Throy Read Free

activists – to establish estates for themselves out in the beautiful Deucas countryside, where they would employ Yips servants and farmhands and live like lords. The charge provoked such violent spasms of outrage that the Chartists’ most sardonic suspicions were reinforced. Such vehemence, they stated, only certified the LPFers’ covert plans.
    At Araminta Station, ‘advanced,’ ideology was not taken seriously. The Yip problem was recognized as real and immediate, but the LPF solution must be rejected, since any official concessions would formalize the Yip presence on Cadwal, when all efforts should be exerted in the opposite direction, i.e.: transfer of the entire Yip population to a world where their presence would be useful and desirable.
     
    VI. Spanchetta and Simonetta
     
    At Clattuc House Spanchetta and Simonetta Clattuc were sisters, more alike than otherwise, though Spanchetta was the more earthy and Simonetta - ‘Smonny,’ as she was known - the more imaginative and restless. As girls both were boisterous, untidy and overbearing; both grew to be large, big-breasted young women with profuse heaps of curling hair; small glinting heavy-lidded eyes; flat pallid faces between conspicuous cheekbones. Both were passionate, haughty, domineering and vain; both were uninhibited and possessed of boundless energies. During their youth, both Spanny and Smonny became obsessively fixated upon the person of Scharde Clattuc and each shamelessly sought to seduce him, or marry him, or by any other means to possess him for their own. Scharde was uncertain as to which of the two he found the more repulsive, and avoided the advances as politely as possible.
    Scharde was sent off-world to an IPCC 4 training mission on at Sarsenopolis on Alphecca Nine. Here he met Marya Aragone, a dark-haired young woman of grace, charm, dignity and intelligence with whom he became enamored, and she with him. The two were married at Sarsenopolis and in due course returned to Araminta Station.
    Spanchetta and Smonny were outraged. Scharde’s conduct represented an insulting personal rejection, and also - at a deeper level - a lack of submissiveness, which they found intolerable. They were able to rationalize their fury when Smonny failed to matriculate from the Lyceum and, on becoming a collateral, was forced to move out of Clattuc House, coincidentally at about the same time Marya arrived, so that the blame could easily be transferred to Marya and Scharde.
    Heavy with bitterness, Smonny departed Araminta Station. For a time she ranged far and wide across the Reach, engaging in a variety of activities. Eventually she married Titus Zigonie, who owned Shadow Valley Ranch, comprising twenty-two thousand square miles on the world Rosalia, as well as a Clayhacker space yacht.
    For the labor necessary to work his ranch, Titus Zigonie, at Smonny’s suggestion, began to employ gangs of indentured Yips, brought to Rosalia by none other than Namour, who shared the proceeds of the business with Calyactus, Oomphaw of Yipton.
    At Namour’s urging Calyactus paid a visit to the Shadow Valley Ranch on Rosalia, where he was murdered by either Smonny or Namour, or perhaps both.
    Titus Zigonie, an inoffensive little man, became ‘Titus Pompo, the Oomphaw,’ though Smonny wielded all authority. Never had she relaxed her hatred of Araminta Station in general and Scharde Clattuc in particular, and her dearest wish was to perform some destructive atrocity upon them both. Meanwhile, Namour, with utmost sang-froid once again took up his duties as paramour to both Spanchetta and Smonny.
    Marya meanwhile had borne Scharde a son, Glawen. When Glawen was two years old, Marya drowned in a boating accident under peculiar circumstances. A pair of Yips, Selious and Catterline, were witnesses to the drowning. Scharde questioned Selious and Catterline at length. Each claimed that he could not swim, so how could he save a drowning woman so far from shore: at least a hundred