She smiled in the darkness. “Is this, then, the secret to a successful captaincy? Pretense?”
“It is perhaps the only such secret.” He sighed. “Far too much of my captaincy, I fear, has been rooted in deception.”
“How can you say that, sir? You are one of the most honest men I have ever met!”
“I do strive to be, when I can.”
The silence stretched out, then, punctuated by the cry of a night-hunting shoshok. Arabella waited, feeling that if the captain were to speak about whatever might be troubling him, he should be allowed to do so in his own time.
“I am not,” he said at last, “the man I present myself to be. My full name and title is Farzand-i-Khas-i-Daulat-i-Inglishia Mansur-i-Zaman Amir-ul-Umra Maharaja Dhiraj Rajeshwar Sir Sri Maharaja-i-Rajgan Bhupendra Prakash Singh Mahendra Bahadur. Or was. Or would have been.”
Arabella blinked. Somewhere in that stream of syllables she thought she had heard a word from her childhood storybooks. “Did you say … Maharaja?”
“Yes. I was born to be a prince of India.”
This, Arabella thought, explained his regal bearing and almost inhuman poise, yet it raised far more questions than it answered. “So … so what occurred to change your estate?”
He sighed deeply. “When I was a young man, I had every advantage. Fine clothes, expansive hunting grounds, beautiful women … all were mine for the taking. Yet the one thing I desired more than any thing else was to waste my time tinkering with automata.”
“You should not disparage automata so, sir. They may be, I believe, instrumental to the future perfection of humanity.”
“My opinion today is much the same as yours, yet in my youth I was even more certain of it, to such a degree that I neglected my other duties. I avoided meals with my family, went days without sleep … all in pursuit of my notion that an automaton navigator could be built that would reduce the lengthy and hazardous voyage to Mars to something as simple as a stroll in the park.”
“And from this ‘notion,’ as you put it, Aadim was born.”
“Aadim, in his current form, was yet many years in the future. Yet so dedicated was I to his conception that, when presented with my bride-to-be, I callously dismissed her.” The twin stars of the captain’s eyes shimmered, then vanished. “I called her stupid and dull, only because she did not share my passion for automata. She went away in tears.”
Arabella listened in silence, wanting to reach out to this intelligent, gentle man whose memories brought him such pain.
“This insult,” he continued, “to the girl, to her family, and to my own father’s judgement in selecting her, was too great to be tolerated. He disinherited me immediately, and cast me out of the palace with only the clothes on my back.”
“How horrible that must have been,” Arabella breathed.
“I was unthinking and cruel, and received no worse in return.”
“But how could you be expected to survive under such circumstances?”
“I had friends, other enthusiasts of automata, who provided me with room and board for a time. But their lodgings were not large, and this arrangement soon made all of us uncomfortable, so I sought gainful employment. A learned man of my acquaintance, familiar with my theories regarding the potential of an automaton navigator, encouraged me to offer my services to the Honorable Mars Company. But upon my approach to the company’s grand and palatial offices, I suffered a crisis of confidence and decided, unwisely, to present my understanding of aerial navigation—which was, in truth, entirely abstract—as actual airship experience.” Again he sighed heavily. “I will never know how I was able to talk my way into that, my first commission as navigator. I certainly hope that, as captain, I would be able to take the true measure of such a charlatan as my own younger self. Perhaps my father, regretting his decision to disinherit me but unable to take me back without losing face, exerted some influence on my behalf. In any case, I was taken aboard—under the name Prakash Singh, the very simplest form of my own name, which is as common among my people as John Smith is with yours—and somehow managed to bring the ship to Fort Augusta without disaster.”