an end, it would become just one more aberrant chapter that would be quickly forgotten in God's everlasting Chronicle of Man.

        That will doubtless be of great comfort to the new inhabitants of the Rock of Ages as they settle in and adapt to their new World.

Raoul Porline
England/Earth
+2017

Rock of Ages

        I saw many fascinating Worlds on my recently concluded random tour of the Iskurahi Universe, but the one that really stands out in my mind is called, of all things, Rock of Ages. If that has been an enduring concept in Christianity, it is even more so for this strange little World, for it has had that name for nearly two millenia.

        To tell you just how Rock of Ages acquired that name, we will have to go even further back in its history, five and a half billion years in fact (I really must get used to the spooky time scales out here...) Worlds, like unborn embryos, can also suffer congenital disorders. Somehow the original dust cloud from which Rock of Ages and its Sun formed contained far fewer of the heavy supernova-created radioactive elements than normal. This stunted the world's subsequent development as effectively as an enzyme deficiency. For these weighty elements would have migrated to the planet's core; their fissile heat would then have set up the complex system of recirculating convective cells that on most worlds allow the lightest materials to rise to the surface and form a thin crust. Instead the magma cooled from the top down into huge plates of granitic rock hundreds of kilometers deep and thousands wide. This strange armadillo world would therefore know nothing of the vast rafting continents most other worlds possess.

        Water and gases did however gasp through the fissures in between these plates in sufficient quantity to cover the surface with a single shallow ocean and a rich proto-atmosphere. But there would be no tides, Rock of Age's one and only moon had strayed within its primary's Roche limit early in its life and shredded itself into a set of Saturn-like rings.

        At some later point in the planet's early history, what must have been a very sizable meteorite scored a freak hit at a point where four of the armadillo plates met around twenty degrees north of the equator. The shockwaves the impact generated caused the fracturing to go deep, allowing the magma that still underlay those plates to exude itself through to the surface. This eventually froze into the form of a roughly pentagonal fortress-like block three kilometers wide that rose some five thousand meters above the ocean surface.

        It would be this feature, named the Rock of Ages by its most recent inhabitants, that would give the entire planet its name.

        In its first billion years, the weight of the Rock balanced the pressures that had raised it only uncertainly so that it rose over some eons and fell during others. It might even conceivably have been ejected from the bowels of the planet like some gigantic multi-megaton turd. But this didn't happen, the world cooled further and locked the Rock into its present position for the last four and a half billion years, about the age of our own world. Erosion and other forms of attrition have reduced its original immense height to a mere 500 meters above its parent body's sea level.

        The planet has not been entirely deprived of its mountains and valleys and swiftly flowing rivers however; it merely keeps them in its sky. Having such a smooth ocean surface means that stable weather patterns can build up and last indefinitely. As a result, Rock of Age's cyclonic zones are ruled off from each other with geometric precision by bands of winds coursing around the globe at speeds of hundreds of kilometers per hour. They don't even move with the seasons, for there are none, the planet has barely half a degree of axial tilt relative to the plane of its stellar orbit. The Rock itself reflects just enough stellar heat to ensure that an anticyclone remains permanently anchored over it, and that in turn locks all the other systems into place round the planet. The only outside variable to have much influence therefore is the stellar wind; this occasionally causes frontal systems to snake out from the cyclonic centers like little broken watch springs.

        These aperiodic instabilities, slight though they are, bring rain to the Rock about once every hundred years. They also provide just enough environmental variation to tickle into existence those little organic challenges of Life. The fact that the ocean floor ranges in depth from mere meters where the rims of old meteorite craters remain to nearly a thousand in others at the plate boundaries helps a little too, but not much. Evolution has therefore proceeded very slowly here. The most complex species so far are fish that have only recently developed jaws and cartilaginous skeletons. Nor has Life for the same reason painted a very colorful canvas on Rock of Ages, the variety of all its species is considerably less than exists on most organic worlds of a similar age.

        Normally the Iskurahi declares worlds that have never developed intelligent species to be Pristine Worlds which can only be visited by scientists and certain selected Others from the Preferred List. But just two years after its first discovery, during which the Eonmern had carried out its usual intensive exploration and research for newly discovered worlds, the Iskurahi declared it a New World. This designation meant it was able to accept a human population, though special conditions would apply to protect its unique environment. Chief amongst these were that it could not be peopled by just anybody who happened to like the look of it; only a single group held together by a common interest such as a philosophy or a religion which espoused environmental values could apply. Its belief system also had to accept the standard Population Restrictions, not only because of the Torsyne's Controls, but because it had to be confined exclusively to the Rock itself and not attempt to cover the anticylonic ocean surfaces with rafts, or export its excess population to other Worlds. Significant fragmentation of the group through ideological discord would cause it to be resettled onto a Lalleldil World.

        Such `Belief Groups', as the Iskurahi call them, apparently have the same survival half-life as entire worlds. The only difference is that their Normal Curve is a little broader; they can expire in less than one year, or last for many thousands.

        The present incumbents on the Rock, the Verians (or the `Democratic Representatives of the People To Their God', to give them their full title), are the 17,578th such Belief Group to inhabit the Rock. They have been there a little under 2000 years, and look good for the same again. But like so much else these days, if I hadn't happened to come across it while I was browsing through the Teklanmeh (shades of the old Internet!), I would never had known about it. Perhaps it was my Catholic upbringing, but I knew as soon as I saw it that there was something there that looked very familiar to me, so I couldn't resist the temptation to visit if if it could be arranged. I guess its appeal was that the Veria had apparently somehow combined the age and experience of an ancient religion with the friendliness of a young one, you know, before it becomes weighed down with the usual compromised principles, empire builders and embezzlements of body and soul.

        Any new occupier of the Rock can do as they wish with whatever previous occupiers leave behind. They can have the work done for them by Tinsla or do it themselves. I mention this because the next occupiers of the Rock, whoever they turn out to be, will have their work cut out for them whichever choice they make. The first impression you get when you arrive at the Rock is that the Verians have strained its limited capacity to accommodate large populations to its absolute limits. For the Rock is entirely covered in buildings, there is absolutely no place where bare rock can be seen at all. And all these buildings seemed to have other buildings built on top of them, onto the sides of them, even suspended beneath them where they hang out over the water from the sheer cliff faces. Even the balconies built onto them have littler balconies built onto those. There are trees and shrubs, but it is as if they have been specially designed not to take up too much space. Some resemble poplars, but most actually look like ordinary trees that have somehow been projected onto the scene in Cinemascope with the lens removed.

        One wonders how such a city could have been built by a society which bans the use of `unnatural' construction materials like structural plastics and whatever else the Eonmern makes available. But then they do have laminated wooden beams which may be just as strong, the product of an art thousands of years old that they brought from their original Home World as refugees from its Contact. The end result makes one think of those ancient European cities like Split or Dubrovnik, except the Rock is somewhat untidier.

        And in the middle of it all, occupying the central peak, sits Rock of Ages' enormous Colosseum-like `Balznecil of the Thirteen Steps'. This center of worship, built from a peach-colored stone, is at least three hundred meters across. Thirteen sets of thirteen tall arches support the rim of its tallis, or bowl, which is in turn made up of concentric circles of descending stone terraces upon which the People sit. Thirteen round minaret-like sohrol towers topped with onion-domes carved in lace-like stone are set round it at the thirteen cardinal points of the Verian compass. These look as if they had been lifted straight out of one of those Ottoman Empire-style picture palaces so much loved in the thirties of Old Earth's last century.

        And at the very center of the grassed pyltree that forms the bottom of the tallis's bowl, is The Veria herself, all thirty meters of her. She actually hangs from an enormous iron gibbet bolted to an immense laminated timber post, her feet mere centimeters above a black onyx-like staircase consisting of thirteen steps. Like Earth's Christ, the Veria had to make her own way to her execution. In her case though she was marched into a courtyard - which the tallis in fact represents but has to take the form of a dish to accommodate the immense congregation - and made to climb thirteen steps up to the gibbet from which she was hung.

        I don't know if photorealistic sculpture is a tradition the Verians brought with them from their original Home World or developed on the Rock itself. The Veria's high level of surface detail for something that huge certainly surpasses anything I have ever seen on Earth. Also, she is not carved from a single piece of stone, nor even from several assembled to look like a single piece. Each of her features, her hair, her eyes, the simple white bodice in which she is clothed, are all carved from separate pieces of stone whose natural colorations closely match those of the objects they represent.

        Yet, amazingly, even The Veria is not the most impressive feature of the Balznecil. This is in fact the immense awe-inspiring Arch formed by the planet's rings. I should imagine these look exquisite enough from space, but seen from that magic edifice they become a thin brushstroke of the most delicate pink so high in that azure sky as to seem all but beyond the range of human vision.
 

