Her glance went to the Denton. “All right,” she said. “I won’t. It’s because of dive hallucinations, I suppose?”
“Thank you very much, Miss Drellgannoth. Yes, it is because of the misapprehensions which may be caused by dive hallucinations. May I be of service to you at this time? Perhaps you would like me to demonstrate the various interesting uses of your personal ComWeb Cabinet?”
Trigger’s eyes shifted to the far end of the cabin. A rather large, very elegant piece of furniture stood there. Its function hadn’t been immediately obvious, but she had heard of ComWeb Service Cabinets.
She thanked the stewardess but declined the offer. The lady switched off, apparently a trifle distressed at not having discovered anything Birna Drellgannoth’s personal stewardess might do for Birna right now.
Trigger went curiously over to the cabinet. It opened at her touch and she sat down before it, glancing over its panels. A remarkable number of uses were indicated, which might make it confusing to the average Hub citizen. But she had been trained in communications, and the service cabinet was as simple as any gadget in its class could get.
She punched in the ship’s location diagram. The Dawn City was slightly more than an hour out of Ceyce Port, but it hadn’t yet cleared the subspace nets which created interlocking and impenetrable fields of energy about the Maccadon System. A ship couldn’t dive in such an area without risking immediate destruction; but the nets were painstakingly maintained insurance against a day when subspace warfare might again explode through the Hub.
Trigger glanced over the diagrammed route ahead. Evalee . . . Garth. A tiny green spark in the far remoteness of space beyond them represented Manon’s sun.
Eleven days or so. With the money to afford a rest cubicle, the time could be cut to a subjective three or four hours.
But it would have been foolish anyway to sleep through the one trip on a Hub luxury liner she was ever likely to take in her life.
She set the cabinet to a review of the Dawn City’s passenger facilities, and was informed that everything would remain at the disposal of waking passengers throughout all dives. She glanced over bars, fashion shows, dining and gaming rooms. The Cascade Plunge, from the looks of it, would have been something for Mihul . . . “Our Large Staff of Traveler’s Companions”—just what she needed. The Solido Auditorium. ” . . . and the Inferno—our Sensations Unlimited Hall.” A dulcet voice informed her regretfully that Federation Law did not permit the transmission of full SU effects to individual cabins. It did, however, permit a few sample glimpses. Trigger took her glimpses, sniffed austerely, switched back to the fashions.
There had been a neat little black suit on display there. While she didn’t intend to start roaming about the ship until it dived and the majority of her fellow travelers were immersed in their rest cubicles, she probably still would be somewhat conspicuous in her Automatic Sales dress on a boat like the Dawn City. That little black suit hadn’t looked at all expensive—
“Twelve hundred forty-two Federation credits?” she repeated evenly a minute later. “I see!”
Came to roughly eight hundred fifty Maccadon crowns, was what she saw.
“May we model it in your suite, madam?” the store manager inquired.
“No, thanks,” Trigger told her. “Just looking them over a bit.” She switched off, frowned absently at a panel labeled “Your Selection of Personalized Illusion Arrangements,” shook her head, snapped the cabinet shut and stood up. It looked like she had a choice between being conspicuous and staying in her cabin and playing around with things like the creation of illusion scenes.
And she was really a little old for that kind of entertainment.
She opened the door to the narrow passageway outside the cabin and glanced tentatively along it. It was very quiet here. One of the reasons this was the cheapest cabin they’d had available presumably was that it lay outside of the main passenger areas. To the right the corridor opened on a larger hall which ran past a few hundred yards of storerooms before it came to a stairway. At the head of the stairway, one came out eventually on one of the passenger levels. To the left the corridor ended at the door of what seemed to be the only other cabin in this section.
Trigger looked back toward the other cabin.
“Oh,” she said. “Well . . . hello.”
The other cabin door stood open. A rather odd-looking little person sat in a low armchair immediately inside it. She had lifted a thin, green-sleeved arm in a greeting or beckoning gesture as Trigger turned.
She repeated the gesture now. “Come here, girl!” she called amiably in a quavery old-woman voice.
Well, it couldn’t do any harm. Trigger put on her polite smile and walked down the hall toward the open door. A quite tiny old woman it was, with a head either shaved or naturally bald, dressed in a kind of dark-green pajamas. Long glassy earrings of the same color pulled down the lobes of her small ears. The oddness of the face was due mainly to the fact that she wore a great deal of make-up, and that the make-up was a matching green.
She twisted her head to the left as Trigger came up, and chirped something. Another woman appeared behind the door, almost a duplicate of the first, except that this one had gone all out for pink. Tiny things. They both beamed up at her.
Trigger beamed back. She stopped just outside the door.
“Greetings,” said the pink one.
“Greetings,” Trigger replied, wondering what world they came from. The style wasn’t exactly like anything she’d seen before.
“We,” the green lady informed her with a not unkindly touch of condescension, “are with the Askab of Elfkund.”
“Oh!” said Trigger in the tone of one who is impressed. Elfkund hadn’t rung any bells.
“And with whom are you, girl?” the pink one inquired.
“Well,” Trigger said, “I’m not actually with anybody.”
The smiles faded abruptly. They glanced at each other, then looked back at Trigger. Rather severely, it seemed.
“Did you mean,” the green one asked carefully, “that you are not a retainer?”
Trigger nodded. “I’m from Maccadon,” she explained. “The name is Birna Drellgannoth.”
“Maccadon,” the pink one repeated. “You are a commoner then, young Birna?”
“Of course she is!” The green one looked offended. “Maccadon!” She got out of her chair with remarkable spryness and moved to the door. “It’s quite drafty,” she said, looking pointedly past Trigger. The door closed on Trigger’s face. A second later, she heard the lock snap shut. A moment after that, the don’t-disturb sign appeared.
Well, she thought, wandering back to her cabin, it didn’t look as if she were going to be bothered with excessively friendly neighbors on this trip.
She had a bath and then discovered a mechanical stylist in a recess beside the bathroom mirror. She swung the gadget out into the room, set it for a dye removal operation and sat down beneath it. A redhead again a minute or so later, she switched the machine to Orado styles and left it to make up its electronic mind as to what would be the most suitable creation under the circumstances.
The stylist hovered above her for over a minute, muttering and clucking as it conducted an apparently disapproving survey of the job. Then it went swiftly and silently to work. When it shut itself off, Trigger checked the results in the mirror.
She wasn’t too pleased. An upswept arrangement which brought out the bone structure of her face rather well but didn’t do much else for her. Possibly the stylist had included the Automatic Sales dress in its computations.
Well, it would have to do for her first tour of the ship.
11
The bedside ComWeb warned her politely that it was now ten minutes to dive point. Waking passengers who experienced subspace distress in any form could obtain immediate assistance by a call on any ComWeb. If they preferred, they could have their cabins kept under the continuous visual supervision of their personal steward or stewardess.
The Dawn City’s passenger areas still looked rather well populated when Trigger arrived. But some of the passengers were showing signs of regretting their decision to stay awake. Presently she became aware of a faint queasiness herself.
It wasn’t bad—mainly a sensation as if the ship were trying continuously to turn over on its axis around her and not quite making it—and she knew from previous experience that after the first hour or so she would be completely free of that. She walked into a low, dimly lit, very swank-looking gambling room, still well patronized by the hardier section of her fellow travelers, searching for a place where she could sit down unobtrusively for a while and let the subspace reaction work itself out.