From Inskerelleryon to Fer Verrilah it was a little over twenty three light years (or one hundred and twenty one Dopplers in that older Confederacy unit of distance represented in GalCon by a rapid frequency shift from 3770 Angstroms to 7700 Angstroms in just under a second). It took Kalindy XII a mere five standard days to cover the distance, a phantom windmill spinning in and out of the winds of reality. Now she was loping in a loose elliptical orbit (with Strip Engine disengaged) above the hard little yellow world to which the small contingent of crew and passengers were descending.

Fer Verrilah wasn’t exactly the sort of planet most tourists would visit. It was in fact a desolate and barren outback outside the Confederacy and included on Kalindy’s itinerary only because it happened to lie almost on a straight line between two frontiers that were more glamorous and because Kaal Dol had made a special request to visit it. Quella wondered why, but she had made what arrangements she could. There was no Booker at Fer Verrilah and certainly no orbital Docking facilities, but perhaps surprisingly, Vital Void did have offices at Kooth, the major city (if one could call it a city) just above the equator. The planet was known for only two things - its vast ‘coloured’ deserts and its enormous moon, almost as large in proportion to the parent body ‘as Luna herself.’ It was a poor world. Perhaps once, Fer Verrilah had been a full member of the Confederacy but in any case it looked likely that it would be a member in a short measure of years. In some strange undirected way, defined only by the sociologists and the traders, the great political beast was lumbering slowly in this direction, the heart of commerce shifting across the sluggish Dopplers as it beat as if in response to some unseen galactic tide which pulled the very blood in the arteries and veins and quickened the pulse in this wilderness.

The ferry screamed as it hit the thin atmosphere on the border of space, carving a scar at the base of Quella’s teeth. It shook slightly, experiencing turbulence in the new medium and the wail of the protesting wind grew louder if somewhat less piercing. The shuttle was hardly the most luxurious of craft but she had been assured by the local company representative that it was the best they could charter. Her eyes scanned the cabin yet again in the nervous way of someone used to control but now under another’s command, and came finally to rest on the pilot’s head. He was a taciturn regular who had intoned a monotonous and solemn prayer to St. Newton (in a normal language which couldn’t even have been bad dialect English) before punching up the orbital calculations on a weary looking PlanNet machine. At least he did speak English, she had checked that, but he wasn’t going to give any free information and he seemed to regard his temporary employers with a curious mixture of contempt and awe. Provided he got them down safely, Quella didn’t care.

Only two passengers had elected to leave the ship. Kaal Dol led a group of four fellow thetans and Theodore Vega sat with the stewards and liaison officers Quella had selected to accompany them. As the noise abated Dol resumed an interrupted conversation with the captain. For Quella’s sake it had to be conducted in GalCon B (although the thetan was a fluent communicator in pure GalCon) and they had been unable to compete with the tortured atmosphere. As if he were playing with the thought of this limitation now, the artist flipped a switch and set up a violent holography about his head. Sitting next to him the captain was able to study the physical form of this enigmatic being with a closeness she had hitherto been unable to achieve. This ferry was designed for regular bodies and the tall alien form was crushed rather unnaturally in the seat. His back vertebrae projected from an amazingly broad spine to create stacks of bone around which the grey black skin seemed loosely folded. Towards the angular head they reached body spanning proportions so that the top surface seemed to form a collar all around the neck, like the image of one of old Earth’s long dead reptiles made flesh. Kaal Dol had this top collar hooked over the back of his seat, bracing him against the casual shocks of the ferry. His skin was tightened there to reveal a scaly structure of large dark cells which seemed possessed of some fluid crawl that was quite disconcerting. Behind his head the machinery for ‘taking the light’ was fastened securely to neck and skull. His arms, wrapped about the GalCon generator, were bent to show the lines of tendons along bones whose joints were at exactly the wrong place for regular perception and looked like a perversion of an anatomical text book, skin stripped and parts not labelled but coloured printing grey. There was something familiar about the light flow round his head.....

“There’s GalCon in those patterns!”

The thetan smiled; a physiological response for once betokening an identical psychological state in the two species.

“Irritating. Perverse even, isn’t it?”

“I’d never noticed before. Do art and language mix well?”

“This one’s called ‘Searching unsuccessfully for the last mad star in a universe of babbling suns'," was the indirect reply. “When I composed it, it created a minor sensation; a very unfavourable reaction. But it was a good time to be lonely.”

The GalCon symbol for loneliness was a solitary white flash almost below the duration of regular perception in the middle of a black ocean of about five seconds. It echoed a pattern of similar winking stars in the composition.

“Is it ever a good time to be lonely then?” Quella asked, probing.
“Good for whom?” the thetan answered and asked with a kind of oblique innocence.

“Whoever.” The captain was content to be enigmatic in turn; to be patient and undisturbed and to drift with the style of the conversation.

“It depends on what you need to do. It’s proof of doing under certain circumstances but more often it’s proof of not doing,” the thetan said. “You see ‘taking the light’ was a principle in total opposition to that of my illustrious genes. They hated me. The sect could never reconcile the psychological effect with Unit Living and my defection had given most of the faithful fanatics a jump in the brain. It was a lousy piece of historical hypocrisy and I’m glad. Any thinking I could induce was a shock into life and if it hurt them ever so much then at the time I was only that much more pleased. Decadent was the kindest of their criticisms. But the new style itself was attacked from different, and to me unexpected, quarters. The old critics hadn’t the vision to see ‘taking the light’ as a medium for anything other than mild intoxication and a bland exploration of abstract form. They couldn’t see GalCon as anything other than a strictly formal communication system. To synthesise the two in this way was to ‘twist the language into a hideous distortion’, to ‘produce chaos out of the abstract and real, random and ordered that barbarises the whole of our culture’, to ‘destroy the beauty of pure colour and shape’. I quote from the best respected. Many didn’t understand GalCon in any case. This is a GalCon choir; a polymorphous three dimensional blasphemy that has finally achieved the distinction of old age and acceptance.”

