If you want a break from shopping and gambling, you can rent a high-powered ground car and, after signing a complex insurance agreement whose welter of clauses boils down to "you break it, you bought it," you can race at terrifying speeds over the undulating, banked, dirt roads outside the city. In two hours you can be in Schildesee, the exquisite ice blue lake at the base of Mount Kreisberg. For centuries, parties of Galainan young people on holiday from work or school have come to this lake to picnic and swim nude in its clear, cold waters, while a mile away at the Schildesee Spa, the aged, infirm and hypochondriacal sit in the sun and take the waters from a nearby mineral spring. If you like hiking, you can make the two-hour climb up Mount Kreisberg to Lookout Point where you have a splendid view of the lake and the lush, surrounding countryside. ... A Night on the Town Evenings on Galaina are given over to feasting. Visitors flock to restaurants like the Purple Rain where you dine in an open air setting bordered by flowering Xacantha trees, cascading Skye roses, and pink and magenta netherlips. Candles flicker at the tables, while Galaina's two moons, Hans and Fritz, lookdown from the sky overhead. (The moons are named for two characters in an ancient Galainan legend, a pair of mythic warriors who, having offended their Duke, were condemned to hang in the skies for eternity and, in the poetic words of the legend, "twist slowly, slowly in the wind.") Purple-clad waiters and waitresses dart from table to table bearing course after course. To accompany the meal there are bottles of a superb Galaina wine, possibly the Gray David Merlot, a light, fruity, aromatic vintage from vineyards on the slopes of the southern hills. For dessert there are dishes of gualomelon, that exquisite fruit, available only on Galaina and impossible to export, which must be eaten within hours of being picked. After dinner, you lean back in your chair, sipping a Stellar Stinger and listening to the night finches, those marvelous birds imported from Terra in the first years of colonization who have adapted to this benevolent climate even more successfully than homo sapiens. But now the night life beckons. You rise from the table and set off for "the strip," a two-block stretch of lower Marienstrasse near the Van Mandelbrod statue of Venus, where over a dozen gaudy theaters crowd together offering the most spectacular stage shows in the inhabited universe. On any given night you can see the greatest stars of the entertainment world: Sunny Ho, Vincent Sihanouk, Marian Mkamba, Joan Ramanujian, or the fantastic animal acts of Cliff and Claf, or great holoplay stars like Shou-Pin Grant and Anastasio Karpov, or the extraordinary dance companies of Toshiro Tanaka and Lester Guiterrez. The theaters are always packed, yet there are no bad seats, for the dancers swirl around you, you can see the sweat glistening on their slim, athletic bodies, you feel swallowed up by the brilliant spectacle. The lights, the music, the gorgeous costumes, the continuously changing scene, all combine to astonish and dazzle your imagination. In one show a girl appears wearing a cape. As she slowly climbs a staircase, the cape unfolds behind her like a train revealing ever more fantastic and colorful designs, until the cape has spread out like a vast iridescent curtain in front of the stage. Suddenly the lighting shifts, the cape becomes transparent and through its patterns of colors you can see dancers bearing sparklers in their hands, advancing and leaping and filling the stage with flashing bursts of light. Later, the stage grows dark, a magenta glow appears, a girl is seen dancing, dressed only in her long, black, flowing hair that reaches below her waist, shrouding and revealing her like a filmy costume as she dances, while a soft voice is heard singing of love and the long sultry nights. Love, Love, Love The songs and dances return again and again to the theme of love, for love is a major industry on Galaina. Brochures and handouts from the major houses of prostitution are available in hotels and restaurants (though not in the casinos, whose managers do not wish to encourage competing evening pastimes). You can choose your night's companion from holotapes and then make reservations from your hotel. All establishments are state-licensed; customers must take a preliminary blood test-since the plagues of the '80s, the authorities are understandably cautious about infection. I half expected to discover local opposition to the widespread prostitution, but there is surprisingly little. The Church's position is somewhat ambivalent. Official doctrine condemns "harlotry" as a sin. On the other hand, one of the favorite myths of the Church is the tale of Dunyazade, the beautiful young maiden who sacrificed her virtue to the tyrant Sennacherib in order to save her people from extermination. The tyrant was so taken by her charms that he not only spared her people but gave them a place of honor among his subjects, while Dunyazade was made chief of all his concubines. Even today, then a young woman joins the profession, she calls it "making the sacrifice." Over the years government regulations and enlightened public attitudes have greatly improved the status and condition of prostitutes, and today the profession is considered an honorable