Star Well Read online

  “Levi,” said Godwin, “do you see Josiah?”

  The hulk looked vacantly around until he saw the operator of the Flambeau table. Then he nodded, stretched a massive arm and pointed. “Uh-huh. He’s there.”

  “Levi, escort him to my office and keep him there until I come. He needs to be talked to.”

  Levi made some hurr-hurr-hurr noises like a cold engine. Villiers assumed that it was a form of laughter.

  Levi said, “Can I have some fun with him?”

  “A little, Levi, but don’t exhaust him.”

  “What does that mean?”

  “Don’t tire him.”

  “Oh,” said Levi, and made his noise again. As he lumbered away, Godwin played a card. Villiers, however, watched the moron over Godwin’s shoulder.

  “In many ways he is a perfect instrument,” Godwin said without turning to watch. “What do you think of him?”

  “I must admit that I admire neither his style nor his wit.”

  Godwin smiled. “Games of chance don’t tempt him. They’re too complicated. He enjoys a simpler line of pleasure. And, Mr. Villiers, he is personally devoted to me.”

  “He does seem to be displaying a childish sort of de-fight in his work,” said Vilfiers, playing a card, but keeping an eye on the commotion at the tables.

  “Oh, that, too. His lack of general understanding is at times an asset, and at other times not. But he does fathom the principles of pain and reward.”

  There was a loud crash, all the more noticeable because the other sounds in the casino had ceased.

  “I believe he does. He seems to be earning an extra portion of raw meat.”

  Godwin played a card and then turned to look. “I’m afraid not. Poor Josiah is more bruised than I intended. However, it may do Josiah good. He seems to need to learn a sense of restraint.”

  Vilfiers laid down a crevasse.

  Godwin said, “You make your own points rather strongly.”

  Adams appeared then and said, “Good heavens, Mr. Godwin, what is going on?”

  “Internal readjustments,” said Villiers. “Were you winning, Mr. Adams?”

  “Not hardly. I should have taken your advice. My luck continued off by a hair. It was damned frustrating.” Villiers laid down his last two cards. “Well, our game is over here. Permit me now to stand your host.”

  “Why, thank you.”

  Godwin slapped his hand down. “It seems that I owe you money, sir.”

  “You may deduct it from my bill,” Villiers said. “Mr. Godwin, will you join us?”

  “Too kind,” Godwin said, “but I’m afraid that business will keep me here.” He salaamed to Villiers. “You are a dangerous man to play against.”

  Villiers laughed. “As Adams said earlier, he used to play the game with his sisters.”

  “Mr. Villiers, if you are not a dangerous man, you had best learn to be one. Call that well meant advice.”

  2

  Of all the known objects in the Flammarion Rift, Star Well is the largest. Its position has been adjusted. Where once it followed its own whims, now its location is relatively central and it can be reached with reasonable ease from all the populated stars on the borders of the rift.

  From time to time, Star Well’s position must necessarily be readjusted, since a cosmic anchor has yet to be invented and the peripatetic stars relieve unknown urges by moving in nine directions at the same time. (It may be ten: the theories of V. H. Rainbird [1293-1447] concerning the movement of the metagalaxy through the universal amnion, unfortunately left incomplete at the time of his death at the hands of Nominalist critics who objected to his experiments on the grounds that the universe might not survive them, are presently being reconstructed by a study group. Word is awaited. )

  On any objective scale, Star Well is a speck of dust and if it didn’t constantly scream, the rest of the universe might one day wake to find itself isolated and alone. Nonetheless, it is large enough to fill its function.

  From the outside, Star Well is unprepossessing. It is an irregularly shaped piece of rock some thirty miles long and, at its widest point, some ten miles across. The only exterior signs of man are the skeletal beacons and the metal lace landing webs. When a ship is docked, a few men emerge on the surface and there is a brief froth of activity, and then the beacons and webs are left to their own company again. Once in a while, when the lag between ships is great and the guests are bored, a party is taken hiking on the surface, but the last time this happened there was a quarrel and a death and a Navy ship came to investigate the circumstances. Ever since, the extra space suits have been locked in a basement room and used even more rarely than before.