Kaal Dol smiled again.

“But tell me captain: you and I are siblings in the sense of the tissue - are you lonely? Have you achieved your own acceptance my clone sister?”

“I think so.” But it was not clear whether Quella was answering the first or the second part of the question.

The ferry was almost quiet now. Through the windows a thin green sky had cloaked the blackness of the void, but there was still a dull red glow from the rapidly cooling hull. There was a space for contemplation.

Quella thought back to the dinner with Prince Falym and his fellows; an uneasy little affair which had not improved her opinion of the Iron Sun’s royal family. There were unhealthy undertones the whole time, as if the prince were trying to achieve a moral, psychological or even sexual conquest over the captain. The same old soldier he’d humiliated had kept referring to Exsa and asking about the Vat processes and the crèche life in a way that seemed to be deliberately reminding her all the time (if not quite goading her) about her clonal origin. The paranoia went deep. She thought back to the chase; back to the satisfaction of getting this command; getting her first command; hard days and nights on the freighters; the sudden riot that had nearly killed her on Gasabod, where the Quella series had left a particularly unfortunate legacy of memory; Malchior at the crèche (she wondered where he was now) and their brief reunion after that horrible Soor to Mavavak run, which left her with an unpleasantly recalled sense of pleasure and pain in secret. To be a clone now was to be even more isolated than a regular crew member, Quella knew too well, but a least for her this job at Vital Void gave satisfaction from an ordered life. She could have a purpose in her running. The captain was silent and her GalCon generator dark for the rest of the flight. She realised that she had answered both parts of Kaal Dol’s question.

It was the insistent force of a real planetary mass that was Fer-Verrilah’s first ambiguous gift to the tourists. Even before they could disembark, the little world was greeting them with a full 0.6 g, unusually high for its size because the metallic core was unusually dense. For the regulars who had kept in shape in the ship’s gymnasia it wasn’t too bad. Their bodies were after all designed to take more than this. For the thetans facing a pressure on their biological systems three times as great as the one their native world would exert it was a different matter. Although she had been assured by competent authorities that it was perfectly safe for a standard day or so, Quella could not help feeling apprehension with her sympathy as she watched the strain on the faces and bones of the five aliens. They had known what was involved and they’d still wanted to come.

Kooth was a small and dusty town of less than ten thousand souls, but it was even so the largest community on the planet. Their pilot led the way across a wide and windy landing field to some sort of internal combustion engined vehicle that was waiting for them. Struggling across the rough ground they walked over land devoid of vegetation; fine, yellow, orange and stony. The sky was a deep and vivid green, darkened to the zenith but pale at the low horizon behind them. Quella knew that this unusual translucent colour was an effect caused by the presence of a extremely regular microscopic fragments in the high level atmosphere which preferentially absorbed the short wavelength of blue light that would otherwise have been scattered. Some scientists thought that the fragments were the bodies of a micro organism that fed on the dust stirred below and settling only slowly back whilst others tried to find an inorganic explanation in terms of remarkably constant wind speeds and unusual mineral structures. No one really knew and there hadn’t been a great deal of effort made to find out because it didn’t matter. The important fact was that the composition of the air fell right in the middle of the band favoured by most Confederacy respirators.

The sun was tiny, white and yellow - a somewhat hotter and heavier main sequence specimen than regular eyes were adapted for, but further away from the planet than old Earth’s sun was from their mother world. It beat upon them from the height of the cloudless green and Quella wished that their hosts had brought them a little closer and that the pilot would slow down. It seemed an age before the labouring party of offworlders reached the shade of some battered ferries, partly eaten by rust and sand before being spit upright to lean in dazed discontent about the edges of this port. That was something. It didn’t seem as though the local Vital Void employees had been lying when they claimed they had chartered the best available shuttle for the Kalindy XII.

The team meeting them were rho, which was hardly surprising. The rho had dominated much of this volume of space; worlds mostly in but some out of the shifting boundaries of the Confederacy, for most of the last two thousand years. Maybe their rule wasn’t so tight or centralised in their recent descendency but there were still plenty of them in key governmental positions all around these stars. Three of them ushered the tourists into a ramshackle old vehicle, their agile little bodies skittering about in contrast to the lumbering thetans and regulars. They reminded Quella forcibly of the bright eyed portrait of St. Inkryma. The artist had achieved a very faithful image of the race.

The pilot didn’t board the bus with his former passengers but strode purposefully off down a heavily shadowed road and turned left at the first alley without exchanging another word.

“He’s the only one of your breed on Fer Verrilah. That’s why he likes it here so you shouldn’t be surprised if he ignores you. It’s his way and we’re used to it. He’s a good pilot.”

Quella acknowledged the quickly flashed GalCon explanation from the senior rho who introduced himself as a sequence of six frequencies in alternating red and blue. As the bus started up she set her generator to repeat them when cued with an unused pressure combination. Smiler, she called him internally, because his face was set in a fixed grin. It would be an easy mistake to make to think of the rho as a sort of tiny servant race, with an in built obsequiousness - always anxious to please. But the smile was the consequence of a different facial structure and unlike the thetan/regular gesture it meant nothing. The rho were not to be patronised.

