The Journalist turned to see that Leovinus had fallen to his knees. He suddenly looked like the old man that he was. The swagger and gallantry that usually marked his public appearances seemed to have been sucked out of him – leaving him like a crumpled empty bag.
‘It can’t be true…’ he was mumbling into his beard. ‘Even Brobostigon… even Scraliontis couldn’t lie so… I mean… Only this morning they told me it was all…’
‘Good morning, sir, would you like to cut your nasal hair?’ A Doorbot had suddenly activated itself and was apparently trying to usher them into a cement mixer.
Leovinus cracked at last.
‘BASTARDS!’ he screamed at the flapping silk sheets beyond the canopy. ‘BASTARDS!’ he yelled at the unfinished works.
Suddenly a movement behind one of the pillars caught his eye. Taking The Journalist totally by surprise, Leovinus seemed to regain all his vitality in an instant, and had sprinted across the parquet flooring and pounced behind the pillar. A solitary worker, in drab overalls, was crouching down, trying to lose himself in a crevice of the unfinished floor.
‘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.