New Celebrations: The Adventures of Anthony Villiers Read Online Free PDF Page B

my misfortune to very seldom show my characteristically violent emotions publicly. I assure you I’ve been disturbed beyond belief.”
    Shirabi found this young man discomforting to deal with. Consistently formal, consistently polite, and all too correct about not showing his emotions. It was impossible to tell whether or not he meant anything he said. And sometimes it was impossible to tell what he meant by what he said.
    “By the way, sir,” Shirabi said. “Just how long is it that you’re planning to stay with us? Somehow that didn’t get noted down. We like to have that for our records. I mean, it wouldn’t do to let people run up their bills indefinitely, so to speak. Not that it’s any real worry where you’re concerned, sir.”
    “I should think not,” said Villiers, “considering that I reduced my bill by half last night.”
    “You did?”
    “In a game of raffles with Mr. Godwin. As it happens, though, I expect to leave on the ship for Luvashe tomorrow.”
    “Didn’t mean to press, sir. Just like to keep things regular.”
    Shirabi waved the way into a lift and they traveled upwards rapidly.
    “One thing I don’t understand,” said Shirabi. “You’re staying three levels above the Promenade. How did you manage to travel down ?”
    Villiers laughed. “It’s plain to see that you are not a walking reader, sir.”
    “No,” said Shirabi. “I’m not.”

3
    O F ALL THE IRRELEVANT QUALITIES THAT MEN HAVE CHOSEN to cherish, immensity is perhaps the least worthy. The Nashuite Empire is easily the largest political entity of all the many misbegotten accidents under which men have lived.
    On the face of it, the Empire is ungovernable. Communication and travel are of equal speed; both are slow, and the Empire is vast. Common law and common language are strained by distance. How long either will survive is a question. Moulton’s classic, The Dynamic Equilibrium of Unstable Systems , which describes the happenstance by which such a precarious proposition manages to reel along and hold together by its reeling, is worth the attention of every serious student.
    And those bureaucratic boobs on Nashua actually spend the bulk of their time planning how the Empire may be extended! Every single one of them pictures himself as a spider sitting at the center of an immense web, every muscle movement having its effects at the ends of the universe. In actual fact, they tend to cancel each other out, though the idiotic little wars the Empire fights from time to time with the little confederacies, free planets, and shadows that line its borders may be laid at their door. Dumb, dumb, dumb. But they don’t know any better. How could they? They never even heard of Moulton, any of them.
    The farther one travels from Nashua, the more of a chimera the Empire becomes. There are planets where it has no place in waking thought—the word, like a phrase of song forgotten for twenty years, floats elusively at the edges of dreams and disappears altogether in the face of solid morning realities.
    * * *
    In the Orion , bound for Star Well, two of the girls on their way to Miss McBurney’s Justly Famous Seminary were making secret plans in their cramped little cabin. The one in the lower bunk lay on her back looking upward. The one above was flopped on her elbows, thumbing a book.
    The one below was named Alice Tutuila. Young she was, and darkly pretty. Her parents had carefully explained to her the point in going to Miss McBurney’s. With schooling in being a lady, the cachet of an education on Nashua, her own attractions and her parents’ able help, she would make a good marriage and live happily ever after. She was not so very romantic a girl that she failed to see the desirability of living happily ever after. Therefore she was willing to endure Mrs. Bogue, discomfort, homesickness, and the traveler’s disease with the thought that minor tribulation is always the lot of heroines.
    The girl in the upper bunk was of far less