Every Man's Fantasy Ch. 17

Author's note:

My usual apologies for tardiness in completing these chapters. Thanks to everyone who commented and voted. There are three chapters to go. Please bear with me.

Some of the things about the outworld settlements and hyperspace engineering learned in chapter 12 are relevant here.

I hope you enjoy the chapter.

*****

1New Exeter

In the twenty-fifth century, long-range communications through hyperspace were conducted by comms probes: cylinders packed with electronics, incorporating a parabolic transmitter at one end (called a 'burster') and shallow receiver dishes at the other end (known colloquially as 'sniffers').

On every hyperspace route, amid the passenger, freight and military traffic, innumerable comms probes tagged along for the ride, bouncing out of hyperspace to transmit their stored messages in high-frequency bursts, briefly sniffing out waiting messages, then bouncing back through the beacon into hyperspace, as if they were on elastic leashes.

Nearby the beacons were huge transmitting stations relaying the messages onto other comms probes or decoding them into normal radio waves to be beamed to their recipients on a nearby planet or space-station.

Even with nearly-instantaneous travel through hyperspace, however, there was a necessary delay as the probes talked to each other and the relay stations transmitted the signals.

The delay between Celetaris, where Danielle and her students worked on the Samothea Project, and Earth, where Roger worked on his video film, was about twenty minutes. It was even longer when Roger and his film-crew took trips to outworld planets, conducting interviews to learn how the settlements had fared after independence from Earth.

Because real-time conversation was impossible, Roger insisted that Danielle and he send each other a weekly video to watch at a set time. So every Sunday afternoon, at 6pm Galactic Standard Time, the lovers sat comfortably in their chairs to view each other's messages.

Danielle once tried to explain to her husband that they weren't really viewing the videos at the same time (there being no such thing as simultaneity in Einstein's relativistic universe); but Roger took the ceremony so seriously that she smiled and loved him all the more for his unshakable romanticism.

Her current video featured a guided tour of the University Campus, starting in her spacious apartment, with its simple decor and picture-window overlooking the gardens. From the apartment, she walked in bright sunshine around the recreation centre and shops and across a wide lawn to the Physics Faculty in the Science Tower, a vortex of plasti-glass and plasti-steel, twisting a thousand feet into the clear blue sky of Celetaris. Here her team worked in an open-plan office lined with charts, books and huge computer screens.

Down the corridor from her office was the laboratory. Like physics labs throughout the galaxy, there was more equipment crammed into it than could ever be profitably used. Danielle zoomed in on a 3-D printout of the first design for the motor by HyperStar Japan. It was only a toy - its flaring wave-guide a distinctive feature - but Danielle was proud of it, as a promise of something to come.

The video transformed into a series of cameos from her colleagues. Confronted early in the morning by a cheerful Danielle and her intrusive videophone, Professor Jakovs managed only a brief scowl before pointedly closing his door. Danielle met up with Professor Martlebury and her gentle unassuming husband walking in the rose-garden. They smiled kindly, not quite sure to whom they were sending a message but happy to oblige their bright young colleague.

Rosa and Herman (now officially an item) waved cheerfully to Roger from one of the student apartments and Li Qu Yuan smiled shyly from a desk in the well-stocked library. She added a recording from Jonathan Wright, talking from his laboratory on Earth about his ambitions for the new beacons.

After a tour of the canteen, showing the sumptuous dinners the university provided, the video ended in the gardens again, with their fountains, their box hedges cut in straight lines by fastidious robots and the rows of brightly-coloured bedding plants, beginning to bloom in the warm Celetaris spring.

Roger's video that crossed with Danielle's was different. It began in his usual way, with out-takes by the film-crew - Roger tapping the microphone, asking "Is this thing on?"; Roger walking off camera saying "Are we still filming?"; and, best of all, Roger stepping in a fresh cow-pat on Naseby battlefield - but he interrupted his own blooper reel with excited, unexpected and very welcome news.

"Darling!" he spoke rapidly, standing in his office. "I've got good news. I've persuaded the director that we need to include Celetaris in the program. We're coming to film there in three weeks, on the way home from New Exeter. I'm going to interview your President. We don't need to wait to meet up at Capella. I'm coming to you!"

