Merce? Dammit, kiddo, are you fuguing off again?

Bryan rose from his seat and came to her, grave concern on his face. “Gaston, can’t you see she’s ill?”

“I’m not!” Mercy was sharp. “It’s going to pass off in a minute or two. Troubadour away, Gaston.”

The monitor zoomed in on a singer who bowed to the little knot of laggards, struck a chord on his lute, and began expertly herding the people toward the maypole area while soothing them with song. The piercing sweetness of his tenor filled the control room. He sang first in French, then in the Standard English of the Human Polity of the Galactic Milieu for those who weren’t up to the archaic linguistics.

A genuine lark added its own coda to the minstrel’s song. Mercy lowered her head and tears fell onto the console before her. That damn song. And springtime in the Auvergne. And the friggerty larks and retroevolved butterflies and manicured meadows and orchards crammed with gratified folk from faraway planets where the living was tough but the challenge was being met by all but the inevitable misfits who stubbed the beautiful growing tapestry of the Galactic Milieu.

Misfits like Mercy Lamballe.

“Beaucoup regrets, guys,” she said with a rueful smile, mopping her face with a tissue. “Wrong phase of the moon, I guess. Or the old Celtic rising. Bry, you just picked the wrong day to visit this crazy place. Sorry.”

“All you Celts are bonkers.” Gaston excused her with breezy kindness. “There’s a Breton, engineer over in the Sun King Pageant who told me he can only shoot his wad when he’s doing it on a megalith. Come on, babe. Let’s keep this show rolling.”

On the screens, the maypole dancers twined their ribbons and pivoted in intricate patterns. The Duc de Berry and the other actors of his entourage permitted thrilled tourists to admire the indubitably real gems that adorned their costumes. Flutes piped, cornemuses wailed, hawkers peddled comfits and wine, shepherds let people pet their lambs, and the sun smiled down. All was well in la douce France, A.D. 1410, and so it would be for another six hours, through the tournament and culminating feast.

And then the weary tourists, 700 years removed from the medieval world of the Duc de Berry, would be whisked off in comfortable subway tubes to their next cultural immersion at Versailles. And Bryan Grenfell and Mercy Lamballe would go down to the orchard as evening fell to talk of sailing to Ajaccio together and to see how many of the butterflies had survived.

The alert klaxon hooted through the ready room of Lisboa Power Grid’s central staging.

“Well, hell, I was folding anyhow,” big Georgina remarked. She hoisted the portable air-conditioning unit of her armor and clomped off to the waiting drill-rigs, helmet under her arm.

Stein Oleson slammed his cards down on the table. His beaker of booze went over and sluiced the meager pile of chips in front of him. “And me with a king-high tizz and the first decent pot all day! Damn lucky granny-banging trisomics!” He lurched to his feet, upsetting the reinforced chair, and stood swaying, two meters and fifteen cents’ worth of ugly-handsome berserker. The reddened sclera of his eyeballs contrasted oddly with the bright blue irises. Oleson glared at the other players and bunched up his mailed servo-powered fists.

Hubert gave a deep guffaw. He could laugh, having come out on top. “Tough kitty! Simmer down, Stein. Sopping up all that mouthwash didn’t help your game much.”

The fourth cardplayer chimed in. “I told you to take it easy on the gargle, Steinie. And now lookit! We gotta go down, and you’re halfplotzed again.”

Oleson gave the man a look of murderous contempt. He shed the a/c walkaround, climbed into his own drill-rig, and began plugging himself in. “You keep your trap shut, Jango. Even blind drunk I can zap a truer bore than any scat-eatin’ li’l Portugee sardine stroker.”

“Oh, for God’s sake,” said Hubert. “Will you two quit?”

“You try teaming with an orry-eyed squarehead!” Jango said. He blew his nose in the Iberian fashion, over the neck-rim of his armor, then locked on his helmet. Oleson sneered, “And you call me slob!”

The electronic voice of Georgina, the team leader, gave them the bad news as they went through the systems check, “We’ve lost the Cabo da Roca-Azores mainline bore 793 kloms out and the service tunnel, too. Class Three slippage and over-thrust, but at least the fistula sealed. It looks like a long trick, children.”

Stein Oleson powered up. His 180-ton rig rose thirty cents off the deck, slid out of its bay, and sashayed down the ramp, waving its empennage like a slightly tipsy iron dinosaur.

“Madre de deus,” growled Jango’s voice. His machine came after Stein’s, obeying the taxi regulation scrupulously. “He’s a menace, Georgina. I’ll be damned if I drill tandem with him. I’m telling you, I’ll file a beef with the union! How’d you like to have a drunken numbwit the only thing between your ass and a bleb of red-hot basalt?”

Oleson’s bellowed laughter clanged in all their ears. “Go ahead and file with the union, pussywillow! Then get yourself a job to fit your nerve. Like drilling holes in Swiss cheeses with your…”

“Will you cut that crap?” Georgina said wearily. “Hubey, you partner with Jango this shift and I’ll go tandem with Stein.”

“Now wait a minute, Georgina,” Oleson began.

“It’s settled, Stein.” She cycled the airlock. “You and Big Mama against the world, Blue Eyes. And save your soul for Jesus if you don’t sober up before we hit that break. Let’s haul, children.”

A massive gate, eleven meters high and nearly as thick, swung open to give them entry to the service tunnel that dived under the sea. Georgina had fed the coordinates of the break into the autohelms of their drill-rigs, so all they had to do for a while was relax, wiggle around in their armor, and maybe snuff up a euphoric or two while hurtling along at 500 kph toward a mess under the bottom of the Atlantic Ocean.

Stein Oleson raised the partial pressure of his oxygen and gave himself a jolt of aldetox and stimvim. Then he ordered the armor’s meal unit to deliver a liter of raw egg and smoked herring puree, together with his favorite hair of the dog, akvavit.

There was a low muttering in his helmet receiver. “Damn atavistic cacafogo. Ought to mount a set of ox horns on his helmet and wrap his iron ass in a bearskin jockstrap.”

Stein smiled in spite of himself. In his favorite fantasies he did imagine himself a Viking. Or, since he had both Norse and Swedish genes, perhaps a Varangian marauder slashing his way southward into ancient Russia. How wonderful it would be to answer insults with an axe or a sword, unfettered by the stupid constraints of civilization! To let the red anger flow as it was meant to, powering his great muscles for battle! To take strong blonde women who would first fight him off, then yield with sweet openness! He was born for a life like that.

But unfortunately for Stein Oleson, human cultural savagery was extinct in the Galactic Age, mourned only by a few ethnologists, and the subtleties of the new mental barbarians were beyond Stein’s power to grasp. This exciting and dangerous job of his had been vouchsafed him by a compassionate computer, but his soul-hunger remained unsatisfied. He had never considered emigrating to the stars; on no human colony anywhere in the Galactic Milieu was there a primal Eden. The germ plasm of humanity was too valuable to fritter in neolithic backwaters. Each of the 783 new human worlds was completely civilized, bound by the ethics of the Concilium, and obligated to contribute toward the slowly coalescing Whole. People who hankered after their simpler roots had to be content with visiting the Old World’s painstaking restorations of ancient cultural settings, or with the exquisitely orchestrated Immersive Pageants, almost, but not quite, authentic to the last detail, which let a person actively savor selected portions of his heritage.