if somewhat exceptional calling. A woman may spend five or ten years in the profession, then retire, marry and become a staid pillar of the community. Her working years can be extremely lucrative. Although taxes, expenses, overhead, union dues, etc., may run as high as 40% of income, prices are so high that a woman at the top of her profession may gross as much as Cb 200,000 a year, enough to live very well indeed and still put by a considerable fortune for later life. There is a certain amount of male prostitution as well, though not on the same scale. It is considered an acceptable sideline for struggling young holoplay actors and has been the source of much malicious gossip and "casting couch" stories. Prostitutes have a deep and abiding resentment for those whom they call "dabblers and swallows." The former include certain thrill-seeking aristocratic ladies (some of whom, it is whispered, belong to the set surrounding Lady Elsa, Lord Anatol's madcap wife) who prowl the night spots in search of sexual liaisons. "These chicks tell people they're professionals," one prostitute complained. "Most of the time they don't know the first thing about the business. They're just amateurs out looking for kicks. I mean, sex ought to be a straightforward business proposition, right? But this bunch, they don't give a damn about business or about the customers or anyone, they're just in it for themselves. So naturally the customers are disappointed and who ends up getting a bad name out of it? We do, that's who." If prostitutes disapprove of the dabblers, they reserve their strongest condemnation for the swallows, female intelligence agents who seek sexual contact with targeted individuals in order to gain information. "Now that's just plain wrong," my informant exclaimed. "It's immoral, it's like a priest telling secrets from confession." This reaction seems less extreme when considered in the light of certain landmark decisions of the Galainan High Court which guarantee that private conversations between a prostitute and her client cannot be divulged in a court of law. As Chief Justice Schultheiss put it (Westheimer v. Lolita, 2933) "pillow talk is privileged." The swallows often masquerade as native prostitutes, their superiors providing them with quite authentic-looking documentation. The casual encounter or "shipboard romance" approach is still occasionally used, although with many targets it is considered implausible and likely to provoke suspicion. How to Make a Stellar Stinger You can get a Stellar Stinger in any bar on Galaina, but you can't get one anywhere else. The key ingredient is the Sideria orange (not a true orange but a sweet, citrusy fruit) which only grows on Galaina. Attempts have been made to ship it, but it doesn't travel well. Another ingredient is Zocco, a local root-based alcohol product, very neat, very dry, extremely potent. I got this recipe from Rene, the bartender at the Excelsior. Crush a catabala leaf in the bottom of a chilled glass. Then fill the glass with crushed ice. Take: 2 ounces of Zocco the juice from one Sideria orange a dash of triple sec Combine. Pour over the crushed ice. Handle with care. Information, Please The intelligence agencies have good reason to use such agents, for Galaina is a potential treasure trove of information. Here in one place are concentrated the wealthy and well-connected, the sons and wives of political and military leaders, the higher officials of the major powers, all of whom, in the pervasive atmosphere of hedonism, are likely to be less than completely on guard. The agencies' efforts do not stop with the swallows. It is reported that agents of both the Draconis Combine and the Federated Suns have attempted to infiltrate Griba the Zork's fortune-telling operation. Their efforts so far have not met with success, but they will almost certainly continue, for the information the Zork possesses about his clients (which he reputedly stores in a high security vault that can withstand anything short of a thermonuclear blast) is a mouthwatering prize for any spy. All the great powers play the espionage game. The planet's ComStar "A" station, one of the largest in the entire network, has an unusually large complement of officials, most of whom are known to be ROM agents. Their efforts are devoted mostly to attempting to decipher the heavily-encrypted messages that stream in from the distant branches of Galaina's financial network. These messages contain a wealth of news, rumors and gossip from thousands of highly placed and well-bribed sources throughout the Inner Sphere, but ROM would be delighted to see just the financial data-the bank records of the most powerful Dukes, the major companies, the suppliers of the armies and mercenary units. To this end ROM agents are known to have made heroic efforts to corrupt bank officials and palace bureaucrats. Pleasure Planet Galaina Introduction A Room at the Inn A Day in the Country Lord Anatol, Duke of Galaina Tomorrow and Tomorrow and Tomorrow by Lee B. Barton Back to BattleTechnology 3 Table of Contents Back to BattleTechnology List of Issues Back to MagWeb Magazine List © Copyright 1988 by Pacific Rim Publishing. This article appears in MagWeb (Magazine Web) on the Internet World Wide Web. Other military history articles and gaming articles are available at http://www.magweb.com