Greenball but it felt as though I lay on my mother’s breast. Oh glad
now that I had worked like an animal for a whole unending dogged
year in the mines on Gargantua’s filthy seventh moon — worked
like a gorilla, like an ox, like a hog tusk-tearing from the rock a
mountain of cred to spend on my darling baby ten-foot-tall Space
Life Support System mother of mother’s womb in which I now lay
in mother space — this iron baby fit to weld up the glaring heart of
an orbital powerhouse, fit to tear the salvage from derelict fortresses with its laser claws, fit and fitted to mother me for a month then comet me down through deep dense atmospheres and baby
me into the arms of planetary seas. Oh great Sleezy my Sleezy —
and I wave my arms and metal-baby-fat legs picturing myself like a
leg-waving beetle of red and black metal.
Serenity.
I fluffed a jet and rolled to float up down sideways — my back to
Greenball and face open to the loving stars that look distant but are
near to a jagger, and lay in space flowing out among the stars and
hearing the swish of eternal seas or of my blood and contented
body noises and the muted life of the sleezy mothering me, smiling
a little at the floor-sweeper, the keyslip clerk, the coffee girl —
though she, young, probably made it with some sweaty youth last
night bursting the membrane of her life, when his phallus burst in
her flesh, flowing out when his hot seed lava flowed, flowing out
into the veiled protoplasmic bejewelled intergalactic teeming
dreaming lifemass.
The Jaxon pilot hadn’t said a dozen words but three were ‘revolution on Otzapoc’. Okay, so a quiet affair — Berlit gently removed from office by the firm minions of Jahenry, bloodless, civilised —
Berlit given a villa in Terengay, in the hills, to live quietly gentlemanly until his years closed or the quietly crazy political tide changed — hardly a ripple reaching the streets as the ostensible
nominal self-supposed leadership of the Otzapocan local cell of the
socio-economic natural biologic evolutionary intergalactic lifemass
changed, hardly a ripple touching the white tree-hidden suburban
hospital where recovered Kolissa worked and waited. Ah Kolissa I
see your intergalactic jewel eye swelling sweet glass living lens shining back the light of the universe — soon soon now we’ll be together and jag jag jag the dark lovely highways between the stars hand in
hand in iron sleezy waldo hand then down to tropic seas a hundred
thousand lightyears distant and caressful sand no iron between
Jagging
203
flesh and flesh sweet my lovely Kolissa.
The loving stars shone back at me from far, hard and dying.
Stars die. Birth life decay and death and decay the wheel of life
and death. Stars dying. Booted helmeted black-goggled storm
troopers rushing from Berlit’s rent blood-smoking body to the
white hospital to spatter its walls with red and rage, Kolissa glaring
disbelief at the open red mouth across her arm drooling blood from
open tubes of arterial channels, Kolissa head-lolling sense-battered
beyond perception of the open red mouth between her thighs,
helmeted booted black-goggled iron gun-wielding rapists laughing
pounding laughing raping with guns of flesh and guns of iron.
H ard and dying stars laughed at me.
And sneak picked up nothing, no data flashed on my faceplate,
no luminous ghostly figures veiled the arrogant jewels of dying
stars. No ship rose from Greenball to burrow through chaos to
those stars.
I called Greenball’s Data Central knowing the laughing fat
Buddha computer would nothing know of revolution on Otzapoc,
no news service torpedo having been allowed down its black nonspace rabbit hole yet while the new government was still buttoning its pants.
The taciturn Jaxon pilot had said no word to turn me aside and
his silence supposed no danger to fellow travellers, angels of space
keeping their own counsel. Yet I saw the hard stars die with no love
left for specks of hum an flesh adrift upon savage tides of radiation
and vacuum and mindless history.
No ship rose but one making lightplus to the other side of the
universe as if fleeing benighted Otzapoc. And perhaps they all
knew, knew more than I, more death
