The Coming of the Teraphiles Read online

  of the time, kept firmly under control.

  Unknown to her husband and daughter, Mrs Banning-

  Cannon had proposed this Galactic Nostalgia Tour precisely

  because she felt the old urge rising in her, threatening to burst

  the bonds she had mentally cast around it. Only moments

  before the decision to embark on this educational luxury

  cruise, while despairing over her daughter's prospects of

  marriage, she had caught herself watching the First Past the

  Post feature by the Major on her V. The Major recommended

  Warp Factor Ten in the 2.30 at Gorgon Gap Park, Heaven

  on Earth, Aldebaran, the acknowledged centre of koop-

  koop racing. Her hand had reached unconsciously for her

  holo-V. Her glance shot like summer lightning towards the

  bookmaker ikon. She was a few short seconds from placing

  five K each way on the filly in question when she was saved

  by the sound of very loud travelogue commentary in her ear.

  Earlier she had forgotten to close the appropriate function.

  Thank Mercury it wasn't a koop-koop race, she thought,

  but merely a report of the All-Galaxy Sporting Re-Enactment

  Society's current tour, which was reaching its close, as was

  traditional, on Flynn in the rather hairy system of Miggea,

  close to the Galactic Hub, with only three games left to play.

  The three teams in question were the Gentlemen, the Tourists

  and the Visitors. They were pretty evenly matched and no

  one in particular tipped to win the coveted 'Big Arrer', more

  formally known sometimes as the Jewelled Arrow of Artemis

  or simply the Silver Shaft, so rarely seen except during its

  presentation to the winner. Had she not been painfully bored

  by that particular sport - individual matches of which could

  be played over periods of weeks, sometimes months, and

  included tie-breakers involving archaic and baffling skills

  resurrected from the Home Planet's dim past - she might just

  have considered a flutter on the outcome. Large sums were

  said to change hands amongst enthusiasts...

  No!

  Had she slipped and V'd her bookie, her five full years

  of refusing so much as to buy a lottery ticket would have

  been as dishwater down the drain. Happily a re-enactment

  game of, say, nutcracking filled her with instant ennui and

  quivering disgust so, with a blink, it was easy enough to turn

  off her V.

  She turned it on again almost at once as a solution to her

  problems popped into her consciousness. She checked her

  V-mail for a letter she half-remembered receiving. Someone

  from the Terraphiles whom she had planned to ignore as

  firmly as only the wealthy can. Ah, there it was. An oddly

  dressed bleating old fogey asking her to present the prize

  to the winner of the 15th Quarter-Millennium Terraphile

  Re-Enactment Tournament on Flynn. They were offering

  all expenses paid for two and space travel to Flynn in the

  Miggea system aboard the luxury tour liner the ISS Gargantua,

  stopping at a number of picturesque planets designed to

  replicate the beauties and customs of Ancient Earth, courtesy

  Messrs TipTop Travel, Inc.

  Like most rich people, Mrs Banning-Cannon loved a

  bargain. What could be better than a free holiday? And,

  including their daughter, two-thirds paid for by someone

  other than herself or her husband?

  An ancestor might have cried 'Eureka!' As it was, she

  was momentarily consumed with admiration of her own

  astonishing intellect.

  In a matter of minutes, she had replied to the Terraphiles

  to say that she would be delighted to accept their offer to

  present the Silver Arrow at the conclusion of their Great

  Tournament. She would make travel arrangements and send

  the bill to their appropriate department. Then she committed

  herself, her husband Urquart and her beautiful daughter Jane

  (aka 'Flapper') to what she was assured was Messrs TipTop

  Travel Inc.'s deluxe Galactic Re-Enactment Tours. Messrs

  TipTop assured the public that their tour was the finest and

  most select available, being both educational and healthy.

  Everything would be provided, including the latest and most

  sophisticated nano-tech translation pill, cultural information

  and style advice.

  In other words, she thought, Mr Banning-Cannon and the

  apple of their eye could educate themselves at a substantial

  discount while she, Mrs B-C, took a well-earned doze in the

  suns of a score of sultry systems while occasionally indulging

  in her Other Vice, clinically known as millinerophilia, the

  ancient compulsion to shop for hats. What was more, she

  had a good chance of solving her remaining problem: her

  daughter might, with luck, find and marry a Peer. (She was,

  she admitted to herself, just a little hazy about what a Peer

  actually was, but she knew her friends would be envious.)

  The advantage also being that her husband's firm owned the

  Peer™ concessions, thus continuing, also, to keep the money

  in the family.

  It had been another advantage in her eyes that' Tournaments

  Mediaeval (Archery Plus)' was a sport she had never wanted

  to bet on. Not only was it one of the few sports rarely offered

  in her bookmaker's menu of choices, it was also very slow

  and unexciting. She fancied it to be played almost entirely by

  titled toffs. Its teams were likely to be crammed with members

  of what she still called the Brutish aristocracy, thanks to a

  fault in her nano-translator.

