You've Always Had a Hidden Agenda, but people were busy with other things

On Theophyllis' timeline, it was one of the main landmarks, a pivotal event. It was a little while after coming back from The Beach, a few years or so, and some time before he had moved up here to the top of Dome 27. He had been called to Dome 1 to sit in council. The notice had even come on paper, probably printed right there in Dome 1, and brought by a messenger with a uniform. Paper and message was his preferred form of communication at the time. Today, such a message would probably come through the pneumatic tube that left off in his living room. He was excited, if a little trepidatious. No one ever had established how or why people were called to sit in council, although the procedure was quite simple: the subcouncil on council placement reviewed people's recent work and scholarship, and then brought them to council, and placed them on subcouncils.

He assumed, at the time, that it had something to do with his scholarship on the Pistol Nebula, or that he had just gotten back from The Beach. His 200th birthday had just happened a few years before (for him, for Icechalk, he was a couple of decades older thanks to that trip to The Beach). He was still writing books in those days, and sending them off to the observatory domes and to the spaceport domes, trying to get the scientists and explorers to read his thesis about what might have happened in the Magellanic Clouds. And that was what he was going to bring to Council. When it was time to go, he got his best writing together (still on paper), and took the hubward train, he was in such a hurry. No time to spiral through the domes! And so he came to Dome 1, not for the first time. When it was time for the new members of council to introduce themselves, he realized that the people ahead of him had cursory introductions. Nevertheless, he launched into the reading of his thesis.

He was, of course, not trying to hit anyone over the head. And at the age of 200, he was not aiming to be a wild rebel. But he did want to share what he was working on. And so he started talking about his researches, and he realized after a while that it was turning into quite the filibuster. He eventually wrapped up, and the other council members, new and old, even asked him a few questions. And then he went on. And then he was assigned to his subcouncils. For his year on the council, he was shifted around, going to different parts of Dome 1. Most of it was just discussion, freewheeling discussions about different topics, sometimes without anyone even taking notes. The conversation took on a life of its own, and it would continue long after the council had switched out, for years, decades, centuries. And then, every once in a while, shifting to a subcouncil working on something incredibly specific and technical and with a needed solution. Hubward Railway from Dome 14 to Dome 1 was becoming inoperative because of Frost Heaves. Blueprints and schematics and engineering and plans, tea consumed until late at night. Then, crisis solved, and off to an open, endless conversation. Most of the people were friendly, although many of them were permanent council people, from Dome 1, or at least from one of the inner domes. Him being from Dome 27 didn't come up much. He tried to see what subcouncil discussed the lost contact with the Milky Way and the Magellanic Clouds, and while he found some that were discussing it in an off-hand way, by the end of the year, he realized no one was really looking at it too closely.

His year there wasn't terrible. It wasn't good. He did find himself losing sight of bigger things, compared to when he came in. And then, finally, his term was over. He politely said goodbye, promised to keep in touch, and then headed back to Dome 27. On the spiral railway this time. It had been close to the equinox, he remembered, and he had gone through day and night as he spiraled back out to his own Dome. He came home, and even after a pleasant enough year, he suddenly felt like he was his 200 years. It was shortly after that that he moved to the top of Dome 27, and switched to communicating via pneumatic tubes.