He woke in the early hours in a bed too small for him. His throat was sore and dry, the roof of his mouth itched. 'Where can I get some water?' he asked, trying to lubricate his tongue with saliva. She — it — wasn't there. He could hear footsteps in the alley outside. He went to the door; cold air seeped over his feet. Someone was in the alley, tall and obese, pacing to and fro. The ash from Wisdom had turned leprous, filling the alley with a wan illumination, patching the figure in its voluminous Opener cloak. 'What are you doing?' he called. A hood was pulled over the face. Ash eddied about it, feathery.
'I was looking for — ' The figure turned and pulled back its hood. It was Dr Grishkin. Truck got hold of the door post. His throat locked up solid. ' — You,' he croaked.
'I can see that your circumstances have changed somewhat, Captain Truck,' said Grishkin — his was a fine memory for unfinished conversations. He made no move to enter the house, stood there in the ash-storm, smiling his streamlined smile. 'It would seem to be time for a review of prices — '
Truck shivered in the wind. That meeting begun in another wind on Sad al Bari IV had finally run its course. He had only postponed the preliminaries.
A stupid thing to do, he thought (thirty minutes after dawn, in an aeroplane: somewhere in front of him, chronologically speaking at least, lay the transparent heart of Openerism — the city of Intestinal Revelation beyond the limestone hills). It was too late for that. Earth's vortex had sucked him in. Stomach turned beneath him like a rotting apple, 'Too long in an attic.'
'Mm?' said Grishkin, sprawled over two seats, his cloak open, his vast body smooth and perspiring where there was no plastic. He wasn't even half asleep. He was watching Truck out of the corner of one eye.
Truck shrugged. He pointed out of the window. 'That. Look, Grishkin,' he said, 'I'm only doing this on certain conditions. There is a price.' The muscles above Grishkin's left eye flexed briefly. 'I want to disappear, hide. If Gaw or ben Barka find me now — '
'I can understand that, my son,' said Grishkin ironically.
'Secondly, I want to know why you're interested in the Device. I'll have to know in the end anyway. On those terms, I'll agree to operate it for you — supposing you can get hold of it. As long as you don't use it for anything connected with this war. I'll cut my own throat first.'
Grishkin smiled, shook his head gently. 'Ah, Captain, Captain.' He hauled himself up, faced Truck properly. 'The war,' he murmured. 'Alice Gaw always wanted a proper war. One could hardly expect her to see things in their proper perspective. To listen to her description of — '
' — Cut it out, Grishkin. Do we have a deal?'
'Oh yes, Captain, we have that. Ad interim, I'll consider your disappearance. Quite.'
He seemed to go to sleep, and Truck had to be content with that. Down below, Stomach crawled on. After a while the cockpit door opened and out came the pilot, yawning. He grinned at Truck, grimaced rudely at the inert priest. 'All well in here?'
'Who's flying the bloody aeroplane while you're asking stupid questions?' said Truck. He hated atmosphere vehicles. There was so much to run into.
'What aeroplane?' Suddenly, he slapped his forehead and stared wildly about. 'Oh Christ, this aeroplane!'
'Ha ha,' said Truck. 'Very comical.'
Beyond the limestone hills there was only more desert — but uglier than Wisdom, with an air of acceptance and failure. He tripped leaving the aircraft, came up gazing at the gloomy sky with his hands coated in putrefying soil. 'What a hole, Grishkin. Can't you do better than this?' In the distance over the hopeless rock flowed rivers of abrasive dust; thick and brown, miles wide. Elsewhere small furtive birds eyed their surroundings sadly, ruffling their feathers as they hopped among the fallen, decaying trees.
Finally, that revelatory city — a handful of ball-bearings embedded in black sand — it closed on Truck like a trap.
'An early failure in climatic control,' admitted Grishkin. 'We were primitive if energetic when we came to Stomach, Captain.' He spoke as if he'd been there in 2143, which wouldn't have surprised Truck in the least. 'It will be rectified, like all things, with time.'
He hurried Truck into a silent place with clean cool white walls. An odd smell of ozone and antiseptic pervaded it. There were static dust-collectors and ventilators everywhere, humming faintly. If you looked closely at the walls, you could see countersunk rivets. People who might or might not have been Openers moved down the passageways dressed in pale green gowns and plastic gloves, their footsteps echoing with queer calm urgency.
'Are you sick?' asked Truck suspiciously. Hospitals made him uneasy. He thought of running back to the aircraft, but the pilot had gone off somewhere to get his breakfast.
'This anxiety, Captain — it isn't necessary. All your problems end here.'
'That's what I'm afraid of.'
He bit his fingernails, swallowed accidentally, coughed. He lagged behind, but Grishkin took his arm possessively.
'What are you going to do with me?'
'Come now, Captain, before we tend to the first part of our bargain, you must see something of our work here.' His diabolic or malefic avatar lurked just beneath his eyelids, peeping out but endeavoring to remain unobserved. 'You'll find the Memorial Theater very interesting. But we mustn't be late.' Things were fermenting, dissolving behind his windows. Every time they came to a fire door in the corridor, he glanced up at the clock above it. His grip tightened. He was actually pulling Truck along.
Suppose the Memorial Theater to commemorate a single genius of the movement (rather than, say, some murky instance or episode of its past) and he'd have to be a fable — a Minotaur of medicine and religion, some accidental connection between the brain of a mad vivisectionist and the bands of an inappropriate rector. Something any decent man would put a boot to without thought. On Stomach, no one had, and his spirit presided.
It was a huge room.
Normally, Truck sensed, it would be full of a seedy, vinegar-colored gloom strained through the thirty-foot stained glass windows (depicting what? Openerism is an eclectic, a catholic faith; there was a bit of everything, from Lazarus rising to Moses descending: but surely Lazarus hadn't died from a Caesarean incision?). Now it was lighted up starkly by thousands of watts of white light. Electrocorticogram operators and organists sat over their instruments while choirboys draped in thick plum felt paced slowly between the massive multifoil arches, their eyes fixed on the groined roof. The operating table, inviolate on the center of the flagged floor, was a limestone altar. The eerie modes of some plainsong chant echoed long and hollow and far away, as if from bare masonry.
Snip, pick, went the hands of the surgeons, slim and dextrous. '+ amp; -, + amp; -, + amp; -,' sang the electrical gear as, masked and gowned, Truck and Dr Grishkin slipped into the inner circle of light and odor.
'This is one of the most impressive events in our history,' whispered Grishkin. The patient lay under a local analgesic. A tent of surgical drape covered his body. Above him, spotlights and sheaves of cable hung from chrome bars. Thin bright laser beams crossed and danced. Grishkin bowed to the surgeons, moved nimbly forward — keeping hold of Truck's wrist — and whipped back the surgical tent. 'Look — ' he breathed.
At first sight, it was a flayed corpse: a mass of yellowish adipose tissue, great ropy blood-vessels, red and blue; all ligament and muscle, wet and sticky-looking and held together by a sac of cling-plastic. John Truck felt his throat fill up with something. He was back among the orbital hospitals and corpse-boats of Canes Venatici, packing them in their boxes. He tried to pull away, but Grishkin held on.