Starship Titanic

by Terry Jones

  'Absolute poop!' declared the Great Genius, in his best how-dare-you-waste-the-time-of-a-great-genius-like-me voice (which he had been practising recently and now had down to a tee). 'I am personally checking the standards of craftsmanship on every facet of the ship, and I can guarantee that standards have - if anything - gone up since the transferral to Blerontin.' He felt his other eyebrow pop loose from his forehead.

  'What do you say about the collapse of the Yassaccan economy, Mr Leovinus?' It was the same dreadful journalist going on. Why couldn't someone ask him whether he preferred architecture to quantum physics or whether he felt painting should be considered a higher art-form than canape´ arrangement? Those were the kind of questions he was a whizz at dealing with these days. 'Do you feel personally responsible at all for the present sufferings of the Yassaccan people?'

  Leovinus went for the last-goal-keeper-at-the-net* defence: 'I am an Artist, Mr Journalist,' he said, with that voice of his that made grown men cringe behind their stomachs and young cub reporters with delightful cleavages feel deliciously damp all over. 'Of course, I deeply regret the terrible destruction of an entire culture that their economic mismanagement has brought upon themselves, and I hereby offer my heartfelt condolences to the people of Yassacca, I am deeply concerned that it should have been the construction of my vision that should have been the catalyst of their monetary downfall. But I am an Artist. My responsibility is to my Art. And I would be betraying the sacred trust of my genius were I to compromise my vision for the sake of fiscal expediency!'

  - - - - - -

  * Blerontin football is played with anything up to six balls, and consequently a large number of goal-keepers is sometimes allowed.

  - - - - - -

  'Oh! Oooooh! Ahh!' breathed one of the cub reporters, and shifted onto her other buttock.

  Leovinus, nevertheless, got the feeling that the entire press conference had spiralled out of control and was now plunging towards some catastrophic conclusion that he must at all costs avoid - even if it meant forgoing a delightful drink with the delightful cub reporters who were even now gazing at him with increasingly delightftil eyes and increasingly delightful cleavages. In any case, he knew how any such assignation would end: he would soon find their smiles begin to grate, their soft gazes would become tiresome, probing arc-lights of banality and he would flee from the two young reporters in despair and disappointment. That was what always happened. For deep down, inside him, Leovinus knew that no one was good enough for him. Why go through it all again?

  Leovinus rose unsteadily to his feet. 'Thank you,' he said and was gone.

  The greatest genius of his age - gone without even so much as a nod in the cub reporters' direction. It was hardly to be believed.

  Despite his age, brilliance and genius, Leovinus was not always a sensible individual. He had passions. Passions that would rise up the inside of his being and take over his magnificent brain like cholera taking over a city. And not all these passions revolved around cub reporters. At present his one over-riding passion was the Starship. That magnificent creation. That crowning glory of his life's work.

  Ever since his recent accident, Leovinus had been reluctant to go abroad, partly because his joints had stiffened up somewhat and partly because he didn't want to be seen without his eyebrows. Leovinus was not without personal vanity. He had therefore got into the habit of supervising the construction of his Starship by virtual reality and telepresence - both brought to such a pitch of perfection by Blerontinian scientists that it was sometimes hard to remember which was the real thing - particularly if you were getting on a bit and your mind was on cleavages.

  For that is what Leovinus's mind had been preoccupied with for many months now - but not the cleavages of the young cub reporters. No. Leovinus's obsession was the cleavage of data-streams as they separated out into random thought fields; the cleavage of neuroconnectors as they bifurcated into the memory bank and the sensation retrieval system, the cleavage of separators and trans-joiners linking and distinguishing those two vital processes: thought and feeling. His obsession was the heart of his Starship. He called her Titania.

  Titania was the heart, the mind, the spirit, the soul of the ship.

  A massive cyber-intelligence system was required to run the ship, of course, but, as we now know, intelligence devoid of emotion is non-functional. However smart a robot or computer may be, it can only do exactly what you tell it to do and then stop. To keep thinking, it has to want to. It has to be motivated. You can't think if you can't feel. So the ship's intelligence had to be imbued with emotions, with personality. And its name was Titania.