        If the Rock's exterior seems crowded, its interior holds even more of the People - four million of them. The underground tunnels and galleries they live in riddle the Rock so completely there is probably not much more than a thin shell of the original material left even below the ocean surface. This dense mass of Humanity produces so much heat it is enough to drive a passive air-conditioning system using the inevitable slight water seepage into the lower galleries, rather like a termite mound.

        And this natural air conditioning is about the only `modern' facility the People have, if you could call it that. The Veria ban Tinsla, Otindas, Hilashels, Rondos, Lotsus, Doanadars, Pasovirs, even the relatively simple technologies from their Home World of Tulsat such as radio, television, and movie cinemas. They also ban anything involving the use of plastic, iron or steel, and `ingestible narcotics in any of their several kinds' not already banned by the Iskurahi.

        However to give the Veria their due, they have wisely refused to push any of this too far. Unlike most of the religious authorities I've ever seen or heard of, they believe that principles that are carried to extremes can all too easily turn into perversions. This is the basis of the Leass bailout clauses in their Contract with their God, without which the Iskurahi would not have allowed them to emigrate onto the Rock of Ages in the first place. These Leasses at the time of writing allow them to accommodate a water desalination plant, a small fusion power plant, and an infirmary which is covenanted to send more serious cases to a Diursuel Medical Facility. At the more mundane levels there is electric lighting (though they nearly succeeded in keeping their ban on that), a sewerage treatment plant, a mass-transit system `for reasons of public safety' something like a system of elevators that run horizontally as well as vertically, a public address system in every room (with an off switch) that gives out news and other urgent information, and a small weekly `newsmagazine' distributed free.

        The Veria is therefore not quite the draconian monster it might seem to an outsider. Though the Rock looks straight out of our sixteenth century with its devout religiosity, you nevertheless get the impression that, if you know where to look, you can find little back rooms awash with illicit booze and Art.

        Visitors are welcome to the Rock although numbers are necessarily restricted; entry is mostly by ballot. The only item of a technological nature you can bring with you is any system vital to your life support. One item presumably covered by a Leass is handed to you as you walk through the Rock's single Nessik however, and it really is like something out of Gulliver's Travels. It looks like a five centimeter-wide bronze medallion on a chain you hang round your neck, they call it a `Malkior'. On one face is a mechanical watch with a face divided into the Rock's 13 hours, each with 13 subdivisions. You don't notice for a while that its single hand moves very slowly indeed, then you realize that each hour is over two of ours long, and that the hand only makes one circuit of its face each Rock day.

        The other face, the one that should be worn on the outside, contains the speaker for what functions as a kind of Hilashel. It does not work as a simultaneous translator that whispers in you ear however, it repeats everything it hears after it has heard it in a rather loud voice. I suspect that the lexicons in these things are censored in some way, I wasn't on the Rock long enough to find out. I was reluctant to experiment in any case since I really did have no wish to offend my most excellent hosts.

        Most of the Rock's visitors come out of curiosity as I did and to sample the cuisine, but a few arrive to help crew the sailing ships for the single voyage they are allowed as a kind of Entertainment. This may well provide more thrills than just about anything in the Universe since it doesn't look safe, but I understand Rock of Age's constant meteorological conditions help make accidents as rare as anywhere else.

        Verian sailing ships are nothing like the square-riggers we think of as sailing ships. Here they actually look more like sailing submarines. Long and narrow, perhaps a hundred meters long by eight wide, they have flat decks close to the waterline and wooden conning tower-like structures near their bows with heavy panes of glass set into them round the top. A few meters behind these are their single masts, rotatable airfoil surfaces barely twenty meters high and one wide formed from laminated timbers. These are the only `sails' they need to negotiate those fast banded freeways girdling the world. They swing from one to the other using the cyclonic systems rather like our old freeway interchanges, indeed, the charts showing the locations of their fishing grounds resemble old-time intercity routemaps. Since the Rock is set right in the middle of a `roundabout' however, this means the ships can only enter and leave the mass of floating piers that surround the Rock by raising and lowering a normal-looking triangular sail. This however still only takes them part of the way; to get across the innermost few kilometers their crews must launch longboats down the net-laying ramps built into their sterns and tow them in with oars and muscle power.

        The large numbers of ships are not there just to take tourists on wild maritime adventures however. In spite of the fact that they have no more need to than anybody else in a Universe of automated bounty, the Verians resolved right from the start to `pay their way' by fishing the waters of their world on a fully conservational basis and exporting exquisitely delicious seafoods to anybody in the Universe who wanted them. And want them they do. With an infinitude of customers, the Eonmern can only distribute the genuine original by lot, though they can, I believe, duplicate them reasonably well using ingredients from less exotic sources.

        In any case the Rock hardly needs outsiders to brighten the lives of its people as anyone can see from their cheerful faces and their light, colorful Scottish kilt-like clothes. On the whole they live in a fuller, richer fashion than most of the people I've seen so far on my travels, even though they live by the intensely behaviorally socialist Rules most Religious Groups develop. Family life for instance is sacrosanct, `exclusive' relationships between men and women without a publicly declared intent to marry are unthinkable. Yet it is as if these Rules themselves somehow provide much of the fun and humor they enjoy. Perhaps that's just as well considering that entire families in the deeper galleries often occupying living spaces of barely fifty cubic meters. The Rock itself could also be compared to a submarine in this respect except that most of its `crew' are women and children.

        The Rock's internal economic system is nothing short of bizarre. The people actually buy and sell everything using credit cards. Now you might think, considering the kinds of societies these things symbolized on Earth, that the Rock is ruthlessly capitalistic in this respect. Not so. Here they are the only form of money allowed. People cannot buy or sell goods to each other, all financial transactions must be conducted through a central exchange-like Impreosk. This also serves as a Department Store, Public Utility, Insurance Company and Civil Service all rolled into one. The Impreosk also makes it virtually impossible for people to `exploit others and grow poisonously rich' as my guide described it, nor can people `receive more than their most basic needs without performing their quota of honest toil'. The penalty for ensuring that this economic system is as centralized as its morality however is that it requires one entire third of the Rock's population to perform their honest toil by processing each of the little bits of paper that records every single little purchase anybody makes, no matter how small. And they are not allowed any mechanical calculating device like some sort of abacus for instance. Only pencil, paper, and their Veria-given brains.

        It was very clear to me though that the Verian Religion offered considerable compensation for the people's hardships. The most important celebrations are, naturally enough, held within the Balznecil, while `everyday' ones are conducted within the smaller senectu within the Rock itself. There are no prayers or sermons here though, the Local Representative of The People to Their God instead conducts a conversation-like Caenlis with Her People in rather the same manner as some of our  television interviewers conducted interviews with an entire studio audience. After the religious side of the Caenlis concludes, all solemnity is abandoned and it then moves to secular matters. It finally concludes with light refreshments and entertainments of a suitably sober kind.

        The huge size of the Balznecil demands that its Caenlises be of a more musical nature. Here the role of the Most Senior Representative is to compose and conduct the descant-like seousis that go to make them up. The main choir in their sector of seating behind the Veria Herself establishes the main structure of a seousis, performing it in a somewhat higher register than European choral ears might be used to, rather like a Polynesian congregation. The other twelve choirs in the tallus itself then follow with their own in their various lower registers. These people appear to have been specially selected for their roles; those making up the lowest register, men and women alike, have chests huge enough for lungs as big as footballs.

        And all are accompanied by the `orchestra' distributed around the thirteen sohrol towers. These each contain a single sohrol, which consists of two octaves of bronze tubular bells struck individually by what look like oversize piano hammers operated by ropes from below. They require no small skill to learn; the women responsible for each usually have to spend up to five years practicing with a muted set in a special room in the Balznecil. The two sohrol towers behind the Veria contains the highest octaves, the one opposite them the lowest, and those to their sides the intermediate octaves. And the musical Caenlis they can create between them can be as complex and fascinating to listen to as any piece from Bach or Haydn. I was lucky enough to attend an evening one on my short visit, and with that magic Arch glowing overhead especially powerfully after the sun had just set, the effect was nothing short of magic.

        The sohrols also serve a utilitarian function, and that is to mark off the Rock's hours, each with its own brief doleful Caenlis. Indeed everything on this Rock of Ages is geared to the number of steps The Veria had to climb to her Extinction. Since she paused to take breath on the sixth Step, not only is the hour of Nebu Ostson the Rock's lunchbreak, but on the day of Nebu Ostson everybody, even Representatives and lesser officials of the Veria, rest, visit one another, or just catch up with their various homely duties. And on the thirteenth hour and all through the thirteenth day, Matstuta No, everybody is extra busy as Caenlis are held all over the Rock, along with major ones in the Balznecil if people preferred to be closer to the continous, albeit doleful, music from the sohrol towers.
 