The rest of the video was a travelogue of places Roger and his film-crew had already visited, ending with leisurely shots of the cows on Naseby field, idly munching grass as the sun set behind them.

Danielle was laughing, even crying a little from pleasure. She sent a joyful message to her husband, saying she'd meet him at the astroport and couldn't wait for him to arrive. Then she cancelled her trip to Capella. She was too agitated to do anything except go outside and walk off her excitement, pacing up and down without purpose on the lawn, neither seeing nor hearing those whom she passed.

******

About three weeks later, Roger, his cameraman, sound-recorder and the director landed on New Exeter.

Once temporarily Marazonia, New Exeter was a small cold planet, originally dry and sandy, now with grey-blue oceans and green forests smothered in snow at the poles. On their way to the astroport, they flew over the main city, set beside a large river in the southern temperate zone, its arterial roads like the arms of an octopus, grasping hold of nearby settlements.

A smiling young man from the Mayor's office met the visitors on the landing strip, introducing himself as the Mayor's political aide. Like the astroport workers and customs staff, he wore a thick fur coat with fur gloves and a fur-trimmed hat. He took them to the capital in his ground car.

They drove past farmsteads and small settlements of single-storey houses with large cottage-gardens from the days when trade subsided and the colonists needed to become self-sufficient in food.

Small wildflowers glinted with dew in the weak morning sunlight, lining the way to the city. So did hundreds of political posters; evidence for a recent election.

"Re-elect Mayor Grandley!" the blue posters shouted; and "Turn on the generator: warm our planet!"

In response, buff posters announced: "Save our fur-trade!" and "No new taxes!"

"Who won the election?" Roger asked the young man.

"Mayor Grandley, of course," he said, proudly. "She always wins."

"What's this about a generator and the fur trade?"

"It's all historical. The generator is left over from when the planet was being terraformed. It burns hydrocarbons to heat our homes and offices. It also heats up the atmosphere by releasing water vapour and carbon dioxide. But we have to import the fuel and it's expensive, so the generator was turned off long ago to save money and the climate never heated up as much as was planned."

"Then the fur trade got started," he continued. "Wild animals were released into the forest and rich people paid to come hunting here. Now we trap animals as well and sell the pelts or make them into clothes. New Exeter makes the best fur-coats in the galaxy."

"I'm sure it does," Roger said, impressed by the young man's enthusiasm.

"Hunting was our biggest source of hard currency for years;" the boy explained, "but now the economy is doing well generally, Mayor Grandley wants to turn the generator back on."

"And the fur-trade opposes her?"

"That's right. They think it will hurt their business. The animals with the best furs, like bears, mink and sable, prefer the colder weather. But the fur-trade also said she had no right to put a new tax on the people. We have no income tax or corporation tax at the moment."

"That's even more impressive," Roger said. "So how will Mayor Grandley pay to fuel the generator?"

"I don't know. She's meeting the appropriations committee this morning. We'll soon know what she's permitted to do. A customs duty on the fur-trade would be best, only because it would annoy our opponents so much."

Roger was amused but didn't take the young politician's opinion seriously.

The car deposited them in the main square of the capital city. There were hotels and shops on three sides of the square and a splendid town hall on the fourth. Its grey clock-tower was the tallest building on the planet. An eighteen-foot-tall statue of Alexander Marazon lay flat on the ground in front of the hall, its legs smashed, its face bashed out of recognition, a mute testimony to the people's judgment.

Around the statue, filling the square and the nearby streets, were stall-holders: fur-traders, dealers in gem-stones, farmers and miners from the asteroid belt, all in heavy parker coats against the chill wind. Tourists meandered through the stalls, interested principally in the gem-stones and the furs.

There were green stones, dark-blue stones and jet black stones. The green stones were semi-opaque and glinted inside with yellow flames (which the advertisers were marketing as 'dancing angels'). Dealers examined the gems with microscopes while tourists sifted through the trays, holding the prettier stones up to the light, trying to see the angels.

These were just the pretty gems: most of the stones went with other products of the asteroids to industrial dealers who crushed or dissolved them for their chemical elements.

