Rated top for hominoids, point of origin Earth planet, might well be work, food and love.
Brant, lifting a metre square cladding sheet in the sweat of his brow to the skeleton frame of his gazebo, reckoned he was short weighted on items two to three inc.
In a mood for maxims, he gave himself another. Work is a great therapy. This one lost out. He said, "To Hell," and dropped the whippy square to fall on the inside, to a purple carpet of thunderberry and leaned out on his safety belt.
Down below, a kilometre of free fall dropped to a valley bottom rioting with mixed veg. From the outcrop it looked mainly blue. But he knew it for a tachiste illusion. Every colour on the palette was there. Metre-wide, crimson remnants; yellow carnivore lilies; creeper, cobalt creeper everywhere, waist-thick, writhing, the dormant life form on Xuthus.
At this distance, a deep bed to fall on. Knock out the clip and float down. Easy. A soft carpet of unknowing. Seventy kilos of complex organics absorbed in seconds in a blaze of colour.
Why not? He was tired of pulling the puppet strings on the ego that was Mark Brant. Rub it out. Start again. Or not? That was the million dollar question.
Postponement of the issue came from outside. Reacting to it, he was himself again and could not tell whether it had been a real confrontation or not. A bleep from a bijou video in the breast pocket of his white coveralls had him fishing it out.
It was Tabal, his Xuthusian sub-controller, eyestalks vibrating with angst. On the miniature screen, his small, pointed face seemed out of proportion behind advanced eye structures, poked forward now as though ready to follow the wave forms through the devious gut of the machine itself.
"What is it?" Brant used the speech tones which were the lingua franca of the galaxy.
Tabal had to use a rectifier. Direct linkage of palate movements to a robot mixer that transmuted them incongruously into a cool female voice saying, "Urgent memo for Dr. Brant. Signal from a military patrol craft. Entering this gravisphere in sector J. Please hurry."
The secretary who had fed in fifty thousand English word choices had kept a golden, even tone. Surface impact was cosy and cheerful. So she would announce the world's end. It took an effort of adjustment to clock up any urge.
But it was unusual enough. A request for him by name. First in six months on this remote station.
It was no good asking Tabal. Xuthusians were impersonal as the communications gear they handled so well. Their flair for using sensitive relay plant had been an unexpected bonus when Xuthus was chosen as a natural telephone exchange for half the planetary systems on the Rim.
It was anyway no good for anything else.
Brant swung himself inside and then knocked free the clip. Hand over hand, he climbed into the cleared, circular well where his blue and white service car lay like a bulky prop in a wind tunnel.
Looked at from below, it was an impressive structure to be the sole work of one man. Brant's Folly. A look out turret, dovetailed to the living rock of the highest landmark on any compass point. Four months work and he had broken the back of the project. Framework finished, cladding sheets nearly to halfway. Still to go, two decks and curved observation panels, then it would be complete like the nose cone of a rocket ship springing from a massive boulder wedged in the valley's lip.
He circled it once in the car, a moth to his own candle, before he flicked in the auto-pilot to take him home.
Two minutes, with his brainchild dwindling to a shiny asterisk, and the car was threading a devious path through outlying ranks of paraboloid bowls. A silent forest as bizarre as anything natural forces had ever thrown up. Metre thick, curtilage wall surrounded by a black carbon waste, where thrusting creeper had been blasted back by built-in, automatic flame-throwers.
How long would it last if they pulled out? Once the flame guns packed up it would be another Angkor Vat in a Xuthusian year. Two hundred Earth days. His pleasure dome would outlast it. If ever he finished it. This call from outside put it in perspective. He was playing like a boy with an outsize construction kit. Delayed adolescence.
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