Paul Minct had hesitated after she spoke to him, but then he nodded agreement.
The streets of Galveston were full of whiteys who had failed to fulfil the ambitions they had conceived in Mississippi and Alabama and were now desperately trying to get back to New Orleans, but could not afford any kind of fare. Black travellers were beset by scores of them whining for help.
Sam Oakenhurst was glad when they got aboard the first schoomer available and sailed out into the peaceful waters of the Gulf. He and the Rose now had a better measure of the situation and yet he no longer had faith in his own good judgement. The thought of New Orleans was already beginning to obsess him.
The Rose begged him to rally. ‘It seems Mr Minct does intend to sail into the Fault. Yet why would he insist on your finding us a meat boat?’ (Paul Minct had commissioned Sam Oakenhurst to approach the machinoix.) ‘Does he want us alive when he goes in?’ Both agreed that Paul Minct had needed more partners only after Swift Thom had stirred some memory. ‘How does he plan to kill us?’ Sam wondered. ‘Perhaps he will not kill me until he has made sure of you, Rose. And you are necessary to him, I think. He knows you can help him.’
‘But you, too, are necessary if he is to get the meat boat. You heard him insist. It must only be a meat boat. Has anyone ever volunteered to sail on such a boat?’
‘It is forbidden,’ said Sam Oakenhurst. ‘He knows it is.’
‘Then he demands of you a complex betrayal. Is this how he would weaken us?’ The Rose began to brush her exquisite hair. ‘Who would you betray?’
‘Not you,’ he said. ‘Not myself. Nothing I value.’
‘Betray the machinoix and surely you betray yourself. You have explained all this to me. And in betraying yourself you must betray me. How will you resolve this? It is a problem worthy of Fearless Frank Force.’
She seemed to be mocking him.
‘A moral conundrum,’ she added.
There was a knock on their cabin door: A kiddikin bringing Mr Minct’s compliments and looking forward to the pleasure of their company in a game of Anvils and Pins.
‘I have earned your sarcasm, I know,’ Sam Oakenhurst said. ‘But I am still willing to learn from you. What will you teach me, Rose?’
‘You will learn that it is, space and time, always a question of scale.’ She touched his lips. ‘Meanwhile you must continue to risk your life. And you are sworn to serve me, are you not?’
‘On my honour,’ he said.
‘But in demanding your help I expose you to more than you ever expected,’ she said. ‘Perhaps you do not have the resources?’
‘I have them,’ he insisted.
‘You must draw upon your archetype.’ The Rose took his hand. Tonight her skin resembled fine, delicately shaded petals softly layered upon her sturdy frame. ‘I have lost my home and must destroy the man who robbed me of it. We are only barely related as species, you and I, but it is Time and Scale which separate us, Sam. In the ether we embrace metamorphosis. You and I, Sam, understand the dominating law of the multiverse. We are ruled by multiplying chance. But we need not be controlled by it. I knew Paul Minct in another guise. Now, I think, he clearly remembers me. He can always recall a weapon, that one, if not a woman. This pair, these shadows, are an afterthought. His interest in the Fault could be secondary now. First he must deal with us, for we threaten his existence. Perhaps he is afraid to let us reach the Fault with him, lest he be cheated of whatever it is he has schemed for? Believe me, Sam, Paul Minct will be giving us his full attention for the next few days. These others, they are scarcely real, merely 1st and 2nd Murderers.’
16. J’AI PASSE DEVANTTA PORTE
THE MACHINOIX HAD sniffed his coming. Sam Oakenhurst stood at the rail of the great triple-hulled schoomer and saw through Major Moyra’s glass that his brothers and sisters had assembled to greet him.
Their snorting, half-organic vehicles, dark green and brown with senility, drooled and defecated on the quayside while neither citizen nor armed militia dare show disgust or objection. In their city, the machinoix were ignored for the same reason quakes were ignored in Los Angeles. They were unavoidable and unpredictable.
Mr Sam Oakenhurst tasted their power as greedily as he embraced their kinship. His veins thrilled with the memory of his long courtships under the shutterbox, his lingering initiations, his education in seduction. Beware, he signalled the Rose, for I am enraptured already. I love you, Rose. Only you.
The Rose held fast to him and gave him the strength she could spare. He knew there was no physical danger. Any decision of his would be accepted, for he threatened nothing the machinoix valued. This knowledge was insufficient to steady his nerve. He had to call on his every resource and never reveal a hint of his condition to Paul Minct and his colleagues. The Rose, understanding the importance of this deception to her own interests, gave him more support. She had no choice. He was her only ally and while he lived so did she. And she loved him, she said.
By the time they had clambered down the gangway to the lighter, he was scarcely able to disguise the signs of his massive emotional conflict.
With her help, however, he succeeded. He at last stood four square on the quayside, clutching her arm once before advancing towards the middle vehicle from which oddly tattooed hands beckoned, their fingers fractured and re-set at peculiar angles with inserted precious stones and gold. Gnarled as old hedges, the hands had the appearance of eccentrically made robot digits, jointed and decorated for their beauty rather than their function.
The Rose was casual enough as she turned to inform a nervous Mr Minct that Sam Oakenhurst spoke machinoix perfectly. ‘He is the only possible interpreter. He will get us swift passage to Biloxi’
‘It must be the meat boat.’ Paul Minct was wheezing from his recent climb up the iron waterstair. ‘I know they reserve it for themselves but it is what we must have.’
By arrangement with the ship’s captain they were to stay in Rue Dauphine at the Hotel Audobon, a collection of old iron slave shacks turned into elegant cabines à la mode. The uniformed whiteys who greeted them at the gates were not permitted to take the little luggage the gamblers brought.
These were cabins of choice, let only to passing visitors of their own high persuasion. When they were settled, Paul Minct told them, they must assemble at Brown’s Bar Vieux on Royale, where he would hire the backroom and a couple of simul-bottles. They could thus link up for a rough and ready run-through of their plan to enter the Fault aboard the meat boat. ‘We’ll be going in through Mustard Splash or Ketchup Cave.’
The bottles were the best quality the Rose had ever seen. Major Moyra and Jasmine Shah were experts at handling and conducting them, massaging unstable gases, nursing their milky energy into responsive motes.
Before they had arrived, Paul Minct had refused to tell her why they must go to this trouble when the Terminal’s huge V resource was at anyone’s disposal. He appeared to have reasons for not alerting the people at the Terminal to his intentions.
Her instincts told her that this whole charade was part of a complicated plot to trap her before killing her. It was unnecessarily elaborate, she thought.
But it was that which convinced her. Elaboration was Paul Minct’s trademark. It was characteristic of his whole game thus to hide a simple brute intention.