Free Johannes Cabal the Detective by Jonathan L. Howard Page B

best of times, and being forcibly surrounded by the well-to-do and very smug burghers and spouses of Mirkarvia intensified that dislike by a comfortable magnitude or two. Perhaps he could plead airsickness and retire early. Then he considered well-meaning matrons pestering him for the rest of the voyage with patented gippy stomach remedies, many of which would involve raw eggs. No, he’d just have to tough it out and be distant, offhand, and generally unfriendly.
    He perked up slightly; the evening was looking more interesting already.
    T he dinner was to be preceded by a champagne reception. Cabal allowed himself to be fashionably late in arriving, only to discover that the fashion had become more exaggerated without anybody telling him. There were few passengers in the aft lounge, only just outnumbering the stewards. He was offered a bumper of champagne in a wide-mouthed glass rather than the flute glasses he thought were becoming the norm. Looking around, he noted that the women were receiving half-filled flutes and realised that in Mirkarvian society it was the male prerogative to get very drunk very quickly. Somehow, he couldn’t see the Temperance League making any great inroads into Mirkarvia anytime soon. He looked dubiously at his glass—it had to have the best part of a quarter of a pint in it—before walking carefully over to one of the aft bay windows that sandwiched the closed and locked gangway hatch. There he sipped slowly, endeavouring to look both aloof and unapproachable.
    It seemed to work. Nobody came over to talk to him except a steward, who hovered by every few minutes to be silently appalled that Cabal was still on his first glass, not his third or fourth. In the rest of the slowly filling lounge, the men drank and drank and the women wittered. It was not humanity at its best, and Cabal was not very interested in observing them. Instead, he looked out of the window at the vault of Heaven. The cloud cover had thinned to the point that there were only a few ragged rolls of stratocumulus moving slowly across the sky, glowing blue by the light of a gibbous moon. The stars were clearer and sharper than he remembered ever seeing them—an effect of their altitude, he assumed. Astronomy had exerted a brief fascination for him in his adolescence, and he amused himself by making out the constellations. Ursa Major was, as always, childishly simple to spot, and he felt a small frisson of childish delight in doing so. He traced the line from the top of the Plough to find Polaris and watched it for a long time. He experienced a less pleasant frisson when it started to shift across the sky and he realised that the ship was turning. A few difficult seconds later, however, and it had stopped; the Princess Hortense was merely making a small course adjustment, not returning to the aeroport. Cabal just wished the damnable meal would start, the sooner to be done with.
    Despite himself, he felt that he was settling into the rôle. He’d pulled together everything he knew about agriculture and was moderately sure that he could impress a layman on the subject of scrapie. Especially if the layman was quite paralytically drunk.
    Abruptly, he became aware of somebody standing by his right shoulder a mere moment before he smelt perfume. He’d allowed his concentration to slip and, in those few moments when he wasn’t being aloof and unapproachable, he’d been approached.
    “Beautiful, aren’t they?” said a young woman’s voice. There was little intonation, and it took Cabal a moment to realise what she was talking about.
    “The stars? Yes, I suppose they are. I’m not a poet or a painter, though, so that’s just hearsay.”
    The woman made a small noise that was probably a laugh, as if he’d said something witty or profound. In a sense, he had. Then she said, “What do you think of when you look at the stars?”
    He considered quickly. He’d heard about this sort of thing. If his understanding was correct, he