Of all the cities of the galaxy, few offered such a wealth of pleasures as Zenith, but to Clifford Gorrell it was as distant and unknown as the first Gomorrah. At 35 he was a thin-faced, prematurely ageing man with receding hair and a remote abstracted expression, and in the dark sombre suit and stiff white dog-collar which were the traditional uniform of the Probate Department’s senior administrators he looked like a man who had never taken a holiday in his life.
At that moment Clifford wished he hadn’t. He and Margot had never been able to agree about their vacations. Clifford’s associates and superiors at the Department, all of them ten or twenty years older than himself, took their pleasures conservatively and expected a young but responsible justice to do the same. Margot grudgingly acknowledged this, but her friends who frequented the chic playtime clinics along the beach at Mira.
Mira considered the so-called honeymoon trips back to Earth derisively old-fashioned, a last desperate resort of the aged and infirm.
And to tell the truth, Clifford realized, they were right. He had never dared to admit to Margot that he too was bored because it would have been more than his peace of mind was worth, but a change might do them good.
He resolved — next year.
Margot lay back among the cushions on the terrace divan, listening to the flamingo trees singing to each other in the morning sunlight. Twenty feet below, in the high-walled garden, a tall muscular young man was playing with a jet-ball. He had a dark olive complexion and swarthy good looks, and oil gleamed across his bare chest and arms. Margot watched with malicious amusement his efforts to entertain her. This was Trantino, Margot’s play-boy, who chaperoned her during Clifford’s long absences at the Probate Department.
‘Hey, Margot! Catch!’ He gestured with the jet-ball but Margot turned away, feeling her swim-suit slide pleasantly across her smooth tanned skin. The suit was made of one of the newer bioplastic materials, and its living tissues were still growing, softly adapting themselves to the contours of her body, repairing themselves as the fibres became worn or grimy. Upstairs in her wardrobes the gowns and dresses purred on their hangers like the drowsing inmates of some exquisite arboreal zoo. Sometimes she thought of commissioning her little Mercurian tailor to run up a bioplastic suit for Clifford — a specially designed suit that would begin to constrict one night as he stood on the terrace, the lapels growing tighter and tighter around his neck, the sleeves pinning his arms to his sides, the waist contracting to pitch him over — ‘Margot!’ Trantino interrupted her reverie, sailed the jet-ball expertly through the air towards her. Annoyed, Margot caught it with one hand and pointed it away, watched it sail over the wall and the roofs beyond.
Trantino came up to her. ‘What’s the matter?’ he asked anxiously. For his part he felt his inability to soothe Margot a reflection on his professional skill. The privileges of his caste had to be guarded jealously. For several centuries now the managerial and technocratic elite had been so preoccupied with the work of government that they relied on the Templars of Aphrodite not merely to guard their wives from any marauding suitors but also to keep them amused and contented. By definition, of course, their relationship was platonic, a pleasant revival of the old chivalrous ideals, but sometimes Trantino regretted that the only tools in his armoury were a handful of poems and empty romantic gestures. The Guild of which he was a novitiate member was an ancient and honoured one, and it wouldn’t do if Margot began o pine and Mr Gorrell reported him to the Masters of the Guild.
‘Why are you always arguing with Mr Gorrell?’ Trantino asked her.
One of the Guild’s axioms was ‘The husband is always right.’ Any discord between him and his wife was the responsibility of the play-boy.
Margot ignored Trantino’s question. ‘Those trees are getting on my nerves,’ she complained fractiously. ‘Why can’t they keep quiet?’
‘They’re mating,’ Trantino told her. He added thoughtfully: ‘You should sing to Mr Gorrell.’
Margot stirred lazily as the shoulder straps of the sun-suit unclasped themselves behind her back. ‘Tino,’ she asked, ‘what’s the most unpleasant thing I could do to Mr Gorrell?’
‘Margot!’ Trantino gasped, utterly shocked. He decided that an appeal to sentiment, a method of reconciliation despised by the more proficient members of the Guild, was his only hope. ‘Remember, Margot, you will always have me.’
He was about to permit himself a melancholy smile when Margot sat up abruptly.
‘Don’t look so frightened, you fool! I’ve just got an idea that should make Mr Gorrell sing to me.’
She straightened the vanes in her hat, waited for the sun-suit to clasp itself discreetly around her, then pushed Trantino aside and stalked off the terrace.
