We followed a waiter down a hall with a red carpet beneath our feet and brass chandeliers with what looked candles sitting on the ends of the gleaming contraptions. When I enhanced my hearing and sense of smell though, I heard the subtle hiss of gas from each “candle”, and I smelled a more chemical scent than a burning wick and evaporating wax. There was likely a little canister of fuel secreted away within each of the many candles in the chandeliers.

The red carpet flowed down marble stairs, leading our group of myself, Livia, Junia, Kato, Caesia, and Antonias to a gaping, cavernous expanse. There was a great deal of height and depth to the hall and none of the patrons were seated on the ground. Each and every table was floating in midair, each group of people attending the restaurant at different heights from others, giving an illusion of privacy in such an open space. In the center of the great room was a white tree with red leaves shaped like hearts. Clockwork hummingbirds with gold and silver feathers and with sapphire eyes sat perched in the white tree’s branches, more hidden against my sight by them nesting in the thick scarlet leaves. The mechanical hummingbirds flitted through the air around the tables and sometimes landing besides plates or on patrons’ outstretched fingers. I saw little Servi boys and girls giggle as the clockwork creatures danced back in front of them, playing with the children as they tried to touch the illusive metal birds.

“So how do we get to our table?” Kato asked. “Are there forcefield stairs?”

The waiter who had brought us from the reception desk and who had accepted our reservation hit buttons and adjusted statuses on her data.

“Your chairs will be here soon, ladies and gentlemen.” She said. Her nametag said her name was Varia.

“Our… chairs will be here soon?” Caesia said, raising a white eyebrow.

I looked at Varia’s datapad and saw a three-dimensional map of the restaurant with open seating indicated in soft blue and taken seating shown with a deep red. The hall was a long cylindrical pillar, hollowed out to accommodate a large number of guests while still maintaining space between all of them.

Hovering chairs flew over to us, occupant-less. The bottoms of them glowed a slight white and they hummed quietely. They lined up in front of us and we took our seats in them. As soon as I sat in mine I felt an invisible locking force pulling me gently against the back of the chair. It still let me lean forward and to the side as if it was a normal chair but if I tried to stretch to the point that I would tumble out, the pulling sensation increased and steadily retracted me back into safety. The fall to the bottom of the hall would not injure me greatly, but I could see how this would be important for lower ranked Servi, children who had not been Awakened to their Path yet, the elderly and the obese.

Caesia’s chair lifted up first, then Antonias’s chair, then Junia’s chair, then Kato’s chair, then Livia’s, then mine. We rocketed up in a spiral, trailing after each other like a game of following the leader. We speedily ascended past most of the other tables and I realized they had gotten us one of the premier tables at the very apex of the hall. Our seats formed up around the very highest table. Livia had had her eyes closed during the rising and she was very carefully not looking downwards.

I looked down and kept myself from whistling out how far below the bottom floor of the hall was. I did not want to make Livia feel worse about her fear of heights. Guess I would not be bringing her with me to try out the zero gravity room to try out beam tag or racing or simply walking on the walls. On the other hand, perhaps the thrill and control of self-mastery over flight would give her the nerve to enjoy soaring through such a big room. I wanted to get more of the others to go at least and preferably I would not have to leave anyone else out.

I looked up and saw that twenty-five feet above us hung diamonds the size of a human head. They glowed with a warm golden-white light though there did not appear to be any source of the light within it, no tiny bulb inside or in the connecting part that held the diamonds to the silver chains holding the light sources to the ceiling. Perhaps the effect was maintained by running electricity through the crystal or heating it or the massive gems being vibrated at a certain frequency. The ceiling beyond the hanging silver chains was a white and yellow mural of Akhilles at Troia, dragging Hektor’s defeated corpse behind him as Akhilles drove his chariot around the city’s walls.

Looking downwards back to the table we sat at and the faces of my friends, I noticed there was a mechanical construction sitting as a centerpiece on the white tablecloth. It was a grouping of blooming flowers, seemingly growing out of the table, and was made of metal. That metal was copper that had partially been oxidized into an emerald shaded patina so that it had swirls and splotches of alternating color between reddish copper and the green tarnish. The petals of the flower had been painstakingly created so that the majority of the petal leaves were green but that copper traceries formed visible vein patterns.

The mechanical flowers moved and hidden speakers in the buds sang a soft, wordless song that was easy to ignore if you didn’t want to listen but still pleasing enough to follow if you paid attention to it. A gold and silver clockwork hummingbird flitted over to me and hovered with its blurring wings in front of one of the flowers. It dipped its head in as if it was searching for nectar like a real hummingbird made of flesh and feather. I saw a drop of amber left behind in the flower in the clockwork’s wake. I dipped my pinky finger in it and brought it to my tongue. I made a face. It was like honey but far sweeter, to the point of being sickly sweet.

Waiters came on hoverboots and went and brought back our food, but I felt… distant. Withdrawn. The others talked with each other and tried to pull me in as well, but I gave few words in return and eventually they stopped trying.

Six weeks of waiting was going to wear on me. I wanted to go to the Scholarium already, not spend time worrying about it.

…

…

…

Six weeks later

My friends and I stood at a viewport, looking out at the planet of Iulius, the capital world of the Apollo system, home to the Governor of the system, as well as our destination of the Scholarium. I said looking out rather looking down at Iulius, because to say such a thing seemed arrogant, like proclaiming yourself above it. The capital dominated all space and all of the system. The learned men of my homeworld might teach children that Lavinius orbited around the star of Apollo, but in all the ways that really mattered to the Dominium, politically, economically, militarily, the system revolved around Iulius. Gravity and physics could be bullied into submission by our technologies, but wealth and power devoured all.

The capital world was surrounded by a ring of Jovium-titanium alloy, like a metal snake swallowing its own tail around the atmosphere, the materials for it worth far more than my homeworld and all the people living on it. The ring’s purpose was simple. There was no space unclaimed for spaceports on the surface of the planet, Iulius was dominated by silver, gleaming skyscrapers that stretched into the upper atmosphere and plunged deep into earth like a nail driven into a crucified man’s hand to accommodate the sheer for the myriad humans infesting the world. There were thirty-three billion people who lived on Iulius. The ring let transportation stop and unload passengers to be teleported down to Iulius.

Interrupting the oppressive, urban sprawl was massive circles of green that dotted the planet’s surface. They were gargantuan, absurd. They had to be millions of acres devoted to what appeared to be… grass. Cut grass, not wild meadows. I could not imagine the constant expense of maintaining it.

“Are those public parks?” I asked the group, pointing at them.

Caesia laughed, though not unkindly. “That’s private property. Each one of the Great Iulian Houses owns each of them."

Once again, I couldn’t imagine the cost of irrigating and caring for that much grass. To have a lawn visible from space when the rest of the population was packed in like rats was grotesque. Most of the population had probably never seen the sky or breathed fresh air. There was no air traffic over those plots of land, the view of the sky kept pristine and unmarred by the inconvenience of people traveling over it. Great streams of aircraft flew along the edges of the circle when they might have simply gone straight over. I imagined that anyone brave or stupid enough to try to fly over the property might get shot down for their hubris.

“That’s our competition.” Antonias said. “The children of families that have either held property from before Iulius was colonized or razed countless cities’ worth of industrial growth and living quarters just so they can brag about having a lawn as big as their rivals.”