a space going behemoth. The Paradise would be a smaller, but no less impressive,
spaceship.
The competition they would face ranged from dreadful to very good indeed. Gambling
ships had begun to grow popular thirty years earlier, their popularity coinciding with the
rise of a moral movement on many worlds against the “sin” of gambling. The antibetters,
as they were called, persuaded many planetary and local governments to forbid
gambling-a maneuver which produced an effect directly counter to what the reformers
had wanted. People who’d previously had only a mild interest in gambling suddenly
became obsessed; the lure of the forbidden was as strong as ever in the human spirit.
The antibetters petitioned the Emperor to ban gambling throughout the Empire, but
Stanley Ten would have none of that. He was, by that time, fifteen years into his reign
and well aware of the limits of any power. A government that tried to forbid basic human
drives would quickly lose all sympathy; trying to enforce unenforceable laws only made it
laughable. The need to test one’s luck at games of chance was as old as humanity, and
would never be eradicated. The Emperor chose instead to take no position, and that was
that. The antibetters had no power to persuade him to do anything.
As a result, while gambling was illegal on many planets within the Empire, it was not
illegal in interstellar space, the region between the star systems where only Imperial law
was in effect. Gamblers and entrepreneurs were quick to take advantage of this
loophole, and the concept of the gambling ship-a spaceship traveling between the stars
for the sole purpose of providing its customers with a legal casino-was born.
Most gambling ships catered to citizens of ordinary means and were tawdry affairs-small
vessels with unpainted walls, holding perhaps twenty-five to fifty guests, with meager
living and dining accommodations. The more a customer was willing to pay, the better his
chances of finding something aesthetically pleasing.
The best of the gambling ships to date held upwards of a hundred guests at a level of
comfort equivalent to that of a good hotel, and cost a thousand rubles for a one-week
“cruise.”
No one had built anything more extravagant because there didn’t seem to be a market for
it; the very rich gambler could always afford to go to Vesa to indulge his hobby. In that
self-styled “Playground of the Galaxy” he could find luxury and indulgence to suit the most
decadent tastes.
Pias and Yvette, of course, did not care whether there was a long-term market for such
a gambling ship or not; they were not in this as a profit-making venture. For the few
months they needed their operation to work, they could create a market. People would
try anything at first if it was hard to get and promised them something original. All they’d
have to do was build a mystique, and the rest would take care of itself.
They would have preferred to build the Paradise from scratch, their own design from
beginning to end-but that would have taken six months just by itself, and they couldn’t
spare the time. Instead, they bought an older gambling ship that was still in good
condition, brought it into a spacedock and had it completely refitted, inside and out. They
had work crews operating around the clock to get the job completed as quickly as
possible, and still it took more than a month before the Paradise was ready for its
maiden voyage. Money was no object; the Bavols threw rubles around like confetti. But
when they were done, not even the Paradise’s former skipper would have recognized
her.
From the outside, the Paradise looked like an electronic genius’s Christmas tree
ornament. It was onion-shaped, and its silvery hull was polished so that it reflected like
an enormous funhouse mirror. Few people ever saw the hull itself, though, for virtually the
entire outer surface of the vessel was covered with a myriad of flashing laser light
displays of all colors. So dazzling was its appearance that, in the depths of space, it was
visible to the naked eye almost a million kilometers away. “Any pirate who can’t find
that,” Pias remarked, “is no threat to anybody.”
Inside, too, the Bavols had been equally innovative. The ship had originally been designed
with 107 passenger cabins of reasonably comfortable size, but the SOTE agents
decided that cramped quarters were not the image they wanted to project to their
luxury-minded customers. The amount of space within the ship was obviously limited by
the external hull, but they could create the illusion of vast spaces inside. Forty of the
passenger cabins were ripped out, and the rest expanded proportionately to give a
roomier feel. Many walls were torn out of the public sections of the ship as well. In place
of the three smaller dining rooms, Pias had them all combined into one magnificent
banquet hall. The smaller gambling rooms were also consolidated into larger casinos,
giving even those people who were not gambling at the moment a chance to mingle with
the crowd and sample the vicarious excitement. Pias left only three of the original small
gambling rooms untouched; they would serve to host the special high-stakes card games
that were an invariable feature of such cruises.
In the exact center of the ship, instead of more casino room, Pias had the walls ripped
out to construct a two-story tall entrance hall. In the middle of the floor stood a fountain
in which a larger-than-life sized gold statue of a woman wore a gown of raindrop
filaments; water trickled down the individual wires that composed the gown, producing a
shimmering effect in the ever-changing light that illuminated the fountain. The entire room
served no purpose but to create the appearance of lavish waste space; and since
interstellar vessels were notoriously economical in that regard, it could only create an
impression of extravagance in the customers’ minds.
Yvette had charge of the actual decorating within the ship, and decided on a style she
called “early precious.” All the colors were pastels, leaning heavily on cupid pink. There
were no bare walls anywhere; the interior surfaces of both the public areas and the
passengers’ cabins had all been wallpapered, then covered over with thick velvet curtains
looped over elaborate gold wall sconces. The effect was to soften the hard lines of
naked bulkheads and again preserve the illusion of open spaces.
The chairs and lounges were all of real wood, with pink flocked velvet upholstery; the
gambling tables were all covered with pink tablecloths, and large crystal chandeliers hung
from the ceiling in the casinos. The thick plush carpeting was pure white, with small
touches of red scattered lightly throughout. In the corners of the room, tall potted plants
covered with red, pink and white blossoms reached upward toward the ceiling.
Pias and Yvette had had a long talk about the services the Paradise should provide its
patrons. Elegant casinos and gourmet food were not enough; if the Paradise was to
project the image of a rich people’s playground, there would have to be “special
services” available, too. The morality was not appealing to either of them-both had been
raised in stern, straitlaced cultures-but they knew that their own feelings did not matter in
this issue. Excessive prudery would detract from their vessel’s image and ruin all they
had worked so hard to build. For the sake of the Empire, they would have to put aside
their own personal prejudices.
The task of procuring the more exotic supplies fell to Yvette, since she would be the
official “hostess” of the ship. The liquor was the easiest to obtain; nearly all of it could be
bought through legal channels except for a few specialty items which had to be smuggled
off planets that discouraged the export of native substances. As for the paid companions,
she spent almost two weeks scouting talent, finally selecting ten beautiful young women
and agreeing to pay them on a salary-plus-commission basis; to be on the safe side, she
also hired five handsome men for any of the women guests who felt inclined to use the
ship’s special services. The drugs were the hardest of all to track down, but Yvette had
enough previous experience to ask the right questions in the right places and was able to
pick up a variety of illegal substances to suit the tastes of the very rich and the very
bored.
While Yvette was rounding up her supplies, Pias had the job of attracting customers to
this unique enterprise. During the three years he had spent as “Pias Nav,” a professional
gambler, he had learned the customs of the gambling world from top to bottom. The
richest customers, he knew, did not always frequent the most expensive clubs; certain
spots were more popular than others for the type of clientele he was striving for.
Pias and Yvette had chosen the Paradise’s cruise route very carefully. It would travel the