Their Majesties' Bucketeers Read Online Free Page A

the Church maintained across the river in Commoner’s Bridge. I closed my bag wearily, looking forward to a pleasant sandy scrub myself, when I happened to glance at the railway clock a few blocks away. Why, I’d completely forgotten my evening’s engagement with—
    “Rather more exciting a spectacle than a museum lecture, I am compelled to agree!” Mav stood suddenly beside me, fur arranged ironically, his uniform exchanged now for dashing evening dress. “I took the liberty,” he told me as he lifted my bag into the hired carriage drawn before us, “of sending a messenger to your girl, who will be ready to assist you in dressing. Why in heaven’s desiccation will you not have a line put in? This is the twenty-sixth century, after all. Now we’ll have to hurry, just to be fashionably late!”
    I climbed into the cab to discover, with some pleasure, that we were quite alone. “Is Vyssu given to fashionable lateness as well, or is she stamping an impatient hand for us in front of the Museum?”
    “Neither, I’m afraid— as she was able to explain upon the telephone a while ago . She had a social obligation which she couldn’t break, after all: a musicale for the Lord, Lady, and Lurrie Kassafiin at your father’s house this evening.”
    By the time we arrived at the Museum, our driver was hard-pressed to convey us through an angry-sounding crowd of demonstrators who had gathered all around the ancient edifice. The streets were overflowing with lamviinity, and Mav, after several vain attempts on the part of our conductor to make a path for us, at last decided we should walk, despite the cablam’s earnest protestations of our safety.
    Through annoying oversight I had left my bag in the carriage while Mav waited outside my modest lodgings, staring at his watch upon its chain. I might, in perfect propriety, have asked him in, but I knew full well this would be transmitted to my mother immediately upon her weekly visit tomorrow afternoon. My maidservant occupied her position far less for my convenience than for my family’s regular edification. That she had a reliable weakness for places like the Bucket & Truncheon and was to be found on such premises more frequently than at her duties suited me perfectly. But it would avail me nothing in the instance of so recent an “indiscretion” as permitting Mav to see my rooms—she had, after all, to have something to report every nine days.
    Accordingly, rather than entrust my instruments (a cherished present from my surfather) to be returned to my apartments by a driver I did not know, I elected to carry them to the lecture, winning, on this rare occasion, an argument against Mav’s archaic insistence that he shoulder the burden. Given the long and arduous day behind me, perhaps I shouldn’t have tried to be quite so persuasive.
    The crowds made quite as much commotion as the earlier fire had. I found myself astonished that the object of their protest was the very lecture we were looking forward to. Of course, the subject of Ascensionism was controversial; but what was there about this esoteric topic to incite what promised soon (were it not for the doughty Bucketeers who formed an inner barrier around the place) to become a riot?
    Many in the throng were carrying torches, while others brandished large sheets of resinboard fastened to sticks after the manner of Continental radicals and labor insurrectionists. I fear that proper conduct precludes me from recording here some of these pronouncements (which in any case were echoed loudly by those who bore the placards), but the import was that they disagreed with Professor Srafen’s ideas and desired that rhe refrain from public discussion of them.
    Either that, or conduct rher next seminar at the bottom of the River Dybod.
    On the bed of a waggon whose shabby watun were tied to a hitching bar before the massive doors of the Museum, a figure pranced in soiled robes that might, a long, long time ago, have originally been