With a jerk and a cloud of evil looking black smoke they juddered off into the streets of Kooth. They made slow progress through the winding roads because the vehicle was not designed for speed, the crude surfacing of dry packed earth was not designed for vehicles at all, and the town was thronged with natives and rho who swirled before and after them with complete disregard. It was an uncomfortable ride too; whatever suspension the bus once possessed had long ago given up to these rough tracks. At least it was interesting.

Almost all the buildings were made of a red sandstone, heavily weathered by wind and crumbling at their edges. They were low and close to provide mutual shelter from the desert storms with tiny windows like slits revealing nothing except featureless deep shadow where they were unshuttered. But here and there were more open spaces where tall tents in some kind of vivid yellow silk stood out against the green of the sky. These were the huge shady market halls attracting most of the crowds. At one point they emerged into a large square where an enormous line of natives coiled about the edges, queuing to get to a structure capped by an intricate but heavy black iron work lattice that dominated the centre. They were a strangely passive, deeply brown biped; tall and ungainly looking. Their skin was crusty and hard looking as though the sun had baked out any trace of moisture.

Theodore Vega leaned across from the back seat. “Who are they?”

Quella shrugged and put the question to the rho.

“Flake people. Fer Verrilah is not their home, we think, but they’ve certainly been here a very long time. There are a lot of them in town today and it’s putting quite a strain on Kooth’s water supply. This is number one public well and the queues are almost as bad at two and three I’m told.”

They edged their way to an exit at the far end. One of the flake people bumped heavily into the side of the bus near Quella’s window. A fragment of skin from the upper arm seemed to be torn away and fell like a giant twisted brown leaf. The light wind rustled it away, twisting into the square as its former owner lumbered off unconcerned. And now that she looked the captain could see evidence of similar epidermal happenings; broken down peelings and mere fragments until even the ubiquitous dust and sand here seemed a darker brown.

“One of the irregular festivals coincided with ‘hard trade day’. It’s drawn a lot of the nomads in with residents of nearby settlements.”

They escaped through a brief parting up a low hill as Quella was relaying this to Vega.

“Don’t worry. We’ve got a spring line into the main deep flow stream and we’ll be there soon,” Smiler reassured her.

The Vital Void offices were impressive, Quella had to grant that. A carefully carved archway in a large sand strewn and chaotic square proved to be the entrance over which was cut ‘Vital Void’ in English and the principal rho script; all angles and dots. Around the square a long cloistered construction formed a Confederacy advance office, lightly staffed as yet by a few indolent looking rho. Extensive building work was in progress directly opposite - Supra Light offices, Smiler explained as the earth coughed up another haze of dust to further dishevel this corner of town. The forth side was occupied by an antique temple, for once not constructed in sandstone but some darker and harder rock not local to the region. Evidently it was not the feast day of its particular god for it sat brooding and massive with only a few cliff pigeons wheeling about its lowering towers.

But through the archway an even taller five story building commanded the northern side of a small courtyard, closed by its own wings, which folded in as if to protect it from the larger public square. The bus was garaged in an open alcove on the south side.

“We’re fortunate enough to own the old Mover-Formulator Guild building,” Smiler said, “the tallest and largest building in Kooth and the oldest as well, apart from the temples and some of the temple trust dwellings. The Mover Guild took it over after the ‘event’ was well and truly over and held it for about fifty standard years before passing it on to a joint trust of the mine committee and Journhall. That arrangement lasted for about five hundred years until Journhall was taken over by Vital Void a couple of centuries ago. We bought out the mine committee interests about forty standard years ago so we have the sole rights now.”

Through grand double doors they came into a splendid lobby - high ceilinged and grandiose after the fashion of an embassy rather than transport company offices. That, of course, was the luck of its history. A row of the slit like little windows that were the standard design in Kooth ran just above a narrow ledge from where they could be shuttered. Through their south facing gaps, bars of light crossed down the cool hall to strike a carved band of rock crystal embedded less than half way up the opposite wall. The band was clearly set in precisely the right place and was of the necessary width to catch the angle of the sun throughout the day and over the small seasonal variations at this low latitude. It made for a series of sources of sparkling multicoloured refraction which, pleasant and pale, provided scattered illumination about the dark still air, ghosting on the light coloured stone. Smiler led them all quickly behind a long reception desk and up a set of winding stone steps to a smaller and more intimate room where they could all sit in reasonable comfort. He introduced them to his superior, an aged individual whose skin had tightened round the jaw in a way that was characteristic of old rho. Quella set up the GalCon sequence, but her own name for him was Parchy because the stretched ivory coloured skin reminded her of classical parchment. His desk was a solid stone block only half a metre above the floor but diverging in a crazy set of branches like the network of Kooth’s streets from a long central bar. He sat on a set of red cushions in a small square enclosed by two arms of the working surface, and the offworlders sat on yellow cushions in a more open space opposite. The desk was littered with a variety of papers. Here and there were steps cut in a simple notch to allow a rho to vault the stone block. Behind Parchy there was a Quaram projection map of Fer-Verrilah sunk into the wall by a skilled craftsman who had made it as a mosaic of king amber and emerald stones. In one corner, beside the thin slit of green from the open sky that was the only view through a single window, a large plastic cube held a representation of the star patterns around Fer-Verrilah, with patterned lights indicating the main trade routes. The expected locations of Vital Void ships were shown as colour coded spots, the little blue dot sitting near the central white light representing Kalindy XII at Fer Verrilah. After earthenware pots of cool mineral water had been passed around to humans and thetans alike, Parchy formally welcomed them to the planet.

“What you choose to do here is entirely your own decision,” he continued, a steward translating simultaneously into English for Theodore Vega’s benefit. “We are here to help you. In that capacity perhaps I should give you a little account of the history of Fer Verrilah which could be an aid to understanding whatever it is that you see or do. Then it’s up to you.”