  Inside Star Well are, of course, the well-lit and comfortably furnished public sections where persons in passage eat, drink, smoke, sleep, gamble and are entertained. There are the quarters of those who serve them. There are any number of corridors and tunnels, warehouses, attics and basements. There are two landing ports. Nonetheless, inside a hunk of junk the size of Star Well, there are nearly two thousand cubic miles, and most of this dead rock remains dead rock, though there are rumors that after the advent of Shirabi there were changes. The story goes that if you are absolutely silent and touch a bare wall at exactly the right time, you can feel the secret work being done down in the bowels of the rock. Secret tunnels. Secret rooms. Shirabi has long been gone from Star Well, but the stories continue—which goes to show the impression that Shirabi made on people. A certain sort of man simply looks as though he would dig secret holes, have leg irons in his basement, and leave greasy moisture on your palm when you shook his hand. (But go ahead anyway—touch the rock, barely breathe, listen.... There.)

  There may actually be something to the secrecy story. In Shirabi’s own time, a passenger somehow introduced himself into the tunnels and became lost. It was some time before his absence was noted and then a search was mounted. He was found at last, dead, apparently from exhaustion, shock and starvation, and possibly frustration, as well. Now that sounds unlikely, but again the Navy investigated and that one passed inspection, too.

  In any case, there is no doubt that if you took all those sitting rooms, bedrooms, bathrooms, salons, dining rooms, casinos, kitchens, halls, reception rooms, offices, living quarters, hydroponics rooms, tunnels, corridors, warehouses, landing ports, (secret rooms) and (secret tunnels), and laid them in a row, end to end . . . well, as I say, they’d stretch out for quite a distance.

  There were two ships on their way to Star Well. One Was the Orion, the ship from Morian whose adherence to schedule had been confirmed by poor Josiah. (Don’t think too hardly of Josiah, by the way. Running a Flambeau table can be deadly dull. Adding a touch of wit and imagination to the mechanical bore of randomness, doing more with the possibilities of control than merely taking an occasional well-funded idiot for one or two big bets—both of these should have been applauded as creative gestures. I don’t blame Levi. He was merely an instrument. But Godwin—sometimes it’s hard to sympathize with someone so lacking in the appreciation of artistic invention.) The ship from Morian was scheduled to lay over for eight hours, to exchange passengers and cargo, to leave mail, and then to continue on to Luvashe, the planet from which Villiers had just come. The Orion was on course and in firm hands, except for a third officer who sat like a lump in a corner of the chart room, befuddledly chewing on a cud of Fibrin. But this was his usual condition, overlooked because his uncle was Baron of Bolaire. It was said that as long as he could be stacked in a corner and forgotten, he would continue to be paid and promoted, and in fact he did become senior captain of the line, still sitting in the corner and chewing to the end.

  The Bolaire Line emphasized economy in all things at the cost of comfort. The main passenger cabin, included as a grudging afterthought by old Bolaire, measured twelve feet by fifteen. This was the largest passenger area on the ship. A double cabin offered a choice to its occupants: either both could lie in bed, one above the other, or the beds could be folded
away and both could sit if they minded where they put their feet. There were seventeen passengers aboard ship, among them a covey of young girls being shepherded to Miss McBurney’s Justly Famous Seminary and Finishing School on Nashua (sic) to leam to be fashionable ladies, but only two passengers enjoyed the comforts of the main cabin. The bear-leader and her five charges stayed in their own quarters, the fifth girl thoroughly unhappy with the situation and her roommate. The reason for the removal was that Mrs. Bogue, the escort, found the conversation in the main cabin not to her taste, and if she wasn’t interested, she was sure that the girls would not be.

  The topic of conversation was theology, and the girls, for their own private and inscrutable reasons, chiefest of which was Mrs. Bogue’s non-interest—therefore, absence-professed themselves only too eager to stay and leam of these strange and interesting matters.

