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
(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.