“Who cares?” said Diana. “It’s dead. It’s in a passenger cabin. It’s your cabin, so you’re dead. And if you’re dead, you’re safe. Safer.”
“Safer?” asked Norton, noticing it was the second time she’d used the word.
“They know you’re on board.”
“Who’s ‘they’?”
“The ones who sent the Sham, the ones who want to kill you.”
“Why do they want to kill me?”
“Because you’re on a secret mission.”
“How can it be secret if they know?”
“Do you know what your mission is?”
“No.”
“Which means it’s secret.”
“It shouldn’t be a secret to me.”
“It should. Because when you’re tortured, you can’t tell them what your mission is.”
“Tortured?”
“Don’t worry. It seems they only want to kill you. But it could be worse.”
“How?”
“It could be me they wanted to kill,” said Diana. “Now, about this coffee?”
“You’re ordering it from a steward?”
“I am a steward.”
“But you’re really the ship’s security officer, aren’t you?”
“No, John, I really am a steward.”
“That isn’t your cover, a stewardess?”
“What’s a ‘stewardess’?”
“A girl, a female steward.”
“In your era, they had different words for a woman and a man doing the same job?”
“Yeah, sure.”
“So a female doctor was called a doctoress, a pilot was a pilotess, and I’d have been a copess?”
“No, girls were policewomen.”
“Not policegirls?”
“No.”
“Or policesses?”
“No.” Norton shook his head.
“As I said, call me what you want. I’m a steward, I’m a stewardess, and that’s my job on board. Unlike you, I have to work during the voyage. I’ll fix the coffee.”
Diana reached into what seemed to be a solid wall and pulled out an oval box. A hatch slid back, and she took out two cups without handles. She tilted the box over the first cup and a measure of brown crumbs poured into it. Norton moved closer so he could watch.
“What’s that?” he asked.
“Coffee granules.”
He took one of the cups, examining the contents.
“Freeze dried,” said Diana. “Like you.”
Norton crushed some of the granules between his fingers and they turned to dust. He sniffed the powder, then licked it. It was instant coffee.
Diana pressed the cup into a recess and it filled with water. Cold water. She handed it to him. He was about to ask for boiling water when he saw the surface begin to ripple and steam to rise above the rim. The coffee was hot, the cup remained cold. It was instantaneous coffee.
“Lightener?” asked Diana. “Sweetener?”
Norton shook his head. Black, no sugar, that was the way he’d taken his coffee three centuries ago.
So much had happened to him since then, so much that was strange, very, very strange. But Norton had accepted it all, let it happen, because what else could he have done?
Sitting and drinking coffee with Diana was the most normal thing that had happened since his resurrection, and yet he felt very distant and removed from what was going on.
“Are you listening?” said Diana.
“Yeah.”
“What did I say?”
“When?”
Diana took the medpak, found what she wanted, and stepped toward Norton.
“Open wide,” she said.
“No,” he muttered through gritted teeth.
“Not your mouth,” she said, grabbing at his knees and pulling his legs apart, then slapping her right hand down on the top of his left thigh.
“Ah!” he yelled.
Diana removed her hand from his leg and slid something from her hand. “Didn’t feel a thing, did you?”
“What was it?”
“You’re in shock. It’s not every day you get attacked by an alien assassin.” Diana sipped her coffee. “But maybe you should get used to the idea.”
“What?”
“Next time, I’ll be there faster. I hope.”
“So do I,” said Norton. “Next time?”
“From now on, I won’t let you out of my sight. I had some doubts about you at first, John, but I was very impressed with how you dealt with the Sham. I was delayed, some stupid passenger asking me to…” Diana paused. “Might have been a deliberate tactic. I’ll have to check it out.”
Norton had been sitting up, but now he felt himself sink against the back of the chair. As he did, the seat wrapped itself snugly around him.
“You’re here to keep an eye on me?” he said.
“Yes. We have to protect our investment. A flight across space is very expensive, and we could only afford to pay for one ticket. That’s why I’m a steward; I’m working my passage.”
It was true what Norton had been told when he first joined the police, that no one saw the person inside the uniform. He must have seen Diana on numerous occasions while he’d been on the ship, but he hadn’t recognised her. All he noticed was the uniform, that she was a steward. Or stewardess.
Her outfit was very different from the one she’d worn the first time they had met, but that was no excuse for not recognising her.
She was dressed in a loose hip-length tunic, gold in colour and studded with rhinestones. Her tight silver pants stopped at the knee, and she wore a pair of white slippers, which were also decorated with ersatz gems. Or the jewels could have been genuine. By now, for all Norton knew, diamonds were no longer expensive. There must have been planets where emeralds and rubies were as common as dust in Nevada. On her head was a glittery pillbox hat, shimmering with strata of silver and gold.
Until it revealed its true identity, the Sham had worn a similar uniform, which must have been as illusory as the creature itself.
“And the Sham was masquerading as a steward?” said Norton.
“No,” said Diana. “He, or it, was working as a steward. I thought his name was Heart-of-Peace and he was from Luna. Instead, he was a low-budget assassin. Which means we’re minus one steward.” She sipped her coffee and looked at Norton. “Or maybe not.”
It made sense, he supposed. If the Sham, pretending to be a steward, had really killed Wayne Norton, pretending to be Julius Winston, then the Sham would still be alive, still pretending to be a steward. And so Norton became a steward called Heart-of-Peace.
This meant he had a far better choice of food than the passengers—because he and Diana chose whatever they wanted. Although everything was automated, there were still buttons to press, controls to turn, dials to operate. He didn’t know what any of them did, but she made him learn.
“I’m a cop,” he said, “why do I need to do this?”
“Because,” she told him, “like most creatures in the universe, you need to eat to live. If you don’t know how to flasheat food, you’ll starve to death.”
“You’d let me?”
“Yes.”
He believed her.
At first, he was worried his steward’s job would entail housework on a galactic scale: cooking, cleaning, dusting, polishing, ironing, washing dishes, doing laundry, making beds. The list of chores was endless. He could never do anything like that. Firstly, it was all women’s work, which meant: secondly, he didn’t know how.
But a steward was more like a waiter in a restaurant. He dealt with the customers, while everything else happened out of sight. A waiter would bring the menu, take the orders, deliver the meal, but he didn’t prepare the food or clear up the mess later.
As he already knew, passengers in his class had to serve their own meals, but the stewards had to make sure all the dispensers were fully stacked. As for doing the dishes, once they were collected and racked, that was also taken care of.
Norton soon came to hate the passengers. They did nothing but moan and complain and ask for the impossible, and even when it was possible he soon learned to be evasive. He could have done his work far more efficiently without passengers interrupting his routine.
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