  This was no use, however. Mrs. Bogue knew what she was being paid for—to deliver five girls to a school on Nashua. This she meant to do as efficiently and at as little trouble to herself as was possible. Consequently, she accused the girls of Massive Indiscipline, proof of which was their slowness to jump when she said “Frog,” and decided the most effective method of instilling discipline was general confinement to quarters. The old ploys are the best ones.

  The girls probably wouldn’t have enjoyed the theology anyway. None of the other passengers did. Men stayed in their bunks reading factsheets for the third time about the shortage of body parts currently causing tremors in hospital stock issues on Morian. I mean . . . dull. But still preferable.

  The captain even said to his first officer, “It’s lucky old Bolaire isn’t going to have a look at the cabin this trip. ‘Under-utilized,’ and next trip there would be half the space.”

  “Don’t anticipate, sir. He may be waiting at Star Well.”

  “There’s no need to worry, son. He never inspects a ship that his relative there is crewing on. It may be trust, but I think he hasn’t got the stomach for it.”

  “I heard that,” said the third officer.

  And he did, but he forgot it before morning, and things you don’t remember never happened. The third officer heard lots of things, all of which he noted down carefully and promptly forgot. Everybody and everything was always new to him. He was introduced to the captain for the first time every morning. When he finally retired, he was carted off his last ship and placed by his family fireside where his old, old mother read Mrs. Waldo Wintergood’s animal stories to him every night.

  The two theologians were an interesting pair.

  One was a Trog named Torve, a light brown, woolly, six foot toad. He had a white belly and the faintest of black stripes on his back. His personality was lumpish. His motives were inscrutable.

  And mark this: the Trogs, since their defeat by men some two hundred years before, had been confined by law to two solar systems. To travel anywhere outside these two solar systems, special papers were necessary. They were requested at every planet, at every way station, registered and returned. Fifty-three Trogs had such papers. Torve was not one of them. Keep your eye on him and watch what happens.

  The other was a fraudulent old fart named Augustus Srb. Short, fat, intelligent, even magnificent, he wore his mantle as a priest of the Revived Church of Mithra with a verve, a flair, that was not matched by his defense of churchly doctrine.

  Mithra was worshiped six centuries before the founding of Rome, and has had his up and downs ever since. He was Son of the Sun, and born of a virgin on the 25th of December. But then, so was everybody else. He died for the sins of all mankind and was reborn at the spring equinox. That’s standard, too, as are the rest of the clutch: baptism, communion, and the promise of eternal life. Perhaps the one best point of the religion is this: the violet is sacred to Mithra, and consequently the cultivation of flowerbeds is encouraged.

  Mithraism spent more than fifteen hundred years underground or as a minor element in other religions before its modem revival in the schisms of schisms and the loss of belief that ruined Christianity for a thousand years.

  Mithraism is a good religion, if not a great religion. It certainly deserved better than Augustus Srb saw fit to give it in the face of Torve’s earnestly presented case for some primitive brand of mumbo jumbo:

  “See you, then, the wholeness so far?”

  “Wholeness? Oh, yes, yes. I am attending you with interest. Continue, if you will.”

  “Wholeness is everything that exists. Outside is nothingness. But nothingness is ripe, ready to nourishmentalize fruit, and existence is reborn. See you?” Torve asked earnestly.

  “Oh, yes.” Srb nodded.

  “Wholeness is born and grows, moving through nothingness and feeding on nothingness.”

  “Eventualistically, nothingness can no longer feed wholeness. Movement slows, then stops. Is like great heaviness in stomach after large meal. When movement stops, all collapses. In eye blink, wholeness shrinks to size of seed and all is stasis. Only in great by-and-by is nothingness ready to nourishmentalize again. Has happened seventeen times since wholeness invented itself. Do you see?”

  “No. I must confess that I don’t. Perhaps we had better work on nothingness for a while.”

  “Oh, nothingness is simple. Is nothing.”

