Once every five hundred years, when the representatives were summoned to New Far Florence, Chromis and Rudd would meet to swap world-weary tales of scandal and chicanery from their respective constituencies.Ĭhromis fingered the ring on her right index finger, tracing the interlocking, hypnotically complex design embossed into its surface. Politically, they had very little in common, but by the same token they had very little worth squabbling over.
Rudd’s constituency, located on the edge of the Ring-where it brushed against the fractious outer worlds of the Loop II Imperium-enveloped a much larger volume of space but only a third as many planet-class entities. Chromis spoke for a relatively small grouping of settled worlds: a mere one hundred and thirty planet-class entities, packed into a volume of space only twenty light-years across. In this line of work it’s almost obligatory.”Ĭhromis and Rudd were politicians, political friends from different constituencies of the Congress of the Lindblad Ring. “We’ve all made idiots of ourselves at some point. I think I’m going to make an idiot of myself in there.” Doesn’t that strike you as suitably auspicious?” I’ve checked: tomorrow will be cooler, stormier.
“Well, it’s certainly a nice day for it,” said Rudd Indigo Mammatus, joining her on the balcony, high above the cloud-girdled tiers and gardens of the Congress building’s footslopes. What she had in mind was, even by her own admission, a deeply unorthodox suggestion. There had always been people eager to tell her that her proposal was doomed, but for the first time it occurred to her that they could be right. The faint possibility of failure had always been at the back of her mind, but now that her ship had actually delivered her to the Congressional capital world, now that she had actually frameshifted to New Far Florence across all those dizzying light-years, the faint possibility had sharpened into a stomach-churning conviction that she was about to suffer imminent and chastening defeat. Her name was Chromis Pasqueflower Bowerbird and she had travelled a long way to make her case.
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