THE ACTUARIAN

The kindly voice inside her head whispered the words as Victoria Carstairs peered down the darkened companionway into Steerage. The nautical star on the back of her left hand glowed pink as she contemplated her dilemma.

The Carstairs—a good family, not First Class, but still respectable—had always held less than ideally situated living quarters on the SS Utopia. Victoria’s family members were to become civil servants after Planetfall. May it come in our lifetime. Their accommodations were far better than those in Steerage, she imagined, but several inconveniently located bulkheads between the Carstairs’ suite and Mrs. Pettigrew’s Academy for Second-Class Boys and Girls made it necessary to ascend to the promenade and then circumnavigate half the ship before descending again to the Lido deck.

Victoria consulted her timepiece. According to , which she had liberated from the First-Class reading room, if she descended down through the bowels of the ship, through Steerage and Crew Quarters, Victoria could be in her seat by the first bell. However, as this area was clearly out of bounds to Second-Class passengers, the