Once upon a time, the average human being was born, lived their life, and died without straying more than ten miles from the point on the surface of the earth upon which they first appeared. Even as technology improved, allowing for both safer and faster transportation and fewer people engaging directly in dirt-based toil, it was not rare to encounter people who had never visited another country, or even thoroughly explored their own.
The essential provincialism of the human race did not disappear when they left the planet of their birth behind them; it was only the scale which had changed. Even with humanity spread out across thousands of worlds, a good deal many more people lived out their entire lives on the surface of a single one of them than not. Far more people stayed within the orbits of their native planet’s satellites than ever strayed to another planet. The differences in size among these groups of people were several orders of magnitude smaller than that between interplanetary voyagers and interstellar ones.
Part of this had to do with the expense, of course. There were numerous options for powering an interplanetary vessel, and if haste wasn’t necessary then some of them could be quite cheap, especially given the relative proximity of most planets to fusion generators of the unfathomably large and free variety. Even when a less leisurely pace of travel is called for, the biggest energy costs for subluminal travel are the same whether one is traveling a single astronomical unit or ten: accelerate at the beginning, decelerate at the end. In between, it’s simply a matter of keeping the lights on and the air supply going.
When traversing the vast and trackless gulf between most such generators, though, things became quite a bit different.
Of course, by this point in the digression you may well be wondering something along the lines of, “If interstellar travel is so rare, how can it support a settlement like Rylea, much less a gigantic commercial venture that caters to tourists?”
The answer to this is that size is relative. Remember the mention above of thousands of worlds? The subset of humanity which journeyed between the stars was tiny compared to the whole, but it was large enough that it could have comprised a race of its own, with its own culture, and within that, subcultures.
Fortunato, like Lilliana, had been reared in a subculture which did not only travel the gulf between stars, it existed entirely within it. When he’d first set about converting his drifting gambling hell into a respectable pleasure palace, there had been a bit of a learning curve about dealing with the expectations of the planetborn.
Most ships designed for interstellar travel were intended to convey people from one planet to another, and thus they catered to terrestrial sensibilities. They were big solid objects with decks stacked vertically, with gravity flowing smoothly from one side of the ship to the other instead of radiating outward from a central point.
The ship on which Fortunato had been born had been constructed from remnants of other ships by people whose grandparents had never set eyes on a planet, to say nothing of their feet. Most of their vessels were only woven with gravity spells because the billions of years of evolution which had gone into producing the animal called Man had not been trumped by a millennium and a half of living in space, but these were people who had no psychological connection to a fixed idea of “up” and “down”.
Frequently the largest usable surface in a chamber was designated as the floor, regardless of its alignment with regards to the floors in adjoining chambers. Where convenience dictated, some rooms had multiple gravity fields, leading to arrangements that anthropologists had likened to something out of the works of a certain famous poster designer of a bygone era.
The chief concerns that went into building any addition to the ships were “What is needed?” and “What is available?”, not “How will this affect our aerodynamics?” or “What happens if we get caught into a gravity well?”
Fortunato’s original casino, which had started its life as his personal vessel, had not tested well with the landlubbers.
The more conventional structure which had replaced it had never quite pleased him, which was one reason why he’d been willing to listen when his rivals in the industry came to him seeking to forge an alliance and centralize their operations around his. Tying his fortune up with those of others galled him, the more hotels and parking bays and casinos ended up jutting out at odd angles, the more his little kingdom felt like home again.
But the larger the operation grew, the less it felt like his kingdom.
He still had certain rights, of course. He was the man whose name was synonymous with the Fickle Finger. He was a legend, a sort of god of gambling… just as he’d always aspired to be. Now he was learning what godhood was actually like.
He was paid lip service by those who were supposedly working in his name. His name and image were invoked far more often than he was actually consulted on anything. The only time anybody took the time to show him respect or thank him for an act of benevolence, it was inevitably as a prelude to them complaining about something that had gone wrong.
A case in point was the manager of The Meadows, who had started his intrusion into Fortunato’s quiet and richly appointed sanctum by saying how much everybody appreciated his smooth handling of a licensing dispute with the homeworlds of the Terran Alliance that had tried to claim copyright on cultures being represented within theme restaurants before segueing into a completely irrelevant rant about how his fiance’s pet princeling had destroyed an eatery, and what was he going to do about it?
“We’ve had to close down the main la Franja concourse!” the sad little man said. “Do you have any idea how much money the casino is losing every minute?”
“If you will cease your bleating long enough to examine the prince’s diplomatic papers,” Fortuanto said smoothly, tenting his impeccably manicured fingers in front of him, “you will find her homeworld carries a very large and rather vaguely-worded insurance policy on her.”
“Are you suggesting we go after insurance company for our losses? That could take years to sort out.”
“Just submit a claim. I’m told they pay very promptly.”
“Mr. Fortunato…”
“Just Fortunato, please,” he corrected. “I’d say ‘Mr. Fortunato is my father’, but of all the names in the universe that’s the only one I’m reasonably certain is not his.”
“Fortunato, we’re all used to getting your unusual requests from time to time,” the manager said. “Nobody minds fast-tracking important guests through security, or closing down a viaduct for a few minutes, or putting the cameras and tracking sensors through an extended reboot at a particular time. We know how the game is played. We know that one hand washes another, and that what goes around comes around…”
“Then I fail to see where we are having a problem now,” Fortunato said.
“Guests are starting to ask questions,” he said. “Do you know what a terrorism scare would do to us? What am I supposed to tell them?”
“Tell them it’s part of a show,” the living god said wearily. “Long live the Meadows.”
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