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 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.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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