[Galactic Comedy 03] • Enfer

Once Faligor was an ideal world, a showplace planet with a model government, productive farms and factories, and a thriving tourist industry. Within the short span of twenty years it became the most notorious charnel house in the galaxy. The first Man to make a treaty with the native inhabitants of Faligor was Susan Beddoes. When she arrived, the golden-furred Disanko, three hundred and first Sitate of the Enkoti, ruled his tribe from a great city. Disanko saw an opportunity to gain greater wealth and power over neighboring tribes. Susan Beddoes saw an opportunity for the Department of Cartography to show the Human Galaxy the right way to open a new world. But the natives of Faligor are more sophisticated than Beddoes thought. They take to interstellar culture as if they'd been born to it. Within five years Faligor is one of the richest, most technologically advanced planets in the sector. The new Sitate, Disanko's son Tantram (known as "Emperor Bobby" by the humans on the planet), is ready to establish a planetary democracy and apply for membership in the Republic. Then it all starts to collapse. Susan Beddoes watches in horror as the new planetary government proves itself corrupt and opportunistic. But there is worse to come: after a few years, the President is overthrown in a military coup by a brutal general named Gama Labu. As off-planet interests flee Labu's astonishingly violent efforts to consolidate power for himself and his tribe, Susan Beddoes stands her ground, the last representative of the Republic, and witness to Faligor's bloody descent into a barbarism far worse than she had found there only twenty years before.