Frank stubbed out his cigar angrily, grinding what was left of it into the ashtray with his thumb. “Fuck ’em,” he grumbled to himself. “Fuck ’em.” He took a deep breath, sucking in the blue soup that passed for air in his cramped stateroom. Sooner or later he’d have to turn the ventilation back on and pull down the plastic film he’d spread all over the smoke detector — otherwise, the life-support stewards would come round and give him their usual patronizing-but-polite lecture on shipboard life-support systems — but for now he took an obscure comfort in his ability to inhale the smog of his choice. Everything else about this ship was out of his grasp, locked down like a mobile theme park, and as a compulsive control-twiddler, Frank was pathologically uncomfortable with any environment he couldn’t mess up to his heart’s content.

Frank was pissed. He was so angry he had to get up and walk, before he gave in to the temptation to start banging his head on the bulkhead. It was one of his biggest problems, he admitted: he had an appalling capacity to feel other people’s pain. If he’d been able to have it surgically removed, he’d have done so — maybe he’d then have been able to make a career for himself in politics. But as it was, given his vocation, it just gave him violent conscience-aches. Especially when, as on this cruise, he was going to have to exorcise some of his own ghosts. So he blinked away the workflow and copy windows, folded up his keyboard and dropped it in a pocket, stood up, took a final deep breath of the blue toxic waste cloud — then opened the door for the first time in nearly twenty-four hours.

Somewhere in the crew quarters of the Romanov an alarm siren was probably whooping: “Danger! The troll in suite B312 has emerged! Send deodorant spray and prepare to decontaminate corridor B3! Danger! Danger! Chemical warfare alert!” He sniffed the unnaturally pure air, nostrils flaring. A big man, with a beetling brow and an expressive nose, one of his ex-lovers had described him as resembling a male silverback gorilla, a resemblance that his silver-and-black close-cropped hair only emphasized. Right then his skin glowed with youthful vigor, and he was almost vibrating with energy: he’d had his first telomere reset and aging fix only six months before, and was filled with a restless teenage exuberance that he’d almost forgotten existed. It was overflowing into his work by way of pugnacious editorials and take-no-prisoners prose, and after a few hours of writing it nearly had him bouncing off the ceiling.

The corridor was lined with doorways and walled with plush beige carpet, recessed handholds, and safety nets ready to turn it into a series of safety cubes in event of off-axis acceleration. Here and there, recessed false windows looked out onto scenes of bucolic harmony, desert sunsets and sandy beaches, vying with lush tropical rain forests and breathtaking starscapes. Indirect lighting turned it into a shadowless tube, bland as a business hotel and twice as boring. And it smelled of synthetic pine.

Frank snorted as he ambled along the corridor. He detested and despised this aspect of interstellar travel. What was the point of embarking on a perilous journey to far-off worlds if the experience was much like checking into one of those expensively manicured racks of self-contained service apartments designed to appeal to the lowest-common-denominator shit-for-brains salesdrone? Hotels with carefully bland hand-painted artwork on the walls, a cupboard where the ready-meal of your choice would appear in a prepack ready to eat, and the ceiling above the emperor-sized bed was ready to screen a hundred thousand crap movies or play a million shit immersives.

Well, fuck ’em! Fuck the complacent assholes, and their trade-mission-to-the-stars quick buck mentality. Inward-looking, pampered, greedy, and unwilling to look at anything beyond the end of their noses that doesn’t come with a reassuringly expensive price tag attached. Fuck ’em and their consumer demand for bland, boring flying hotels with supercilious or patronizing hired help, and absolutely nothing that might give them any sign they weren’t in Kansas anymore, Toto, that they might actually be aboard a million tons of smart matter wrapped around a quantum black hole slipping across the event horizon of the observable universe on a wave of curved space-time. Gosh, if they realized what was happening, they might be disturbed, frightened, even! And that might make them less inclined to buy a ticket with WhiteStar in future, thus impacting the corporate bottom line, so …

Frank had traveled by oxcart. He’d traveled on antiquated tramp freighters that had to spin their crew quarters like a wheel to provide a semblance of gravity. He’d spent one memorable night huddling with other survivors on the back of an armored personnel carrier thundering across desert sands, neck itching in the edgily imagined sights of the victor’s gunships, and he’d spent a whole week huddled in the bottom of a motorized vaporetto in a swampy river delta near the town of Memphis, on Octavio. Compared to any of those experiences this was the lap of luxury. It was also puerile, bland, and — worst of all — characterless.

At the end of the gently curving corridor Frank pushed through a loose curtain that secured access onto a landing that curved around the diamond-walled helix of a grand staircase, spacecraft-style. The staircase itself was organic, grown painstakingly from a single modified mahogany tree that had been coaxed into a spiral inside its protective tube, warped into a half-moon cross-section, then brutally slain and partially dissected by a team of expert carpenters. It led up through the eleven passenger decks of the ship, all the way to the stellarium with its diamond-phase optically clean dome — covered, now, because the aberration of starlight from the ship’s pilot wave had dimmed everything except gamma-ray bursters to invisibility. He glanced around, puzzled by the lack of passengers or white-suited human stewards, then did a double take as he checked his watch. “Four in the morning?” he grunted at nobody in particular. “Huh.” Not that the hour meant much to him, but most people lived by the ship’s clocks, trying to keep a grip on the empire time standard that bound the interstellar trading circuits together, which meant they’d be asleep, and most of the public areas would be shut for maintenance.

The night bar on F deck was still open, and Frank was only slightly breathless from hauling himself round fifteen hundred degrees of corkscrewing staircase when he arrived, pushed through the gilt-and-crystal doors, and looked around.

A handful of night owls hung out in the bar even at this late hour: one or two lone drinkers grimly tucked away the hard stuff, and a circle of half a dozen chattering friends clustered around a table in the corner. It was often hard to judge people’s age, but there was something that looked young about their social interaction. Maybe they were students on the Grand Tour, or a troupe of workers caught up in one of those unusual vortices of labor market liquidity that made it cheaper to take the workers where the work was rather than vice versa. Frank had seen that before — he’d been on the receiving end himself once, back when he was young and clueless. He snorted to himself and slouched onto one of the barstools. “I’ll have a Wray and Nephew on ice, no mixer,” he grunted at the bartender, who nodded silently, realized that Frank didn’t want a whole lot of chatter with his drink, and turned away to serve it up.

“Good voyage so far, eh, what-what?” chirped a voice from somewhere by his left shoulder.

Frank glanced round. “Good for some,” he said, biting back his first impulsive comment. You never could tell who you’d run across in a bar at four in the morning, as at least one senior government bureaucrat had discovered after being mugged by the Times and left for dead in the Appointments pages. Frank had no intention of giving anything away, even to an obvious weirdo. Which this guerrilla conversationalist clearly was, from the tips of his ankle boots — one of which was red, and the other green — to the top of his pointy plush skull cap (which was electric blue with a dusting of holographic stars). Soulfully deep brown eyes and crimson moustache notwithstanding, he looked like an escapee from a reeducation camp for fashion criminals. “You’ll pardon me for saying this, but I didn’t come down here for a co-therapy session,” Frank rumbled. The bartender punctuated his observation with a clink of crystal on teak; Frank picked up his shot glass and sniffed the colorless liquid.