Cabal pulled Meissner’s little bundle of documents from his inside pocket and quickly sorted through them. Now he thought of it, there had been some sort of ship’s timetable, but he’d assumed it was for general meals, not for anything as specific as a “departure dinner.” But there it was, the captain’s table, dinner dress mandatory. Cabal gritted his teeth very slightly; he couldn’t really worm out of it without drawing attention to himself. He just hoped Meissner had seen fit to pack a dinner jacket.
Cabal let himself into cabin Starboard 6, locked the door behind him, and sat heavily on the bed. He despised acting; the whole conceit of concealing his personality was distasteful in the extreme, and he could hardly wait until these few days were over and behind him. In the meantime, however …
He opened Meissner’s steamer trunk and had a swift sortie around its contents. Minor Meissner’s role in government may have been, but the salary must have been quite impressive. Either that or Meissner’s father was a rich man with plenty of strings to pull for his son. Somehow, the latter seemed more likely. Cabal found no fewer than three dinner jackets, one of which couldn’t possibly be worn except on a bet. He consigned it to the bottom of the trunk and looked at the others; they were both black and acceptable but one was cut less fashionably than the other, and this was the one Cabal hung up in the small wardrobe for wear that evening. Next, he found a pair of trousers and measured them against his leg — yes, he and Gerhard Meissner were of a height. The shirts were also suitable. The underwear, Cabal was profoundly relieved to discover, was brand-new and still in its shop wrappings. With no idea of whether Meissner was still alive, Cabal had few qualms about wearing dead man’s shoes, but he drew the line at dead man’s knickers.
His ensemble for the evening decided, Cabal sat on the bed, picked up the thin bundle of documents from the bedside, and leafed through them to make sure there were no more unpleasant surprises. It seemed fairly quiet after the first evening; mainly optional events until a mandatory dinner the evening before journey’s end, in Katamenia. There was also a pamphlet about what a wonderful ship the
When he was finished and the swan was in residence on the cabin’s small writing desk, he turned off the bedside light and sat in near-darkness. Outside his porthole, there was nothing to see but stars. The earth below lay in night without even the light of a cottage to break it. Cabal watched the world — or, at least, he watched what little he could make of the horizon — go by for a few minutes. He felt deeply, profoundly miserable.
He really,
He perked up slightly; the evening was looking more interesting already.
The dinner was to be preceded by a champagne reception. Cabal allowed himself to be fashionably late in arriving, only to discover that the fashion had become more exaggerated without anybody telling him. There were few passengers in the aft lounge, only just outnumbering the stewards. He was offered a bumper of champagne in a wide-mouthed glass rather than the flute glasses he thought were becoming the norm. Looking around, he noted that the women were receiving half-filled flutes and realised that in Mirkarvian society it was the male prerogative to get very drunk very quickly. Somehow, he couldn’t see the Temperance League making any great inroads into Mirkarvia anytime soon. He looked dubiously at his glass — it had to have the best part of a quarter of a pint in it — before walking carefully over to one of the aft bay windows that sandwiched the closed and locked gangway hatch. There he sipped slowly, endeavouring to look both aloof and unapproachable.
It seemed to work. Nobody came over to talk to him except a steward, who hovered by every few minutes to be silently appalled that Cabal was still on his first glass, not his third or fourth. In the rest of the slowly filling lounge, the men drank and drank and the women wittered. It was not humanity at its best, and Cabal was not very interested in observing them. Instead, he looked out of the window at the vault of Heaven. The cloud cover had thinned to the point that there were only a few ragged rolls of stratocumulus moving slowly across the sky, glowing blue by the light of a gibbous moon. The stars were clearer and sharper than he remembered ever seeing them — an effect of their altitude, he assumed. Astronomy had exerted a brief fascination for him in his adolescence, and he amused himself by making out the constellations. Ursa Major was, as always, childishly simple to spot, and he felt a small frisson of childish delight in doing so. He traced the line from the top of the Plough to find Polaris and watched it for a long time. He experienced a less pleasant frisson when it started to shift across the sky and he realised that the ship was turning. A few difficult seconds later, however, and it had stopped; the
Despite himself, he felt that he was settling into the role. He’d pulled together everything he knew about agriculture and was moderately sure that he could impress a layman on the subject of scrapie. Especially if the layman was quite paralytically drunk.
Abruptly, he became aware of somebody standing by his right shoulder a mere moment before he smelt perfume. He’d allowed his concentration to slip and, in those few moments when he wasn’t being aloof and unapproachable, he’d been approached.
“Beautiful, aren’t they?” said a young woman’s voice. There was little intonation, and it took Cabal a moment to realise what she was talking about.
“The stars? Yes, I suppose they are. I’m not a poet or a painter, though, so that’s just hearsay.”
The woman made a small noise that was probably a laugh, as if he’d said something witty or profound. In a sense, he had. Then she said, “What do you think of when you look at the stars?”
He considered quickly. He’d heard about this sort of thing. If his understanding was correct, he could well be in the process of being “picked up,” currently at the “small talk” stage. This could be useful. Keeping one — ideally, fairly stupid — woman entertained for the duration of the voyage would go a long way towards avoiding the company of others. Nobody, as the saying goes, wants to be a gooseberry. It might be as well to cultivate her acquaintance.
Looking steadfastly up at the stars and assuming an expression that he had reason to believe was dreamy and romantic, he said, “Once upon a time, it was believed that our futures were, literally, written in the stars. It was called stelliscript. It was said that you should read them west to east if you wanted to know the good things in your future.”
“And north — south for the evil things?” asked his companion, ingenuously.
“Of course, it’s all nonsense; the stars are set in their paths,” said Cabal, wondering if that was a lucky shot on her part. “The future remains unknown to us, no matter how you might try to read it. There was another technique called gyromancy, for example. A practitioner of this piece of flummery would spin around on the spot until he got dizzy and fell over. The manner of the falling-over told the future of whoever had hired the gyromancer. I should think,” he added with an artful chuckle, “that the true reading would invariably be ‘You will soon be gulled by a confidence trickster.’”
There was silence for a few moments, and Cabal wondered if this would be a good time to turn and look as handsome as possible. Before he could commit himself, however, his companion spoke again.
“Gyromancy … I would have thought
It went very quiet in the lounge.
Then somebody laughed, the chatter started up again, and Cabal realised that it had simply been a natural silence in a dozen conversations occurring simultaneously, the merest fluke. Or, at least, nobody had stuck a gun in his back yet, so that was probably the reason. He stopped looking at the stars — his throat tightening and his head
