Do Unto Others

A hapless nephew named Hapland “Happy” Graves lives under the shadow of his formidable Aunt Mattie, president of the Daughters of Terra and patron of a sprawling interplanetary garden. Their family wealth funds lavish space‑yacht expeditions to distant worlds, where Mattie’s club corrects “reprehensible conditions” while cultivating exotic flora across hundreds of acres. The narrator’s sardonic humor and his aunt’s penchant for clichés set a lively, off‑kilter tone as we glimpse a universe where the Golden Rule is taken seriously by the philosophers of Capella IV.

Behind the humor, Happy grapples with a lingering sense of inadequacy, examined by a psychiatrist who suggests his resentment toward his aunt’s projects masks deeper family pressures. As he shuttles between the glittering corridors of power and the quiet rows of alien blossoms, the story probes questions of duty, ethics, and the struggle to carve an identity when the world seems pre‑arranged for you.