There were no objections, although Quella knew that the only reason for the thetans’ visit, at any rate, was to see the painted desert which hardly required any historical explanation. She suspected that Parchy wanted to demonstrate his importance more than they needed to know this history. After all, the visit of the Kalindy XII was probably the most significant event to happen here for a very long time and that must have caused some excitement in the Vital Void offices. It was a natural reaction and probably no bad thing. It might be a bit boring but it could do no harm to learn from the locals.

“Rho interest in Fer Verrilah goes back just over one and a half thousand standard years ago. In those days Aquazyra (our home world) was governed by the Dominator in close co-operation with the Guild Council which represented the most powerful of the old Guilds. The Mover Formulator Guild (which was founded by St. Inkryma) was concerned largely with the manufacture and physics of Strip Engines and had general interests in astrophysics. They discovered that La Verrilah, a system only fourteen Dopplers from here, had a sun which was on the point of leaving the main sequence. It was a yellow/white type about the same age as our own sun but a little heavier and having used up nearly seventy percent of its hydrogen in fusion was about to become a red giant. Naturally they wanted to study this event and to this end they built enormous laboratories on the planets of La Verrilah, including the famous Deep Lab buried under the crust of a vacuum planetoid right on the edge of the new predicted diameter. Fer Verrilah provided a convenient staging point during the operation to set up this enterprise and a support base for the system throughout the eight hundred years that the project was maintained. It was a very large scale undertaking with detailed studies before, during and after the expansion which we simply call the “event” here. In fact, La Verrilah is probably the most studied star in the Confederacy. (Except maybe for Gaftiz, when it was too late).

"Anyway, these offices date from the start of the project. Kooth is even older. The rho who first came to Fer Verrilah discovered that it was already inhabited by the ‘flake people’ who you’ve certainly seen. They had temples here and at some of the mines. They probably came to this planet as miners but they seem to have lost all knowledge of their history. Certain biological clues make us suspect they didn’t evolve with the rest of the ecosystem.

"Fer Verrilah has never been a particularly attractive planet for settlers. You can see our problem at a glance if you look at the map. That sort of geography gives us our deserts.”

And indeed it was obvious. Encircling the equator of Fer-Verrilah there was a thin strip of ocean completely connected but occupying less than ten percent of the planet’s surface area. There was no other free water visible and only short little fresh water run offs into the ocean providing a way for life to survive. Kooth was at the western edge of a large bay just in the northern hemisphere.

“All the ‘weather’ takes place at the equator. The only rain is scarce and driven in belts to fall mostly straight back into the ocean. The vast majority of the northern and southern hemisphere is desert - flat pan and sand - a wasteland broken only by the mines. We’ve always had mining interests here, but not very extensive ones; ores of molybdenum, vanadium and manganese mostly. The communities are very hard to support. They rely on distillation plants processing water piped from the ocean and in some fortunate cases, deep wells or small rivers if they are near the ocean. The flake people are better out there than us. They seem to have adapted to the conditions. They require even less water per unit weight than we do.

"When the iotans Emerged about a thousand years ago with an improved Strip Engine, Fer Verrilah became less important as a staging post. Then, when we’d finished with the “event” and the Mover Formulator Guild gave up this building it must have seemed bleak indeed. Mining was the only thing that kept Fer Verrilah from extinction. By then the old Guild structure on Aquazyra was breaking apart anyway. The dynamic new Directorate swept away the last of the old Dominators and rho interests as a whole fell away from this region of space. You know how Confederacy politics works.”

“What about the painted deserts?” Quella interrupted.

“If you want to see them, the best option is to hire a family group of flake people as nomad guides. For that purpose you’ve chosen a lucky time. With the festival in town there are bound to be some around who will be travelling that way very shortly. I can have my staff check it out.”

“There are some of us, at least, who will want to see the deserts”, she indicated the thetans who seemed to be getting used to the gravitational burden. Lapsing into English she asked Vega if he wished to accompany them or if he would prefer to explore Kooth.

“I’ll come with you. On a world that is predominantly desert, one should see the desert.”

Quella gave him a grateful smile. It made the arrangements simpler.

“It’s settled. We’ll all travel to the desert.” She signalled for a steward to come forward and he handed her a large leather pouch.

“We have a thousand Promises in Low Tech standard. Will that be sufficient to cover our expenses?”

“More than enough, but you’ll have to change them into the local currency. For all the efforts of our Confederacy friends," he indicated the neighbouring building complex with a broad sweep of his arm, “Fer Verrilah is not yet EconLinked. The mine committee is divided but expected to come over shortly. You’ll need some of these.”

From a concealed wall safe behind him Parchy took out a box of flat shells whorled in pink and green.

“The exchange rate is... let’s call it five capa to the Promise. We can trade your coins with the captains of our ships.”

One by one, Quella dealt out the flat shiny metal from her pouch and counted in the capa.

“These are amongst the highest native forms of life outside the deep ocean. There are family groups of flake people who do nothing but patrol the shores collecting the shells which are quite rare. The breakage rate is about equal to the replacement rate which just pays for their trade. A broken capa is worth nothing and they’re fairly fragile so be careful. Of course, it hardly makes for a stable economy. The whole currency is devalued when there’s a large find and the mine committee have to break up some of their reserves and tax the gatherers.”

GalCon in pure or B form is not a language for conveying the subtleties of emotion. Quella wondered whether the rho regarded this with irony, amusement or even contempt but she suspected it was closest to contempt.

