As a young woman who adored jewels and jewelry, I always marveled at how Glyttir 7 had some of the most amazing deposits of jewels in the galaxy, but very few jewel thieves.
When I became a fleet science officer I learned that the Glyttirati had their own native security guards for their gems, and that for more than a millennium before humanity made contact with the Glyttirati, it was known by the ancient space-going civilizations that the penalty for stealing Glyttirati jewels was death.
When I became a captain, I realized that there was a world above the humble world I had grown up and through beginning with my humble beginnings as a child on Spica 5 … a world in which rules were bent if money and influence were sufficient, and in which, at the very top, people thought themselves immune to the regular prohibitions that bound others. As a captain, I had reached the lower edge of that world.
It was still ten years before humanity would make contact with the Glyttirati and know of their jewels from the source, but I as a jewel collector certainly knew of those glorious items, and dreamed someday of having one. But, that was merely a dream. There is no salaried work in the galaxy that would suffice for resources. I am a woman … but I would fear the non-Glyttirati man who would woo me with such a gift, for I would have to be sure that I could be safe feeling owned by this man, and one never knows what a man will do when he feels he may own a woman.
I am highly intelligent … there was always the possibility of a scheme … but that possibility I refused to entertain on the edge of a world in which all means were used to obtain the dreams of avarice.
This is one of the reasons I have lived to see 60 years of a career, and 25 years of marriage to a man who has given me that which is priceless to me: his love, built on the same humble, faith-filled beginnings that I have also had.
It is not me, in my days as a semi-retired full fleet admiral at the top of the military world in the galaxy, who has faced this lovely an instant death.
When you actually buy jewels from the Glyttirati, they remove the ten percent of their jewels that are infested by jewel-eating borers that, outside the sub-zero temperatures of their home in the mines, rapidly grow to their full size and burst out, filling the wearers with shrapnel and waste laden with beryllium and hydrogen cyanide into the air around the wearer.
Shortly after my 18th wedding anniversary with my husband, Marcus Aurelius Kirk Jr., he presented me with what he had spent 18 years paying off: the Gem of the Galaxies collection.
And, see the art and M.A. Kirk's story about that here!
My collection was crowned there; to me, because he gave it to me, it is priceless.
But, my husband being who he is, he noted that someone had given his lover a Glyttirati gem that same week.
“I'm not quite there yet in revenue in my business,” he said to me, “but if you want one, Vlarian, you'll have it by our 25th anniversary.”
Mark cannot stand to see any other man give his woman anything he cannot give me … until I provide perspective.
“I know him. He can't afford it either, which means he had it stolen. That also means he and she will be dead in under a week for stunting like this.”
“What? I thought that was just a legend!”
“Wait a week and see, Mark.”
Three days later, the death of the couple hit the news, and Mark shook his head.
“It's a good thing you are content as a woman, much more so than I am as a man,” he said.
“I have you, Mark,” I said. “What else do I need of treasure in this galaxy? Someday, you're gonna believe me.”
But later, I considered the matter … had I not chosen to remain on the path of contentment and humility that my parents and elders had raised me in, I might have succumbed to such temptations as were common around me by the time I came to truly high society. If I had, a young, scrappy commercial captain would never have appealed to me … and, it was entirely possible that a senseless death of lawless excess would have been mine, because in a galaxy so large and frankly not quite suited for humans and human-humanoid hybrids, it was very easy to find such deaths.
By humble means we see a full span of days in this galaxy, and only by those means.
These are four palette choices of the same jewel-like pure fractal made in Apophysis 2.09 ... the shrapnel shards came with the fractal, and gave me the idea for the story!