Above ground, in twenty sumptuous rooms, the longest-running party in the history of the universe was still in progress. People were born, people died there; some were said to have lived entire lives there. It slowed, but it never stopped; the dope was benign, the cuts were appetizing — and, by agile bribery, the King kept even the least of his guests safe from harm and from all arrest.
It couldn't last for much longer.
Every six months, each room was redecorated in the style of the Important Moment: now, the moment was twentieth century. Captain John Truck (somewhat recovered from his recent malaise) and Tiny Skeffern entered the King's domain by a chromium plated vagina, passed into a plastic lobby where valuable objets d'art — the reheat pipe and aft fan assembly of a GEYj93, cut away to reveal V-gutters and low pressure turbine; original pressings of Bing Crosby and Johny Winter; a calf-bound set of Ethel M Dell firsts, signed and numbered by the author — strewed their path.
Beyond, in a room full of drifting colored smoke, where the strobes jumped and hopped from one wavelength to another and Tiny Skeffern's sound fell in solid blocks from original quadrophonic equipment, Chalice Veronica himself lounged on a sofa wearing crocheted culottes.
'Hello,' said Tiny Skeffern, bobbing around. 'I brought a friend.'
'That's so nice,' whispered the King. He pulled himself languidly to his feet and smiled at Truck. His hand was icy; his skin had the texture and color of distemper, damp and powdery; he was old, and his voice was fault, destroyed; arcus senilis, the yellow band of decay, disfigured his eyes. It was common knowledge that he knew everything but the date of his own death.
'I want some information,' said Truck.
The King laughed. 'He's very direct, isn't he?' he said to Tiny Skeffern. 'I do love a celebrity, though. So good of you both to come.'
He studied Truck, and it was like being measured by Death.
'I've been hearing so much about you. But you're safe here. Nobody will bother you here.' He tilted his blunt, lizardlike head to one side. 'A lot of them would like to, though. What on Earth can you have done?'
Truck zipped his jacket up. 'Thanks. That's all I wanted to know. I'd better go. Tiny tells me you're expecting a raid.'
Chalice Veronica held his hand up in the ancient mainliner's gesture, forearm stiff from the elbow, palm open.
'There'll be no raid,' he murmured. 'The party won't stop. Stay. Circulate. Some of the finest minds in the Galaxy are here, Artists, thinkers, revolutionaries. Criminals. Do stay.'
Truck caught Tiny's eye. Tiny nodded dubiously.
'We'd love to,' he said. 'Only for a moment, though.'
Chalice Veronica smiled distantly. He began to roll up his sleeve. Someone brought him a tray of sweet cakes. 'For the Moment,' he mused, 'a fine sentiment Yes, always the Moment.'
As they walked into the next room, Tiny said: 'He's showing his age this last year. He can't face facts any more. But we should be all right for a while.'
'Ah, Hermann Goring! Now there was a true Romantic maligned by his own age. Always the fate of the innovator.' In the long gallery on the fifth floor, Horst-Sylvia, the biological sculptress, was demonstrating her latest animal, something small and multimorphic. 'Such excitement, such — ' Upset by the hubbub, it skittered over a waxwork tableau depicting Nixon and Brezhnev and the other great landowners of the twentieth century, gazing down benignly on their peasants and bondsmen. It squealed. 'Gaw hunting for him, I hear. Smoke?' In rapid succession, it became an albino marmoset, a spider, a golden salamander. It vanished into the folds of Sylvia's robe.
'Tiny's music is so… well… I just can't describe. Only the music can say it, you see. That's the beauty of the nonverbal.' Finally, it took the form of a black mongrel dog and sneaked round peeing on everyone's shoes. 'Harking back to the optimism — the Romance — of the Cold War, the promise of technology!' Someone found a piece of leather for a collar, but the dog had died. It was a great success.
'They don't last very long, of course,' said Horst-Sylvia.
John Truck, hanging about in a dim alcove beneath a blurred black-and-white photograph of an XB-70 ('so very characteristic of the imagination of the period'), picked sourly at his nose. Tiny had wandered off to be told what gave his music such an acute sense of aesthetic urgency.
'What did the old fool say about minds?' muttered Truck.
'You're in Carter's Snort, Captain' — a low, amused voice from somewhere in the alcove — 'it doesn't do to expect too much.'
Truck squinted into the gloom, positive that the recess had been empty when he entered it. He jumped. A shadowy figure wrapped in a black cloak had detached itself from the wall, eyes hidden by the brim of an enormous soft hat.
'At least they aren't dressed like silly buggers.'
A hollow laugh. The mouth was obscured by a ridiculous stormcollar; beneath the cloak, bones seemed to stick out at peculiar angles.
'You have to play your part, Captain. Look here — '
A thin white hand slipped from beneath the cloak, palm upward; across it lay a single long-stemmed green carnation, uncrushed and delicately perfumed.
'Sinclair-Pater sent me. He wants to tell you this: he admires what you did on Morpheus; he wishes to help you now in any way he can.'
The carnation vanished. A conjurer's gesture. It reappeared.
'What does he want from me? I've got nothing to sell. I'm no more an anarchist than an Arab.'
Pater's messenger snapped his slim pale fingers. He was incredibly tall.
'An offer of help. No more. You may need it sooner than you think.'
Chalice Veronica's warehouse shuddered. The lights went out. A long, rolling explosion rocked the gallery. Feeble emergency flares spluttered into life. The King's guests moaned and groaned in a sick gray twilight, gazing into each other's ghastly faces.
The anarchist swung his cloak tighter about him and stalked away into the crowd, his long legs carrying him off at great speed. Almost out of sight in the crush, he turned and shouted, 'Narcotics, Captain. They'll have stopped all the boltholes. Try the roof.'
And he vanished.
The emergencies died.
Truck fought his way out into the sweating, heaving darkness. Someone elbowed him in the groin. He kicked out. 'Move, you — ' It was useless. A Chambers bolt flared out in front of him. 'They'll never take me alive!' A hysterical laugh.
'REMAIN WHERE YOU ARE,' said a calm, gigantic voice.
Aerosol anesthetics hissed into the gallery.
Something blew up silently in the back of Truck's skull and he slid down into a profound hole. His last thought was that everybody seemed to know more about him than he knew about himself.
FOUR
Too Much Gravity
General Gaw, Dr Grishkin that peculiar priest, and Swinburne Sinclair-Pater the Interstellar. Anarchist had each captured a piece of him.
General Gaw had the arms. 'Come off it, sonny!' she cried, waving her awful spoon. Dr Grishkin pulled his right leg off in an attempt to attract his attention. Sinclair-Pater, laughing madly, put his hands into Truck's head. 'I know you!' he said archly, waggling his skinny fingers. 'We all know you!'
There are mysterious troglodytic wreckers hobbling and hopping about in the gloom at the very base of the universe; for millennia, they have been searching for the one golden bolt that holds the whole surprising contraption together; Truck knew its whereabouts to the inch just before he woke up to all the vast sordid horror of a rubber restraining garment, in West Central Detention, Carter's Snort.
'I'll tell you!' he yelled, trying to thrash about. But they had all left by a back door in his head.
The only new construction in Carter's Snort since the depression: West Central Detention, thrown hastily up when the decline became apparent: conceived, built, doomed to be a slum, to deliver hinterland justice. Not that anyone inside it is interested in the latter (which is represented non-representationally in a mural above the unwelcome gate and has, apparently, to do with globes, balances, and lightning. Very inspiring, but all that can be said for sure is that it smells of disinfectant); no, they're deep down in all that concrete to earn a living. It bows their shoulders, as if they supported the whole steel-laced, flat faced pile on their necks.