bothered. I knew what to expect, I’d been in a hundred Pororaks, so
I just retreated and went outside onto the endless desert apron of
concrete with a few metal beetle tractors moving slowly and the
ships tall under the bright fanfare of dawnlight that now conquered
the sky.
And made my way to the staff and crew cafeteria through a side
door that a deep entombed computer without hum an resentments
opened for me without question.
Getting a coffee I said to a pilot with crescents of bone beneath
his eyes, and long lips, ‘Ya know anyone going up?’
‘Yeah brother, I know me, I’m going up and I don’t want no dead
weight.’
H alf an hour and several pilots later I was alone at a table in the
cafeteria, the cafeteria getting busier, and there were sad stains on
the shiny surface, scratches and old burn marks, there was dirt
under my nails, the keyslip was worn, my coffee cup was empty and
dirty, a light panel in the ceiling was flickering forlornly and all the
pilots in their uniforms or their stiff dungarees or their grease-
polished leathers looked right through me. Once, I remembered, I
hung around a rotting space port for two weeks while its tables became dirtier, its walls more cracked, its tin roofs more rusty, rotting towards the inevitable heat death the cinder plain the ash heap the
dust the broken bones of everything cooling and falling to dust the
graveyard of the universe. A squirt of coffee belched into the back
of my throat sour with last night’s rotting wine.
‘Jagger?’
‘Yeah.’
‘Where to?’
Leathers, this one, well worn. He dumped his bag on the floor
and his coffee on my table.
‘Otzapoc. Bennet-Kenny system.’
‘Got your sleezy?’
‘Yeah.’
‘I’ll put you in orbit. I’m going to Jaxon’s, the other way.’
And me out onto the wide free concrete running in the wide
Jagging
201
bright morning to open the locker so light shines in on my slcezy
which is like a crab-armoured empty iron red and black dwarf, but
ten feet tall, garaged in a metal nest, its back open and empty. I
load my bag into a pocket on its monster thigh. I climb in through
the back, seal in, power up, bringing my big red and black iron
man to life — I’m a monster red and black iron man now. I back
out, metal-bear-swipe the locker door shut, stride over and hand in
the keyslip to the tired clerk at the window, me wide-grinning down
at him through the wide wide glass faceplate then striding off with
seven league iron power boot strides feeling ten feet tall because I
am ten iron feet tall to the sun-glinting ship where the pilot is waiting to lift with a cargo of ivory and apes and peacocks, sandalwood, cedarwood, and iron man me.
Twenty minutes later I was beyond morning and night lolling
weightless on the edge of space’s dark ocean in the silence of a billion years. The island planet Greenball lay ten thousand kilometres away, diametered ten thousand kilometres, Dourisburg and all the
other burgs with all their tired faces shrunken to invisible specks in
the perspectives of the universe. The ship was receding above, below or beside the worldball — its pilot hadn’t said a dozen words.
Down in the rabbit hole of the sleezy arm my fingers played the
radio buttons and his face ghosted up on my faceplate drawing my
focus, though stars still blurred beyond.
‘Thanks again,’ I said.
‘No trouble.’ The voice briefly shared my helmet where there’s
room for a cat to walk and stroke your face — and was a jagger once
who used to take his cat with him right there in his sleezy which
must have been a beautiful friendly sharing of warmth and fur and
solitude (solitude as I had now) except that there were jokes about
catshit on the faceplate — he used to feed it something to bind it
before a trip, except once when he was in a hurry . . .
The pilot almost smiled, then vanished, joining a host of others
winked from my faceplate about their business — company pilots,
astrogators, owner-lighters, work-trippers, richies, patrolmen
(sometimes), and those without faces — tinskippers and disembers
— all percolating along their own capillaries through the great
dark heaving breathing sighing semi-sentient microbic metropolitan lifemass of the universe. Gone. G’bye. Goodluck to you and to me.
His ship was tiny now, burning off for the jum p to Jaxon, and the
stars jewelled at me from a million years of serenity.
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Anthony Peacey
I
