She filed for annulment the next day, citing `my mother' under `Reason For Dissolution'.
Mother was furious, especially when, as she rolled into the court for her appearance (through some freak of nature, Minnie was as slim and tomboyish as Mother was - well, the other way), the judge granted an immediate end to the proceedings in favour of Minnie's claim.
And now, the matter of this cruise.
Mother had been nice - too nice, Minnie thought in retrospect - the day she rolled into Minnie's seaside cottage in New New Jersey. She had won a cruise on the maiden voyage of the U.S.S. Gerrald in a Publishers Clearing House raffle. She wanted to give it to Minnie to make up for all the nasty things she'd done in the past, she said, since, after all, a woman Mother's age (read weight) just wasn't into the quiet on-board life, cruising between the stars, so tranquil.... It would be wonderful, of course, if you were a writer looking for peace and space....
So, Minnie bit, and was hauled in by a fat fisherwoman with a gift certificate. Of course, it was probably just another ploy to get Minnie married off so she could give up all her dreams of writing literary fiction.
There was also the new dicta-typer her mother had convinced her to buy herself for the trip.
It was a beautiful state of the art machine, just what Minnie needed when she wanted to write on the run. It took dictation, recorded memos, answered the phone, and had a huge grammar/spelling package for correcting errors before making hard copies on the contained printer.
It was sound-activated, set to her own voiceprint, so she could call to it just like a dog, and begin.
It was an unnecessary luxury for a poor writer.
And the way things were going, in all probability it would stay in its little purple packing crate all the way to Centauri and back.
The morons on the deck were throwing purple streamers and pellets of synthi-rice at the observation windows, pretending they were ocean cruise passengers just like on reruns of `Love Boat'. The rice bounced off the windows and fell back to the deck where more morons picked it up and threw it again.
Minnie stood in the midst of it all, silent, wishing to scream but not wanting to sound like she was enjoying herself. The pudgy lady in the hideously loud flowered dress beside Minnie gave another meaningless holler.
Minnie looked back at the air-lock doors that led to the main body of the ship. They were closed, and guarded, to make sure no one could escape the festivities of the launch which was being filmed by all the major holo-vid stations.
Minnie was jerked backwards suddenly. She turned to find the pudgy lady (who suddenly and disconcertingly reminded her of her mother) holding most of Minnie's long hair in one fat fist.
"Lovely party, isn't it?" she screamed in Minnie's ear over the noise.
Why, thought Minnie, are the loudest ones always the last to lose their voices?
"You have such pretty hair," the screaming pudgy lady continued. "Too bad it's such a mousy brown. I'll colour it for you. How's blue? How's tonight? I won't take no for an answer! What's your name, dear?"
"Minnie," yelled Minnie in return, "And I'm sorry but the answer's no!" She made a run for it.
"What was that all about, Annette?" asked the pudgy woman's husband. He had grey hair and question lines all over his face.
This was because he had only asked questions when he spoke since the fourth grade when his teacher had told him he'd never know all the answers and he set out to prove her wrong. He wore a fedora which his wife had bought him for Christmas. It was called Harold, by some agreement he had now forgotten, and he meant someday to find someone who knew why.
"Nothing, Bobby," said the pudgy lady, and sighed. "She has such mousy hair."
Suddenly there was a gurgling scream that somehow managed to cut through all the other racket.
"Goodness, what's that?" said the husband, looking out to the lower deck where a crowd had gathered around a jerking, blue-haired form.
Someone from the crowd below picked up a megaphone and began addressing the assembled vacationners. Those closest could see that it was a tallish looking man sitting in a chair carried by six porters.
"Achtung," he said. "This is your Captain making words at you through this cone-thing.... thank you, megaphone. This mman has appeared to have had - a confusion - a number - ... trouble, thank you, and shoots - seems to be throwing - eating .... thank you, choking." He paused, a confused, vacant expression on his face.
"Ask them if there's a doctor in the room, sir," whispered one of the porters, the same one who had been feeding the Captain the correct words before.
"Oh yes," said the Captain. "Would there happen to be a mman in the vicinity of the double locked air-holding door-things who is - can - knows the art of...."
"Medicine?" the porter suggested hopefully.
"Doctoring," finished the Captain resolutely. "Thank you for your help, porter, but I must learn to swim before I can fly. Now, pick me down and let's tango."