  Also reassuring to Mrs B-C was that many of the other

  planets they would visit had been created by her husband's

  family company TerraForma™, which made its main profits

  from taming various intergalactic hellspots into Earth-like

  speciality worlds, mostly on sporting themes. Thus the

  TFIII series was largely devoted to gulf, the TFVI series to

  chicklit, the TFVXI series to fruitball, and so on. The TFXX

  series, featuring Archery and Middle Ages Tournament Re-

  Enactments, was perhaps the least popular and therefore

  unlikely to be swamped with tourists. Like most tourists,

  Mrs Banning-Cannon loathed tourists and tried to avoid

  them at all costs. Therefore she was further delighted that the

  Terraphiles had chosen the cruise-ship Gargantua on which

  to make the Re-Enactment Tour, conveniently beginning on

  Cygnus 34, not far from their home in Barnard's Star, and

  due to end, as stated, in Miggea in Sagittarius, close to the

  galaxy's centre, where she would present the victorious team

  with the coveted Jewelled Arrow of Artemis.

  As previously stated, she and her husband were currently

  enjoying a pleasant snooze in lawn chairs on this regenerated

  English village green where handsome young men in whackit

  pullovers and blazers and pretty young women in cloche

  straws and filmy silk frocks stood cheering for their team

  or for individual players. There were a few strict Terraphile

  conservatives insisting on authentic tournament formals,

  including 'pa
ge boy' haircuts, Wedgewood plate armour,

  long velvet dresses, the odd wimple, long strings of pearls,

  habits, top hats, bloomers and so forth taken from the earliest

  surviving pictures of Earth between the years 1430 and 1930,

  a period described by tour operators as Merrie Eusa. Behind

  them, on the veranda of the pavilion, from which waved

  various banners, chaps of many planets wearing feathered

  green pointed caps, crenellated capes, green baggy trousers

  and the loud multicoloured blazers of the Ancient and Most

  Honourable Order of Toxopholite Terraphiles, were relishing

  shants of VW Best while occasionally casting an eye on the

  'Friendly', enjoying its third day played by the Gentlemen

  against their old rivals the Tourists.

  The players consisted of more chaps in glaring Lincoln

  Green, their trousers, where they had any, held up by old

  school ties, shooting blunted wooden arrows at two other

  chaps, one of them a rhinocerid Judoon and the other a canine

  Pilparque, in heavily padded armour, helmet and gloves,

  situated at either end of the field and holding large whackits

  in their hands. These two attempted to stop the 'shooters'

  from hitting the 'wotsit' or board (three legs supporting a

  round, straw-filled object divided into many numbered

  sections) behind which stood 'wotsit keepers', whose job

  appeared to be to catch the arrows which missed and stick

  them in the said wotsit. Whoever scored 380 first would, Mrs

  Banning-Cannon understood, be declared the winner. It was

  a wonder, she thought wearily, that the bookies took any

  interest in the sport at all.

  Although this Planet of the Peers™ had been chosen from

  the itinerary because the great matriarch assumed it to have

  been populated by human bluebloods, actually it was mostly

  colonised by archery enthusiasts wishing to honour the great

  Mr Peer, founder of the original London archery ground

  bearing his name, but she had struck lucky in her choice even

  though she hadn't quite got it right. Everywhere on Peers™

  chaps, mostly humanoid or at least bipedal, were shooting,

  whacking, fielding, wotsit-keeping or imbibing pints in

  one of the many pavilions in a few thousand Tournament

  Renaissance grounds on a franchise world which had been

  let for the last nine millennia to a 'regrown' family with

  undisputed DNA links to England in Old Old Earth. The

  Lockesley family's current concessionaire-in-chief in the

  old huntin', shootin' and fishin' tradition was Lord Robin of

  Sherwood, Earl of Lockesley, a keen archer on a world almost

  entirely given over to bowmanship and a public school

  education, what some called a shaftin', runnin', jumpin',

  crammin' and whackin' planet. Those who were not enjoying

  tournaments were either 'gated' for some misdemeanour at

  school or mooning miserably over a pretty 'stunner' with

  which the planet was plentifully seeded in order to keep

  up the supply of new chaps and stunners to attend schools

  and play the great and noble Tournament or the Grand Old

  Whack as devotees called it.

  Peers™ was one of several concessions built by the

  Banning-Cannon family in the Moravian Cluster. All were

  called Peers™ and were pretty much identical, with a good

  supply (in appropriate species) of Decent Chaps, Silly Asses,

  Pretty Girls and, of course, Fearsome Magistrates, Kindly

  Uncles and Terrifying Aunts, Fogeys (Old) and Fogeys

  (Young), not to mention Policemen (Helmeted) and Policemen

  (Unhelmeted) as well as Marryin' Maids, Littlejohns, Scarlet

  Will O'Haras, Magnum Carters and all the other characters

  and accoutrements likely to be needed to sustain what most

  Decent Chaps agreed was a pretty spiffin' sort of a planet,

  created for the TerraForma™ company by Algernon Pine, a

  reconstituted writer of OE's Mediaeval English Edwardian

  school defrosted on Old Old Mars about ten thousand years

  ago.

