Fermin, the Arch-Mutant , had risen before dawn and in the garnet-colored light that passed for morning on Ganymede, repaired to the magnificent austerity of his cloister where he received an endless series of reports. He had been reading Seville-Lorca the previous evening, delighting in the incredible pages which had been the great historians' dying contribution to their worlds, and to which he had every intention of adding an ironic anti-climax of his own. He sat in an austere Jadite chair bas