  The Starship was Leovinus's creation. So was Titania.

  It had suited Leovinus, while he concentrated on this vital heart of the ship, to work from home, but now he suddenly realized that he hadn't actually been on the ship itself for... well he really didn't know how long!

  Thus it was that night, after the press conference, the great man put on a long snork-hair coat, and made his way towards the Assembly Dock, where his masterpiece stood, awaiting tomorrow's launch.

  Earlier he had received tele-calls from the project manager, Antar Brobostigon and the chief accountant, Droot Scraliontis. They had both been so full of gratitude for his defence of them during the press conference, and so reassuring about the prospects of the launch, that Leovinus found a vein in his right thigh beginning to twitch, and he kept thinking of the phrase 'parrot-droppings' without any viable context.

  He slipped unseen down the service entrance, and waited in the shadows until he saw the security robot stop to take its scheduled rest-break (as laid down by Blerontin law). He then hurried across the open forecourt and disappeared into the shadow of the temporary construction workers' sheds. It was not as if he didn't have a perfect right to be there - it was just he wanted to do this without the usual fanfare and the welcoming party and the official guided tour and all the usual commotion that accompanied his public visits. He wanted to commune with his creation alone.

  He looked up. There was the Assembly Dock, looming up into the night sky far, far above him. It stretched a good mile up, and the Starship - his Starship - his baby - rose up another half mile above that - ready for blast-off at midday tomorrow - precisely.

  The silk coverings flapped in the breeze that swept across the Observation Arena, over the Administration buildings and around the Dock Structures. Leovinus felt a surge of emotion sweep through his body and engulf his magnificent brain, His heart missed several beats. His knees turned to jelly. But it was not his pride in that stupendous structure that gave him butterflies in the tummy. Nor was it the exaltation that, after all these years, it was finally complete that made him feel like a schoolboy on his first date. No, what made his hand shake as he sleeked it through his greying locks was the thought that in there - in those vast halls and state rooms Titania was waiting for him.

  As Leovinus leaned towards the Starship, the wind picked up, blasting dead leaves, old snack-wrappings, torn religious journals, pages of sentimental verse, knitting patterns and all the other usual detritus left behind by construction workers, across the Servicing Area. The sheeting that covered the Starship flapped frantically, like the Great Ghoul in the ancient filmed entertainment The Great Ghoul Frightens A Lot Of Folk. Leovinus shuddered with a childhood memory of fear. Then he shuddered again as he suddenly saw a figure slip from the base of the launching gantry into the shadows opposite the main steps of the Starship.

  The moment he saw that figure, he knew, deep in his bones, with that certainty that comes of being absolutely without any doubt whatsoever, that everything was about to go terribly, fearfully wrong.

  Cautiously he edged round into the shadows where he had seen the figure disappear.

  'So?' a voice spoke to him out of the darkness. It was a voice that made his stomach relocate itself around his knees - a voice that made him want to be sick - to be anywhere but where he was. Leovinus looked around for a means of escape, but it was
too late. 'Last minute check-ups, eh?' The figure stepped out of the shadow and confronted him. It was that dreadful Journalist from the press conference.

  'Haven't you tormented me enough? Haven't you already ruined a day that was meant to be one of the greatest days of my life?' That's what Leovinus wanted to say, but he merely mumbled: 'Oh. It's you.'

  'Are you afraid something's going to go wrong with the launch?'

  'Of course not!' Leovinus adopted just the right cold tone that gave nothing away. 'I've merely come to pay my regards.' He liked to be thought of as a bit of a sentimentalist as well as a great brain.

  'But come on! You must be a bit worried. Everyone knows that the workmanship here on Blerontin has not been a patch on the Yassaccans - in fact, you know and I know, Blerontin craftsmanship is nowhere near good enough to finish a ship of this sophistication.'

  'Just because the Blerontin Government chooses to employ the Amalgamated Unmarried Teenage Mothers' Construction Units there is no reason to think that the work is in any way slipshod,' retorted old Leovinus. 'I have every confidence in their work.'

  'I don't believe you,' replied The Journalist.

