Excerpt:

1.2

I’m told that something called world-building is a key part of this enterprise. That people like yourselves will find this story more believable – as if to convince the likes of you were the point of stories! I spit on your vital organs! – if the background to our petty struggles is vividly painted, cohesive, if it seems like a real place. My problem with this is that I am scarcely convinced, myself, that the court of His Velvet-Gloved-and-Steel-Handed Overlord Wilson Ten is, in any sense, real. I can in no way suspend my disbelief. My trousers, all of them, reek of ammonia. Small children laugh at me in the street. Larger children laugh at me in the street, louder and more harshly than their smaller brethren. Adults, in fact, laugh at me, also in the street. I am in general a person who is, frequently, laughed at by other persons.

With the above kept firmly in mind, I invite you to entertain in some part of the fleshy mass of your brains the following facts about the planet upon which we lay our scene: Rama VI is the approximate size of Pluto, and would have the approximate conditions of Pluto, save for a terraforming effort in the days of Wilson The First, which is to say, obviously, nine generations back. Foolish we, we kept the year of the Earth calendar but not the period. There is another employee of His Glorious and Hosanna’d self whose job it is simply to work out, immediately on demand, what year any given Earth year is in Rama time, and vice versa. If he in unable to work out the correct date within a second, his feet are stabbed with a small, sharp, and silvered implement the approximate size of a ballpoint pen. Another two servants are retained to bring this off: one of them is the keeper of the small, sharp, and silvered implement, and one has the responsibility of the stabbing of the timekeeper’s feet with the small, sharp, and silvered implement. Of the aforementioned terraforming effort I will honestly say I have no idea, as do most, quite how it worked, save that there was something to do with ozone involved, the addition or subtraction of it, one of the two.