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Authors: M. John Harrison
Tags: SciFi-Masterwork
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numbered one hundred Denebian mainliners sweating out their unnamed obligation to the King), Chalice Veronica was alone behind his secret door. His reptilian, scrawny hand urged Truck through the gap; he cocked his head and listened; he threw the steel lever that fastened the bolthole.
'Run for it, Captain!' he hissed. 'The invading faction has been embarrassed; they are preparing a final stand.' And he made off down a low, ill-lighted tunnel. Crouching and lurching, scraping the top of his head on ancient stinking brick, his feet reluctant in two inches of evil water, Truck followed.
They had made perhaps four hundred yards from the motor pool when the floor sank a foot and the bolthole cleared its throat behind them with a vast, bellowing cough. Dust stormed about them, the lights went out, and they clung together in the dark, staggering about to keep their balance like practitioners of a strange vice. Locked in that unpleasant embrace, the King's sour old junk-breath in his nostrils, Truck felt the earth creep and shift in the dark. He was deafened, there was foul grit in his eyes and in his mouth.
After millennia, or perhaps seconds, the subsidence stabilized. Track disengaged himself from the King's arms, spat, and rubbed his eyes.
'The whole bloody Snort's come down on top of ns,' he suggested.
Veronica bared his yellow teeth in the gloom.
'I don't think so, Captain. But someone — inadvertently, perhaps — has made sure that West Central won't hold spacers for some time to come, and we seem to be safe for the Moment. Look!'
At the further end of the tunnel, a blue light glowed. They walked toward it, brushing ineffectively at the filth on their clothes.
'If s a pusher's Galaxy, Captain Truck,' said the King complacently, eating white iced cakes and applying the traditional tourniquet to his upper arm with a stained silk necktie four centuries old.
The Party ebbed and flowed desultorily around them like a thick, landlocked sea as they sat in quaint inflatable chairs (vinyl gone yellow as a junkie's face with age, its transparency clouded) beneath the Renfield Street silos.
'Each in our own way, IWG and UASR, myself, even poor mad Grishkin and the masters of his idiotic religion, we keep people from remembering that they hurt, or that they are made puzzled and miserable by the immensity of the Galaxy, the irreversibility of their own humanity. It isn't a state that can last of course — ' He snickered at himself, licked pale crumbs from his blue, anoxic lips. 'Still, we never close, Captain. We make you feel nice.'
Fat worms of cable ran the floor of the abandoned cistern — one of the four that served Veronica's trade — to power the drying plants and chemical vats; and batteries of floodlights slung fifty feet up in a network of girders poured out a devastating heat. The King's court moved slowly and amiably, drenched with warmth, sleepy with it; the party had become introspective, like a frog in the sun.
'A pusher's market, and you're a prime commodity now. Alice Gaw needs you, so the Arabs must have you — oh, yes! Don't avoid the issue, Captain! Why else would Gadaffi ben Barka, nobody's fool and an astute commando, lead an absurd strike on an obsolete prison in a cold country? He's innovative, but not given to adventures.'
Truck was appalled by the speed of the King's intelligence operation. Eighteen hours had passed since the escape from West Central, and he had slept most of them away. Now he sucked on a knickerbocker glory, sweating a little, and meditated on price — the King being the King and information being another pusher's market.
'I hope they wiped each other up,' he said.
Veronica closed his eyes sleepily. 'It's unlikely. Both are survivors. Whoever exploded himself down there, it wasn't Colonel ben Barka. And remember: it was Alice Gaw's aide-de-camp who got caught in the "accidental" bombardment of Weber II; she'd been off-planet for five hours or more — ' He tapped his
'Run for it, Captain!' he hissed. 'The invading faction has been embarrassed; they are preparing a final stand.' And he made off down a low, ill-lighted tunnel. Crouching and lurching, scraping the top of his head on ancient stinking brick, his feet reluctant in two inches of evil water, Truck followed.
They had made perhaps four hundred yards from the motor pool when the floor sank a foot and the bolthole cleared its throat behind them with a vast, bellowing cough. Dust stormed about them, the lights went out, and they clung together in the dark, staggering about to keep their balance like practitioners of a strange vice. Locked in that unpleasant embrace, the King's sour old junk-breath in his nostrils, Truck felt the earth creep and shift in the dark. He was deafened, there was foul grit in his eyes and in his mouth.
After millennia, or perhaps seconds, the subsidence stabilized. Track disengaged himself from the King's arms, spat, and rubbed his eyes.
'The whole bloody Snort's come down on top of ns,' he suggested.
Veronica bared his yellow teeth in the gloom.
'I don't think so, Captain. But someone — inadvertently, perhaps — has made sure that West Central won't hold spacers for some time to come, and we seem to be safe for the Moment. Look!'
At the further end of the tunnel, a blue light glowed. They walked toward it, brushing ineffectively at the filth on their clothes.
'If s a pusher's Galaxy, Captain Truck,' said the King complacently, eating white iced cakes and applying the traditional tourniquet to his upper arm with a stained silk necktie four centuries old.
The Party ebbed and flowed desultorily around them like a thick, landlocked sea as they sat in quaint inflatable chairs (vinyl gone yellow as a junkie's face with age, its transparency clouded) beneath the Renfield Street silos.
'Each in our own way, IWG and UASR, myself, even poor mad Grishkin and the masters of his idiotic religion, we keep people from remembering that they hurt, or that they are made puzzled and miserable by the immensity of the Galaxy, the irreversibility of their own humanity. It isn't a state that can last of course — ' He snickered at himself, licked pale crumbs from his blue, anoxic lips. 'Still, we never close, Captain. We make you feel nice.'
Fat worms of cable ran the floor of the abandoned cistern — one of the four that served Veronica's trade — to power the drying plants and chemical vats; and batteries of floodlights slung fifty feet up in a network of girders poured out a devastating heat. The King's court moved slowly and amiably, drenched with warmth, sleepy with it; the party had become introspective, like a frog in the sun.
'A pusher's market, and you're a prime commodity now. Alice Gaw needs you, so the Arabs must have you — oh, yes! Don't avoid the issue, Captain! Why else would Gadaffi ben Barka, nobody's fool and an astute commando, lead an absurd strike on an obsolete prison in a cold country? He's innovative, but not given to adventures.'
Truck was appalled by the speed of the King's intelligence operation. Eighteen hours had passed since the escape from West Central, and he had slept most of them away. Now he sucked on a knickerbocker glory, sweating a little, and meditated on price — the King being the King and information being another pusher's market.
'I hope they wiped each other up,' he said.
Veronica closed his eyes sleepily. 'It's unlikely. Both are survivors. Whoever exploded himself down there, it wasn't Colonel ben Barka. And remember: it was Alice Gaw's aide-de-camp who got caught in the "accidental" bombardment of Weber II; she'd been off-planet for five hours or more — ' He tapped his
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