        While I have found life on the Rock of Ages fascinating in its depth and richness, I have to ask myself if they really have found something here, or have they merely been lucky so far? I know such a life would not (now) suit me. And that raises an even more disturbing question: can a person only hope to find happiness in this infinite Universe by being born into a Belief Group and growing up to see reality only through rose-colored glasses? To me the Universe is too fascinating a place to leave unexplored. Am I in peril of my mortal soul thereby? Or, to ask again that most ancient question, is it in the seeking that the answer truly lies?

        Some things never change and I guess they never will. Not even in this whole new Version of Reality.
   

        "That smell!" Quincey gazed forward expectantly, arm wrapped round one of Eve's bow pillars. "It's absolutely delicious...!"

        "That's their good home cooking - you just wait 'till you taste it," Barkworth called across to her.

        "Look forward to sampling that myself in another lifetime," Eve said in a wistful tone.

        As they skimmed over the wavetops with Eve's Taurnal Spheres switched off and everything battened down against the cool spray-drenched breeze blowing through her, Rock of Age's midday sun sintered into their necks and shoulders. The Rock slowly rose higher above the horizon ahead of them, and from this distance, surrounded by the myriads of sailing vessels that would be strange on any World, it all looked extraordinarily serene. But as Barkworth knew from his first visit all those years ago when he first began his travels through this Paradise of Infinite Horizons, it would soon take on an entirely different aspect altogether...

        "Deus Meo!" Quincey shouted as the Rock finally revealed itself in all its cockeyed splendor. "How exquisitely, delightfully loony! It reminds me of that 1939 movie you showed us a while back Eve, you know, `Great Expectations' from Charles Dickens? That wedding cake moldering on the bridal table all those years with mice running in and out of it." She laughed outright.

        "That's it exactly!" Barkworth grinned back at her. "Thought you'd like it. But wait till you see it from the inside."

        Eve then lifted to clear the Rock's long narrow sailing ships with their masts that looked more like single raised oars. Their decks were crowded with shouting, waving sailors; what sounded like rude sea shanties rose into the air. Quincey waved back, absolutely beside herself with delight.

        Eve began to wheel round towards the Rock's port side in preparation for circling the Rock, its inhabitants could then get the one good look at her the Veria had allowed. It wasn't just that spacecraft were a rare sight anywhere in a Paradise of Step-through Dimensions, there was good reason to believe Eve was the only one left of her kind at all. She looked rather like one of those Greco-Roman follies the elderly rich of Old Earth might once have built in a secluded corner of their private grounds. She consisted of a circular platform about twelve meters across and a meter high, this was encircled by three steps that allowed easy access when she was on the ground. A three-quarter ring of eight slender fluted columns four meters high, without bases or capitals, supported a similarly incompletely circular architrave half a meter high, its two free ends extended over what was Eve's bow in horizontal flight. She had been built entirely of a white marble-like substance, although the decking inside her pillars was a checkerboard of black-and-white squares each a meter or so across.

        There would however be no place for Eve to land on the Rock, and Barkworth doubted whether they would have received permission for her to hover off the end of a wharf perhaps to let them step ashore, even if they had thought of it. So she simply flew round the Rock itself once as Agreed, then back up into space into a parking orbit some way above the atmosphere. He and Quincey then stepped through her onboard Nessik into the Rock's Visitors Reception in the basement of the Balznecil.

        Here they were met by a youth, Velcro, who had been assigned to act as their guide for the duration of their visit. He was not however a complete stranger, at least not to Barkworth; he was the son of one of the `rebels' Barkworth had met on his first visit.

        Velcro took Quincey and Barkworth to the rebels immediately. Most of them however appeared to have grown many years older rather than wiser. Some had left altogether to rejoin `The System' as they married and found their theories had not taken full account of parental responsibility. Others gave the impression that it would have been better if they had rejoined it. The few who actually had taken off into the wider Universe had mostly discovered that they were lucky to have any sort of System at all and had come back vowing to `improve what we already have'. One of these had since even been Elected as a Representative of the Veria itself - and Hespessel had been the most interesting rebel of the bunch. It was he who had made the arrangements for their visit, including altering their entry documents to show that they were married, and assigned Velcro to them as a `safe' guide. They were due to dine with him in his wharf-side house tonight, Barkworth was looking forward to it.

        The walk around those crooked little streets and alleyways of the Rock's surface Velcro and two other younger rebels had taken them on had been fun. And the party that night, in spite of its slightly forced `good old days' festivity of most middle-aged parties, had been exactly what they had wanted after Solciessa. And the rebels in their turn were happy to listen to the stories Quincey and Barkworth were able to bring them from the Worlds they had visited. Quincey was able to conclude their account of their experiences on Solciessa by telling them about the woman who had attempted suicide in that spectacular fashion there. Named in the Adjoahsno Inquiry only as Ense, she had been an engineering systems analyst from a recently Emerged World who had failed an Assignment, and knowing she would have virtually no chance to use her talents again, felt her life was over. She had tortured herself with thoughts of becoming less than human, as if she suffered some dread disease. Even so, it became clear that she might have changed her mind about ending it had she not seen the Jiotextrot; on her Home World airships had been her specialty.

        Quincey was also able to add that there was a simple explanation for the `missing teenagers'. Most were indeed kept inside, but the age at which they could leave Solciessa was much lower than for most Worlds. Their future participation in adult society on Solciessa was therefore entirely voluntary. About half took this escape route, which she thought was surprisingly low considering the social straitjacket that was all they otherwise had to look forward to.

        Barkworth couldn't help thinking at this point that Rock of Ages' own teenage rebels did not seem particularly impressive. They were either slavishly sycophantic to the older members who were still reasonably active, or had what they believed to be Different Ideas about the Real Truth and formed splinter groups of their own. Barkworth began to wonder if all this wasn't indeed a vital part of the system and that it was in fact covertly fomented by the Veria itself.
 

        These thoughts returned the following morning as Velcro proudly began to show them through the Rock; Barkworth found himself constantly having to reassure the youth he was okay. Although Velcro had been born and bred down here as he had proudly explained to them the night before, Barkworth suspected that he would have been blond and fresh-faced even if he had been born amidst the more Mediterranean-looking people on its surface. And a more absolute personification of the word `callow' Barkworth had never come across. Quincey had unfortunately hit the nail right on the head when she observed that Velcro `was probably even worse than you must have been at his age'.

         It was probably only because he was so young and enthusiastic though that Velcro had woken as early in the morning as Quincey and Barkworth had, their circadian rhythms still being a couple of hours ahead of the Rock's. He had then been hurriedly detailed by their more somnolent friends to give them a quick guide round the `touristy bits' before they met up again `sometime this afternoon'.

        `Never Go Back' was beginning to haunt him as much as Velcro, with his cross-culturally unfortunate name, was haunting him now. The agreement he had and Quincey had made `never return to Worlds they had already visited on their own or together' had always held up until now. When he showed her the 3Ds of Rock of Ages, she had naturally been doubtful for this reason as for the more obvious ones, but Barkworth hadn't wanted any more nasty surprises. It was only after he was able to reassure her that the people he knew on the Rock `made it their business to see it wasn't quite the way it looked' that she had finally relented, retied the bun in a businesslike way on the back of her head, and once more agreed to `keep on tilting at windmills' with him.
 

        As they wandered through the crowded tunnels and galleries of Rock of Ages far beneath the surface of its surrounding seas, it seemed to Barkworth that the entire history of the People's Home World of Tulsat had been captured in the fresco-like haboshra that covered every square millimeter of their walls and ceilings. These had been painted in an organically lurid style - or perhaps it only seemed that way after they passed through that immense cavern crammed with huge cauldrons full of slowly-cooking fish and various less readily identifiable sea species. Suddenly he found it all too easy to imagine they were walking around inside a huge model of the human digestive system like the one his father had made him walk through when he was as a little boy.

        Finally they came upon one of the thirteen underground entrances that led up to the heavily-columned comtiksua immediately beneath the Balznecil's tallis. It was from this vast circular space that thirteen stairways led up in their turn into the tallis itself. Only the people who lived on the Rock's Surface used the outside entrances, something like ninety percent of its population had to enter via the comtiksua as joyously as possible. The resulting pandemonium was overseen from the vaultings overhead by myriads of malign-looking figures ornately carved in white stone; to Barkworth they looked like the products of illicit unions between Victorian Gargoyles and Thai Temple Goddesses.

        The comtiksua wasn't entirely empty however. a ring of thirteen free-standing booths stood in its center. And they were in fact one of the most extraordinary features of the Balznecil. About two meters high and a little more than a meter square, they were constructed of plain, rough-hewn timber so that they looked rather like little wooden outhouses. Each had a viewpanel set into the front, and looking through this one could see a stunningly realistic view into the interior of one or another of Tulsat's thirteen most important Balznecils. Yet these were not holograms - not on Rock of Ages - but models with forced perspectives so carefully crafted that even the woodgrains and stone surfaces became progressively finer with distance. Along with the subtle lighting this lent a strong sense of actually being there, as if one was gazing into the actual buildings themselves.

