A Trip to the Stars by Nicholas Christopher Page B

murmured.
    I nodded, mesmerized by the complicated play of water amid all that marble and bronze—like a ballet in which everything was in motion except the dancer herself.
    “It was commissioned by the original owner of the hotel,” Samax said, “a Frenchman named Canopus from whom I bought this place. The design was by a Swede named Spica, who was also the hotel’s architect. He oversaw the actual sculptors, and returned to the hotel to install the fountain when I became owner. I approved what he’d done, and after a couple of months Spica finished and left without a word. Just a note saying his design was based on a fable, though no one has been able to find its source. I hired both an art historian and a historian of religion to trace its origins, and they came up empty-handed. And I was never able to find Spica again.”
    The doorman wore a white jacket with yellow epaulets and a black fez. The fez made me think of Egypt, and indeed he was Egyptian.Rectangularly shaped as the building of which he was the guardian, he had an impassive face, a thick nose, and unflickering brown eyes. Had he wanted to block the doorway, I thought, he needed only to step into it and he would have filled the frame as neatly as the twin doors themselves.
    “Good evening, Azu,” Samax greeted him, and he responded with a respectful nod, politely looking me over as he held the door open.
    Entering the lobby, I stopped in my tracks and whistled softly. It, too, was enormous, a long black desk along the right-hand wall, a pair of black leather couches on the left, and at the far end a bank of elevators. Samax merely smiled and stood aside as I stepped farther into the room, gaping.
    The walls were great slabs of black marble, veined red, that ran unbroken to the ceiling about fifty feet above. The marble was inlaid with bronze and silver astronomical objects—comets, planets, and clusters of stars—and figures from the zodiac like Cancer, Pisces, and Scorpio. Polished stones, like lapis and onyx, highlighted their eyes, teeth, and scales. The white ceiling was unadorned, but the floor, a chessboard of white and black marble tiles, was centered by an enormous zodiacal wheel of polished brass set into the marble. I stopped in the segment representing Sagittarius, the Archer, who was poised intently with drawn bow.
    “Of course, that’s your sign, isn’t it,” Samax observed, for, as I would learn, he was not someone who missed very much. “Canopus was obsessed with the zodiac,” he continued. “He put zodiacs all over the place. The basin of that fountain outside is an enormous zodiacal wheel. And there was another huge wheel in the garden, which I had removed. He consulted astrologers whenever he made a decision, but I’m afraid it didn’t do him much good.” Samax caught and held my eye. “No one can tell you how to make good decisions,” he said, “they can only suggest where your decisions may lead you. Canopus was a bad businessman, and a worse hotelier, and no amount of astrology could save him from that. He ran this place into the ground. When he went bankrupt, I bought it for a song—for less money than a house would have cost me—and then I spent a fortune fixing it up, but it was worth it. I kept the name because I like it. Good evening, Della,” he called out to a woman who had appeared through a leather-padded door behind the desk.
    She was slight and straight-backed, with slate-colored hair, a woman whose age, from a distance, was difficult to determine. She was wearing a red jacket, red hair band, and bright coral lipstick. “This is Enzo,” Samax said loudly. “He’ll be with us now. Would you make sure that his room is ready.”
    “Welcome, Enzo,” she said in a smooth, easy drawl as she crossed the lobby to the elevator bank. “It’s good to have you with us.”
    “Thanks,” I said hoarsely.
    “Come, let me show you something,” Samax said, and I followed him over to the desk. As soon as Della