Bobby looked around for his wife Annette, but she was gone again. How does a fat woman move so fast? he wondered. He turned to a couple near him to ask that, and a few more questions that had just occurred to him. The first would be, Did you see where my wife went? but he also wanted to know the answer to 5550 divided by three, as well as the average number of steps on a ziggurat. Maybe they'd know.
IV
Minnie took advantage of the confusion on the lower deck to escape through the air-lock to her stateroom. It was a box. So much for first-class accommodations.
She stretched back into one of the junky synthi-beanbag chairs that littered - literally - the room, and sighed.
She just wasn't all that social. And she wasn't interested in marriage, no matter how hard her mother tried to convince her otherwise.
Besides, she had a short piece of fiction to write for the International Earth News, and as always, her career to think about. There just wasn't time to think of settling down. She unpacked all three of the outfits she had brought, her one jar of all-purpose cosmetic slop, and finally, her purple-packed dicta-typer.
She sat the little modern typewriter on her lap and caressed the crate for a moment before setting it down on the synthi-waterbed (an underblown air-mattress) and digging in a pocket of her sensible suit for her plasticredicard so she could buy supper from room service.
It wasn't there.
She blinked twice and decided to go without supper. Starve the creative mind. She'd rather sleep for a while anyway. Just one more quick look for the card, then take a nap.
It was then that she found the diamonds.
Seven diamonds, in fact, three set in a necklace, three loose, and two in a pair of ridiculously large earrings. Minnie's hand went unconsciously (have you ever known a conscious hand?) to her own unpierced ear.
"There's a note, dummy," said a voice from the vicinity of the stateroom door.
"Ah," said Minnie, thinking wrongly in her confusion that the voice had been in her own head. She found the note and read it out to herself.
"Please forgive my little contribution. I saw you being robbed on deck, and, where my interest in preserving decorum wouldn't permit me to make a fuss, I thought I could offer you a little something to tide you over."
Minnie pressed the note to her heart. "Thank you, unknown benefactor," she said.
"No problem," said the voice.
Minnie turned to see a figure disappearing from her doorway. It moved remarkably fast for someone of its size.
Minnie stared down at the fortune she'd just acquired, and felt fear rising in her throat. The truth was, she enjoyed being a starving writer, her books and stories critically but not yet financially successful. She was poor, but comfortable.
In one fell swoop, or rather, in one heavy bound, her need to write for survival had been eliminated.
Minnie blanched, and rushed out of the stateroom in pursuit of her benefactor.
V
Minnie missed all the conversation in the dining hall about the deck-death, as on-board gossip had labelled it. A doctor had eventually been found among the holidayers, but by that time, the convulsing blue-haired passenger had passed away. The ship's surgeon, playing golf on the hololinks at the time, was heard to remark, "Terrible. Of course, if it hadn't been Wednesday..." Cause of death was undetermined, and no one wanted to spoil their vacation by thinking it could be anything but a tragic accident.
Fortunately, thought Wiiki Whyki, the ship's social director and mortician-by-proxy, the incident hadn't really spoiled the mood aboard ship at all. No one had claimed the dead individual as a friend or relative, and so life went on, marred only by the appropriate number of tsk-tsk noises.
She sighed, and slipped an electronically coded toe-tag around one appendage of the unfortunate dead individual, rolled him into a tank of coolant, and went for supper.
It is perhaps hard for any reader of this account to imagine that Wiiki Whyki had noticed nothing unusual about the dead creature, which, after death began to grow hair all over its body, and pointy ears and a little sharp nose.
Shortly after Whyki left the ship's morgue, whiskers appeared on the nose, and claws poked out from what were definitely paws, not hands. All in all, what had formerly seemed to be a well-dressed, extremely fashionable man with blue hair just the epitome of good taste in Neo-Paris had become a large, blue rat.
VI
Minnie manoeuvred her way down halls packed with happy holidayers on their way to dine. The fat woman, moving with surprising agility, had already disappeared far ahead. Every now and then, Minnie would catch the briefest glimpse of a bulgy figure, replete in a loud flowered dress like a mobile wall of calico, just to let her know she was still on the right track. Suddenly, Minnie saw the fat woman disappeared around a corner. Minnie followed, and found the brightly lit corridor all but empty, a suspicious thing at any time. There was only one door in the hall, and a dead end beyond. In front of the door stood the only person in the hall, a woman who didn't look like she'd fit any of Minnie's notions of "friendly."