        Like the Balznecil of The Thirteen Steps itself, they too in their various ways represented the courtyard in which the original Veria had met Her end thirty-five hundred years ago. However, since few of Tulsat's climate zones were as dry as the Rock's, the Balznecils there were all roofed with immense but light shell-like domes carefully fabricated from laminated timbers. They too had gargoyle-like figures carved into them, though only in the shallowest relief. The Renaissance Cathedral builders of Old Earth might well have looked upon those roofs with envy.

        Barkworth could tell from Quincey's quick indrawn breath when she looked into the first booth she came to that she was as impressed as he had been when he first saw them. She automatically reached into a pocket for her Rhondo to take some images back to Eve, but of course it wasn't there. She moved methodically round from one booth to the next, peering at some length through each viewpanel in complete silence apart from the occasional `Deus Meo!'.

        Suddenly she seemed to Barkworth as alien as if she was from another World. She had chosen to wear her "suitably chastest raiment" that day, a long plain belted pink dress that went down to her ankles. And with her bony slenderness and the absurd blue high-heeled shoes that went click-clack, click-clack against that hard stone floor, for a moment he found it hard to believe that she was actually accompanying him. But then in many ways she was from another world. Although she had shown him round those parts of Brazil where her family lived, that part of her had remained as unknowable to him as the country itself seemed to be.

        After Quincey had peered into the last of the booths, she came back to him naturally oblivious of these thoughts. She only looked pleased with herself in that way people do when they have added some vintage memories to their collection.

        A young couple, hand in hand, then swept past them followed by a small group of people with that sober look of Relatives. It was only then that Barkworth realized how oddly empty the Balznecil was most of the time considering the amount of space it took up on the Rock. Perhaps it was a kind of conspicuous consumption in the name of Her Maternal Holiness.

        "I wonder if anything like the 2000's Moral Revival could ever happen on Earth again?" Quincey whispered in his ear as she mock-submissively wrapped her arm around his waist and snuggled coquettishly up to him to Velcro's obvious embarrassment.

        "Impossible to say," he responded as he drew her in closer.
 

        The extraordinary figure held Quincey transfixed as soon as its head appeared over the top of the tallis stairway. She then raced up the rest of the steps two at a time.

        Barkworth then realized that Quincey's appreciation of the Veria might not be of a kind readily acceptable to whatever local populace might be around. He too ran up the stairs two at a time, followed closely by a slightly confused Velcro.

        "Deo..." she breathed as Barkworth and Velcro caught up with her.

        Whoever had sculpted The Veria was easily the equal of Michaelangelo, for it would have required superhuman artistry to have avoided an extreme bathos with a subject like this. Hanging from her enormous iron gibbet, the black hangman's noose contrasted with a knowing vividness against Her white skin as She stared, eyes almost as protuberant as Her breasts, up towards the Arch. The black onyx staircase, each of its thirteen steps bearing the symbols of its own special name, just failed to reach Her feet.

        Again Quincey reached for a Rhondo that wasn't there. "Oh - Poo...!"

        She swung round to look at Velcro in evident apology, but he just looked blankly back at her. It looked like their gong-like Malkiors really did censor even the most innocuous Unapproved Words.

        "Sorry," she said to him anyway.

        She then raced down the stairway to the pyltree as if The Veria was an apparition that might soon vanish in the sun. As she moved quickly across the grass towards it, Barkworth thought for one horrified moment she might even try to climb the Steps herself. But she halted a few meters before them and just stood there looking up at Her. She only began to walk back towards them as Barkworth and Velcro themselves approached the Veria.

        "Thank you, Velcro," she smiled brightly at him. "Perhaps we'll show you a few of the religious statues we have back home one day."

        Barkworth was relieved. It seemed some element in her Catholic background was still strong enough to have prevented yet another disaster.

        But in his relief he almost failed to notice the sheer joy that came into Velcro's eyes at the thought of seeing those statues with Quincey. He only now realized that Velcro had taken a shine to her and that she had been responding to it, even if only in a mildly indulgent way.

        Meanwhile Quincey was busily looking round the Balznecil's tallis and up at the Veria again. Barkworth couldn't guess if she had noticed Velcro's feelings herself.
 

        It took a moment or two for Barkworth's eyes to accustom themselves to the bright sunshine again as the party emerged from the interminable passageway snaking gently up from the Comtiksua. The arched doorway through which they passed opened out onto a wide expanse of large gray flagstones. The ornately filigreed parapet running the length of the Balcony still looked rather low to Barkworth considering that this was the highest point on the Rock - indeed on the entire planet - that the public had access to apart from the rim of the Tallis. The Balcony had been built high up inside the arches supporting this, their shadows reached starkly across it as in a De Cherico dream. A sohrol tower stood off a short distance away from the parapet, its onion dome out of sight somewhere above. The Balcony was a popular place for people to bring their children, especially outside the lunch-hour when it could be crowded with people from the offices elsewhere in the Balznecil. If they preferred, they could sit up at the polished-wood circular tables at one end and wait to be served from the tiny kitchen built into the wall. More often though they would simply bring a light picnic snack and spread it out on the flagstones themselves.

        The Balcony's however was probably just as popular for its cuitos as its view. Children especially loved them, for the brown gull-like birds would sweep in low from the sea calling cuito..! cuito..! cuito..! as if the tidbits offered them were theirs by Her Divine Right. But once they had made their crazy crash landings and all culinary obligations to them had been met, cuitos became very friendly indeed. They enjoyed being stroked and didn't even mind having their feathers gently ruffled.

        Velcro's childhood experiences of these birds were obviously still uppermost in his mind, for he immediately dragged Quincey and Barkworth over to the cage that formed the entire back wall of the Balcony. Its light iron meshwork resembled a passionfruit vine with intertwining serpents. Once one's eyes got used to the dim light inside, the female cuitos themselves with their peahen-like headfeathers could be seen hugging into their nests. Occasionally they called to each other in their coolly liquid tones that had given them their name.

        As Velcro explained for Quincey's benefit, the cuitos had been added to the list of the many bird species that had been brought to the Rock from Tulsat more for their behavior than their appearance. Indeed, as they watched, one hurtled through a gap in the lacy grillwork with its wings folded so that it resembled a little feathery football. It then splayed its wings and feet out quickly, wheeled round to avoid the inward sloping rear wall formed by the bowl of the Balznecil itself, then dropped onto the runway that had been cleared of nests along the floor. It had needed to be, for as Velcro explained, cuitos built their nests on the sides of cliffs in a part of Tulsat where the winds were strong and constant. Apparently they had so little use for what flat areas there were that their huge, webbed feet had become clumsy out of the water. Although this one landed well enough, it promptly tipped over and fell head first into another bird's nest with a squawk of flying feathers and batting of wings. It rather reminded Barkworth of an old 2D documentary he had once seen about those extraordinary aircraft carriers that had once cruised the oceans of Earth. Some of the landings their aircraft made had looked just as hair-raising.
 

        The Balcony was not crowded, it was still too early for the lunchtime throngs. The three of them were easily able to pick their way round the various tables to one in the far corner by the parapet where they could sit and watch the houses tumbling into the sea.

        "Are you the man and lady who came in the spaceship?" a very young tow-haired little boy looked up at them as they passed, eyes as big as saucers. His mother shushed him down as Quincey and Barkworth looked at each other.

        "Yes, we are," Quincey bent down to him. "And Eve is a very beautiful spaceship too, isn't she? It is a pity you couldn't have met and talked with her."

        This was very much the wrong thing to say. The boy's mother visibly flinched and drew her child back.

        "Sorry..." Quincey tried to apologize. But the expression on the women's face made it clear she was deeply shocked.

        Perhaps it was just as well Eve hadn't been able to land on the Rock. Hespessel had assured them that the Rock's lack of television or 3Ds would allow them to remain as anonymous as they wanted for a couple of days until the Rock's newsweekly came out. Then it might be a different story, even though coarse half-tone photographs were all that were allowed. He also suggested it might also be as well if they tucked their Malkiors under their clothing - which Barkworth now realized he had forgotten to do. He quickly tucked the device under his shirt. The boy had obviously made a wild guess about Eve, but Quincey couldn't really have denied him the truth.

        To Quincey's joy and relief, the boy peeped round his mother's shoulder and smiled at her.

        Barkworth squeezed Quincey's hand and smiled `childlike' at her too. She smiled one of her best sarcastic smiles in return. She was all too well aware of her ineptitude with children, if not quite so with adults.

        They found their way at last to the table. Barkworth waited for the others to sit, then sat down in the corner seat.

