Zero History

86. DOILIES
Fiona was getting her hair cut.
Milgrim stayed in the cabin, finishing Hollis’s book, then digging deeper into the
archival subbasement of Cabinet’s website, where he might learn, for instance, that the
watercolors in the hallways leading to Hollis’s room were early twentieth-century, by the
expatriate American eccentric Doran Lumley. Cabinet owned thirty of these, and rotated
them regularly.
He looked up at the decor of the cabin, remembering Hollis’s room at Cabinet, how
much he’d liked it. Designers from Hermès had based these cabins on ones in
transatlantic prewar German airships, though nobody was making much of a point of
that. Frosted aluminum, laminated bamboo, moss-green suede, and ostrich in one very
peculiar shade of orange. The three windows were round, portholes really, and through
them, if he looked, an empty sea, gone bronze with the setting sun.
The ekranoplan reminded Milgrim of the Spruce Goose, which he’d toured in Long
Beach as a high school student, but with its wings largely amputated. Weird Soviet
hybrids, the ekranoplans; they flew, at tremendous speeds, about fifteen feet above the
water, incapable of greater altitude. They had been designed to haul a hundred tons of
troops or cargo, very quickly, over the Black or Baltic Sea. This one, an A-90 Orlyonok,
had, like all the others, been built in the Volga Shipyard, at Nizhni Novgorod. Milgrim
already knew more about them than he cared to, as he was supposed to be translating a
four-inch stack of technical and historical documents for Bigend. With Fiona here, he
hadn’t made much progress.
He’d tried working in the smallest of the four lounges, on the top deck, directly behind
the flight deck (if that was the term, in something that arguably voyaged, rather than
flew). There was scarcely anyone there, usually, and he could take the papers and his
laptop. But the wifi was excellent onboard, and he’d found himself Googling things there,
eating croissants, drinking coffee. That was where he’d discovered Cabinet’s site.
“That’s Cabinet, isn’t it?” the Italian girl had asked, topping up his coffee. “Have you
stayed there?”
“No,” Milgrim had said, “but I’ve been there.”
“I used to work there,” she’d said, smiling, and walked back toward the galley, looking
very smart in her Jun Marukawa tunic and skirt. Fiona said that Bigend, with the Hermès
ekranoplan, had gone totally Bond villain, and that the crew uniforms were the icing on
the cake. Still, Milgrim had thought, no denying the girl looked good in her Marukawa.
But when he’d finally settled down to translate what was really quite dreadful prose,
Bigend had emerged from the flight deck, the Klein Blue suit freshly pressed.
He’d taken a seat opposite Milgrim, at the small round table, the suit contrasting