coffee-stained couch wrapped me warm and we climbed the grav-
slope away from Greenball to the point where we could cut. With
interest, with politeness, with thoughtful readiness to pull a new
point of view over his head like a woolly jum per he inquired about
Kolissa, then about our travels, our purposes, our means of support. Over the jagger with the catcrap on his faceplate he laughed like a horse. ‘But,’ he said, suddenly changing direction, ‘you come
in here, you climb out of your life support and send it into the bay
for a free refill of all the things it needs, fuel, concentrates, oxygen
. . . Doesn’t that embarrass you? Isn’t it begging?’ He was a strange
jack. I told him what he already knew: that sleezies are programmed to seek the bays at every opportunity, so I didn’t have to send it, though I accepted responsibility for it; that once he was
making the trip and had his can in motion the cost of flight modification to pick me up, of carrying me, of feeding my sleezy was less than one hundredth of a percent of the tripcost; and that usually a
pilot would not pick up a jagger unless he expected the return in
company, conversation, or the pure altruistic inner glow (I did
206
Anthony Peacey
smear that a bit) to repay him well. Amused, he agreed.
He had not mentioned the revolution. He’d been on Greenball
three days to pick up some kind of tagged juice for some weird
experiments so I supposed he didn’t know, and I was reluctant to
tell him, but did in the end. And this jack, Claudian Fainey-Juveh
(he had introduced himself), did a strange thing with his mouth,
pursed his lips while making the upper one tall, and said ‘I wonder
if it will alter things much.’ And then, Are you sure?’
‘Yeah, oh yeah. The pilot who lifted me into ring said. Spacevine
is always accurate, no one says more than they actually know, kind
of tradition.’
‘Ah yes. I’m not actually on Otzapoc — I’ll take you there,
though — your life support will take you down, won’t it? — I’ve
been on Trivash for a couple of years. The last time I was on
Otzapoc itself was more than a year ago. I hardly heard anything of
Jahenry — I rather got the impression that he was out of favour
with most people.’
‘Would you have heard, though?’ I said, perhaps because he’d
questioned the morality of jagging.
‘W hat do you mean?’ Still the polite interested inquirer.
‘Well, people often don’t hear about things they’re not interested
in.’
He chuckled. ‘Quite so. I’m not very interested in politics. As a
m atter of fact I see the whole business as predetermined, as
organic, like ocean currents for example. The demagogues that
arise are mere opportunists taking advantage of the currents,
riding them. When they can no longer hang on, or when they try to
alter their courses, they are swept aside.’
Right, right, right. And ocean currents bring storms and ocean
currents bring sunshine and we the bathers the beachcombers the
surfers — we take what comes. We were bound, this Fainey-Juveh
and me, in beautiful understanding and agreement.
Trivash, then. I had heard the name. Yes, he explained, one of
the twenty-seven moons of Bubutap, great raging storming
whirling gas giant of the Bennet-Kenny system. Bubutap of giant
lightnings like that old seagod’s fork, Bubutap of the vortex-edged
speeding methane-ammonia hurricane belts, Bubutap of the
orange angry skewed thunderous eyes. (I knew there was some
weird passion at the core of his life, even from when he looked at
that list off-camera before he picked me up — I could see the list
now, pale brown fax skin stabbed over a knob, curled and awkward
Jagging
207
to read. Now, stepping from great god globe Bubutap he submerges in his private ocean current.) Ages ago pioneers from Otzapoc’s neighbour Heljring terra-formed Trivash and founded an empire that lasted for ten thousand
years. Most of the other planets and satellites in the system were left
natural, but the empire colonised them all — with