  Pine, that honest soul, had been a bit miffed to find his

  suggestions tweaked here and there until it was explained

  to him that democracy demands you give the public what it

  wants. Little remained of the original at such a distant date

  in the future of Old Old Earth's history. It should be pointed

  out that, allowing for public taste, the reconstructors had

  done their best. The concession had been pieced together

  by experts in what was known these days as the History

  Entertainment business, providing excellent templates for

  many nicely, and safely, made new worlds. That most of

  them recollected a relatively short, yet lively, period between

  European fifteenth and twentieth centuries was because of

  Original Terra's (Old Old Earth's) thoroughly frozen state.

  A couple of nuclear winters and a large comet had seen to

  that.

  Having established through careful research that the game

  of arrers or archery was the most popular of olden times, the experts had skilfully reconstructed it as the grand finale

  game of the Renaissance Tournamentors, establishing The

  Rules of Tournament (2137) by which everyone nowadays

  played. TerraForma™ guaranteed their remade worlds were

  as much like the originals as possible.

  The Society of Terraphiles held a Grand Toumey, currently

  the most exclusive game in the universe, every two and a half

  centuries, playing for the ancient Silver Arrow of Artemis

  (the Big Arrer), whose origins were lost in the mists of time.

  Some said it was of supernatural manufacture. Players often

  belonged to the other galaxy-wide re-enactment society,

  the Ancient and Most Honourable Order of Toxopholite

  Terraphiles, who prided themselves on following the

  customs, costumes and manners of the Original Olde English

  archers and knights. Before the main games began, several

  other events had to be played out, including Quartering the

  Knave, Broadswording, Charging the Peasant, Stiffing the

  Publican, Dungeoning the Dragon, Swatting the Quintain

  and, most popular of all, Using a Sledgehammer to Crack

  a Nut, plus various contests involving axes, dragon-lances,

  swords, war-hammers and several other means of ancient

  human conflict.

  Which was about the most Mrs Banning-Cannon

  understood or wished to understand of the Grand Old

  Whack. All this and considerably more had been explained

  to her by the agreeable Bingo, Lord Sherwood, Peer™ being

  his home world, who had the advantage in her eyes of being

  an acknowledged pedigree Peer of the Realm, unmarried and

  heir to a huge castle known as Lockesley Hall with grounds

  as extensive as a moderately sized country, somewhere on

  this side of the planet. Not only was he therefore An Eligible

  Bachelor, but he was also reasonably good looking, if a bit dim

  and over-eloquent on the subject of the Ancient Tourney of

  Archerie on which, it emerged, he had written several papers

  well reviewed in The Whacksman's Wisdom, the best-regarded

  V-joumal on
the subject. That he was by his own admission

  as poor as a church mouse and urgently in need of what he

  called variously 'dosh', 'tin', 'lolly' or 'argent' only enhanced

  his eligibility in her view because, as every plutocrat knows,

  the once-wealthy destitute are always more malleable than

  the poor who have never been anything else. And, while

  she wanted a blueblood for a son-in-law, she did not want

  a stroppy one who would talk back. It had not occurred to

  her that such a weak-knee would not exactly be a type her

  strong-willed daughter favoured for a spouse.

  Her eyes half-closed against the balmy light, Mrs Banning-

  Cannon smiled favourably on a heavily padded and helmeted

  whacksman who currently defended what she understood

  to be the Gentleman's End against a famously keen canine

  player, G.H. O'Gruffy, whose tail was waving in what might

  have been triumph and who let out loud, challenging barks

  as he again took aim with his bow at a wotsit defended by

  the rival whacker, whose protective clothing was now stuck

  with so many arrows he resembled a porcupine in the prime

  of its porcupinehood and whom Mrs Banning-Cannon fondly

  believed to be her anticipated son-in-law but was actually

  the Hon. Old Bill Told, standing in for Bingo.

  The Silver Arrow of Artemis, having been stashed with

  other valuables in a super-secure time-locked travel-vault

  and sent ahead to Flynn to be opened immediately before its

  presentation to the winning team, Mrs Banning-Cannon was

  determined to enjoy the tour in the ways she loved best. The

  attractions of this game were becoming clearer to her, now

  that she realised that it was almost demanded of spectators

  that they sit in lawn chairs and snooze through much of

  every match. She had almost accidentally picked up some

  of the rules and objects and now even had a favourite team.

  The one she favoured (i.e. Lord Bingo's First Fifteen) was the

  Gentlemen. They were one of three which had been tipped

  from the start to win the All-Galaxy Tournament, though at

  present slightly better odds were being offered on the present

  Arrow holders, the Tourists. Not, she told herself firmly, that

  odds had anything to do with it given that this was anyway

  a mere friendly. These players, she had read, were so devoted

  to their sport that some members even went so far as to take

  nano-identity pills so that they believed they were human.