Written in the Stars
by Max Dunbar
Some Piscean or Taurian took his coat and Patrick was so fired up and nervous that he actually thanked the guy. Reflexively he glanced about the room to see if anyone had noticed. Mark Roche, his best friend, who noticed everything, was grinning at him from the door.
‘The soldier who is not scared is only half a soldier,’ Mark told him. The man glittered in First Citizens’ evening dress. The assembly looked impeccable but also had a hint of calculated disarray. Although they were the same age, Mark seemed older.
‘Well, here we are,’ Patrick said. ‘The last night of freedom.’
‘Yeah, gotta make the most of it.’ Mark spoke like a man who knows he has many more nights of freedom ahead of him. He stared into Patrick’s face, brushed real or invisible flecks of foam from his neck, and said: ‘Yep. You’ll do.’
And then Patrick was led into the Hall of Fire. At first he just stared. Diamonds winked off crisp red jackets. So much clashing aftershave you thought your eyes would water. The boys he’d grown up with were now men. Him included, although it didn’t feel that way.
He took a couple of champagne flutes off a tray carried by a hard-faced tight-bodied Virgan. The two men toasted each other and drank. A demurral rippled through the crowd. Those who had seats took them. A stooped figure appeared on the dais.
‘I have no wish,’ the old man said, ‘to delay this most unique, this life-affirming, this truly Arian of ceremonies.’ Fair enough: but then the Cardinal proceeded to do exactly that by droning on, through splinters of microphone feedback, about tradition and duty and honour, about the historic alliance of Fire and Air and the heroes and martyrs of the Virgonian War. Patrick’s attention wandered and he gazed at the giant vertical cables of separation, then at the paintings on the wall; court-portrait style renderings of tinweared generals and the Founding Cardinal and the many celebrities born under the sign (such as the Supremes star Diana Ross and the actor Marlon Brando). These images and carvings, so familiar and dull on the million or so times he’d walked under them, now looked like exactly what they were: history.
He was aware of attention wandered, of gazes drifting in the same direction – the other side of the dais, where cream shoulder and shining bodice could be discerned through the gabled barrier. But when the Cardinal finally wound up, with the obligatory lecherous pun on the mingling of fire with oxygen, his speech was met by long applause. It was indulgent but still genuine. They could afford to love him, now. They would not see the old man again.
You expected those ancient winches to crumble into shards of rust, for the gables to slam and teeter, for the silent reverence to erupt in shock and screams. Yet in a long ninety seconds the barrier was stacked at the side of the hall, the only time Patrick had seen it up, and the guttural lad-murmur was joined by the discreet music of female conversation.
The woman had bronzed hair halfway down her back. They were smoking cigarettes on the top of the fire escape. Mark had disappeared, presumably on the bed-by-ten rule.
‘So what do you fancy doing after graduation?’
‘Tricky one. Where I come from, the only real options are astrology or the army. And the army, I’m not a coward, but…’
She smiled. ‘My brother got killed in Goat City last year. It’s getting real messy out there, isn’t it?’
This was a fair analysis. The Confederacy of Fire Nations had declared war on Virgonia after it had annexed the tiny oil-rich Caprian colonies. Defending this land should have been easy, and indeed the first wave of suicide bombers had achieved considerable success. It looked like a home-by-Christmas situation until Virgonia had bought the support of the Water astrocracies. Now Arian casualties were so common the papers didn’t bother to report them. If that wasn’t enough, the Libran Republic was developing a nuclear bomb. The Fire Council was falling over itself to repair diplomatic links, slashed in the centuries-old dispute over whether the Arian birth stone was the Sapphire or the Moss Agate. Thinking about it, Patrick realised the world could actually end within his lifetime. But now all this was really a secondary concern.
‘So what was your prophecy for this evening?’ the woman asked.
An obvious feed line. ‘The forecast was that I would meet a beautiful Aquarian woman. Cainer himself came to me in a dream.’
‘Such a smooth talker!’ She clapped her hand to her thorax, mock-demure, and Patrick felt a jolt of vicious lust. The woman seemed to sense it. Her eyes narrowed, and in a terrible moment Patrick thought he’d lost her.
But then she said: ‘Ever fucked anyone?’
‘Yep.’ Several times he and Mark had travelled to the Scorpian district in north Manchester. Risky as hell, and a lot of anxiety afterwards, lying awake in the dorm, waiting for that brisk knock on the door. But it had been worth it, at least to have the knowledge that he’d done it. And the stereotype was true: Scorpians banged like the proverbial shithouse door.
‘I wouldn’t have expected to hear such language from a refined lady such as yourself,’ he told her. She was close now; he could feel the cold metal of the water-carrier sigul pinned beneath the swell of her breast. Suddenly he was aware of the party inside. DJ Otzi, ‘Hey Baby,’ on the dancefloor.
‘I know. It’s all about romance, isn’t it? Life compatibility.’
‘We haven’t even completed the forms yet.’
‘Yeah, but who cares? You’re only eighteen once, that’s what my brother always said.’
The woman’s face was upturned now, silently expectant, and he capitalised on the silence before it became awkward, taking her chin in two fingers and kissing her. God, this was a million miles away from the mattress in that tower block in Harpurhey! He was suddenly a lot less sceptical about this whole zodiac compatibility thing, and that was good, because the Cardinals were not open to question.
As they left, hand in hand, he glanced upward to the clock of the Great Hall. Ten fifteen.
She noticed and followed his gaze. Looking down at her, he had the idea that she had heard his thoughts somehow – close enough, Roche would be proud of me – and again, what could have been awkward suddenly wasn’t and the two of them simply burst out laughing.
Across the overpass Patrick looked out onto the city, the girl dozing off against his chest, a hulking Taurian behind the wheel of the cab. At this hour there were no city lights; it would be an act of blasphemy. No building could obscure those heavenly bodies. No light pollution, generated by men, would stain and obscure the stars that decided everything and watched over them as they slept.