New Celebrations: The Adventures of Anthony Villiers Read Online Free

encouraged.
    Mithraism spent more than fifteen hundred years underground or as a minor element in other religions before its modern revival in the schisms of schisms and the loss of belief that ruined Christianity for a thousand years.
    Mithraism is a good religion, if not a great religion. It certainly deserved better than Augustus Srb saw fit to give it in the face of Torve’s earnestly presented case for some primitive brand of mumbo jumbo:
    “See you, then, the wholeness so far?”
    “Wholeness? Oh, yes, yes. I am attending you with interest. Continue, if you will.”
    “Wholeness is everything that exists. Outside is nothingness. But nothingness is ripe, ready to nourishmentalize fruit, and existence is reborn. See you?” Torve asked earnestly.
    “Oh, yes.” Srb nodded.
    “Wholeness is born and grows, moving through nothingness and feeding on nothingness.”
    “Yes.”
    “Eventualistically, nothingness can no longer feed wholeness. Movement slows, then stops. Is like great heaviness in stomach after large meal. When movement stops, all collapses. In eye blink, wholeness shrinks to size of seed and all is stasis. Only in great by-and-by is nothingness ready to nourishmentalize again. Has happened seventeen times since wholeness invented itself. Do you see?”
    “No. I must confess that I don’t. Perhaps we had better work on nothingness for a while.”
    “Oh, nothingness is simple. Is nothing.”
    Why did Srb continue to sit quietly listening to this? I suppose because he was given an equal chance to explicate Mithraism—but then he didn’t take proper advantage of that. Perhaps because it was a way of passing the time. And then, how would it have looked for him to step out on a round of shoptalk? Appearances.
    The other ship bound for Star Well was not publicly scheduled to stop there, and only a few people knew of its imminent arrival. It was a blackness against the blackness. It announced its presence in no way. It moved swiftly and certainly, and nobody aboard was fuzzed on Fibrin.
    When Villiers rose that morning, he dressed himself and cursed happily at the difficulties of inducing a drapeau to hang correctly behind him without other hands to help. In addition to being decorative, and impressing people, servants had a certain usefulness in delicate and chancy matters like these. Villiers owned an odd and secret gaiety and he enjoyed this exercise of his capacity for wishing bad cess that he might the better spend the rest of the day being his normal good-humored, but reserved, self.
    He put unfortunate wrinkles in three drapeaus and discarded them all. On the fourth try he finally achieved the drape he had been aiming for, and might have had sooner if he hadn’t been enjoying himself so much.
    His toilet completed, he considered himself in the mirror. He nodded at last and then went forth from his quarters in search of breakfast.
    He chose to be served in the Grand Hall. Villiers followed the old dictum, Live as you dress. He dressed well. A plump, homely, good-natured girl served him an excellent breakfast. She had left the preserve behind and went to fetch it. It was a living green jelly that grew on rotting vegetation on New Frenchman’s Bend, and after an initial unfavorable reaction to it on first encounter, Villiers had decided that he liked the gloppy stuff and ordered it whenever he could.
    He complimented the girl on the meal when she returned.
    “Why, bless you, sir,” she said. “Thank you.”
    “Tell me,” he said, “do you live here in Star Well permanently?”
    “Oh, no, sir.”
    “You don’t mean you travel here from somewhere else every day?”
    She laughed happily. “It’s a five year contract between m’lord, the Marquis, and Mr. Shirabi. I’ll be going home to Herrendam next year with the others. I’ll be getting married.”
    “Congratulations. I hope you will be very happy. Are Mr. Godwin and Levi also from Herrendam?”
    “Levi Gonigle is, but Mr. Godwin was here