Then I remembered the train – still only the day before. It had braked to a sudden halt, because, the crew said, the track was at the incorrect gauge. An impossibility! The track was a permanence. What must have happened was that the engineer, the driver, or one of the control instruments in the cab, had perceived a change in gauge.

I mentioned this to Frejah, but she said immediately: ‘That’s a regular occurrence on the trains. The tracks are often out of true. It’s extremely dangerous. Especially on that line, because it passes one of the main gravitational nodes. There have been several accidents.’

‘Caused by a perception?’

‘The problem of mutability. It is both real and unreal, it happens or it is only thought to happen.’

‘I still don’t get it,’ I said.

‘No one else does.’

She started fingering one of the touch-enabled instruments beneath the dash, glanced at a graphic that instantly appeared on the HUD.

‘We’re approaching another off-road area,’ she said. ‘Are you ready for lunch yet?’

‘Getting that way, yes.’

Ten kilometres further along we drove off the highway and into a cluster of low-level modern buildings. As before, Frejah ignored the directions about where and where not to park, and headed for a subterranean garage. It was marked Strictly Private – Authorized Vehicles Only. There was only one space vacant – Frejah took it.

A long lunch followed.

Sad Story of the Death of Kings

8

Sad Story of the Death of Kings

By the time the food was brought to our table we were both hungry, and while we ate we said little to each other. I still had at the back of my mind Frejah’s remark about serfs, but I was hoping the subject would not come up again.

The feudal system, still almost universal in the Archipelago, was the subject of an extended debate going on in political and seigniory circles: it was one of those subjects that kept cropping up on news broadcasts, whenever someone else had an argument to make about it. The debate was beyond me – I understood it, but it was a subject that you could not help feeling was seized on by opportunistic politicians and administrators, trying to make their name. The needs or wants of ordinary people were disregarded, except in some general way. The arguments were based on theory, not the reality of everyday life in the islands as known to millions of islanders.

The debate was about social change, the governance of the islands.