fishmen, birdmen, high-G dwarfs, methane breathers, leaf-
crowned UV sugar-builders and other strange types. In its long
long lightning-and-rainbow history of empire the sovereignty of
Trivash was scarcely threatened, for in its most careless, its most
benign, its most decadent moments Trivash kept savage control of
the making and distribution of specific environment life support
systems without which these diverse humankinds could not live
away from their appointed places. Just like me.
Yet the empire breathed like the sea, its tides alternately enfolding the far corners of the system and retreating, leaving them silted and naked to self-generated flocks of predators. And quinquiremes
of space plied between stellar Ninevehs carrying ivory apes peacocks, steel coal iridium, hard vacuum and a couple of fluorescing atoms in snailshell glass bottles (souvenirs from the Trifid Nebula),
soldiers, slaves, silk-painters, dog-catchers, data-merchants,
doom-sayers, governors and grocers, lawyers and lumberjacks,
prostitutes and priests. All that the crazy hearts of women and men
have ever desired travelled in those ships, all that their eaglesoaring minds have dreamed, brought from the edges of known space and beyond back to the savage-gentle heart of empire. The
ships docked in vast glittering cities of space whose steel was ripped
from the entrails of a thousand moons, whose metabolism rested
upon the thunder of giant forges, the wind-ocean roar of induction
pumps, the incandescent love of atom for atom eternally consummated in radiant energetic union.
All this Fainey-Juveh told me, his eyeglasses reflecting twin
groups of instrument lights. And I was caught up in his living
breathing rolling bopping crazy empire — caught like a lucent
little sea insect in the warm lucent limitless ocean — there was no
disjunction between his gorgeous vast empire and me — in my
vision I was part of it. And surely it was a glorious place for a space
jagger, surely.
We cut sometime then. One bunch of razor-bright constellations
and soft glowing nebulae instantly gone, a new bunch before us as
if they had been gazing through our reflectionless glass shields for
208
Anthony Peacey
hours. The space between the stars, the original mother of black
night, of which the darkest planetary darkness is a clowning
imitator, remained itself, arrogant, perhaps amused.
The empire lived on. Plated warships threw the fire of suns down
upon rebellious worlds, or stung the insect craft of raiders into
clouds of expanding glowing gas. They even swam in shoals to
other systems and for a brief half millennium brought Fomalhaut
and Angk with all their worlds under the barbarous-benign heel of
the emperor.
Trivash, the imperial world, like old legendary Earth, was a
garden. After the first couple of thousand years of empire the entire
ball became the emperor’s demesne. The seas were his fishponds,
the sierras his rock gardens, the forests his hunting parks. Each city
was a palace: each palace a city. Furnished and equipped for every
business known to man, for every lustful lust and joyous joy, the
halls stables laboratories workshops, and their staffs, eternally
awaited the moment when the emperor should chance their way.
Teniki X X V II of the fourth millennium was a flyer. He flew in
balloons, in sailplanes, in single jets; he flew on G-discs and under
hangwings; he flew rockets and stratoscoops and slept all his long
life suspended between heaven and earth (or anyway between
chrysoberyl floor and azurite ceiling studded with diamond stars)
in a founting whispering cushion of warm air. Maybe he took his
favourite folded hangwing into this zephyrous bed with him instead of noble lady empress wife or plum-smooth little concubine, maybe. But wherever he went he found the sky vehicle of his whim
ready. Until one day, suddenly tiring of the air, he asked for a freedive suit. They were in the smallest, remotest of his cities at the southern tip of his coldest land. The dive suit for those waters was
unusual, requiring a special heating system, and insulation, and
the emperor, only a week before, had allowed his arms and fingers
to be modified so that now he had wings like a bat. Even so the suit
was straightway brought — and found to fit perfectly. Smiles of
approval appeared on the faces of
