However, in consideration to Xanthippe long service on the planet, the Administrative service was ready to convert the on-Anipos funds of her 458(a) retirement plan into Earth monetary units, under the comma 458(b), or set up an inter-mundi pension, under comma 458(c) of the Anipos Administration Financial Law.
Keeping the money on Earth would bind her indefinitely to the planet, so Anthippe Xeyos was inclined to opt for plan (c) - it allowed her the maximum of flexibility, should she - or one of her daughters - ever decide yo leave the system. Which was very unlikely.
On Earth, Xanthippe was a Queen and a Superwoman, with a vast network of underground alliances that would not vanish overnight only because she no longer had any official duties in the Legation.
Allies, friends and lovers and daughters - the small planet had been generous with her.
On Beta Canis, she had nothing to go back to.
As for the rest of the universe, she knew all too well the unwritten rules of the Anipos government: any Betan that had sex with a citizen of Anipos would die - and their lovers too.
The most hypocritical government in known galaxy had no qualms at using them as weapons of mass societal destruction, as long as said destruction was kept far, far, far away from them.Ticket out-of-system that it was, there was n love between the Betan expatriates and the government that employed them
Also, alot was happening under the surface here - much more than what had happened in the last five centuries of the Anipos civilization. If someone got her thrills out of making history, and Xanthippe as such a person, here was a place to stay - at the centre of the action.
The only flip-side of staying on-planet was that the local health services weren't nearly as good as back home, but this was probably of a secondary importance - her wives gang's 'god' had more than enough capacity to fix everything that could ail her, and had its own reasons to see that the gang continued to be happy.
Mostly because they were at the network of the network of brains that helped creating its emotive state.
No matter her decisions, these were going to be the last three weeks of Xanthippe's tenure as the Adjoin Undersecretary of the Anipos Legation. Oh, well, not a Gov't employee any more... good riddance.
She read what she could about her substitute, and realized that Izlata Athos was more of the same, served from the Anipos administrative machine to Earth.
The new woman was 25 local years old, fresh out of Beta Canis Major, prone to casual sexual encounters, back home. Maybe less inclined to cutting comments than the person that she was replacing, but that was as far as their differences went.
It was clear that Anipos Prime still considered "betanizing" the local humans - i.e. to sabotage, in the long run, the planet societal cohesion - among its main long terms goal, or they would have pressed to repatriate X-X and the three hidden Bridgewater sisters. Instead, they wanted to have more Betan women spreading their peculiar STD - superpowers - on the planet.
There was no official data about the number of the infected, as no Earth health service wanted to acknowledge the issue, but the gang told her that it was in the order of a quarter of a thousand people, nowadays.
The gang had access both to the network of their 'god' drones and cronies, both to the real data collected by the 'bots - the data that the robots, having recognized the less than savvy nature of their masters, wily decided to keep to themselves and shared, sometimes, only their true allies.
It may seem much, 250 supermen, but the masquerade called society still held well, possibly because the very merciless 'god' of her wives, who had both the tastes and the capacity to kill any superhuman that strayed from the righteous path - and did something more showy than, say, robbing a bank - had let every one of them know that it would chase, contain and cut the throat (or something indicibly worse) of everyone that incurred its wrath.
It is hard to be a superwoman, in a world with a 'god' - the thought crossed Xanthippe's mind, then she corrected herself... it is good to be a super woman, in a world with it.
The history of her home planet proved what a terrible hassle could be super-humanity without any ethic power to keep it in check. 'god' may be motivated by its desire to exploit the world's current societies for its own purposes, but it was already better than nothing.
Xanthi started writing a note, about her own imminent replacement, for the next internal newsletter - she was sure half the planet's intelligence community was going to read it and take a long breath... before discovering that the Anipos had short-changed them, and that the new girl was more or less cut out of her very same cloth.
"I have the pleasure to inform you that, with the end of the current fiscal year, my contract with the legation will reach its final expiration, as the Central Administration office has decided to not renovate it, and it opted to replace me with a younger - a-hem - version of me.
I am sure that this new, lewder Sassy Betan Slut will keep you dreaming wet, sweaty, terrible things for years to come, as well as that my decision to settle down - and build a closed family with my eight wives - has everything to do with Central Admin decision to waste a couple of billion petajoules, just to send another Betan to Earth.
It has been a honor and a joy, to work with all of you these last twenty years, but I confess that I look forward to my retirement, now. I gave this job my all, and I reckon that it is time to go.
As a final note, I invite all of you that still have a functioning liver to The Fitchy Frill, for my last booze as an anointed Legation member, Friday the whatever November 2107, after the end of my last day in office.
By the way, I wll remain on planet and my wives are every bit as dangerous as the intelligence reports say.
So, that friday, watch your mouths and beware of making any passes on me, OK?
I would shrug it off, but my ladies could take it the wrong way, and nobody really wants to irritate them. No even me.
No matter how she spun it, Xanthi felt sad.
Good and bad, she had spent twenty years keeping the planet afloat, while most of its so-called authorities were out to chase imaginary terrorists.
Electric cars had, finally, replaced internal combustion engines, and the photovoltaic panels in Earth's solar shield were the source of 89% of world's energy. In this, her and her chief, the ineffable Andrew Magalgan , were as proud as anybody can be.
The CO2 in the atmosphere was going down, five years in a row now, for the first time since measurements of the damn gas were ever taken - methane was an ongoing problem, as much of it had been released by the Antarctic ice melt, around the half of the previous century.
What was bad, was the attitude of the two hundred or so nation-states - as soon as it was clear that the Solar Shield would save the biosphere from man-induced collapse, they had gone back to their business-as-usual state of mind, and gutted out of the U.N. even that shadow of effectiveness that it had gained during the war.
Left to its own devices, this branch of humanity would be on the road to extinction again, by the time she was dead, and this time no clever action would lure the Anipos back to fix things.
It never really left that road, which cast a different light on the long range colonization efforts of the three hidden powers that the war had created.
Xanthippe thought for some minutes, about advising the newcomer of the real nature of the forces shapiung this world, then she decided against it.
If Izlata was any good, she'd found out for herself soon enough - on the other hand, some of what Xanthi knew was from being embedded in her terrifying loving, polyamorous family.
The gang wouldn't mind, but others would not be so happy with her divulging the secrets of their 'god'.
She sighed, hit "send" and then relaxed.
She looked though the holographic crystal of her family, that she kept on her desk. Virtually nobody else ever looked at it, because virtually nobody recognised it.
It was a technology that didn't hold. like stereoscopic TV - you had to place a crystal at exactly the right distance to see its content and it gave a sore headache to everybody but its alien creator. In this crystal one could see Xanthi, her eight wives, and their twelve (going for 15, now) daughters, in various states of disarray over their country home biggest sofa.
- "458(c) it is", she observed, then flew home for the customary Tuesday Stew.
No comments:
Post a Comment
Feel free to point me out conceptual, orthographical, grammatical, syntactical or usage's errors, as well as anything else