  'Very well! I'll show you!' The Great Man saw his private tête-a-tête with Titania being blown away on the wind that now buffeted them, as a small unlit work platform carried them up one of the service gantries that surrounded the great Starship.

  It was only when you started getting this high up, thought The Journalist, that you really began to appreciate the full scale of the enterprise. The launch area below receded into darkness and silence, as they rattled their way up the side of the vast Starship - higher and higher - until the great keel broadened out and they reached the main body of the ship. A short walk across another gantry and they were at the main doors of the spacecraft. An entry-coder received Leovinus's fingerprint and cross-checked it with a blood sample, recent hair-loss estimate, and favourite recreational activity. The doors slid open and the two entered.

  The Journalist had, of course, often been in Starships, but he had never been in a Starship like this. It was magnificent, astonishing. It was built with luxury star-travel in mind. It was built to last. It was built to impress. What's more, it was still being built! Two workmen were slipping into the service elevator, as Leovinus and The Journalist entered the Embarkation Lobby.

  'Just some last-minute adjustments,' one of them mumbled to Leovinus and they were gone.

  'Hm,' said Leovinus in a way that The Journalist freely translated as: 'I wonder what those two could have been up to? They surely can't still be making adjustments this near to launch? And why didn't I know about them? I'd better check everything.' It was, you understand, a very free translation.

  'Donkey-Data-Bases!' exclaimed the Greatest Living Genius in the Galaxy. 'Look at that!'

  The Journalist looked. He saw a smartly dressed robot wearing headphones, and standing on the polished marble floor of one of the most elegant rooms he had ever stood in. The design was typical Late Leovinus and yet it was imbued with a spirit that was new. It had a lightness that some critics had thought lacking in much of his earlier work, and the colours were vibrant and yet warm and welcoming. Perhaps Leovinus had at last got in touch with the feminine side of his nature - or perhaps the gentler, more approachable feel of the Starship's interior owed something to the many little finishing touches introduced by Titania.

  The Journalist was at a loss to see why the great man was so angry, but Leovinus was already striding across to the far wall. There he yanked at a decorative panel. 'Upside down!' he yelled. 'I sometimes think I have to build the entire ship with my own hands!' And he produced a screwdriver and proceeded to replace the panel in the correct position. 'Can't they see the entire ambient structure of the room is destroyed by exactly that sort of inattention to detail?'

  The Journalist made a note in his thumb-recorder.

  'Welcome to the Starship Titanic.' The smart robot was now addressing a light-fitting that protruded from the wall. 'Allow me to show you the facilities available to Second Class Travellers.' The thing then turned smartly on its heels and walked straight into the nearest closed door. There was a clang and the robot fell backwards onto the highly decorative marble floor. 'Here you may see the Grand Axial Canal, Second Class!' it announced proudly and extended a whitegloved hand at the ceiling.

  The Journalist made another note in his thumb-recorder.

  Leovinus's reaction to the robot's minor mishap was also noted down in The Journalist's thumb-recorder. It started off as 'blank disbelief' and ended up as 'cold fury'. In between it went through a fascinating range of adjustments all of which were noted down by The Journalist: 'surprised dissatisfaction' was rapidly replaced by 'stupefied indignation' which in turn quickly became 'bitter resentment' which equally quickly was transformed into 'burning thirst for vengeance' and so to 'cold fury'.

  'Brobostigon!' murmured the Great Man, 'That bastard has been skimping on the syntho-neurones!'

  The Journalist made another note, but Leovinus turned on him so suddenly that he stuck his thumb in his mouth and pretended to be sucking at it.

  'This can't happen on this ship,' explained Leovinus, as he picked up the fallen robot. 'Every Doorbot has a fail-safe neuron embedded in its circuitry that cancels out any non-rational activity such as we just witnessed. They are expensive items, but, I think you will agree, well worth the money.'

  The Journalist nodded and pretended that he had a splinter in the end of his thumb.

  'Except that that BASTARD BROBOSTIGON HAS OBVIOUSLY LEFT THEM OUT! When I see him I'll...' But Leovinus stopped in mid sentence.

