Priests, sure, there'd be a class of sycophants, bastards who'd sell out to the extraterrestrials for glory and profit ... yeah, your gentry sound like another type of sell-out, traitors to their race and their world ... describe those squires' costumes again, will you?... Holy cats, eighteenth century to a T! Not a thread changed, from the sound of it! And a lower class, you call it the ruck, which is downtrodden and lives in what might as well be hell....
Yep, it sure sounds like hell and ashes. The globes; then, as is natural to a conquered country, the top dogs, priests in your case, who run things but are run by the globes; then the privileged gentry—I'll have a look at those books of yours in a minute, honey—who pay some kind of tax, in money or sweat or produce or something, for being what they are; then the ruck (I know the word, son, you've just enlarged its meaning) who have been serfs and peasants and vassals and thralls and churls and hoi polloi and slaves since the Egyptians crawled out of the Nile. The great unwashed, the people. Let 'em eat cake. I'm sorry, Mink, go on.
Your gentry sound about as lousy a pack of hellions as the eighteenth century squires! Too bad you don't know about tobacco, they could carry snuffboxes and really act the part....
My God! Even the fox hunts—with people hunted. Anyone but miners? Open days, eh? Ho-oly....
Glad to know you, Rack. Don't know as I'd care to have you on the other side, you look like Goliath. So you just saw the light when the gods started to die? You are lucky you saw it, big man; brother against brother is the nastiest form of war, especially if mankind's fighting an alien power....
Your rebels sound familiar, Mink. They had 'em about like you in Ireland, a hundred or so years ago—I mean before I went bye-bye.... Always romantic, unbelievable, unfindable, foxes with fangs....
I wonder what your globes wanted? Power, sure, if they're that humanoid in concept, but it must have been more. Maybe their own planet blew up. Maybe they ran out of something. Tell me, do you have to give them anything? Any metal, say?
Diamonds? Are those small hard chunks of—yes, I guess diamond still means what it did. By gravy, I'll bet I know! They were just starting to discover the terrific potential of energy of the diamond when I went to sleep in 2084. I wonder how long ago that was? Anyway, I'll wager these globes of yours run their damned saucers—buttons—on diamond energy. Maybe their planet ran out of diamonds. By god! what a yarn!
You'll have your hands full, but maybe I can help. There's a way to bring those saucers down out of the sky in a hurry.... They won't give up easily. They obviously have atomic bombs, and the lush intoxication of power won't be a cinch to give up, not for anything that sounds as egotistic as the globes....
Dolfya? We called it Philadelphia. Kamden, Camden, yeah.... Woods lions, wow! They must be mutants from zoo or circus lions that escaped during the atom wars; or maybe someone brought 'em to the U.S. The Tartarians had tame lions, I remember.