The arrangements for the trip began and the party was ushered into a larger and lighter waiting room overlooking the courtyard. Quella stayed behind for a few moments at Parchy’s request.

“I’d like to take the opportunity to put in a petition to my superiors,” he explained, “and I’m sure it would be better received if you supported it. Fer Verrilah needs the status of a Booker. Look here,” he indicated the star map. “We have an occasional trade route with Inskerelleryon and two more regular ore haulage routes back to Kaka Verrilah and Horont. At the moment it doesn’t look like much, I’ll grant you, but the mining is going to expand soon. We happen to know that MetalMan Industries is just waiting for the system to be EconLinked to pour vast resources into the development and serious exploitation of the mines here. It won’t be long after that before we’re in the Confederacy and the regional representative of the Centrum tells us to wait for that. But by then it may be too late! Supra Light know what’s happening and they’re building their offices as fast as they can. We have the advantage of longer standing links with the planet and a better organisation but it won’t last unless we get the status of a Booker. The neighbouring Vital Void installations will just have to swallow their pride.”

He handed her a written submission in English and she promised to forward it and to use what influence she had to see that it received a fair and prompt hearing. The case seemed good and she knew from past experience how local company politics could undermine necessary structural change.

“I’m glad you stopped me,” she continued, “because I wanted to tell you something in private. We have at the moment on Kalindy XII four regulars found guilty of high level crime under Ship Law. I have chosen to maroon them at the first port of call, according to custom. Fer Verrilah will have to accommodate them until they can find a way off planet, but they will, of course, have no currency and I don’t want you to give them any additional help. Perhaps they can work in the mines until they’ve earned their passage? When the shuttle takes us back to Kalindy XII I trust you can arrange for the pilot to bring these men down.”

“I think that’s quite clear,” Parchy said. He knew his duties and his status and he asked no further questions.

The party left Kooth heading west into the setting sun. It was the opposite direction from the landing field and took them through suburbs they had not seen before. These were the garden grounds, where under managed shade and sun, offworld crops were cultivated to feed the town and to trade with the nomads. The straggling and spare fruit bushes, the water tight root vegetables and the lean grain had all established themselves wherever there was any water on Fer Verrilah, Smiler explained, but they only grew really well when carefully tended. The rho had been appointed as interpreter for the flake people guides and general assistant to the travellers, a task which he seemed to enjoy, communicating freely on all manner of topics with Quella. They had eight hover vehicles to carry the eighteen of them; a real multiracial crowd - six regulars, four thetans, one rho and seven flake people. The robust little craft carried four individuals each, so they had chartered four extra to accompany the four possessed by the flake man family, three for their bodies and one for their water and supplies. The ride was quiet and very smooth, and they were informed that mechanical breakdown seldom occurred. It was bliss compared with the bus which had brought them into Kooth.

In a little while they reached the Road and about ten minutes after that, the sea. The Road was the only major line of travel on Fer Verrilah so it needed no other name. Running always close to the northern coastline it circumnavigated the planet without a break, but it was depressing to realise that even if you followed it for the complete distance (nearly twenty thousand kilometres in all) you would find no community of more than a thousand souls until you came back to Kooth again, and precious few of over two hundred. It wasn’t surprising then, that the Road was little travelled and in many places hardly distinguishable from the rocks and sand over which it ran. Nevertheless it was free of major obstructions (usually) and smooth enough for the hover vehicles to negotiate without any difficulty.

The sea was a beautiful green, magnificent and unconquerable until the eye measured it against the desert. It tumbled like a sleeping monster, dreaming of future victories, idly foaming white in the light wind that brought waves up against the base of the cliff where the Road came to it and angled a few degrees north of west. The sound was soothing and very attractive, mellowing the bleakness of the landscape like a close friend who won’t interrupt your thoughts but whose unspeaking presence is a comfort on a lonely trail. For a while Quella tried to maintain conversation with the stewards and Vega with whom she was sitting, but no one really wanted to speak and eventually she was glad to give up and let the sea lull her with its seductive mutterings. As the steady featureless kilometres passed she fell asleep.

She woke to the gentle whine of engine strain and a light jolting that carried through the suspension of soft tyres. It was quite dark and the vehicles were running down a gently winding trail, wheels and brakes controlling the descent and wide red lights illuminating the way. The cliffs had faded at last to a flat sink against which the sea washed as though it were some infinite beach. Above the highest tide, the Road ran straight across the plain. The stars were sharp in the cold clear air and Quella sat back imagining for a moment that she could identify the ones that they had visited and the ones that were to come. But it was a fantasy to indulge in any certain constellation formation, not having seen a computer generated astral projection. Her eye was caught by a particularly brilliant and lovely orange star, low in the north. Smiler was beside her, eyes glittering and black as he observed her interest and uttered a series of groans and chatters to the next craft. One of the flake people responded in kind and the rho flashed a burst of GalCon at the captain. In the dark it was suddenly hard to judge the absolute magnitude and this had the effect of making the translation seem muffled though fully comprehensible.

“They call it Serevan’s Ember, the Desert Fire or the Desert Fly in different parts. These people are members of a sect that think it is holy. We know it as La Verrilah.”

At sea level, they stopped to make camp. A certain amount of haggling ensued as Smiler bargained with the flake people for the price of next day’s guide. The natives wanted eighteen capa but Smiler managed to get away with only twelve when they were forced to admit that the route followed the Road all the way. He seemed pleased by this little victory, uttering disquietingly loud burbling sounds like distinct and unpopular relatives of regular laughter as he counted out the shells.

