Inferno: A Chronicle of a Distant World (The Galactic Comedy) Read Online Free PDF

avocation. During her first two years on Faligor she had identified, cataloged, and named more than three thousand species of insect.
    She was pleased to see that her passion for entomology, if it didn't exactly infect her fellow Men, at least caused most of them to bring her any insect they hadn't seen before, rather than grind it into the dirt. Once she began naming them after their discoverers, she found to her amusement that her fellow safari guides would bring them to her by the dozens, and would make sure she knew how to spell their names before they left.
    Since she still had friends in the Cartography Department, and since Faligor was still in the process of being mapped, she frequently went out with them on their surveys, just for the pleasure of seeing new areas of her adopted world. There were vast flatlands filled with herbivores, which had picked up such Terran nicknames as Thunderbulls, Tanbucks, Candystripes, and Skyjumpers. There were impenetrable rain forests, a huge central desert, and a number of mountain ranges, the most impressive of which was the snow-capped Hills of Heaven, the slopes of which were home to huge numbers of primates and avians.
    There were some twenty-seven distinct tribes on the planet, all of them living on the one major continent. Each had several subgroups, and it was virtually impossible for any Man or jason to learn more than a handful of the hundred-plus languages, but at various times almost every tribe had been conquered by the now-decimated Maringo tribe, which had fallen upon hard times and numbered less than two thousand members, and most of the tribes spoke some variation of Maringo in addition to their native dialect. The Sitate Tantram decreed that all of his citizens must also learn Terran, and not to be outdone, the sitates of the other tribes followed suit, so that before long there were two planetary languages. Terran became the language of state, used for formal occasions and when dealing with off-worlders, while Maringo was preferred when the jasons spoke informally among themselves.
    Within three years there were boreholes in every village, allowing the jasons access to water in times of drought, and modern farming methods had been adopted by all of the jason tribes. Before long huge hotels towered above Romulus and Remus, and hunting concessions were replaced by game parks in order to attract even greater numbers of tourists.
    Faligor had come so far so quickly, had adapted itself to Man's vision so completely, that Beddoes found herself half-expecting the planet to be visited by some disaster, if only to chastise Man for his ambition. No world could be this perfect, this tranquil and peaceful, this close to paradise. Oh, to be sure, the Rizzali and Traja had a minor border dispute that erupted into warfare, but when the Republic's representatives moved in to mediate, only eleven jasons had been killed. And a particularly virulent form of skin disease, not totally unlike smallpox, had surfaced among the tribes living on the eastern savannah, but it took the human doctors less than a month to isolate the virus and only another three weeks to come up with a vaccine. Johnny Ramsey came back for two more hunting safaris, accompanied, as always, by two or three dozen members of the press, and word of Faligor spread throughout the galaxy.
    It was on Ramsey's final safari that the Sitate Tantram went out hunting with him, and was badly gored by a huge amphibian known as a Riverkiller. The medics managed to save his life, but he became an invalid, and turned over the kingship of his people to his younger brother, a Terranfile who took the name of the Sitate Robert August Tantram II.
    The new sitate spoke exquisite Terran, had been schooled on the university planet of Aristotle, had a passion for Terran history, fast vehicles, and human clothing. He built a huge theater in the center of Romulus and imported the finest human stage, opera and ballet companies. He also funded a