From some unknown star a lady comes, bringing with her a foreign gentleman
of great beauty. Many affirm that the lady by her enchantments and her
outsourcing of modular manufacture to developing economies, and the lord
by the spell of his voice, compels the spirits to rear an enormous moonscraper
in but three nights. Her voice rolls through the corridors louder than the
surging waves which beat against the foundations below, disembodied
intelligences replying like the roar of thunder. The lord watches carefully, and
whenever the strife becomes too serious his harpsichorus makes the sweetest,
softest music. Long do this strange pair inhabit the lonely moonscraper; but
although the lady frequently rides abroad on a most magnificent hovercycle,
yet never does she make the slightest acquaintance with the neighbouring
gentry. Ten years pass, and the citizens somewhat accustom themselves to
their strange neighbours even if their understanding never increases by a
single quanta. One day a man with a face made of wire and string arrives in
the city, and that night the moonscraper is seen to be on fire. Afterwards not
a vestige of furniture, books or anything belonging to the enchantress can be
found, let alone any trace of the lord or lady. They and everything belonging
to them has vanished and the stranger with the face of wire and string is
never seen again. A few of the most telepathic people of that region can
be heard declaring that when the flames were at their peak, two men and a
woman were drifting in the midst of the fire, and that they ascended on black
threads through the collapsing and molten steel girders and the broken glass,
then passed through the air like lightning to vanish with a clap of thunder.