“In the deep desert we would have to travel all night and rest all day, but this close to the sea it is cool enough, with the coastal breezes, to make progress in the day and water is plentiful enough to replenish any losses,” he later explained to Quella. “Nevertheless we will be starting before light and resting at mid day, resuming in the late evening to go on for a few hours into the night.”

The period of natural rotation on Fer Verrilah was some twenty standard hours so in a little over six hours they broke camp, travelling for an hour before the sun rose behind them. Dawn found them still crossing the region which was called the plain of Kooth, with no apparent change of scene ahead. That day Quella sat with Smiler and two of the thetans in the second craft behind the leading flake people. The thetans had been in the habit of conversing amongst themselves in pure GalCon and in their own clicking language for long periods. Quella was anxious to know how they were feeling.

It was still pleasantly cool and the captain was refreshed and light at heart in a way she had not analysed but which was probably a consequence of her unusual and relative freedom from responsibility for their communal safety. They were all in the hands of the flake men now.

“Are you finding the gravity bearable?” she said to Cothyll, the nearer and younger of the two aliens, but it was Annaba, the famous artist’s almost equally famous agent who answered perhaps ironically or perhaps out of simple fatigue.

“Such questions find better replies in retrospect. It depends on whether we consider the whole stop over was worthwhile. If we do then we shall say that the gravity was not noticeable but otherwise unbearable.”

“A typical answer,” Cothyll put in. “That is the nature of these dealers in Promises when it comes to philosophy. Statements like mist. No form in themselves but opaque enough to obscure any truth behind them, eh captain?”

Annaba slumped back without replying. It was undoubtedly his skill in manipulating local trade holdings and Confederacy bonds that had promoted a good measure of the enormous fortune of Kaal Dol, and of equal importance was his ability to deal with the critics and the public. He handled both the practical details of the artist’s appearances and the strategic advertising but he didn’t dictate either. Kaal Dol was too strong a personality to let that happen. Cothyll was a much lesser figure; one of the rising stars of transient art and a particularly loyal adherent to the ‘Dol’ school, if one could call it that, whose members stuck most closely to their founders precepts. This was hardly surprising. Cothyll was a long time personal friend of Kaal Dol. His work was original if less impressive but it was always in the mould of the radical orthodoxy.

“But what about Dol?” the captain probed. ”He’s the one who requested this excursion. Do you think he’s enjoying it?”

“You’d better ask him,” Annaba replied shortly but Cothyll was more forthcoming.

“I suspect he is. This is his sort of country. But if you would indulge me captain I would rather ask you a question. What do you think of transient art? You can be honest with us.”

“If the captain is sensible she won’t have thought much. We get too involved with our art,” Annaba said a trifle grumpily before dropping into a resigned withdrawal when Cothyll was undeterred and persisted with his inquiry.

Quella thought hard.

“I have little direct acquaintance with the form and it is said that direct acquaintance is the essence of transient art. I was present on Varn when Pappa-Jo set up the original people wheel that was later copied so much and since you say I must be honest I found it grotesque - a circus. At Tooreeo I went to an exhibition by Greatbanks. I don’t know if you regard him as a true transient artist but he seems to see himself as the prophet of transient art to the regulars and most of his human critics admire him. I found the whole thing a boring show of little significance: the domino sculptures and the burning mobiles - they meant nothing. Now tell me I’m ignorant,” she smiled.

“Pappa-Jo is ill disciplined and wanders into fixation but Greatbanks gets close to the heart of transient art. he draws on the local source, the...”

Cothyll made a strangely guttural noise that was a harsh intrusion into the hitherto almost silent conversation. For a moment Quella was lost, then her brain clipped unexpected sounds into badly pronounced English with startling effect...”theatrical tradition”.

He continued in GalCon almost apologetically. “We are practising your tongue. Kaal wanted to learn the dominant language. He has some idea that it is important to have the token power of words and I think he wants to disconcert you with the knowledge and the resonance. I’m afraid I’ve taken the sharp edge of surprise from that game but he’s had enough fun with his ship board mansion already.”

“For transient art, yes, you are ignorant and so you are lucky to have me here to enlighten you,” the thetan smiled. “If you had experienced the subtle delights of Namaran’s desert ice statues or been at Kaal Dol’s ‘fountain head’ you would perhaps think differently. Or do you think that if you’ve seen the records and the critics analysis you know how to judge it? If so, you are making the greatest mistake of all. It’s Annaba’s job to keep such things to a minimum, though unfortunately we can’t stop the clandestine recordings escaping. They don’t carry away the soul of the work.

"I don’t know a lot about the specific history of human art but we find time and again that amongst all the Confederacy races there is a general pattern and I’m sure you are no different from the rest. Transient art is the first cross-cultural art and to justify that I need to explain a little bit about this common history since I’m sure its what gives you your false view of what art should and shouldn’t be and blinds you to all the new possibilities of my ‘school’.

"For all races, art is born through the breach of the self/communal consciousness split at the origin of society and self awareness. As a young animal it is always representational, serving functional as well as emotional needs. Gradually, as technology prospers the practical craft grows, and mathematical and technical science skills are introduced into material and technique to push the representational form to its limit. There is usually a high period when comparatively few artists of great skill dominate. It may last for several generations but it is inevitably killed by advances in the technologies which brought it into existence. Science finds a better way to achieve representation and somehow this depreciates the process and it is not art. Perhaps it is automated or perhaps it is just so easy and universal that there is an explosion of image. Art is thrown into confusion. It’s entire historical momentum seems to have been misguided; so it is that we observe the rise of an abstract period. The critics frantically hunt around for definitions and they almost always come up with facile phrases like ‘Art is Communication’. More and more it is seen to be identified irrevocably with the culture which produces it. It freezes into the mind set of the critics. Meaningless random patterns, intended to be meaningless are given meaning purely by virtue of their relation to the new artistic structure. Having been wounded by the representational sciences, art is in danger of being dominated by history and sociology. As the trend continues the critics labels intensify, the artist tries to escape the inescapable label and the general population is left further and further behind. This crisis is present in almost all the Emergent races at the point of Emergence and in many of the ascendant ones.

