Fiddler's Green

"Hello, dears," she said in an accent unlike any spoken by the other inhabitants. "Mr. Hanoi, Mr. Kindle, so wonderful of you to drop in. Come in, everyone. Come in."

The interior of the house suffered from the same poor construction and neglect as the outside, However, the furnishings, sofas, chairs, were models of outstanding craftsmanship. The paintings on the walls were clearly originals, and very good originals indeed, but they were mounted on walls whose wallpaper was faded and peeling and where great gaps exposed the construction underneath.

Miller settled in and explained the situation, beginning with Pegasus and concluding with the crash-landing in the swamp, as Clarence Thomas Wilson listened attentively. Eva offered to bring them cups of a local beverage, and they politely accepted. When they saw the beverage was in fact, thick and dark as unrefined hydro-carbons, they demurred, at which point she tossed their cups through an open window, and sat down beside her husband.

"You say this ship of yours, this Pegasus, is about to crash into the swamp, too."

"Za."

"With how many people on board?"

"Almost seven thousand."

Wilson looked dour. "And you also have to extract your own shuttlecraft from the swamp."

"Don’t you have a spaceship deswampificator?" Eva asked.

"Oh, for crying out loud, there is no such thing as a spaceship deswampificator," Clarence Wilson steamed. He pointed to Mr. Hanoi. "Six thousand years ago, his ancestor tried to sell my ancestor a spaceship deswampificator to get his own ship out of that swamp. He paid six hundred Commonwealth Intercreds for a device that was nothing more than a water pump connected to a waffle iron... and it exploded when he turned it on."

"Well, sir, I believe that unit is out of warranty," said Hanoi.

"Get out of my house!" Wilson thundered.

"I told you he was a hothead," said the fat woman.

Miller tried to bring the group back on topic. "Mr. Wilson, we were told that you have some special insight into the planet that might help us prevent our ship from crashing here, because you’re something of an outsider."

"They have treated my family as outsiders ever since we emigrated here from Atlas."

"Atlas...?"

"You’ve never heard of Atlas?"

"Atlas was one of the Old-Line Earth colonies, and one of the greatest, if I remember my colonial history."

"Atlas was one of the first colonies, the largest and most powerful. Eighty billion people lived there when my ancestor left."

"Eighty billion?" Miller said incredulously.

"Ten times as many people as lived on Earth at the time. Four billion of them lived in the New Gotham-Saratoga-Empire City megaplex, a huge city that ran over a thousand kilometers down the eastern seaboard of the northern continent and another two hundred kilometers inland. According to my ancestor's journals, he could stand at the window of his inhabitation, on the eighty-fifth floor of his inhabitation complex, and look out across a landscape of skyscrapers and transportation systems stretching from the horizon to the sea." He pulled out what looked like an ancient photograph, color and depth long-washed out of it, encased in a kind of crystalline frame.

"Did your ancestors also come from Atlas?" Lawless asked Eva.

"Oh, no, dear. My ancestors were BeTrobi. My 1543rd great grandfather was a prince of the Betrobi."

"Oh, he was not," Clarence objected.

"He vas."

"Who were the BeTrobi," Lawless wanted to know.

"BeTrobi never settled on any planet, at least not for very long. They moved from place to place. They were passing by this planet, when my ancestor’s ship broke down, and they couldn't leave because they couldn't get a tow-truck."

Mr. Wilson rolled his eyes. "Oh, Eva, not again with the tow truck."

"This is all very interesting," Miller put in, "but it isn’t helping us keep our ship from crashing into the swamp."

Mr. Wilson sighed. "My ancestor was lured to this planet with the promise of leaving behind the chaos and noise of that urban nightmare for a simple life on an agricultural colony. He just wanted to grow crops, to plant seeds in the ground and nurture them toward the sun, and make a fortune on the Atlas Galactic Commodities Futures Exchange."