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!.7WdLd240M 06/16/11(Thu)02:31 No.26877529The Rigel Concourse is Sir Julian's most noteworthy discovery: twenty-six magnificent planets, most of them not only habitable but salubrious, though only two display even quasi-intelligent autochthones. . . . Sir Julian, exercising his prerogatives, named the planets for boyhood heroes: Lord Kitchener, William Gladstone, Archbishop Rollo Gore, Edythe, MacDevott, Rudyard Kipling, Thomas Carlyle, William Kirkcudbright, Samuel B. Gorsham, Sir Robert Peel, and the like.
But Sir Julian was to be deprived of his privilege. He telegraphed ahead the news of his return to Maudley Space Station, together with a description of the Concourse and the names he had bestowed upon the members of this magnificent group. The list passed through the hands of an obscure young clerk, one Roger Pilgham, who rejected Sir Julian's nominations in disgust. To each of the twenty-six planets he assigned a letter of the alphabet and hurriedly supplied new names: Alphanor, Barleycorn, Chrysanthe, Diogenes, Elfland, Flame, Goshen, Hardacres, Image, Jezebel, Krokinole, Lyonnesse, Madagascar, Nowhere, Olliphane, Pilgham, Quinine, Raratonga, Somewhere, Tantamount, Unicorn, Valisande, Walpurgis, Xion, Ys and Zacaranda—the names derived from legend, myth, romance, his own whimsey.
One of the worlds was accompanied by a satellite, described in the dispatch as "an eccentric, tumbling, odd-shaped fragment of chondritic pumice," and this Roger Pilgham named "Sir Julian." |
