'What the devil are you doing here?' screamed Leovinus.
The worker stood up shiftily and pretended to be adjusting a loose end of wire. 'Just making good,' he said.
'Making GOOD?' yelled Leovinus. 'You call this GOOD?' He threw his arm around the vast unfinished reaches of the Promenade Deck. 'We launch the ship tomorrow and there's months more work to do here!'
'Yeah... It's... bin a bit... slow...' The worker was edging towards the sleek, stainless-steel lift that offered him his only means of escape from this elderly lunatic.
'What were you doing just now?' demanded the elderly lunatic.
'Me? Just now?' replied the worker.
'Yes! I saw you doing something!'
'Me? No, I wouldn't do nothing, I only came to collect my parrot.' The words fell out of his mouth and seemed to freeze in the air, and then like lumps of solid ice they hit Leovinus, one after the other, and he reeled from their impact.
'Parrot?' he said. 'Parrot!!! What parrot?'
'It's... er... just a parrot... you know... couple of wings... that sort... you know...'
'What is a PARROT doing on board my beautiful ship?' demanded the outraged genius.
'Oh! There's the lift!' said the worker, and the next moment he was in it with The Journalist hard on his heels; the door closed and they were both dropping to the lower floors.
'A parrot! On my Starship! What the hell has been going on?' Suddenly the great, the magnificent, the envied Leovinus was hunched up in a corner, weeping over a statue of a winged female.
'Titania!' he was sobbing. 'Titania! What has happened? What shall we do?'
Titania! The genius of Leovinus was nowhere so evident as in this - his last and best-loved creation; Titania was the brains of the ship and her statue appeared everywhere on board - serving as the eyes and ears and communicating essence of the ship's intelligence. But the ship's intelligence was also imbued with emotional life as well. And this is where Leovinus had excelled himself. Titania was not only the brains but also the heart of the ship.
Titania's emotional intelligence had to be carefully crafted to match her task. To run a gigantic ship of such bewildering complexity, to manage its crew, and to look after an enormous complement of passengers of different races, species, mentalities and bodily functions and make them all feel happy, safe and cared for required that Titania be hugely intelligent, kind, wise, caring, serene, warm... and she was all these things.
Like her image - all those giant brooding angels in every room on every deck - Titania's spirit should also have been imbuing the entire ship. Quite clearly, it wasn't.
4
'Antar Brobostigon, please.' Leovinus spat the name into the phone.
'I'm afraid Mr Brobostigon is not here. Would you like to speak to Mrs Brobostigon?'
Leovinus had always felt secretly sorry for the project manager's wife. He could not imagine what it must be like living with such a duplicitous, cold-bloodied egomaniac as Antar Brobostigon - his pity was only slightly modified by the knowledge that Crossa Brobostigon herself was, if anything, marginally more duplicitous, cold-blooded and egoistical. Perhaps the two cancelled each other out and the Brobostigons lived a warm, intimate and caring family life. It was a mystery to the Great Inventor.
'So nice to hear from you, Leo,' said Crossa Brobostigon. Leovinus hated it when people called him that, and he knew she knew he knew she knew it. 'How is the family?'
'I don't have any family, Crossa,' said Leovinus with what he hoped she could hear was strained patience. 'Where is Antar?'
'I think... in fact I'm sure he's at the ship. He went there with Droot a couple of hours ago. Some panic about something or other - you know how those guys worry themselves sick over your ship.'
He knew: about the same way an anaconda does over a goat it's just eaten.
'Is there somewhere they can reach you when they get back?'
Leovinus flicked the phone off. A deep sense of foreboding spread from his thighs, up to his abdomen and across his chest into his heart.
'Brobostigon and Scraliontis on the ship! What the devil are they up to?' The deep sense of foreboding suddenly changed into sharp stabbing pain in his stomach. He felt cold. He felt sick. He had to talk to the only person that could help: Titania.
He made his way down onto the canal level, along the Grand Axial Canal, Second Class, towards the Central Dome. When he reached the vast statue of Titania that dominated the Central Dome and the head of the Central Well, he disappeared into a doorway under one of her wings. A long staircase led up to the vital heart of the ship: the secret chamber of Titania herself.
Leovinus had long enjoyed his reputation as the originator of Ironic Architecture. There was the famous house he designed for Gardis Arbledonter, the Professor of Mathematical Implausibilities at Blerontis University, in which the doors were actually radio sets and entrance and egress was gained via the bath. But here, on the Starship, he believed he had constructed one of his most satisfying constructional ironies: Titania's Secret Chamber, her central intelligence core, was located in the very middle of the great Central Dome; it formed the giant chandelier that hung above the Central Well. The secret heart of the ship was hidden in full view of every passenger and every member of the crew.
The chamber itself hung upside-down, but it had been surrounded by an inverted gravity field so that, when you entered it, it appeared the right way up. The serrated ribs that transversed the Great Dome were, once you had entered the inversion field and submitted to the disorienting process of gravity reversal, in fact long upside-down staircases leading up to the chamber, and the Great Dome itself was a vast concave floor at the bottom of the immense Central Well that stretched up above, topsy-turvy, in an arrangement that bewildered and astonished the first-time visitor.
Leovinus sprinted up the staircase, two steps at a time. His mind focused on one thought: Titania! The love of his old age. The obsession of his ageing heart:
intelligent, kind, wise, caring, serene, warm .. Titania!
He burst into the secret chamber and gasped. His head went into a spin - and, when you have a mind the size of Leovinus's, a spinning head is a formidable sensation. He vomited. He could scarcely bring himself to look at the horror before him and yet he could not take his eyes off it: Titania - his Titania - his darling creation - his joy - had been dismembered. She lay there in the centre of the chamber, her hair and wings spread out in their perfect circle around her. But her beautiful, gracious head was grotesquely disfigured: her mouth had been ripped away, her eyes gouged out, and her nose torn off, leaving a gaping cavity of raw microcircuitry...
But before he could even so much as mutter the word 'Fiends!' Leovinus became aware of someone else in the room. A figure was crouching behind the Vac-U-Bus console.
'Brobostigon!' Leovinus ground the word out like a piece of gristle. 'What in the name of Darkness are you playing at?' Without thinking, Leovinus found himself lunging at the project manager. A small glowing silver shard fell from Brobostigon's grasp and tinkled to the floor. Leovinus glanced down and realised that one of Titania's incredibly delicate cerebral arteries - the central intelligence core of Titania's brain - was lying against his foot. 'You're destroying her!'
Brobostigon pushed Leovinus off him, and the old man staggered back and fell onto the floor across the outspread wings of his beloved creature.
'You're blind, Leovinus! You sit up there in your ivory tower, thinking you're too high-minded and pure to deal with grubby things like business and finance! Well, this whole thing's gone way out of control thanks to you!'
'What d'you mean? What are you talking about?' Leovinus was almost crying.