Star Well

by Alexei Panshin

  She was not overly pretty, not the sort of girl whose looks would hold your eye, not the sort of girl you would pick out in a room to fall in love with. She had sparkle and a lived-in face, both qualities that beautiful women can lack. Basically, however, she was just a girl—and that was perfect for someone with her ambitions.

  She was planning to skip at first opportunity, and Alice Tutuila was—romantically—willing to help her, at least to the extent of making plans. For aid in settling on a jumping-off point, reference works—guidebooks borrowed from behind the theology discussion in the main cabin—were the thing.

  “So what do you have there?” Alice asked.

  “ ‘Star Well: 2 Indg prts, rms 315 (9th-lr), dng var. (Grand Hall 4A), gmg, th & a, a*, d*, p-(A), sh-(A), no ta, sked 3 wk + unsked. Circumstances make this one. Star Well is a tiny rock, but because of location, hub of the Flammarion Rift. Primarily an entrepôt, and secondarily known for its gaining tables. Extremely dull, were afraid, unless you gamble.’ Then there’s an owner-operator list. But that’s all it says.”

  “What does the first part mean? All the abbreviations?”

  “Let me find the table. Oh, yes. There are two landing ports, and 315 rooms, ranging from nine thalers up to one royal a day.”

  “They charge that much for a room? Wow.”

  “That is an awful lot. There’s a variety of dining accommodations and a special note for the Grand Hall. It’s—let me see—excellent and extremely expensive. Gaming, but they said that afterwards. Theater and amusements. Alcohol. Drugs. Perversions—limited and expensive. Shopping—also limited and expensive. No tourist attractions. Three ships a week scheduled, plus unscheduled.”

  “That doesn’t sound very good, Louisa. It sounds kind of small. There’s nowhere to flee to. You can’t run away if you can’t flee anywhere. Hey. Say, how about this: You hide in the closet of a royal-a-day room until the ship departs without you. A gorgeous gentleman discovers you there and is smitten with your charms. He offers on the spot to make you his mistress and carries you away to a life of sin and mad, mad passion. Oh, I love it.” Alice hugged her pillow and closed her eyes.

  “I’m not sure that would work. He might not like me that much. Or maybe he wouldn’t be gorgeous. Anyway, I’ll have to see the place.” She thumbed ahead in the book. “Let me see what the next stop is like. Oh, this is much better.”

  “What’s this about losing money to young Villiers?” Shirabi asked. He was wearing his gloves and disposable suit, and he was up to his elbow in chemical glop designed to make the plants he worked among grow up big, and straight, and strong, and healthy. After all too many years of nervousness and ill-health, the result of living under constant pressure in small rooms and dealing only with symbols and symbols of symbols, he had adopted a hobby designed to put him back in touch.

  “Plant a seed, watch it grow, baby it along—it’s a real satisfaction,” he liked to say.

  He didn’t care particularly what he grew, though he knew each plant as a friend. But flowers and food were irrelevancies. He just liked to see plants and know he had a hand in raising them. He liked to discover what food a plant liked best and supply it. He liked the feeling of fatherhood.

  “I’ve won money, Shirabi,” said Godwin.

  “I expect that. I don’t expect the other. I don’t pay you to lose money.”

  “You don’t pay me at all!” Godwin said sharply. “Let’s not forget that.”

  “No. But as long as you’re here, you might as well do something for your keep. And I don’t include losing my money. You know I’m saving every minim. You know ways to avoid losing.”

  “My money, too,” Godwin said. He was sitting gingerly on a stool he had covered first, and was regarding his surroundings with distaste.

  There was an essential difference between Shirabi and Godwin: If they were both drinking cider and eating summer sausage, which I hope you will agree they both might do, and each dropped his piece of sausage between the cushions of his chair, both would fish for it among the trash. But they would assume different attitudes for their search, and they would search for different reasons.

  Shirabi turned around, straightening. “How did you lose?”

  “Why don’t you get rid of these weeds? I hate them.”

  “How did you lose?”

  “Or hold these meetings of yours elsewhere.”

