The first time Sal Broome heard a Rigellian play the gnostic flute, he was ruined for all other music. His mind shattered into myriad tiny mirrored fragments, his soul melted down into a puddle of honeyed whey, and his gut suddenly hosted a whirling maelstrom that made the vortex that Arthur Gordon Pym encountered look like a bathtub drain.
The encounter happened in the infamous Rigellian ghetto, at a hidden club with no signage, no online presence, no sidewalk touts. You got there only by knowing someone who had been there before and would take you. How the first human ever arrived inside, no one could say.
Away from home on business, Broome was in the city that hosted—uneasily, with decided lack of charity and pride—the world’s singular encampment of Rigellians. His job was servicing p
