'Never argue with your bos'n, Captain,' advised Himation, and with flourishes made Fix a present of the lizard.
'I'm sure I don't know what to do with it,' grumbled the Chromian, but you could see he was pleased.
The asteroid was hollow.
Himation let Truck and Tiny through an outer shell, a primum mobile, of workshops, where pandemonium reigned among powerful lifting rigs and ships components to which Truck could put no name; where masked relatives of the wreckers at Carter's Snort waved their plasma torches like hayforks and seemed to take altogether as much pleasure in putting things together as their cousins did in taking them apart. After this demonic leaping and cutting and commotion of shadows, they passed through a sphere of armories — deserted and still, racked with dyne-torpedoes and the barrels of reaction cannon like organ pipes in the chill of an ancient church. 'Pater comes here often. Aren't they fine?' And finally a living area, where the air was heavy with an enigma of luxury: passages tapestried with hunting scenes by long dead artists from Oudry to Desportes, full of strangely clothed anarchists who nodded to Himation or halted their errands to attend to cheval glasses of crystal and adjust an item of dress.
They glimpsed through half-open doors a room whose tall, latticed windows seemed to look out over a pale lake among oaks where the great wet leaves of hemlock hung melancholic and inviting; another with a huge mantel on which ticked a clock shaped like a gilded elephant; a third empty but for one fauteuil — a woman wearing a white dress oddly spotted with crimson reclined there, slowly passing the rings on the fingers of her left hand to those of her right as she listened with immobile expression to the voice of a man they could not see. Himation smiled. 'A hologram,' he said. 'The Hotel Pimodan, 1849. Maryx, who inspired the Mignon of Ary Scheffer. She is listening to Baudelaire. They are waiting for Gautier and the snake-woman and the rest of the salon' He entered the room and pressed his hand through the languorous, mask-like face. 'See? Isn't it beautiful?'
'Are you a history professor or something?' asked Tiny politely. Truck sniggered, impressed against his will.
But Himation only shrugged laconically and, further on, rapped lightly twice at an elegant double door. The room he ushered them into was a spacious airy studio, lighted as if by a northlight as precious and passing as the Art it imitated. On a dais at the end of the chamber were easel and canvas; at the other sat a little sallow-faced girl with grave eyes and tiny breasts. Her clothes hung over a lacquered screen, and beside her was a basket of crochet work and a volume of poems; and, as she worked, she thoughtfully sang a song about artists and the way they loved:
Her eyes rested briefly on the intruders, calm, uninvolved. Around her on the eggshell-tinted walls hung Hokusai prints of uncanny refinement, arranged with harmonious aloofness; ethereal porcelain ginger jars adorned with the flowers of prunus and hawthorn rested on their shelves in rapturously exact alignment; there were silken fans decorated with dim balletic shapes. It was a fabrication of Art in itself, exquisite, ephemeral.
But it was not the room, despite its dreamy invitation; nor was it the girl. It was the man before the easel, with his tube of white lead and hog-hair bristle.
He was small and dapper, with tidy brown hands. He wore a white linen suit, a green carnation in the buttonhole of the left lapel. His eyes were dark and sharp, yet bubbling — as if a constant rediscovery of their use were being made behind them. His hair was black and curly, with a strange white streak. His palette was a nocturne of grays and midnight blue. He addressed the canvas with deft, quick motions, but somehow contrived to suggest by them an air of eloquent idleness. He was a thief and a rebel, he was a man of discrimination, he was ageless. He was Swinburne Sinclair-Pater, aesthete extraordinary and Interstellar Anarchist; and he prowled the Galaxy like a brilliant tiger, stalked the self-respect of IWG and UASR; and — snap! Bright teeth.
'Ah, le petit Manteau, au chapeau bizarre!' he cried, waving at Himation. 'Come in, dear boy! (Heloise, we are finished for today. Come tomorrow at the same time.) Captain Truck' — he dropped his brush and sprang down from the dais, extending his hand — 'how wistful of you to come in fancy dress!' Truck looked down at himself resentfully. 'Do you like my studio? The porcelain is K'ang, wonderful in its brittleness, hm? (Come, Heloise: out! Out!)' And he gestured extravagantly toward the door. The girl thinned her lips at him, shrugged, indolently put down her crochet hook and took up her clothes.
He forgot her and harried Himation instead. 'An unimaginative time with the Queen of Cups, eh, Manteau? Still living in the Paltry Century? But you gave him my message. Look, well go into my living room shall we?'
By contrast, the suite of rooms adjoining the studio was frugal and austere, with little chintz curtains, stained floorboards bordering Turkish carpets, and an atmosphere of cherished isolation. In the sitting room, which was achieved by way of a low passage and a Gothic doorway, there were a few short shelves of old books, a scrubbed deal table, and some stiff but charming high-backed chairs. For ornament, a bowl of dried rose petals stood in the precise center of the table. On the walls of this prim apartment were hung two pictures: one a head of some wine-god, unfathomable and sensually cruel; the other a rough sketch of a morose, stooping young man — thin, heavy-jawed, with deep, close-set eyes, dressed in the garments of a defunct High Church order.
Here, they sat down. Himation disappeared into the depths of the suite, returning shortly to flourish his cloak over the table top (rose petals stirred like leaves of another year, and a remote scent filled the room) and manifest a bottle of wine. He held up his hand — prolonged the moment — four glasses appeared, their stems between his fingers. A faint musical tone. Pater smiled on indulgently.
John Truck, like most spacers, was strictly contemporary. He preferred the latest things. He had no particular use for history, little knowledge of it except where it coincided with fashion, and no desire whatever to live in it. He regarded Pater's rose bowl with suspicion, feeling that he might be the butt of some rare intellectual joke, and Pater himself with a faint hostility. He couldn't understand the dualism of character suggested by the rich studio on one hand and this monkish living room on the other; he couldn't discover a reason for any of it.
So when Pater, eyeing Himation's hands with severe appreciation as they passed the glasses round the table, said, 'I admired your effort on Morpheus, Captain,' he didn't quite know how to respond. After a moment:
'I only did it for the money,' he said curtly. He sensed an opening gambit and was determined not to be enlisted. 'It was a long time ago, and on another world; I don't remember much about it; it was the last time I ever pushed dope. I didn't even realize your lot were organizing a revolution until quite late on. I probablv wouldn't have done it if I had.'
This last wasn't wholly true. He had enjoyed the last days on Morpheus when it became plain through the smoke and the smarting eyes that the putsch had succeeded. Living among the ruins had made no demand on him; and, like Himation, the anarchists who had used his peddling operation as a cover had been self-contained, amiable, demanding little. But he had been used, nonetheless. He scowled at himself, opened his mouth; but before he could make it plain that he wouldn't be used again, Himation had interrupted.