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decisions of fate. For him, it was the end of the road. Mortality had got him in the end. You can’t fight the four horsemen. Everyone arrives at his own private apocalypse, someday.

CHAPTER FIVE
    The first ordeal I had to face following my introduction into the Valerian household was breakfast. I didn’t want any, but I didn’t get the option. It was phase one in my adoption program. Valerian wasn’t just hiring me, he was absorbing me into his particular form of life. I think the theory is called “indoctrination by example”. Or something.
    By the time Curman and I got back to the rotting mansion and dumped such of my erstwhile life as was portable it was late—nearly ten. Valerian, a creature of casehardened habit, had eaten at his usual hour. But he stayed to preside.
    The meal, like the house and the fittings and the life Valerian had molded, came out of the past. I guess the aristocrats of finance have always taken advantage of their privilege in separating themselves and their whole personal environment from the turgid present and the ugly world they prey upon. All vultures are graceful flyers.
    So breakfast was a time-machine, a doorway into a myth-world where everything was pretense and pretentiousness. There was an abundance of servants. I saw five. I didn’t know what their official denominations might be, so I thought of them all as waiters. Good servants are so easy to find nowadays—that’s the benefit of labor redeployment planning, the industrial army and the multiple redefinition of work.
    The taste of the food meant nothing to me. It was too foreign. I’d been eating out of plastic packs all my life, and to me, that was real. Eating was a function, not a vice. In times of resource crisis, that’s the way it has to be. But there were no crises inside Valerian’s time machine. It was exempt.
    I ate calmly, maintaining an attitude of careful self-assurance. Valerian watched me. Curman ate with me, as was obviously his habit. He was Valerian’s good right hand, not just a hired gun.
    The table had been originally set for four, and I tried to add that up. Valerian had eaten but the last place remained empty. I figured that if someone in the house was accustomed to eating at any old time instead of sticking to the timetable he or she had to be family. I couldn’t quite work out what family Valerian might have. Franco had been his only child and the old man’s wife had long since given way to the pressure and departed for a kinder existence, or lack of it.
    The coffee was brought in, solemnly and with ceremony. I could hardly conceal my fascination for the way the minutiae of life were so carefully structured.
    â€œDid you enjoy the meal?” asked Valerian, politely. I could see that he was ready for a sarcastic reply.
    â€œHow much did it cost?” I asked, quite blandly.
    â€œDoes it matter?”
    â€œI don’t know,” I countered. “Does it?”
    â€œIn nutritional value, of course,” he said, “the food you’re used to is at an advantage. It gives you what you need without any other considerations being taken into account. But this food has aesthetic qualities which you may care to learn to appreciate.”
    â€œI don’t think I need antique vices,” I said. I didn’t think I could learn them either. I’d been brought up with the idea—carefully nurtured by government propaganda—that food is fuel, that eating is a boring necessity with no more inherent pleasure than elimination or excretion. That’s the attitude which has to be evolved to meet circumstances of supply-limitation. Valerian had lived since the moment of his birth with a different system of values. Neither of us could change, and it was futile for Valerian to be laying down that kind of challenge.
    â€œSome people,” I pointed out, quite inoffensively, “find self-indulgence rather