  “How did you lose?”

  "He knew what I was doing and called me on it. No challenge. Just let me know he knew what I was doing.

  He knows Josiah’s Flambeau table is rigged, too. I had to stop, and he won after that.”

  Shirabi laughed. “No challenge? His type isn’t like that. No, you must have ducked, my fine gentleman.”

  “Don’t say thatl I tell you that he didn’t press the point.”

  “Oh, didn’t he? Your reputation overwhelm him, did it?”

  “I can handle him if I need to. I told him so, in a roundabout fashion.”

  “I’m sure he was impressed.”

  Shirabi was startled as Godwin came abruptly off the stool and across the room. Before he could drop the formula mixing bottle he was holding and bring his hands up, Godwin had him by the throat and was bending him painfully back over the hard edge of the tank. A green frond batted him lightly across the nose.

  Tightly, exactly, word by word, Godwin said, “He did not challenge me.”

  With equal tightness, the result not of emotion, but of a constricted throat, Shirabi said, “Look at your suit.”

  With sudden apprehension, Godwin loosed the darker man and stepped back, looking down at himself. He could feel the wetness even before he saw it. His entire front was darkening rapidly with the formula poured on it by Shirabi. His lip began to tremble and his face to darken with anger.

  The instant he was released, Shirabi ducked down, went under the tank and came up on the other side. With one clean motion he dipped his mixing bucket into the chemical sludge and brought it up at the ready.

  “You ruined my suit!”

  “That I did. I’m not one of your six a year, or whatever the count is. If I killed you, I wouldn’t even bother to remember it. Gentleman!"

  Godwin made a movement toward the front of his suit.

  “Don’t bother,” Shirabi said. “You might kill me, but you’d get a bucket of chemicals in the face, and I guarantee you’d swallow half of it if I had to sit on your head and pour it down your throat.”

  After the briefest of hesitations, Godwin looked down at his suit again and the moment was over. That sort of fight needs momentum to turn deadly, and the momentum was gone.

  “If I ever got into a fight with you, I’d kill you,” Godwin said.

  However, Godwin was not certain of this. Though Shirabi might not share his pretensions and might even resent them, he was no less dangerous for his common clothes.

  Shirabi simply said, “Maybe. Maybe not.”

  Godwin had gone to considerable trouble to leave all commonness behind him, and it had never seemed fair that Shirabi should have more power here than a man of greater polish. Their dislike was mutual. Being ihe men they were, one day one might decide to kill the other. This time, however, Godwin simply nodded sharply and took his soiled suit away to be changed before it fell apart.

  After Godwin had gone, Shirabi puttered around his plants thoughtfully. Once he took off his left glove and scratched his ear. Finally, he went to the service in the corner. The signal showed contact when the call was completed, but Godwin left his end of the conversation dark. An inconvenient moment, perhaps.

  “Gentleman, I’ve been thinking and I’m starting to wonder about this Mr. Villiers of ours. If he didn’t challenge you, he isn’t the man I was taking him for. And I found him wandering down here this morning. Accidently lost, he said.”

  “In the basements?”

  “Yes. He’s altogether too sharp for my taste. And he told me he was leaving tomorrow for Luvashe. That’s where he came from. Why wo
uld he just travel out here and then turn around? Makes it sound like he was coming here for something. I only know one thing that could be.”

  “That’s your problem, not mine,” Godwin said. “From now on, I’m just keeping track of the split and my own job.”

  “What good will the split or your job be if we’re caught with a basement full of thumbs, and pick-up a day away?”

  “It’s still your problem. You boor of a peasant! I should do you favors?”

  “Zvegintzov.”

  Godwin thought that over for a few moments, and then said, “All right. You said he was leaving for Lu-vashe tomorrow. If Villiers did suspect something, he wouldn’t be able to do much about it on his way to Luvashe, now would he?”

  “If he leaves tomorrow, he’s clear, and it was all an accident. I’ll stop worrying. But have him watched every minute. And search his baggage.”

