Starship Titanic

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.

'This whole project is a financial catastrophe! Didn't you realise that? We're on the brink of a major fiscal meltdown!' Brobostigon was trying to get to the door, but Leovinus, with surprising agility, was back on his feet and cutting off the exit.

'So what are you trying to do?' But even as he asked the question, Leovinus suddenly saw - with total clarity - the whole plot 'The insurance!' he gasped. 'You were going to scuttle my priceless ship and claim the insurance!'

'Grow up!' growled Brobostigon. 'This is the real world...' But he never got any further. The aged genius had hurled himself upon him, hitting the manager squarely on the chin with a remarkably mundane upper-cut. Brobostigon lurched backwards, caught his foot on one of Titania's wings, and fell into the Vac-U-Bus tray.

The moment he did, the Vac-U-Bus robot was activated. It leant forward extending its brass snout: 'Always a pleasure to dispose of your rubbish!' it announced, and sucked Brobostigon up. There was an unpleasant crunching sound and a slight plop! and the project manager was gone!

The Vac-U-Bus system was a rather controversial part of the ship's design. In an age when telepresence was all the rage, the idea of transmitting objects around the ship quite physically and literally, by means of vacuum tubes, seemed old-fashioned and retrogressive. But Leovinus had insisted. It was yet another little irony that he cherished. He finally carried the day by using the safety argument. Physical transport was always less risky than teleportation or any pseudo-travel arrangement. What's more, his Vac-U-Bus robots would be able to categorize and sort everything put into their tray - so if you failed to tell them where you wanted your object sending, they would do it automatically.

The system, however, was not designed for human beings, and the Vac-U-Bus was supposed to be programmed to reject any living human who might fall into the tray. Clearly this was yet another area where compromises had been made. Leovinus knew, with a queasy tingle, that Brobostigon had become the victim of his own plot and would now be a condensed cube of detritus on its way to the ship's bilge.

And now the full impact of the situation began to come home to the Great Man. Here he was - the Greatest Genius the Galaxy Had Ever Known - the day before the launch of his ultimate masterpiece, with an unfinished ship, a financial crisis (of which he had known nothing) and a dead project manager caught in the act of sabotage. This was not going to look good in the official biography.

Meanwhile - where was Scraliontis? Crossa Brobostigon had said her husband had come to the ship to meet the accountant.

Leovinus knelt beside the disfigured Titania, and lovingly slipped the silver shard into the nerve centre at the base of her skull. His hand shook as he realized the other artery was still missing; in fact - now he came to look - most of her brain was missing - how had he not noticed that before? Titania's brain! So delicate it was! The slightest shock or scratch could permanently injure it.

With a ship of this sophistication you couldn't afford to have the nerve centre non-functional. There had been recent stories about a new phenomenon: a kind of high-tech metal fatigue that could afflict certain artifacts which had too high a density of logic systems built into them: SMEF. Spontaneous Massive Existence Failure. Leovinus knew it was theoretically possible if unlikely. He also knew that practically every molecule on the Starship Titanic was in some way part of the ship's logic system. If the thing were launched in its present state - who knew what catastrophe might follow?

There was no time to lose. He must retrieve all Titania's missing parts and reassemble them before the unthinkable could happen.