“One wonders,” Elsbet says, twirling her parasol between her fingers. It rolls back and forth across her shoulder and the lace throws strangely shaped shadows across her face.

“What precisely does one wonder?” Terrence asks her when the silence stretches far too long in his opinion. Elsbet has a habit of starting a comment and finishing it several minutes later that infuriates him sometimes.

“Oh,” she replied, looking out over the balcony at the mass of people in second class. “One merely wonders why the Engineers thought the Motoped should look like an elephant.”

At that moment, somewhere in the bowels of the beast that was taking them to their new lives, an Engineer pulled a lever that caused the articulated smokestack cleverly disguised as the trunk to point skyward, and steam forced its way through pipes canted to provide a whistle not vaugely unlike that of an elephant’s trumpet.

Cheers and applause sounded from second class. Terrence’s fellow first class passengers looked faintly scandalized.