  The object of this speculation set out for dinner in the Grand Hall that evening. Just outside the plush purple entrance, he encountered Norman Adams. Adams was no longer in his sneaking clothes. He had apparently found his way home again and there changed into equally somber, but rather more socially acceptable apparel. This was just as well. It was unlikely that he could have entered the Grand Hall in his black skin-tights and not drawn rather more attention to himself than a gentleman of taste could like.

  “Hello, Mr. Adams,” Villiers said.

  “Servant, sir.”

  “Will you join me for dinner?”

  “I’m sorry, no. I dropped a royal last night, and the Grand Hall is rather above my touch now.” There was an attempt on Adams’ part to ape his usual buoyancy, but beneath it there was a tone of sullenness. It was much like a small boy who has been taught that good manners should mask unpleasant emotion, but who still wants you to know that his unpleasant emotions are being masked by good manners. The result, if the boy isn’t so small that his natural feelings overwhelm him (“Well, I tried to be nice.”), is a peculiar sort of well-bred sulkiness. It’s a tense and difficult effect to achieve properly, and mark it to Adams’ credit that he was successful.

  “Well, stand as my guest, then.”

  “No, sir. I think I’ve accepted too much hospitality from you already.”

  “But I insist.”

  “I have already eaten. If you will excuse me?” Adams turned and abruptly moved away.

  Villiers raised his eyebrows and looked after Adams, and then instead of lowering his eyebrows and turning in to dinner, he raised them even higher. Yes, it was definitely the sound of crying behind him.

  He turned and saw no one immediately, and then realized that it was in a purple alcove set in the purple wall that the tears were being shed. He investigated and found that it was the delightful young miss of his breakfast love affair. Her crying swelled in volume as he came into sight, at the same time the young lady apparently was redoubling her efforts to staunch the flow. There was an odd sort of relationship there that Villiers was not prepared to attempt to explain. Tonight the girl’s hair was red and shoulder-length. It clashed horribly with her setting, but Villiers felt that it might distress the girl to tell her so.

  Instead, he said, “Excuse me, young lady, but I could not help overhearing. Is there any way I may be of service to you?”

  “Oh, sir,” she said, “no one can help me now. I am beyond all help.” She languished delicately and with so much grace that any objective observer must needs approve, applaud and appreciate.

  “Well, perhaps not beyond all help,” Villiers said. “Have you eaten dinner yet?”

  “Oh, no,” she said and dabbed at her eyes. “I do not feel up to partaking of food. I am far too upset.”

  “Ah, well,” said Villiers. “I had thought you might join me for dinner here in the Grand Hall. Quiet, good food, pleasant surroundings and a sympathetic ear—in sum they might improve the look of the world no end.”

  She looked shyly up at him through beautiful lashes that might have been her own, and probably were not, but that in any case suited her admirably. “Perhaps they might,” she said. “I think I might take a light dinner after all.”

  Villiers escorted her within. When they were taken to their table, he saw her seated on the outside. It is difficult to say it, but the time has come to admit of a deficiency in Villiers. Taken separately, the shade of her hair, the shade of her lips, her choice of dress color, and the surroundings were all unexceptionable. In concert, they made a constant series of minor and major discords that bruised his ear. The only word for a man like that is inconstant. Though he still found her extremely beautiful, his deliberate seating of her on the outside rather than against an immediate background indicates that his devotion was less than total. One cannot like that.

  His presence must have been a calming influence, however. When the meal was brought, ordered while she was still occupied in rounding off her bout of tears with neatness, she found her appetite returned and fell to heartily. In sum, she ate rather more than Villiers did. It is possible that she was blessed with a metabolism that required vast amounts of fuel and easily burned all that she provided. There are such systems, and we who eat two light meals in a day and watch every bit of it turn to unsightly fat can only envy her.

  Her story, presented between and during mouthfuls, was enough to shake the steadiest heart. At times, it so affected her that against her inclinations she was brought to tears again, a helpless slave of the poignancy of her own sad experience.

