more blood flowing in smoking freedom and white hands half
closed on severed arms and white faces half closed in raped oblivion
— perhaps no ship now would ever jum p to Otzapoc where final
chaos had broken into the universe from the black Outside and the
seeds of universal perdition germinated at this moment.
W hen I slept I dreamed we were going skiing but the heel clip
was broken and I couldn’t get my ski to stay on. Kolissa, Albion and
the others started to move off, laughing. I cut my finger on the clip
and the end joint fell off, lying there on the snow, sunshine glinting
on the nail and three bloodspot flowers in the snow beside it.
Kolissa and the others had gone. Black storm clouds piled behind
the mountains and flowed across the sky. I woke gripped by huge
‘2
,04:
Anthony Peacey
rage against Kolissa.
Two bottomless days I fell around Greenball before my jag came.
As soon as sneak picked up something, I would send: ‘Jagging to
Otzapoc, Bennet-Kenny system. Jagging to Otzapoc, Bennet-
Kenny system,’ along with my everloving face. And this strange
jack came ghosting up on my faceplate with eyeglasses that I’d
never seen anyone actually wearing — ‘Yes, I can give you a ride,’ he
said. Then, ‘I take it you are in orbit — whereabouts?’
I sent my path definition.
‘How do I find you, then?’
‘Your computer will have accepted this data already. Just tell it to
latch onto my sneak and they’ll close us.’
‘Your what?’
‘Sneak — Sensory, Navigation and Communications — it’s a
little computer.’
‘Oh yes. Let’s see —
‘Problem?’ I said. He was looking at something.
‘I was just checking the instruction codes.’
He must have had them pinned up beside his console. I was a bit
tickled in my despair over entrusting life and limb to this oddball.
But we closed, I got into his can, got out of sleezy feeling tiny and
stick-limbed like an ant on the metal mesh floor while sleezy
hunkered into the sleezy bay and burbled, beginning to flush itself
and tank up with expendables.
And walked light-footed with the coveralls brushing my skin past
aloof machinery cabinets to the dark control cabin where instrument displays burned green and red and the stars burned cold through vertiginous glass.
‘There,’ he said dangling a finger towards a rag hung over the
couch lieback stick, ‘I spilt coffee on the seat.’
I started to wipe the sticky black upholstery.
‘No, no, just spread it under you.’
I glanced up: his other hand tangled in the attitude controls over
his head — head with a reflection of an instrument glow on baldness between strands of hair.
‘Oh all right,’ he said.
But I was an animal, dumb, introverted, incapable of making
civilized conversation. Destination? Origin? Name?
‘Bandy Spiragel,’ I told him.
‘Bandy . . . ’ He was a thoughtful old jack. ‘Would that be from
Pantopash, with voicing of the p and t£’
Jagging
205
‘No. As far as I know I’ve no ancestors from that arm. It’s short
for Bandito. My old dear got it one day playing with the library
keyboard — it means outlaw or robber in one of the early Earth
languages.’
‘Fascinating.’
‘Yeah, she thought it was sort of romantic.’
‘Does she think catching rides around the stars — jagging, you
call it? — is romantic?’
He knew the word all right, it was just his learned other-worldly
way. But I liked his question. My mother, one of the old man’s
eleven wives (and I was the second of her two only sons), had
assumed I would follow in his footsteps and be a dirtfooted breeder
on faraway farout longlost Swannest helping to boost the population in the traditional, honourable manner, though the clone labs have been pouring them out for fifty years now and the Fempref
Immigration Scheme past history for almost as long. He was right:
she had not been impressed with my jagging, but years have passed
and now when I happen home she likes to hear my stories. W hat
she cannot swallow is my longtime exclusive attachment to Kolissa.
‘Yes,’ he nodded, ‘yes’, as his ship breathed and sang softly like an
insect in whose cranium we lay, as the consoles twinkled like the
sectors of a nightbound city and we gods looking