The pelts were stacked in piles on tables or hung as finished garments on rows of metal hangers. Keen buyers felt the skins and loaded them by the armful onto ground cars, while tourists tried on individual coats, gloves and hats. Business was thriving.

Roger and his crew were led into the town hall, whose ground-floor was a food-court filled with stalls of local produce and imported exotic fruits. A handsome stone staircase under a crystal chandelier led to the Mayor's office on the second floor.

It was a simple room and unheated, like the rest of the public part of the Town Hall. Most of the Town Hall was now occupied by private companies, who heated their rooms; but government staff all wore fur coats (some also wore gloves and hats) and shivered conscientiously in their offices.

Mayor Esther Grandley was a stout imposing woman, grey-haired with a kindly face that belied a stern centre which revealed itself in a no-nonsense manner and impatience with time-wasters. Not that she judged Roger to be a time-waster, yet.

She had a heavy tweed suit on under a warm synthetic coat. Her jewellery was a necklace of green stones and a bracelet of alternating blue and black gems, their sharply-cut faces glinted in the light from the lattice windows.

"I can allow you exactly forty-five minutes," she said, glancing at her desk clock, then giving him the full focus of her clear hazel eyes.

Roger sized up Mayor Grandley immediately and kept to his script with only one deviation:

"Congratulations on winning the election, Ma'am."

"Thank you, but I lost the vote this morning in the Appropriations Committee. I cannot turn on the generator because the Committee won't release the funds to import methanol to power it, nor grant me tax-raising powers."

She dismissed his sympathetic comment.

"The fur industry wins this round," she said, "but I will have another go next year and the year after; and maybe men sympathetic to me will win places on the Appropriations Committee."

"Didn't you just win a majority?" Roger said. "Isn't democracy the rule of the majority?"

"I see you're playing devil's advocate, Mr. Harcourt," she replied in a admonishing tone; "but I read your book as soon as I learned the name of my interviewer."

He smiled his appreciation.

"I know you don't believe the majority has absolute power in a democracy," she said, "nor that democracies are typified by mere voting. Ours is a democracy because, if the people want me out, they can get me out peacefully, by legal measures. Tyrants are rulers who cannot be removed peacefully."

"We know this more than any other settlement in the galaxy," she continued, "because Alexander Marazon was elected by a large majority of our ancestors but he changed the constitution so that the people couldn't get rid of him at all, however many of us wanted him gone in the end."

"Was everything that Marazon did bad?"

"Of course not. He started the fur industry, for example, though that was really for the sake of his carpet-bagging friends and only to make the most of the cold climate after economic failure meant we couldn't afford to import fuel. Marazon wasted the millions he stole from the Settler Company with handouts to voters."

"Was the settler company entirely in the right?"

"The settler company was short-sighted to over-charge us for rents, especially when the mining franchises failed to sell and galactic trade slowed down. They had terraforming costs to recover, of course, but rather than compromise, they allowed Marazon to tap into a sense of resentment."

"But it wasn't the Settler Company's fault that trade contracted and miners didn't come," Roger suggested.

"True, but the original reason to colonise New Exeter was the minerals on the asteroid belt. Business only slowed for the mines there and they've been at pre-slump levels ever since Marazon was exiled. In fact, he sold them off too cheaply to fund his welfare state and his vanity projects, such as this monstrous Town Hall and that vulgar statue."

"Could the Settler Company have extended their loans or deferred rent arrears?" Roger asked.

"Not easily because they had other debts; yet they did extend the loans after Marazon was expelled and New Exeter applied to re-join the AngloSphere. As you know, at that time, because of the Marazonia debacle, there was a change in the law extending the Settler Company's monopoly over their colonies to one-hundred years after first settlement. Just five years ago there was another change in the law."

"Yes; a further extension," Roger concurred.

"Now a Settler Company can apply to have exclusive rights to colonise a planet for another fifty years, so long as a representative of the Settler Company visits the planet or the colony itself applies for an extension."