        "Hello. My name is Madilu."

        She must have been following along behind them. Yet she didn't look like a typical Rock waitress, indeed she hardly looked like a resident of the Rock at all. Young, perhaps no more than fourteen, she was much thinner for her height than even Quincey must have been at her age; her breasts barely hinted through the white translucent frilly dress she wore. Her skin had a white translucent quality about it, although unlike Velcro's it did not appear to have been caused by tunnel pallor. Even the curly wisps of hair surrounding her elfin face were white, and for a moment Barkworth wondered if she was an albino. But her huge eyes were of the deepest violet he had ever seen. They also looked very much older somehow...

        Then it struck him. She looked amazingly like The Veria Herself might have at the same age.

        "May I join you please?" she asked them in her childlike yet oddly un-girlish voice.

        Poor Velcro had "Yes Please!" written all over him in big flashing lights. Quincey looked a little miffed, it appeared she had in fact noticed the special attention he had been giving her.

        Barkworth though couldn't see how he could possibly refuse.

        "You are most welcome to," he said, rising again to pull out the remaining chair. "This is my friend Quincey, and the bright shiny young gentleman next to her is a friend of ours from the Rock, Velcro."

        "What beautiful names..." Madilu said to the accompaniment of many blushes from Velcro as she sat down. The sun poured through her hair from behind and turned it into an aura of the most delicately spun gold.

        " - You people believe in euthanasia, don't you?" the girl then looked at Quincey and Barkworth wide-eyed as if she had only learned about it in school that morning and hadn't quite recovered from the shock.

        "I don't think anybody actually believes in it. It just, well, exists," Barkworth said. It was the only reply he could think of on the spot.

        "Has been since the Torsyne Advent," Quincey added, puzzled at the girl.

        "And anybody can suicide anytime they want to, can't they? There's nothing to stop them."

        Barkworth would have thought even children knew that, even on the Rock. Indeed, especially on the Rock. The Veria was no less interested in disguising the unpleasant facts about Paradise than any other Belief Group seeking to discourage their people from climbing over the walls.

        "That's the way the Torsyne wanted it," Quincey answered her in her best `hard facts' tone of voice. "Part of their Restrictions on population growth. All you've got to do is say `Terminal World' when you approach a Nessik and you're on your way to one. You could probably do it even here on the Rock, saying you were going to visit a relative on Tulsat or something. Your Gatekeepers wouldn't be able to stop you."

        "Has anything like that ever happened here, Velcro?" Barkworth asked the question to try and soften Quincey's tone, though he quickly realized he probably hadn't done that too well.

        "The only case I've heard of was years ago; a man whose wife cheated on him," Velcro said with obvious disgust. Barkworth hoped that this really was for the event rather than the question..

        "What about young people who do it on an impulse when the one they love throws them over for somebody else?" Madilu asked Barkworth.

        " - Has that happened to you?" Quincey asked her, obviously concerned.

        The expression on the girl's face was completely unreadable, though Barkworth couldn't be sure if that was because of his naturally incomplete knowledge of The Rock's facial expressions.

        But then the girl's expression seemed to soften a little as she looked at Quincey. Quincey then actually put her hand out to her, but Madilu was unable to respond for some reason.  

        Quincey's gesture was something Barkworth had never seen her do before. He wondered if she had had a similar experience herself in her earlier years. She had clearly taken to this odd girl. It was hard to tell though whether it was because something in her mind resonated with Quincey's own, or whether it was some odd maternal instinct showing through. 

        He didn't know what to think.. 

        The expression on Velcro's face was also one of total puzzlement. He glanced towards Barkworth as if for support.

        "It's alright Velcro," Barkworth tried to reassure him, though he wasn't sure of quite what. "Girls go though these things, one or two blokes - boys - do too, I'm sure," 

         Quincey snorted at this. Even Madilu looked at him quizzically.      

        "Are such people allowed to suicide though?" Velcro then asked him. "I mean, - what Madilu said."

        "The Lalleldil usually intervenes to prevent it if possible," Barkworth replied, grateful for his diversion, "But - yes, if they're determined, no-one can stop them." He spread his hands.

        "The people actually most likely to suicide are middle-aged folk without close family ties, or those who have difficulty fitting into a community," Quincey then said to Velcro. "The kind of people you might imagine would find a few painless, pleasant moments in a Terminal World infinitely preferable to a living death. Because you are effectively dead without the respect of other people, aren't you? A Terminal World just makes it official."

       Barkworth couln't repress a wry smile at the way she put that.

        "Can't anything at all be done for such people before they get to that point?" Velcro asked, now clearly upset.

        "As I say, chances are that, by that time, everything already has," Barkworth said to him. "Even our Lalleldil has its limits. People like that may feel so trapped by life that, if they don't suicide, they'll go insane, sometimes criminally so. And the consequences of that can be disastrous for anyone they come into contact with, especially when it involves any of the technological goodies we have Out There," he pointed to the sky. "Nothing can be made perfectly foolproof. Even the little Lotsus that power these Malkiors could be turned into very powerful bombs if somebody ever found a way of short-circuiting their self-protection systems."

        "What about people with children?" Velcro asked. "Don't they get left behind?"

        "Yes, that can unfortunately happen though it's very rare," Quincey answered him, "That's because people with children often let their lives center round them since there is usually not a lot else for them to do. In fact some people think it's children who are the real human species in the Universe now, not adults. Unfortunately children who grow up that overly-pampered way often fail to become adults, and with succeeding generations... That's probably why many Worlds eventually degenerate and get Closed Out."

        "How's it actually done?" Madilu asked her. "What actually happens when you go to a Terminal World?"

        Even Quincey looked at her askance. Barkworth began to worry if her feelings for Madilu weren't a little displaced.

        "When you tell a Nessik you want to go to a Terminal World," Quincey answered her, "you can also tell it what kind of landscape you want to die in, desert, arctic waste, forest glade, city, whatever. Once you pass through you have about four minutes to change your mind, after which you won't even be aware that you're losing consciousness. What happens after that of course, no-one knows. - What do you do for people who develop psychiatric conditions here, by the way?" Quincey then asked Velcro, now clearly concerned about the girl.

        "It's very rare, fortunately. They get sent to the Infirmary, who usually pass them over to the Lalleldil. They seldom come back though, " he looked at Madilu. "Once you have a reputation..."

        Madilu jumped up, yanked her chair round, and pouted out over the parapet in what Barkworth didn't doubt was an ardent sulk.

         " - I'm sorry..!" Quincey jumped up and tried to comfort the girl, but again she seemed frozen.

        It was unfortunate, but Quincey would have had no idea that mental illness was still a stigma in some societies, especially in what was essentially an Old World one like the Rock's. Because mental illness wasn't exactly uncommon in a Paradise of Compulsory Happiness, it was seen as being no different from any other illness which could be caught and cured.

        "I guess it would be extremely rare here," Barkworth tried to patch things up as best he could. "Close-knit communities like the Rock's tend to have as little mental illness as suicide. Price of this blessed state though: everybody has to work from dawn to dusk and still get to church on time. - Wouldn't that be right, Velcro?" he grinned at him. "And you actually want to rebel against all that?"

        The boy grinned back. "If only we didn't have to work so hard."

        "Why don't you just leave then," Madilu snickered, "instead of just playing at being a rebel."

        "Because, unlike you, we're not selfish," he said to her sharply. "We want to improve things for everybody."

        "There may not be much point in having work at all unless it is hard work," Quincey said to him. "Otherwise it wouldn't be enough to stop anybody thinking about its being so pointless."

        Madilu turned round in her chair to Quincey and smiled at her in obvious delight. "You know, you're the most intelligent person I've ever met on this silly Rock."

        Then to Quincey's clear delight, the girl swung her chair back round and moved it closer to hers.

         Velcro was totally astonished. He just looked from one to the other, then actually scratched his head thumb down and palm up in the Rock equivalent of complete confusion.

         "Welcome to the world of women, Velcro," Barkworth had to laugh. "You mightn't understand them, but you will learn to love them, sad to say."

        "Patronising old fart," Quincey retorted. "Anyway, Madilu, why don't you leave the Rock and come join us? You've got all the makings of a great Conversationalist..."

        And with that she went on to explain just what being a Conversationalist was all about. "We don't just do it as a form of rebellion againt the Torsyne and their silly Paradise, but as our own way to try to guard against mental illness and stay alert for as long as we can."

        "You mean, live without work?" Velcro was genuinely puzzled. Such a notion was clearly abhorrent to him, though as he said earlier, provided it wasn't too hard.