"I see you nodding. You are still caught in the pattern of thought which compels art to say something. But it doesn’t have to say anything. It is as big a mistake to regard art as a communicator as it was to regard it as a representer and transient art offers an escape from these degenerate ideas. Language is communication. Pictures are representation. Art is art, or although it is still a circular definition as we transient artists prefer to say ‘Art is the evocation of the artistic experience’; no more and no less. Perhaps its a bit of awe, a bit of aesthetics and a bit of religion or perhaps those things are a bit of art : it doesn’t matter. That is why it is still such a force when a culture doesn’t need it to represent and has been bogged down by communication.

"So transient art is an attempt to get back to the roots of art and to demonstrate that art doesn’t need the shackles of the critics. It can break free as an individual transaction between the artist and the participant. Unlike the critics we’ve given up the search for a definition. We seek to do art. You must be at a transient art event because it is designed for one ‘moment’ only (although it may be a long moment) and no picture may capture it because it is the experience. For the best artists it is the total experience. A reproduction would be a new work of art if it worked at all. I believe one of your ancient philosophers said ‘no man can step into the same river twice’. Now do you understand?”

Quella thought she was beginning to.

“But how do you deny the power of permanent recording?”

“Well, lets first admit that it needs denying and who else is going to do it? This is the trouble with fixation - you think it is the same every time but the same painting for instance, does not evoke the same response every time, now does it? You have to learn to treat each encounter, each moment, as unique. That’s the only way to respect the universe. That’s the philosophy of transient art.”

“I fear that’s the philosophy of chaos. You have not convinced me that the artist really practices an art. The universe can produce enough natural spectaculars without sentient intervention.”

“Ah but it can’t understand them!” He turned to the rho. “Do you agree?”

Smiler had been following the conversation without contributing. “I think that we are hardly qualified to comment on a rising debate.” And in that almost sullen reply it was clear that he referred to his whole race. The veil of descendency lay heavily in the hot desert air between them.

“You have yet to have a good interaction with transient art. The fault must lie equally between you and the artist,” Cothyll resumed to Quella but the response of the rho had taken the heart out of the conversation and it lapsed along with the captain into mild gloom. For the next few kilometres they were all withdrawn, content to watch the passing flats, the dun sand and the water.

At noon they reached a small watercourse. A track of off greens, the scars of thorn bushes and sparse grasses marked its path winding through the wasteland for fifteen minutes before they came to the bottom of what had been an imperceptibly shallow depression. The flake men planned to rest here at the head of a brackish estuary. The sea had receded during the morning at the behest of the mastering tide and the Road, which always ran above the highest high tide mark, was now some distance from the waves. A few springy trees showed where the fresh water boundary was and provided some shade, but their guides had other ideas about that. They ushered the tourists out of their vehicles and towards the stream, then working swiftly they activated hidden controls inside each craft and out sprang enormous screens which the flake men unfolded carefully and aimed at the boiling sun. Not only were the hover vehicles shielded from the worst of the heat by these shadow screens but their internal batteries were recharged from solar panels on the front surface.

At close quarters the roughly textured brown skin of the natives presented a very curious appearance. It was divided into a map of irregular fracture domains, rising like large gently sloped islands, in each of which were grouped one or more wart like swellings. Some of the edges of these regions seemed loose, flapping back fractionally at the margins and it was clear that these would ultimately flake. Reading Quella’s thoughts, Smiler broke in.

“They are exposed to the sand storms in adolescence when their skin is soft. Its a genuine physiological development which hardens the hide after sexual maturity but by then they’ve picked up the unique features of a lifetime. Each grain of sand which strikes them hard enough during the critical period, burrows in and forms the core of the cysts you can see. It can take years to work it’s way out to the surface with progressive flakings and it may stay there until death. You can easily identify an old flake man because his skin is smoother and he flakes less easily, having finally lost most of his sand. That accounts for the origin of the phrase the flake men use to describe death. ‘His soul has returned to the desert’”

At the end of that afternoon, the travellers found the end of the plain of Kooth in a run of small hills which once again took them above the sea. The desert had been beaten back here, where the local rainfall was relatively high and a woody scrub prevailed on the hard ground. The Road wound between gently sloping dry valleys, crossing the occasional short swift stream and sometimes mounting cloud like little hills to give a glimpse of the sea. Away from the flat expanses the party felt the security of a more intimate landscape where the green sky was narrowed above their heads. Just before dusk they emerged onto a grassy headland and came in sight of Summa Bol. By the standards of Fer Verrilah, Summa Bol was a large town of almost a thousand flake men and rho. It owed its importance to the fact that the encircling ocean was rather narrower here than usual and good natural harbours in both hemispheres were at their closest. The main ‘industries’ then, were fishing (which was the same everywhere) and trans ocean shipping from the port, which kept a shallow contact with some of the even more remote and less concentrated southern hemisphere communities. There was no equivalent of the Road on that shore.

It was pointless to preserve the usual travelling routine so they stopped to lodge in the ‘Road House’, a large stone barn with better facilities than their own camp could offer and for the use of which Smiler paid the old rho owner twenty capa. And in the morning they left the rough streets of Summa Bol behind; the last settled community before the painted desert.

