If King Villelm had been crocked when he arrived, he was now almost paralyzed. He must have had a steel bar sewn into the back of his white uniform jacket because I swear his own spine shouldn’t have held him up. But he was still drinking and swaying back and forth, his head bobbing as though it were loosely attached. He had a crowd of old boys around him and they must have been swapping off-color stories because they gave me varying degrees of get-lost looks when I trundled up and snapped to attention. I was bigger than most of them and must have made a nice blob of color because I caught Villy’s eye and the head slowly slewed around in my direction. One of his octogenarian cronies had met me earlier in the evening and was forced to make the introduction.
“A very great pleasure to meet your majesty,” I droned with a bit of a drunken blur to my voice. Not that the King noticed, but some of the others did and scowled. “I am by way of being a bit of an entomologist myself, if you will pardon the expression, hoping to follow in your royal footsteps. I am keen on this and feel that greater attention should be paid on Freibur, more respect given I should say, and more opportunity taken to utilize the advantageous aspects of the Forminifera, Lepidoptera and all the others. Heraldry, for instance, the flags might utilize the more visual aspects of insects. …”
I babbled on like this for a while, the crowd getting impatient with the unwanted interruption. The King—who wasn’t getting in more than one word in ten—got tired of nodding after a while and his attention began to wander. My voice thickened and blurred and I could see them wondering how to get rid of the drunk. When the first tentative hand reached out for my elbow I played my trump card.
“Because of your majesty’s interest,” I said, fumbling in my pocket, “I carefully kept this specimen, carrying it across countless light years to