        "He has a point, girls," Barkworth laughed.  "Perhaps Quincey and I should forget Paradise and move in here. After all, it's not the work itself that's so important, but the working together with other people. One popular theory in the Teklanmeh has it that virtually all human species descended from more primitive forms with very rudimentary codes of ethics, probably descended from the ability to hunt co-operatively, in sizeable groups. In other words, it's built into our genes to try and help each other, and it shows up in all sorts of subtle ways - "

        "So you're saying that being selfish requires real effort?" Madilu giggled, to an approving glance from Quincey.

        "Actually, for some people it probably does," Barkworth shot back, "But even the most overtly selfish people can become uncomfortable when they see selfishness in others. And those who build their lives around it can pay a stiff price, loneliness mostly, and generally unpleasant little lives."

        "And suicide...? Velcro asked.

        "And suicide," Madilu sneered at him.

        "And suicide," Barkworth said to her. "The most stable and happiest communities are - well, exactly that, communities which have strict behavioral rules that emphasize mutual consideration at the very least. - "

        " - Though it's probably best if there are a few individuals who consistently break them to keep things interesting," Quincey giggled, "since for some unguessable reason we also seemed to have evolved a gene for boredom . - That's probably the real reason why you rebels are tolerated here, Velcro. You and yours might actually be performing a valuable service to the Rock community."

        Madilu broke out into a fit of giggles to rival Quincey's own. Barkworth could only smile at this, after all, he could hardly disagree. Velcro, poor soul, could only once more look confused.

        Perhaps it was just as well that they were then distracted. An argument, in hushed tones but accompanied by vigorous gesticulating, had broken out between a young waitress and a woman, obviously her superior, just outside the door to the kitchen. The waitress kept glancing nervously towards them, though more, Barkworth noticed, towards Madilu. When the senior waitress saw them all looking in their direction, she glared what looked like a Final Warning to the reluctant girl.

        She reluctantly began to make her way over to them.

        The waitress was a big girl, slow-moving, with pallid blue eyes and thickets of curly hair. The blue poncho top and black culottes she wore did nothing for her figure . And it was indeed clear that it was Madilu she was frightened of as she circled round the table to put it between them. Madilu had obviously established some sort of reputation in this part of the Rock at least.

        Barkworth couldn't help beginning to wonder what for...

        "May I order for you both?" Velcro asked Quincey and Barkworth. "There's so many dishes I'd like you to try I hardly know which to choose."

        "Yes of course, Velcro. Love you to," Quincey nodded at him with an enthusiasm Barkworth though unwise. Though she had that enviable gift of being able to eat anything put in front of her, throwing culinary dice on a World without Doanadars, even on the Rock of Ages, could be risky.

        But he could hardly fail to follow suit.

        "Okay, fine," he said with as much enthusiasm as he could muster. "I'm sure you'll come up with something different and interesting."

        "Madilu?" Velcro asked her.

        But she completely ignored him.

        "I see," he said as he fixed the waitress with his eye and reeled off the names of two similar dishes Barkworth had heard of and two different ones he hadn't. His politeness and charm weren't quite enough for the girl however, and it quickly wilted round the edges with her hurried departure.

        "Do you think the Torsyne are just breeding us for happiness?" Madilu suddenly looked up at Quincey.

        "What do you mean?" Quincey asked her, astonished.

        "So many people suicide in the Universe, don't they? They wouldn't do that if they weren't unhappy. So that must leave only happy people."

        Since a similar thought had crossed his own mind barely a moment ago, Barkworth could hardly disagree. Now that the Torsyne had usurped Evolution in this Paradise of Superseded Humanity, cultural selection based on the ability to Be Happy would seem to make more sense in the Human Universe than things like intelligence and sensitivity.

        "You obviously think a lot more people Out There die than actually do," Quincey said to her. "It's simply not true, only about one out of ten people voluntarily end their lives. But while your idea certainly looks plausible, it just doesn't work that way. Voluntary Life really is mostly a means of keeping the population down, it makes no other difference."

        "Why not?" Velcro wanted to know.

        "Do you happen to know anything about Normal Distribution Curves?" she asked him, obviously not expecting an answer in the affirmative.

        "No."

        She looked at Madilu, but she too indicated the same. Quincey had clearly piqued her interest though.

         "On average, if you take a thousand people at random and ask them how happy they are, then about a quarter will say they are happy, another quarter will say they are miserable, but roughly half will say they are somewhere in between. Now if you allow all the miserable people to Terminate, that doesn't mean those who are left will stay the way they were. A quarter of them will be happy, a quarter miserable, the remainder in between, just as before. If you let the process continue, all that really happens is the population shrinks."

        "I see," Madilu gazed at her, all glassy-eyed attention.

        "In fact, come to think of it, most preContact worlds that have always had Voluntary Life discover the same thing," Quincey said. "It's much easier for them to keep track of the numbers because of the finite size of their populations"

        "Do you think a person can learn to be happy?" Madilu asked her with a sadness in her voice Barkworth felt pierce right through him. It was a total surprise.

        "It's purely a personal view of course," Quincey's voice dropped a semi-tone, the girl's appeal had clearly moved her too. "But it does seem to me that the capacity for happiness is to some extent born in you - just like Barkworth's dumb 'morality' gene. I've seen some people come out of the worst emotional disasters only more determined to survive, but others seem to just fall over and die with the first puff of wind. Another sad fact is that human happiness often appears to be relative, the kind of happiness some people have when they see everybody round them being all miserable."

        "I guess even the Rock would have levels of overall happiness roughly corresponding to its physical levels, wouldn't it, Velcro?" Barkworth asked him. "Its more disgruntled people will tend to be found in its lower galleries rather than up here in the sun." He pointed out over the somnolent houses below.

        "That's not true actually, Barkworth," Velcro replied. "Most Rebels actually come from the surface rather than the tunnels like me. As you said earlier, our people are just too busy to think about things too much."

        Madilu laughed delightedly at Barkworth; Quincey just gave him a mock-indulgent smile.

        "How can you have any unhappiness at all in the Outside Universe," Madilu then asked Quincey, "when all you have to do when you want something is ask?"

        That seemed an odd question to Barkworth, considering all that had been said.

        "Because while the Torsyne can supply us with any amount of material things, they cannot do the same with emotional and spiritual things," Quincey replied. "For instance, if two people are passionately in love with the same person, there's no possibility of a `copy' being made to satisfy the loser even though it might be technically feasible. Nor can Tinsla be used as surrogates in any way, they are not physically equipped for that."

        "Surrogates? How do you mean?" Velcro asked Barkworth with an innocence he found touching.

        Madilu smiled a particularly smirky smile. Quincey's wasn't much kinder.

        "You can't use them as substitutes for people in any way," Barkworth said to him gently. "You can't get them to - play games with you or anything like that."

        "I see," Velcro said in such a way Barkworth doubted it. His heart went out to him.

        "Come to think of it," Quincey said to Velcro with one of her `gentlest' smiles, "the Torsyne could have gone all the way and made out lives easier by doing those things, as well as allowing free access to narcotics, or letting us just wire each other up together with electrodes inserted directly into the pleasure centers of our brains. But what would have been the point? We would have become no more than organic machines kept going for no real purpose at all. Just death with dreams."

        "So why don't they just euthanase the lot of us the moment we are born?" Madilu asked her.

        Quincey rolled her eyes in exasperation, Velcro tilted his head at an odd angle that meant the same thing.

        "The most popular idea in the Teklanmeh," Quincey stared at her, now clearly wondering if she hadn't misjudged her herself , "is that they can't be bothered. They would have to exterminate worlds at the point of Contact, or maybe even sterilize them before life can even evolve on them. Maybe that's harder than what they do now. Maybe they like us, even see us as pets. But since nobody's come up with a way of asking them, nothing can be proved. So I guess we'll just have to shut up and enjoy our pathetic little lives as best we can, won't we?"

        "Some people believe it's a sort of compromise," Barkworth thought he'd better smooth things over. "The Torsyne go only so far by providing us with all the creature comforts we can stand and which we love and cherish them for. The rest we have to provide ourselves, presumably so that we can at least feel we are more than mere machines."

        "So love and passion really count for little," Madilu said with a barely stifled giggle.

        Quincey was clearly taken aback by this.

        "In the right setting, in good strong communities, they count for everything," Barkworth glanced at her sharply. "Unfortunately though, some people try to found communities on love or passion alone. But before too long they find out that there has to be something more to life than just that, and their community can go quite spectacularly loony."

        "Whole communities can go loony?" Velcro was shocked and surprised. "What happens then?"

        "You name it, they can do it in ways you wouldn't even want to think about," Quincey said. "Yet on the surface they can quite often seem perfectly sane and ordinary, just like individuals with similar proclivities. You mightn't even be aware of them until a flock of Stromlos moves in."

