by Jack Vance
[7] Unspiek, Baron Bodissey, a philosopher of Old Earth and elsewhere and creator of a philosophical encyclopedia of twelve volumes, entitled LIFE, was especially scathing in regard to what he called “hyper-didacticism,” meaning the employment of abstractions a half-dozen stages removed from reality to justify some pseudo-profound intellectualism. Toward the end of his life he was excommunicated from the human race by the Assembly of Egalitarians. Baron Bodissey’s comment was succinct: “The point is moot.” To this day the most erudite thinkers of the Gaean reach ponder the significance of the remark.
[8] Those familiar with the works of Baron Bodissey may remember his tale of the guest at a dinner party who, anxious to impress the company, asserted that he had only just arrived from an extraordinary world where the sun rose in the west and set in the east.
[9] Sol: monetary unit, about equal to $8 in contemporary terms.
[10] Gihilites: a sect of mystics based in the Uirbach Region at the far side of the continent. The Perpatuaries were roving missionaries who purportedly stole children and conveyed them back to Uirbach for unpleasant purposes.
[11] Inexact rendering of the word “tchabade”: a hurting complex emotion, encompassing all the following: drained of mana; emasculated; forced to submit, as if to perverted sexual acts; demoralized; rendered negligible; defeated and left behind; stripped of all comporture. In short, a vicious, debilitating emotion.
[12] Wilbur Wailey, after a stint as locator, began to conduct enterprises of a questionable sort. His supreme achievement, by his own assessment, was his “Empire of Song and Glory.” On a world so far Beyond and so lost among the galactic wisps and star-streams that five thousand years later, it still had not been rediscovered.
To this world, which Wailey named Safronilla, he brought bevy after bevy of handsome young women, whom he recruited by a variety of tactics. To some he paid generous bonuses; others he kidnapped, from convents, colleges, holiday camps, beauty pageants, spiritual improvement groups, and the like. On one occasion he captured an all girl fife, bugle and drum corps, along with their instruments. A few months later he induced six hundred and fifteen prime Type-A virgins of the Pellucids aboard one of his ships, on the pretext of viewing his collection of tropical fish. Once all were aboard, and were looking here and there for the fish, the doors closed, and the ship flew off. On Safronilla the Pellucids disembarked but their indignation went for naught. One by one, methodically, assiduously Wilbur Wailey got each of them with child—not once, but several times. Fifteen years later he made the rounds again, this time inseminating his daughters with neither prejudice nor favoritism; as he did his granddaughters in the sunset of his fife.
When anthropologists gather for a gossip or an excursion into shop talk in the lounges of their clubs, sometimes late in the evening after several tots of Pusser’s Regulation or Old Tanglefoot have been consumed, someone may make a reference to Wilbur Wailey and his career. After a few moments someone else will say: “They don’t make men like Wilbur Wailey nowadays!” And for a time the group is quiet, while everyone thinks his or her own thoughts, and wonders how it goes now on far Safronilla.
[13] If an observer imagines himself standing at the equator of a planet, facing the direction of rotation, north is to his left and south to his right. The polarity of the north and south poles, in terms of magnetic flux, may or may not correspond to the rule cited above, which essentially establishes that the planet’s sun shall rise in the east and set in the west.
[14] cavalier: an inexact translation, still more accurate in its overtones than “young nobleman,” “knight,” “bravo,” or any other such expression.