  Why did Srb continue to sit quietly listening to this? I suppose because he was given an equal chance to explicate Mithraism—but then he didn’t take proper advantage of that. Perhaps because it was a way of passing the time. And then, how would it have looked for him to step out on a round of shoptalk? Appearances.

  The other ship bound for Star Well was not publicly scheduled to stop there, and only a few people knew of its imminent arrival. It was a blackness against the blackness. It announced its presence in no way. It moved swiftly and certainly, and nobody aboard was fuzzed on Fibrin.

  When Villiers rose that morning, he dressed himself and cursed happily at the difficulties of inducing a drapeau to hang correctly behind him without other hands to help. In addition to being decorative, and impressing people, servants had a certain usefulness in delicate and chancy matters like these. Villiers owned an odd and secret gaiety and he enjoyed this exercise of his capacity for wishing bad cess that he might the better spend the rest of the day being his normal good-humored, but reserved, self.

  He put unfortunate wrinkles in three drapeaus and discarded them all. On the fourth try he finally achieved the drape he had been aiming for, and might have had sooner if he hadn’t been enjoying himself so much.

  His toilet completed, he considered himself in the mirror. He nodded at last and then went forth from his quarters in search of breakfast.

  He chose to be served in the Grand Hall. Villiers followed the old dictum, Live as you dress. He dressed well. A plump, homely, good-natured girl served him an excellent breakfast. She had left the preserve behind and went to fetch it. It was a living green jelly that grew on rotting vegetation on New Frenchman’s Bend, and after an initial unfavorable reaction to it on first encounter, Villiers had decided that he liked the gloppy stuff and ordered it whenever he could.

  He complimented the girl on the meal when she returned.

  “Why, bless you, sir,” she said. “Thank you.”

  “Tell me,” he said, “do you live here in Star Well permanently?”

  “Oh, no, sir.”

  “You don’t mean you travel here from somewhere else every day?”

  She laughed happily. “It’s a five year contract between m’lord, the Marquis, and Mr. Shirabi. I’ll be going home to Herrendam next year with the others. I’ll be getting married.”

  “Congratulations. I hope you will be very happy. Are Mr. Godwin and Levi also from Herrendam?”

  “Levi Gonigle is, but Mr. Godwin were here before I came. Even before Mr. Shirabi, some say. Levi’s ready to bust the way they’ve taken to him here. Nobody wanted to give him work before and the Contract Master picked him out in particular. He wants to stay on after the contract. He doesn’t wan
t to go home.”

  She excused herself as a new couple entered the room. They sat at a nearby table and the girl hurried to serve them. Villiers turned his attention back to his meal, placing some of the jelly on his meat. It spread itself thin and put feelers down. He gave it time to settle, time to feel comfortable before he began to eat it.

  While he waited, he amused himself by falling in love with the beautiful girl who had just sat down. Gorgeous, indeed. He craned his head a little to see her better. Yes. A delightful girl.

  The girl was expensively dressed. She was a blonde whom pink flattered. Her hair was short and worn in tight little curls that played tweaky-fingers with each other over her forehead and around her delicate ears.

  Her nose was unpresuming. Altogether a sweet and lovely thing.

  Her companion, a man somewhat older than Villiers, was also well-dressed—but more by good sense than by good taste. His figure was mediocre and he had contented himself with a cut of cloth that concealed. In short, he looked well enough if anyone ever bothered to look his way.

  As Villiers finished his meal, and as the two were themselves served, the man spoke animatedly and with good humor. The girl, however, sat solemn throughout. For the most part, she kept her eyes on her food. She did look up at Villiers once, which pleased him.

  However, when his meal was done, Villiers went his own way with only the briefest sense of regret, quite prepared to indulge himself in appreciation of the next attractive young lady he should meet, and equally ready to admire this one if he should see her again.

  ' Now he considered various inexpensive entertainments and decided that a look at Star Well’s shops might be in order. He found the appropriate level with no great difficulty, stepped off the lift, and began to walk the Promenade. He gestured politely to the people he met and passed the shops one by one, until at last he came to a shop that purported to sell the curious and ancient. He stopped there, and went inside.