        "Can they be cured before that happens?" Velcro asked with a shudder. He had obviously heard of those. But then they were the stuff of everybody's nightmares, no matter how secluded from Paradise they might be. They were thought to have visited Earth early in it's Transition. A well-organised group of religious fanatics had begun to blow up some of Earth's most loved buildings. A few tribespeople in the remote part of Earth where the group was based thought they had seen what looked like Stromlo's, but couldn't be certain. The bombings certainly stopped however. Tinsla rebuilt the destroyed buildings within a few months using the Rolodon as a guide.

        "If picked up early enough," Barkworth answered him. "All communities are in fact monitored by the Lalleldil anyway. A community might begin to split into two warring factions for instance, or get swallowed up in the personality of a single person who manipulates its people into doing things that make them a danger to themselves or others. It is then declared a Lalleldil Community, and quarantined from all others if necessary. Specialists then try to nurse it back to health. - As it happens something like this happened back on our home World about a hundred years ago," he glanced at Quincey. "Just one man wanted to run the whole planet his way, and he caused the death of millions of people before he was finally stopped. He also tried to institute a particularly nasty form of euthanasia which revulsed our world against it so completely it didn't return until just before Contact and even then only in a small part of it. A lot of people on our World found Contact very hard to accept as a result, and that has since come to be seen as just one more item to be added to that man's long list of crimes."

        "I see..." Velcro said, genuinely interested. "I suppose curing such a community would take years, wouldn't it? And very often lead to their being broken up. Or worse."

        "A kind of social euthanasia," Madilu said.

        Barkworth wondered for the umpteenth time what could possibly have happened to this girl that had given her this extraordinary fixation on euthanasia. Nevertheless he couldn't deny that it was one way of looking at it.

        "Yes, I suppose so," he said to her reluctantly

        "But how can a community itself tell when it's going loony?" Velcro asked.

        "Well, it can't, " Barkworth replied, "because in that situation it can't - or won't - see outside itself. Somebody has to step in from outside. And that, as I say, is the Lalleldil's role."

        "But the Iskurahi is a community too, isn't it?," Madilu smirked. "What's to stop it from going all loony? The Torsyne of course. But what stops them from going all loony? Nothing."

        If only Madilu's intelligence could be turned in a more worthwhile direction, Barkworth couldn't help thinking to himself, it might become as constructively devastating as Quincey's.

        "There's quite simply no answer to that, Madilu," Barkworth said to her. "All we know is that there have been no drastic changes in the way the Universe has been run since their Advent."

        "Meanwhile, luncheon is about to be served," Quincey said into the silence that followed.

        The waitress cautiously maneuvered her trolley round to Barkworth's side of the table.

        "Shut..!" the heavy-set girl shouted as she shooed away the army of cuitos that had followed her. They ran off as if on little built-in stilts.

        The meal she laid before Barkworth when his turn came was, to his relief, the same as Velcro's. It looked like a large multilayer sandwich of thin fillets alternating with different colored pates; he remembered the orange sauce it was covered in had tasted like a tartare. The meal the waitress then put in front of Quincey he knew to be considerably more expensive, even if it looked less attractively like curried king prawn with a garish chop suey all drowned in custard.

        But when the waitress cautiously put Madilu's meal in front of her, he nearly gagged as he did when he first saw one on his first visit to the Rock - indeed he had nearly fallen over the parapet in his rush to throw up. And that ghastly wooden bowl piled full of assorted eyeballs from the Rock's marine species must have cost Velcro half a week's income. He wondered if Velcro wouldn't like to have been able to change his mind.

        He glanced at Quincey who had not, thank God, wheeled out that Eat Anything smile of hers. She had instead turned a pale shade of green that made his heart go out to her.

        "Velcro!" Madilu's eyes gleamed. "Thank You! I just love this particular dish."

        "I somehow knew you would," he grimaced with a sarcasm of his own. "Drink..?" he then had to prompt the waitress. She was openly staring at Madilu and that plateful of eyes in sheer horror.

        "What would you like to order, sir?" she asked pointedly.

        Velcro must indeed have been close to his financial limits, for he just asked her to pour them four cups of the Rock's Local Equivalent of Tea from the complex-looking urn on the trolley. It was a purplish-brown liquid that tasted unrefreshingly like a mix of raspberry juice and a concentrated extract of old boots, but its heat and the tannic acid it contained, even if in excess, saved it from being entirely undrinkable.

        The waitress then looked at Velcro with ill-concealed scorn. He nodded, pulled his credit card from within his jerkin, and drew his complex personal hieroglyph on the little chit of paper she presented to him along with a felt-tipped pen. When he looked up she checked the photograph on the card against his face in what seemed an unnecessarily exaggerated way.

        Holding an eye between thumb and forefinger of one hand, Madilu then shanghaied it vigorously at the waitress, striking her in the face. The poor girl ran off screaming as heads turned all over the Balcony. An elderly couple who had just sat down a few tables away gave Madilu what was probably the hardest stare of their lives.

        Barkworth noticed that Velcro's expression was hardly less outraged.

        "Madilu!" Quincey shouted at her. "Stop being a silly little girl!" But try as she might, she just could not conceal a tiny little smile as she tried to stare sternly at the  girl.

        When the girl began eating however. she could hardly have been less pleasant about it. Although she used the little silver tongs with their tiny five-fingered claws to pick up each eye in the proper fashion, she would then eat it in an exaggeratedly open-mouthed way.

        Eating for the moment was completely beyond Barkworth. Even Quincey was clearly finding it hard to ignore this display. Determinedly picking up her china spoon however, the sides and bowl of which appeared to be covered in battle scenes from the haboshra, she courageously made herself eat.

        "What do people find to do in your communities anyway?" Velcro then asked as if making a desperate grab for anything that would take his own mind off Madilu's disgusting display. "Do they play much sport?"

        "A good many of our communities devote all their time to it," Barkworth replied grateful for the diversion. "But then I guess it's one way of providing those little challenges to mind and body us humans are designed for. Help us feel real."

        "And since warfare is banned, sport can often be the nearest thing to it," Quincey said. "Especially when it's taken too seriously. Yuk."

        Barkworth could never understand her attitude to sport considering that Brazil led Earth in so many. Still, just because 99% of her country was sports-mad didn't mean she had to be.

        "Do you play any sport?" Madilu asked Velcro with a smirk as she flicked an eye towards an advance party of cuitos cautiously making their way towards their table. Her dish must have been their favorite too. They ran for the morsel, batting each other with their wings and shrieking names a lot stronger than `cuito' at each other. Barkworth had the disturbing feeling that the waitress had been right. Placing a meal like that in the hands of a girl like Madilu hadn't been a good idea.

        "Yes - and much healthier ones than you obviously do," he retorted. " - I play toxnip mostly," he said to Quincey, but I've always wanted to row. Not quite fit enough yet."

        "`Toxnip' by the way is something like our squash," Barkworth explained to her.    " - It's ingenious the way you can cram so many different games into the small amount of space you have in the Rock," he said to Velcro.

        "Could you spend the rest of your life playing toxnip though? Doing absolutely nothing else but?" Quincey asked him.

        "I certainly couldn't!" he laughed. "For me there has to be something more for the mind. I guess that's why I became a rebel, it means I can talk about things without having to drag The Veria into it all the time. But it's still not really enough. - What about the mind by the way? Does the Universe allow for that?"

        Madilu snickered as she tossed another eye into a growing melee of birds. One had somehow made a successful landing on the parapet behind her, and now watched her every move with its beady little eyes.

        "You can actually almost satisfy its yearnings, as us Conversationalists try to do as I explained to Madilu," Quincey said, "Though a lot depends on the kind of mind you have."

        Madilu noticeably reddened at that. She still obviously looked up to Quincey, even though she must have seen Quincey's indulgence of her was clearly coming to an end.

        But as if to show she didn't care, she flicked another eye to a different spot from where the birds were all standing expectantly. The bird on the parapet with advantage of wing over feet swooped expertly round the table and got it in one.

        "Education, as always, helps," Barkworth said to the boy, pointedly ignoring her. "Much of our art unfortunately seems little more than recreation, sport even, for the brain. A few people pursue the more rigorous disciplines of science, but since the total sum of human knowledge is probably tiny compared to what the Torsyne must have, you need to be really keen. The main reason for acquiring a good general education is that it helps you at least feel you understand the Universe a little more," he glanced quickly at Quincey. "It also helps a lot if you want to take off and wander from World to World. You could start off just traveling round your own World - well, I guess in your case you'd have to start with another World."

        Velcro's expression only became more downcast however.. "So how on Earth would I get on, being from a limited background like the Rock?"

        "From the way you have been talking to us, I would say very well indeed," Quincey said, to which Barkworth was happy to nod his assent. "You're a natural."

         It was a lie of course. Velcro would never leave his beloved tunnels.

