hospitable, but I didn’t like to say anything which might offend
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Anthony Peacey
him. We were silent for a long time. When I voiced my fears for
Kolissa he snapped at me, said I was stupid, she would be all right
along with all the other little nurses. Kolissa isn’t a nurse. Perhaps
he really didn’t want me along anymore, or perhaps he thought
anger would drive home reassurance, or perhaps I had struck too
close to some fear of his own.
He sent a call to Trivash. First he asked me about Svend transformations. Sure, I said, his sneak would have agreed a set with his home computer long ago, and he could ask the sneak for the instruction codes. Yes, he had thought so. But I suggested he didn’t use transformations, as what Jahenry’s mob couldn’t crack might
arouse suspicion. In some ways he was like a little kid. He had
nothing political to say, just didn’t want them listening in, but
finally he sent the call on open beam. H alf an hour later his wife’s
reply came in. She was worried too. Some archaeological big jack
coming to see the opening of the tomb had been shot out of the sky
leaving Otzapoc. It was supposed to have been a mistake, but the
big jack was dead anyway, dead beyond hope of reconstruction.
After that it was a long trip, Fainey-Juveh catatonic with rage
and gloom, me unable to cheer him spinning slowly down into my
own black vortex of nightmare where Kolissa was torn from me
and torn apart, me torn apart as she was torn apart in the black
bottomless vortex of space, those stars mocking through the falling
falling glass, our can falling falling spinning slowly down the vortex
to nothing. I . . . I . . . 1 . , . Couldn’t think I. Couldn’t without
Kolissa think I, without Kolissa I am not whole, I am already torn
apart and the mist of her blood, my blood, our blood freezing in
black iron microscopic droplets clouds of invisible black glass
microdrops lost in the mocking hollows between the stars. Severed
like pitiful disgusting halfshell Fomalhauti by Jahenry’s steel wall
which jerking clipped black moustaches drop like a guillotine
blade. Severed and spinning . . .
On Trivash I started to drink. I should have known better but I
spent two days lurching from hour to hour with hours lost between,
from m orning to noon, from stupor to lucidity, loathsome to myself
with alcoholic sand beneath my eyelids and the skin of my arms,
my hands heavy and hot wdth thick blood from my drunken heart.
Hateful to myself (lying in my closed room) for caving in like this in
front of Fainey-Juveh’s lovely brow'n angel wife. His second wife —
‘I got rid of the other one,’ he had said, then amended that: ‘Well, we
no longer suited each other when it came to it, and we agreed to
Jigging
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part. It was very civilised, really.’ And married this brown angel
many years younger than himself. But she already had her two
daughters and he, childless before, loved them and her — loved
with passion, loved with joy, where before he had been able to love
only his dead dust empire. So that when we circled pocked and pitted dark savage ravaged airless Trivash greater than I had imagined but me seeing nothing, no sign of scratching humanity, only his
camp, beneath rolling Bubutap more huge than I had dreamed, the
star-sky and the rest of the universe making way for him, and when
we squeezed down (me squeezed in the coffee-stained couch),
squeezed, cushioned, lightly stood then walked through the tunnel
to the camp sitting partly above ground like frogs’ eyes and partly
below, his three angels met him (the only three people on Trivash I
had discovered and was surprised) and dragged his soul up out of
the black horrors into mere burning and abiding anger — while I
was more alone because he was made whole hand in hand with
Praliya, with Limini and Pixr clinging and jigging around them.
Limini and Pixr, eleven and nine years old, with teeth, such palisades of
