New Celebrations: The Adventures of Anthony Villiers Read Free Page B

them a covey of young girls being shepherded to Miss McBurney’s Justly Famous Seminary and Finishing School on Nashua (sic) to learn to be fashionable ladies, but only two passengers enjoyed the comforts of the main cabin. The bear-leader and her five charges stayed in their own quarters, the fifth girl thoroughly unhappy with the situation and her roommate. The reason for the removal was that Mrs. Bogue, the escort, found the conversation in the main cabin not to her taste, and if she wasn’t interested, she was sure that the girls would not be.
    The topic of conversation was theology, and the girls, for their own private and inscrutable reasons, chiefest of which was Mrs. Bogue’s non-interest—therefore, absence—professed themselves only too eager to stay and learn of these strange and interesting matters.
    This was no use, however. Mrs. Bogue knew what she was being paid for—to deliver five girls to a school on Nashua. This she meant to do as efficiently and at as little trouble to herself as was possible. Consequently, she accused the girls of Massive Indiscipline, proof of which was their slowness to jump when she said “Frog,” and decided the most effective method of instilling discipline was general confinement to quarters. The old ploys are the best ones.
    The girls probably wouldn’t have enjoyed the theology anyway. None of the other passengers did. Men stayed in their bunks reading factsheets for the third time about the shortage of body parts currently causing tremors in hospital stock issues on Morian. I mean . . . dull. But still preferable.
    The captain even said to his first officer, “It’s lucky old Bolaire isn’t going to have a look at the cabin this trip. ‘Under-utilized,’ and next trip there would be half the space.”
    “Don’t anticipate, sir. He may be waiting at Star Well.”
    “There’s no need to worry, son. He never inspects a ship that his relative there is crewing on. It may be trust, but I think he hasn’t got the stomach for it.”
    “I heard that,” said the third officer.
    And he did, but he forgot it before morning, and things you don’t remember never happened. The third officer heard lots of things, all of which he noted down carefully and promptly forgot. Everybody and everything was always new to him. He was introduced to the captain for the first time every morning. When he finally retired, he was carted off his last ship and placed by his family fireside where his old, old mother read Mrs. Waldo Wintergood’s animal stories to him every night.
    The two theologians were an interesting pair.
    One was a Trog named Torve, a light brown, woolly, six foot tall toad. He had a white belly and the faintest of black stripes on his back. His personality was lumpish. His motives were inscrutable.
    And mark this: the Trogs, since their defeat by men some two hundred years before, had been confined by law to two solar systems. To travel anywhere outside these two solar systems, special papers were necessary. They were requested at every planet, at every way station, registered and returned. Fifty-three Trogs had such papers. Torve was not one of them. Keep your eye on him and watch what happens.
    The other was a fraudulent old fart named Augustus Srb. Short, fat, intelligent, even magnificent, he wore his mantle as a priest of the Revived Church of Mithra with a verve, a flair, that was not matched by his defense of churchly doctrine.
    Mithra was worshiped six centuries before the founding of Rome, and has had his ups and downs ever since. He was Son of the Sun, and born of a virgin on the 25th of December. But then, so was everybody else. He died for the sins of all mankind and was reborn at the spring equinox. That’s standard, too, as are the rest of the clutch: baptism, communion, and the promise of eternal life. Perhaps the one best point of the religion is this: the violet is sacred to Mithra, and consequently the cultivation of flowerbeds is