        But Quincey's comment still made Velcro feel so pleased and confident in himself he didn't bat an eyelid when Madilu flicked away another eye. Indeed, watching Velcro was beginning to give Barkworth that same odd sensation he had when he first watched that extraordinary time-lapse 3D of the coming together of a new star. This had been placed in the Teklanmeh only recently by a World which, in a reversely analogous process, had Closed Out shortly after doing so.

        "Now what about the soul?" Velcro asked pointedly.

        "That's not entirely impossible either," Barkworth repled. "There's always a religion to suit you somewhere - the Teklanmeh is a good place to start. Some people swear by doing art - or science, as I say. But really, I guess it comes down to finding out what you like doing for other people as we said before. Probably why so many people want to join the Iskurahi and its various Divisions."

        Barkworth had been discovering again that the Rock's Malkiors did have certain virtues that offset their gross limitations. Unlike Hilashels which whispered in your ear, these things broadcast their delayed translations loudly to all and sundry (though of course the all and sundry always pretended not to be listening). However this limitation also meant you could get a decent bite of food while it was doing the talking. And now that he too had been able to make himself ignore Madilu's somewhat off-putting style of dining, the dish was tasting delicious. It was more like a mixture of delicately flavored smoked game fish like trout or eel than anything that could have come from the sea, and the sauce tasted as if it had been laced with the finest tawny port.

        "I suppose one single moral code for all Worlds wouldn't be remotely possible," Velcro asked him then, sweeping his hand up towards the sky.

        "That's right," Barkworth looked at Quincey; Madilu just flicked off another eye. "Most worlds have hundreds, even thousands of cultures with their various moral and ethical codes. So long as they don't go outside Iskurahi guidelines and draw the attention of the Lalleldil, they just continue on until something goes wrong, as it eventually does."

        "Not even with a very strong powerful leader?" Velcro insisted. "Has that ever happened in the Universe - you know, a single person uniting whole worlds behind him?"

        "Just keep trying, Velcro," Madilu giggled as she tossed an eye in his direction. He ducked as a cuito whizzed by his head after it..

        "That's never happened, Velcro," Quincey said to him, she was now deliberately ignoring the girl. "The Lalleldil probably spots people with that kind of talent and redirects them in some way. Your Veria probably would never have made it in a post-Contact World."

        "Character and personality are not otherwise suppressed though," Barkworth said. "Most communities depend on them in one way or another."

        "Like the Veria's so-called Representatives," Madilu sneered.

        "We are all well aware of the importance of character and personality here on the Rock," Velcro said to her with venom. "We have an old saying that goes all the way back to Tulsat: `If you had to spend the rest of your life in a jail cell, who would you prefer to share it with? Someone who had committed the most unspeakable of crimes, but was always pleasant to you and fun to be with; or someone who everybody knows to be innocent, but who keeps on whining about it till your nerves are rubbed raw?"

        The sohrol bells in the onion dome above the Balcony then began to sound. Their tinkling joy sounded alone for an instant before being joined by the deeper sohrols on their more tortuous paths to the Balcony. The lunchtime hour of Nebu Otson had begun.

        "Velcro, you're as dumb as these stupid birds," Madilu said as she picked up the last tiny little eye in her bowl, gazed thoughtfully into it for a moment, then tossed it over the table into the corner behind him.

        A mad scramble of cuitos quickly piled after it, crushing themselves into the corner. Velcro tried to move, but he was too late.

        When the birds finally untangled themselves after this last morsel had been swallowed up, one lay flapping wildly behind, its neck clearly broken.

        "Oh no...!" Velcro jumped out of his chair, looked at the bird, then turned on Madilu. "You stupid, vicious, evil little girl."

        Quincey and Barkworth's Malkiors then followed with their own versions of Velcro's condemnation. She looked at them as if she couldn't understand what they were talking about. Barkworth felt a sudden sense of chill. This girl clearly had something very wrong with her.

        "You - you silly, silly people. You wouldn't know what evil was." She rose from her chair and moved towards the balcony. She jumped up onto it and raised her arms as if she was preparing for flight.

        Barkworth didn't notice this for a moment. After all, entering and leaving high buildings from balconies was what you normally did when you were wearing a Pasovir.

        But this was the Rock. Madilu was not wearing a Pasovir.

        To Barkworth's horror, she then launched herself into the air. For an instant she appeared to fly..

        But then there was no doubt.

        He rose to stare at the space she had occupied just seconds before. He couldn't believe it was now empty.

        " - Madilu..!" Quincey screamed as she jumped up and rushed to look over the balcony. When she turned round to look at Barkworth, her face was very pale.

        Then she burst into sobbing tears.

        Barkworth rushed to comfort her, hugging her as closely as he could. He rubbed her back, which seemed to help.

        The restaurant had become quite crowded, people were still coming through the door. At first only the people who had seen what had happened gathered round, but others quickly came over.

        Barkworth looked at Velcro. He sat absolutely still, staring fixedly at the point on the balcony where she had gone over.

        "Not your fault, Velcro. She should have been in a Lalleldil Community, not here. Now..." he looked round over Quincey's shoulder. "We'd better find some help...."

        But Velcro was already, amazingly, on his way, the stunned crowd was parting for him. Barkworth noticed some activity at the servery, it looked as if they too had seen what had happened. The senior waitress was giving instructions to a sensible-looking junior as she made for the door.

        She and Velcro nearly bumped into a Representative who had just entered. Immediately sensing something was wrong, he glanced round, saw the crowd around their table, and began to make his way over to it. Velcro stopped uncertainly, then turned to follow him back.

        "What has happened here?" the Representative asked Barkworth and Velcro. Anxious faces peered at them and the balcony.

        The Representative then spotted the forgotten cuito. Moving quickly round behind Barkworth, he picked up the now torpid bird and cradled it in his arms.

        "Cuito..." it called softly.

        A new hush went through the crowd as they saw what had happened to it.

        Barkworth glanced at Velcro who had now just rejoined them.

        "We just don't know," he answered the man's question, still stunned himself. "A young girl we were talking with just - jumped over." He pointed. "She seemed utterly obsessed with the subject of euthanasia. Also wanted to know about mental illness, things like that. We could only tell her - her name was Madilu - what we knew, what happens Out There. I had the feeling we were taking a risk..." he hugged Quincey tightly again. "But we had no idea..."

        "Where do you come from?" the Representative then asked amazingly. Barkworth could hardly recall ever being asked that on his travels even by children. The chances of one person's having even heard of another's Home World was so impossibly small no one bothered.

        "We both come from Earth," he replied.

        The man nodded as if that somehow meant something. "I see."

        "I get the impression we're not the first people Madilu has approached," Barkworth said to him. "We're very, very sorry."

        "We really had no idea." Quincey sobbed into Barkworth's shoulder. "She seemed so - well there seemed to be something to her..."

        The Representative glanced at Velcro.

        "Your son?"

        "No, he belongs here," Barkworth said. "Look, he's a friend of Hespessel's. Do you think somebody could go find - "

        The Representative turned and barked a brief instruction to two young men standing nearby. They took off at speed towards the door.

          Meanwhile the `sensible' waitress had brought over another cup of tea and offered it to Quincey. She grimmaced, but she took it and even seemed grateful. Barkworth then helped her back to the table to sit down. She sipped a little of the `tea', and actually started to look a little better..

        "It's a strange and rather sad story," the man looked at Barkworth with his old, orange-flecked brown eyes as he sat down to the table with Barkworth and Velcro. The crowd moved respectfully away.

        "Madilu was very probably the last survivor of a religious cult that tried to break away from our community forty years ago," he began, Barkworth's Malkior could pick up his resigned tone of voice. "They claimed they wanted to return to what they described as the true principles on which the Democratic Representatives to Their God was founded. But they went sadly astray. They knew they wouldn't be assigned a New World for themselves, they were too few and had not been together long enough. So they established themselves on an Old World who's authorities either didn't notice that they were staying rather too long or didn't care. But a lot of the World's people did, and the `new' religion became popular. The end result was that the original group of well-meaning idealists was quickly swamped with new converts from a World which was too old. These people were only too delighted to join a religion whose rules could be changed to suit themselves at any time, and they would never lose the understanding of their Goddess. They created more and more intricate rules that allowed them to - violate - each other in more and more indelicate ways, all under the watchful eye of what then became an approving Goddess.

        "Eventually the Iskurahi saw what was going on and quickly declared their communities to be Lalleldil Communities. But they were too late. Many, many minds had been damaged beyond any real hope of salvation. Young Madilu managed to come to us just before the entire World had to be Closed Out. She came to us in the belief that we could save her.

        "But unfortunately it was not to be."

        He looked down at the cuito. It was now showing no sign of life at all.

        "Well, thank you for trying. I'm sure you did your best." He looked at Quincey, then at Velcro. "Forgive yourself, boy. You did your best too. Your friends will tell you that. We all do our best. It is all in accordance with the Soul of the Veria."

        Barkworth then saw a tear roll down his cheek.