I think I should comment on the background of this novel also. Today physical travel is easier than ever before, and television takes us literally anywhere. The world is generally accessible to most people, and as a result it’s becoming homogenized. I don’t insist that this is a bad thing, but it’s a major change from the situation of a generation ago, let alone that of a hundred years in the past.
In the late 19th century a party of Russian nobles bought a South Seas trading schooner from its owner/captain, hired as captain the former mate (a man named Robert Quinton), and for several years sailed the Pacific from Alaska to New Zealand, from Kamchatka to Diamond Head. They hunted, bought curios, visited ancient ruins, and viewed native rites in a score of localities.
This sort of experience was available only first-hand and only to the exceptionally wealthy (or their associates like Quinton, who wrote a memoir of the voyage). Today anybody who watches PBS and the Discovery Channel can see everything those aristocrats saw, or at any rate as many of those things as survive.
I’ve tried as one of the themes of The Far Side of the Stars to give the feel of that former time, when travel was a risky adventure possible only for the few. While I’m glad that many—myself included—can share the world’s wonders today, I do regret the passing of the romance of former times and the fact that maps no longer have splotches marked Terra Incognita.
Dave Drake
david-drake.com
CHAPTER 1
Adele Mundy wore for the first time her white Republic of Cinnabar Navy dress uniform. The sleeves had the chevrons of a warrant officer, the lightning bolt of the Signals Branch, and a black ribbon of mourning. She paused to check herself in the mirror in the entryway of her townhouse.
Three generations of Mundys had lived in Chatsworth Minor, ever since the family became so politically prominent that Adele’s grandfather replaced their previous townhouse in Xenos with these imposing four stories of brick, stone, and ornate carvings. Adele had grown up here, but she’d been off-planet continuing her education as an archivist the night sixteen years ago when the Three Circles Conspiracy unraveled and gangs arrived to carry off the remainder of her family for execution.
She’d never expected to see Chatsworth Minor—or Cinnabar—again. When she learned that the heads of not only her parents but also her 10-year-old sister Agatha had been displayed on the Speaker’s Rock, she hadn’t wanted to see any relic of her previous life.
She smiled faintly into the mirror. Times change, but people change as well. The stern-looking naval officer with splashes of medal ribbons on the bosom of her tunic wasn’t the reserved girl who’d left Cinnabar for the Academic Collections on Bryce just in time to save her life. They shared facial features and a trim build, that was all.
Or almost all; because both the officer and the girl lived with the bone-deep certainty that they were Mundys of Chatsworth. Adele’s parents had been egalitarians and members of the People’s Party, but there’d never been any doubt in their minds that the Mundys were first among equals . . . and no doubt in their daughter’s mind that whether she was a scholar or a street-cleaner, she was a Mundy. There’d been times after her parents were killed and their property confiscated for treason that Adele believed a street-cleaner probably lived better; but that didn’t change anything that really mattered.
Adele’s servant Tovera—if servant was the right word—glanced at her mistress briefly in the mirror; her eyes flicked on, never resting anywhere very long. If Adele was prim, then Tovera was so colorless that casual observers generally paid her less attention than they did the wallpaper. For the funeral she wore a gray dress suit of good quality, also with a mourning ribbon. Her only other ornamentation was a blue-and-silver collar flash that proclaimed her a retainer—the sole retainer at the present time—of the Mundys of Chatsworth.
Tovera missed little but cared about even less; perhaps she cared about nothing except whatever task she’d been set or had set herself. Having Tovera around was much like carrying a pistol with a trigger as light as thistledown.