Either Smiler wasn’t as knowledgeable as he professed to be or the flake men were deliberately varying the routine, because the next day’s journey ran from almost sunrise to sunset without a midday rest or any need for the night driving the rho had suggested they might have to endure. The reasoning seemed to be that because they would be leaving the Road at first light on the next day (again later than expected) to travel the desert trails known only to the flake men, they would all rest much better at the point of departure. From there it was apparently only a day to the best sites and non essential supplies could be left in a camp at the Road. Certain of the flake men would stay there to guard the cache whilst others guided the tourists. When they had seen enough, the party of tourists and guides would return to the Road and the natives could continue on to their nomadic homelands (their current camp being another three days west), whilst the offworlders and the rho should be able to return to Kooth in their own two vehicles.

All this had been negotiated in Kooth but was now re-negotiated as they travelled through more of the same sort of countryside that had led them to Summa Bol; relatively fertile hills. It cost them another twenty five capa and Smiler was clearly annoyed that he had failed to secure them a guide back to the capital (although they hardly needed one)

Despite the protracted arguments of the previous day it in fact took some time to get underway on the morning they were to enter the desert. This was because the flake men argued for a long while over who would go with the tourists and who would stay at the camp, what was to be left at the camp. for how long and where exactly they ought to take the tourists, who would be their spokesperson and a dozen other things ranging from religion and politics to the state of the weather. They had now lost all awe of their unusual travelling companions and were making up for earlier silence. The thetans and Vega endured this patiently enough with Smiler interpreting brief snatches from time to time and one of the stewards translating that for Vega, but the captain had had enough long before they finished the laborious process of redistributing equipment and she wandered away from the Road towards the sea.

A few hundred yards upwind and out of earshot a small trail through fractil form bushes brought Quella to the edge of a cliff overlooking the ocean. A cool breeze blew intermittently from over the water and provided a welcome relief from the rising heat of what even at this early hour threatened to be a very hot day. Although the seascape presented a disturbed panorama it was very peaceful at this height, and in later years, despite all the glories of the painted desert it was by this view that she would always remember Fer Verrilah.

The sea was chopped into irritable little waves but the sky was completely clear and serene. This was surely one of the very thinnest parts of the ocean’s ring round the planet because Quella could clearly see the orange and red scars of sandstone cliffs on the opposite shore and she imagined that the angry waters were crumbling them back into streams of their original vivid sand before her eyes. And there, rising in the west, was the source of all the trouble; the large and languid white moon hanging limp and pale but whipping up all the frantic tides below like some decadent dilettante, shielded for too long from the effects of idle sadism by an indifferent remoteness. But the overwhelming impression was one of green; a green so intense as it reflected back and forth from dark sea to light sky that it was not living but chemical - the taste of copper in the mouth and a sting in the eye. It was as if the whole scene were a feverish dream - the sea sweating spray as it tossed uneasily like hot blood in the arteries and veins of the planet - the air supersaturated with an ionic solution too concentrated for life and cooking quietly above the seething fractious foam. Salts oozed from every pore until at last the savour was too strong and the captain turned away. They were ready to venture into the desert.

For the most part the deserts of Fer Verrilah were made up of the standard mixtures of quartz and feldspars with a rather larger than normal concentration of pink microcline. In the painted desert, old igneous activity had brought the big metal ions that usually skulk at the bottom of the periodic table and in planetary cores right out onto the surface. Outcrops of rock beached like ancient dry whales, showed thick veins of yellow and red sulphides, cinnabar, orpiment and even traces of orange realgar. The concentration of manganese was exceptionally high - rhodonite and rhodochronite were common and a variety of more obscure minerals from the heavy transition elements could be found by careful inspection. It was a geologist’s dream. But charting a coherent geological history out of this wealth of sometimes apparently conflicting evidence from the different strata was more like a nightmare.

At midday they stood atop a rocky island in the universal heat which the stones and sand reflected back like cries for help to the cruel sky; Quella, Annaba, Smiler, some flake men and the stewards. The wind at their back felt dry, seemingly unaffected by its passage over the brief sea, hurrying little particles of grit and dust over the barren land as if it knew it must soon change direction. Vega, Cothyll and Dol had gone ahead a little way to find isolation from the other tourists. This was what the great artist had come to see and he wished to see it alone. The other two, feeling a common energy, had accompanied him a little way, before separating themselves, fanning out on their own into the painted inferno. Quella could see Dol striding to the top of a chromium dune, his dark figure struggling against the gravity and pushing slip streams into the vivid sand. Emaciated cirrus clouds traced lacy lines of mocking white ice in the high atmosphere of the zenith.

“He’ll make something of it. It’s perfect.”

"Of course," Quella realised as she saw Annaba’s aside. "How could the artist ever leave his work behind. It must have been his intention all along."

The garish brightnesses of red, orange, yellow, vermilion, crimson, purple and gold clashed like the broken dream of a madman. At each dune top as it rolled into the wasted distance, long sand sprays fluted the ridge, wearing it down to the rocky bones. Harsh shadows were short but effective from the stumpy rock spires. They looked too angular to be natural. And between the poisonous mineral architecture occasional pockets of wind summoned up malicious little dust devils - the hopelessly inadequate familiars of some urgent and dangerous outcast godling, desperate for any companion soul in the desolation of his demented throne room. Yes. It was the perfect place for the new structures of transient art. What grand edifice to the supreme intellect would Kaal Dol build out here one day? What vast expense of the defined as disposable - the engineering of waste only the Confederacy could afford to fashion for the oh so lucky selected participants drawn from a score or worlds? But Quella was not a Core World aesthete. Somehow she felt the desert was more honest as they saw it now and without knowing it she frowned in the heat.