Chronicles of the Flying Dolphin

It had been days now since he had stopped demanding the return of his precious forms and files. And while he still would not join in the games the girls played, he had become more tolerant of them. He was even beginning to enjoy the opiated wine that he had slapped to the ground ungraciously that first day at Kristal's palace. Soon he would be ready to take von Fractal's place at the Undivided Planet's council meeting - and made the scapegoat of the recent activities in Terra's orbit and atmosphere.

Things had been getting out of control lately, he would reason, and the Federation was anxious for this world's alliance.

But he would remember little of the meeting. And come to resent the "promotion" bestowed upon him by the High Command.

All too soon he was back on his own turf. And it seemed positively alien to him.

His superiors decided that he would have to be rehabilitated after such close contact with the decadence of Princess Kristal's Terran society. But the grey cubes stacked one upon the other in the grey atmosphere over the grey mud made the grey three piece suit and matching grey tie seem as though they were trying to strangle the life from him.

His mind's eye still embraced the polychromatic jungle birds of Kristal's court, the golden sand and turquoise waters of the planet's capitol isle, and the shimmering strawberry blond locks of the matriarch herself. It was hard to believe that she had, at one time, been a Federation officer like himself.

The synthetic grey suit seemed more and more genuinely hostile against the ambassador's tanned skin. But the tan would fade soon enough.

What was worse than the tactile discomfort were the windowless walls of grey plasteel, their uniformity broken only by the grey plasteel door at his back as he sat at the grey plasteel desk.

The thick, humid air that refused to turn itself into rain left everything it came in contact with wet and gritty, and was itself a shade of grey so neutral as to never have caught his attention before.

The narrow, potholed streets between the cubicle upon cubicle of grey plasteel offices seemed mere shadows cast by themselves.

So many worlds had become just like this, he thought, and he wondered about the fate of the great red apes and the iridescent iguanas that had played on the beaches strewn with semiprecious stones that in turn had scattered the bright light of Terra in brilliant rainbows against the firm naked bodies of his former captors.

Why had they set him free?

And, where had they all disappeared to?

The day before he had been zeplifted to the Undivided Planet Headquarters, half the planet's population had mysteriously vanished. The remaining Terrans were more than eager to pledge their lives and souls to the political power he represented. But the Federation had not been involved at all in the depopulation of the neutral states.

In all his life, the ambassador had never once doubted the benevolence of the great Federation. Uncounted worlds had grown rich under the accepted standards of conformity. But he had never been on a tropical island with weird albino women who somehow opened both his eyes and mind to realities he had never dared dream of.

And this god damned cubicle was beginning to close in on him.

In a serious breach of protocol his coat and tie were draped unceremoniously over the back of the grey plasteel chair. Not that anyone would ever enter his office to notice.

With the chair leaned back against the door and his uncharacteristically bare feet propped up on the grey plasteel desk, he stared at the grey plasteel wall before him until it seemed to melt away. In it's place he saw again the verdant jungle of gumbo limbo, mahogany, crepe myrtle and buttonwood, and the turquoise sea undulating sensuously beyond.

He could hear Lilith and Lilitu calling him to join them in the hot spring that fed the glorious waterfall in Princes Kristal' courtyard.

His mind had snapped. Perhaps he could be rehabilitated.

If he was lucky, he would not be.