  'He's probably wondering what else is wrong with the ship,' thought The Journalist with mounting excitement he could feel a story materializing in front of him - a big story - a humungous story, and the great thing was he wouldn't have to do anything - it was all going to unfold in front of him. He knew it. And, sure enough, before The Journalist could pretend to find the non-existent splinter, Leovinus had given the Doorbot a quick adjustment, the door had opened and the Great Man had been bowed through into the corridor beyond.

  'Enjoy your honeymoon, you lucky couple!' called the Doorbot cheerfully. The Journalist noted this down, and hurried after the great architect and ship-builder, who had just turned right into one of the most astounding architectural spaces The Journalist had ever entered.

  It was an oval space, marked out by columns. Around the perimeter wall was painted a frieze depicting the favourite recreational pastime of the Founding Fathers of Blerontin: posing for frieze-painters. Leovinus was standing staring up at a huge statue of a winged female that stood at the other end. But The Journalist's eye went down... down and down into what seemed like an infinity of descent, for there at his feet was the great Central Well that occupied the gigantic keel of the Starship. It was the spine of the ship, and around it, like nerve impulses, illuminated elevators constantly went up and down servicing the living quarters that were stacked below them - tier after tier. At the very bottom, far far down below near the bilges of the ship, the Super Galactic Traveller De Luxe Suites; above them, the Second Class Executive Duplexes; and above them, far above them, the fabulously appointed First Class State Rooms.

  But The Journalist scarcely had time to take all this in, for Leovinus was off - striding through the many-columned hall towards the far vestibule - through which he disappeared.

  By the time The Journalist had caught up with him, Leovinus was standing on the jetty of an even more extraordinary and beautiful feature of the Starship Titanic: the Grand Axial Canal, Second Class.

  From the Central Well of the Starship ran two great canals - one to the fore and one to the aft. These partly had the effect of cooling the engines, but were also elegant recreational facilities. Up and down the canal, gondolas plied their way, the automated gondoliers each singing their own personal selection of Blerontinian folk-songs - but particularly the one about the beautiful young female acrobat who fell in love with a gond
olier and gave him six pnedes (approximately one million pounds sterling) as a tip.

  Leovinus was doing his from-blank-disbelief-to-cold-fury routine again. The Journalist took note.

  'They are not supposed to sing unless they've got passengers!' Leovinus seemed to be choking as he clambered down into the nearest waiting gondola. The singing immediately stopped.

  The Journalist joined him and said: 'Perhaps they're doing a test? Reversing everything?' It was the only thing he could think of that was in any way cheery.

  'Don't talk pigeon poop!' snapped Leovinus. He was clearly in no mood to be cheered. 'Promenade Deck Elevator!'

  'Si! House-proud and Religious Mother of Twins!' said the automated gondolier. Leovinus flinched, and felt the vein twitching in his thigh.

  Leovinus allowed the irritation to mount within himself, as he straightened one of the priceless NO-Art Masterpieces that decorated the elevator lobby.

  'Good day to you, sir, madam or thing. And how may we assist you in your vertical transportation requirements today?' The Liftbot was half-embedded in the wall of the lift - its free hand rested on the lever that came out of its chest.

  'Just to the Promenade Deck and no back-chat!' snapped Leovinus. He sometimes regretted the characters that these robots seemed to acquire, but there it was: if the ship's intelligence were to be allowed emotions - and certainly no one could doubt that Titania had strong emotions - then you had to allow her to choose robot-characters she got on with. It was no good forcing the issue. Although Leovinus had, on occasion, spoken to Titania quite forcibly about some of the characters with whom she surrounded herself. But then Titania was so tolerant, so understanding of people's failings and mistakes that she could get on with practically anybody. He had made her like that.

  The giant Promenade Deck was Leovinus's particular little favourite. Under its vast transparent canopy, passengers could stroll and marvel at the mind-erupting brilliance of the Galaxy through which they were passing. The vari-spex composition glass, of which the canopy was made, had the effect of intensifying the radiant brightness of the stars, while at the same time making it possible for the observer, by a mere twist of the head, to see - in the detail of a powerful telescope - any particular star that caught his, her or its fancy. Around the perimeter, the pellerator (a sort of horizontal lift of Leovinus's design) enabled the less active travellers to tour the Deck without stirring an unnecessary muscle.