re rediscovering James Branch Cabell. Old Genji
Gartner, the scholarly and half-piratical space-rover whose ship had
been the first to enter the Trisystem, had been devoted to the
romantic writers of the Pre-Atomic Era. He had named all the planets
of the Alpha System from the books of Cabell, and those of Beta from
Spenser's _Faerie Queene_, and those of Gamma from Rabelais. Of
course, the camp village at his first landing site on this one had
been called Storisende.

Thirty years later, Genji Gartner had died there, after seeing
Storisende grow to a metropolis and Poictesme become a Member Republic
in the Terran Federation. The other planets were uninhabitable except
in airtight dome cities, but they were rich in minerals. Companies had
been formed to exploit them. No food could be produced on any of them
except by carniculture and hydroponic farming, and it had been cheaper
to produce it naturally on Poictesme. So Poictesme had concentrated on
agriculture and had prospered. At least, for about a century.

Other colonial planets were developing their own industries; the
manufactured goods the Gartner Trisystem produced could no longer find
a profitable market. The mines and factories on Jurgen and Koshchei,
on Britomart and Calidore, on Panurge and the moons of Pantagruel
closed, and the factory workers went away. On Poictesme, the offices
emptied, the farms contracted, forests reclaimed fields, and the wild
game came back.

Coming toward the ship out of the east, now, was a vast desert of
crumbling concrete--landing fields and parade grounds, empty barracks
and toppling sheds, airship docks, stripped gun emplacements and
missile-launching sites. These were more recent, and dated from
Poictesme's second hectic prosperity, when the Gartner Trisystem had
been the advance base for the Third Fleet-Army Force, during the
System States War.

It had lasted twelve years. Millions of troops were stationed on or
routed through Poictesme. The mines and factories reopened for war
production. The Federation spent trillions on trillions of sols, piled
up mountains of supplies and equipment, left the face of the world
cluttered with installations. Then, without warning, the System States
Alliance collapsed, the rebellion ended, and the scourge of peace fell
on Poictesme.

The Federation armies departed. They took the clothes they stood in,
their personal weapons, and a few souvenirs. Everything else was
abandoned. Even the mo