What's Past_ The Future Begins (Book 2) - Michael Schuster [15]
However, some people didn’t like the way the visitors to Risa behaved. They claimed that the Risian lifestyle was the cause of complacency, vanity, and extreme hedonism. In response, they had founded the New Essentialists Movement and tried to show people the error of their ways. Nobody would have complained if they had done it by holding rallies and handing out pamphlets, but no, they had had to switch off the entire weather control grid and the tectonic stress regulators. Who in their right mind believed that was more likely to convince people to change their lifestyle?
Anyway, that was long past. The Risian Ministry for Planetary Affairs had realized that they needed a better weather grid, one that couldn’t easily be controlled by a small handheld device, so they had installed a new one and hoped it would solve all their problems.
It had not. In fact, it had created more of them. Some satellites stopped working for hours or even days at a time, and their memory cores had to be completely wiped before they could be reactivated. Visitors to Risa had to cope with incredibly localized gales and thunderstorms—if they stayed. Most of them left when they discovered that the planet no longer was the paradise they’d been promised.
As it so happened, a Starfleet admiral was spending his vacation in the Temtibi Lagoon Resort. He had contacted the local facilitator and told her that he knew just the person to solve all their tech-related problems. A number of calls later, Montgomery Scott was packing for his journey to the oldest pleasure planet in the Federation, ready to prove once more that he was the original miracle worker.
Admiral William J. Ross had been right. He had known that Scotty would enjoy his time there, even after he’d repaired the weather grid. The government had even offered to make him honorary citizen of the Risian Hedony, but he’d declined politely, telling them—and himself—that he’d be content if they let him stay on the planet just a little bit longer.
Luckily, a reason to stay had cropped up—there were other problems that needed his attention. The management of the El Dorado Holiday Resort contacted him about some computer trouble they had and asked him, since he was on Risa already, if he could help them out.
He hadn’t said no. After all, the resort had a very nice bar.
Another deep breath, another look across the lagoon, taking in all the sights that Hanotis Harbor offered. He made a point of coming up here every now and then; seeing fantastic sights like this was part of the reason he’d gone into space in the first place, and he wouldn’t let retirement stop him from doing it.
Even from here, he could still see the big horga’hn s that symbolized the attitude toward sexuality held by the planet’s three billion Risians (not to mention more than a billion visitors that came every year). The majority of them had a rather…open approach to intimate pleasures. Not that he minded, of course. Not at all.
Ah…Belunis. He was sorry that she’d left so soon after he met her. She was a lovely woman, and he wouldn’t have minded spending more time with her. Being a living Starfleet legend could get pretty lonely after a few years, not to mention boring. So it had come as a pleasant surprise that there was at least one woman who didn’t know who he was or what he’d done. She liked him nonetheless. He had believed that she even loved him, but he would never find out now, would he?
A sigh escaped his lips before he could stop himself. Melancholy and self-pity wouldn’t help him. That Hermat he’d met on Argelius II had told him as much, and it was still true.
Right. Abruptly, he turned around and headed back for the lift.
Scotty’s shift began at eight in the evening