"As we've found the Settler Company to be amenable to our requests for re-financing," Mayor Grandley said, "New Exeter is one of the colonies that has asked to remain attached to its Settler Company for another fifty years. I'm glad to say that Outworld Ventures agreed."

Roger absorbed this.

"So," he asked, "if you believe in liberal government, why do you want to increase government spending and create new taxes?"

"Aha! Good question, young man. The answer is that a temporary measure for a specific purpose was always part of the settlement plan. Our constitution allows for legal appropriations to complete the settlement plan."

"Then why did the Appropriation Committee refuse you the funds?"

"A bad reason, believe me. My opponents put it about that I oppose the fur trade because I disapprove of hunting."

"Do you?"

"I most certainly do; but that's not my reason for wanting the generator turned back on. That's another problem of democracy: that arguments about personal motivations succeed when rational arguments about facts fail. I don't think you cover that fully in your book, which rather naively obscures the differences between a democracy and a republic."

"I see."

He paused to consider this criticism.

"So what else can you tell me about the process of becoming an independent polity within the AngloSphere?"

"It is slow, bureaucratic and frustrating," she said with a weary sigh, "especially when disputes with private companies are concerned. Things stretch out in the courts and costs spiral. Tensions between Earth and the outworld settlements just make things worse."

"But we are in a good position," she concluded, "now that the Settler Company will underwrite our loans for the next fifty years. In fact, New Exeter has begun to thrive. Both homeworld and outworld settlements are happy to trade with us. We're seen as a good investment. Best of all, since we abolished taxation and stopped all state hand-outs, the carpet-baggers and welfare tourists have left."

"But why re-join the AngloSphere? Why not be completely independent, or make friends with the Sino-Russian Federation?"

"Because our colonies do better than theirs."

She paused and then smiled knowingly at him, saying:

"That was another question you already knew the answer to, Mr. Harcourt. In your book, you argue that our colonies prosper because the AngloSphere is a loose confederacy that allows many different political systems, so long as they use the English language for commerce, law and diplomacy. We are successful because of our individualism and our objective laws. A businessman in a dispute can be certain of getting the same impartial judgment on Capella Spaceport or New Exeter as he can in Britain or Japan. The law in other regimes and off-world settlements is less reliable."

It was a full answer and Roger had the idea that the lessons from his work were understood better by a tiny colony of only ten-thousand people on a cold planet at the edge of the AngloSphere, while Earth, with its nine billions, and the homeworld colonies, with their hundreds of millions, had no clue why they were successful and strong.

He left New Exeter with mixed feelings: pleasure at a successful interview, but disquiet that the lessons from the history of Marazonia had been learned only on Marazonia itself.

2Celetaris

Danielle met Roger and his film-crew at Ocean City astroport. They managed to bundle the film-crew into a taxi to a hotel and took her jet-car for the hour-long journey to her apartment in Art City. Though they had things to tell each other, there was no chance to talk because they leapt on each other as soon they got into the car. She returned his passionate kiss, holding him tightly, pressing her tongue into his mouth, but with presence of mind enough to press the button that made the windows opaque. Then she lay back into the wide seat and pulled him on top of her, wrapping her legs over his waist.

They didn't undress, just loosened their clothing in the right places. Roger's cock was rock-hard in seconds and Danielle was wet and ready even before he took a mouthful of tit and sucked hard.

"Oh, God! Darling. I can't wait!" she cried and he plunged his cock into her.

"God! God! ... Oh, God! ... That's wonderful, Darling. ... My God, I've missed you!"

That was the last coherent thing she said for a while as she lost herself in the uncontrollable lust, holding his head to her tit and bucking her pelvis wantonly in time with his urgent thrusts. She moaned deeply and arched her back, stiffening and holding her breath as the first jolt of an orgasm careered over her body, shaking her thighs. It was a foothill, not the mountain-peak. She stiffened again and cried out, her head back, her eyes tight shut while her legs shook and her pussy spasmed.

She climbed to another climax - stronger, more intense - but Roger couldn't last long. Breathing heavily, another dozen hard thrusts and it was all over for him. He kissed her hard as he pumped his seed deep into her thrusting body. The peak came like a dam-burst, a flood of pleasure and a release from months of tension.