  Her name was Maybelle Lafferty, and she was an heiress. That was the crux: being beautiful, innocent and an heiress. It had made her the target of fortune-hunters since she was little more than the veriest child.

  Her father was Ragnar Jacob Horatio Lafferty, primary manufacturer of fardels in the Empire, and the wealthiest of the wealthy on Livermore. She was the child of his old age.

  “Daddy—dear, sweet, kind, lovable Daddy. He protected me and I never knew it. A man would come to call and I would receive him and find him altogether wonderful. Daddy would run him off and I thought Daddy didn’t really love me, that he just wanted to make me unhappy, that he never wanted me to be married. I didn’t understand.” (This was one of the points where tears presented themselves and required coaxing to go away again. )

  Resenting her father’s interference, she saw in him an enemy to be thwarted. Then Henry Maurice had been introduced to her at a social evening at the home of a dear schoolmate. He was a mature man, a gentleman, a man of culture and taste unlike anyone she had ever known. Fearing her father’s displeasure, they had met each other secretly, caught in the overwhelming swell of their mutual passion. Her father, discovering the meetings, had forbidden her ever again to see her Henry. At that point, Henry had proposed that they elope. She had packed her bags with the aid of her maid and set out with Henry into the unknown.

  “Is he the gentleman with whom you breakfasted this morning?”

  “Yes, that’s him. Doesn’t he look evil and repulsive?”

  Villiers reserved comment.

  Henry Maurice, it seemed, had presumed upon her innocence, and only now had she learned the truth. He was every bit as bad as her father had said. He was using her, coldly and calculatedly, as a steppingstone to her father’s fortune.

  She elaborately produced a delicately pink handkerchief and blew her nose. It seemed to be a method of forestalling tears.

  Plaintively, she said, “But Henry doesn’t know Daddy.

  Daddy will never give him a minim, no matter what. Daddy loves me and he would pay to have me back, but Henry will never persuade Daddy to give him anything.”

  “That is unfortunate.”

  “Oh, but it’s much worse. Henry is a cruel, brutal man. When he discovers his evil plotting is of no use, what will become of me? I’m afraid that Henry will abandon me, friendless and without a penny, in some gutter a hundred light-years from home and anyone I know. From my daddy. Or worse. If only I had someone to depend upon.”

  Villiers opened his m
outh to reply, but before he could say a word, the girl gave a startled “Oh.” At the corner of their table was the man who had enjoyed Miss Lafferty’s breakfast company. He was dark and saturnine, at close range much more like the monster she claimed him to be than the god who had first laid claim to her affections. But then, not really so much like a monster, either. Dark, pudgy, glum, conservative, and angry.

  “Servant, sir,” he said shortly to Villiers and immediately ignored him in favor of the girl.

  Villiers half-rose. “Equally yours,” he said.

  “Miss Lafferty, I desire a word with you in private,” Henry Maurice said, and seized her firmly by the wrist.

  “Oh, no, Henry.”

  “If you could postpone the conversation for a few moments, we could finish our sweet,” Villiers said. “It would be a shame to leave half of it untouched.”

  Henry Maurice shot the least of looks at him, and then said, “Come. Come now. I insist. Excuse us, please.”

  The beautiful Miss Lafferty’s resistance failed her and she left her chair murmuring, “Yes, Henry,” her eyes downcast. But behind Henry’s back she lifted her lashes and gave Villiers a penetrating glance that set a capstone in place.

  “Servant,” said Henry Maurice, and the two took their leave. He still held her by the wrist. They went then from the room, she hanging back the least bit, but not so obviously as to create open scandal or provide cause for talk. It was apparent that the young lady was well-schooled.

  Villiers looked after them until their egression was complete and then turned his full attention back to his dessert.

  The door to Villiers’ room slid silently open in its usual well-bred fashion. The doors to less expensive rooms were altogether a coarser lot, not nearly so prettily behaved or confidently quiet. This was not altogether the accident of chance it might appear to be, nor yet the acknowledgment of that generally recognized more sensitive hearing for which the rich are noted. It was, in fact, token of the larger number of people who had need to enter here without being observed.