'Don't!'
She stared over his shoulder. Her lips moved, but it wasn't she who whispered eerily into the gloom:
'You don't want to go any further, Captain Truck.'
He was there suddenly, but with a look of permanence, as if he'd been waiting just beyond the periphery of Truck's vision ever since the debacle beneath Carter's Snort. As if once acknowledged, he would never go away again. His emaciated and reptilian body was hung with a pale fawn suit cut in that good twentieth-century fashion; his shoes were of the finest alligator; on his head was a straw panama, bent and grimy at the brim from being pulled down over his eyes. At a glance you could see he belonged to the streets of Egerton's Port, that he'd get you anything you needed: with the end of the longest-running party in the history of the universe, it seemed he'd found his level.
'You aren't a king any more Veronica,' said Truck; narrowing his eyes. 'Don't try and stop me.'
He felt something that might have been sympathy. Chalice Veronica had fallen from grace. He was fading away. What gray cheesy junk flesh he'd once possessed had melted off the bone, which shone through like a lamp behind waxed paper; he was all eyes and resentment, all paranoid jaw and gray stubble; he smelled like an old, old pusher who'd had his hand in the stock cupboard just once too often.
'You're a little fool, Truck,' he hissed, 'and I wish I'd never seen you. It's still a supplier's Galaxy. The King, even in exile, knows things, sees all — Timelines whip the Moment across the Universe like broken hawsers — Intimations input spinal sensors — H signals flicker like heliographs across the spaces of the dyne — I — see — ' He shuddered.
'Ben Barka or General Gaw, what difference can it make to you who owns your callow little brain?' He chuckled. 'I see one of my little dogs has found you again — '
He swung his blunt, shapeless head and — as if using some other sense than sight, some slow junk radar — located Angina Seng, up there rigid by the wicket-gate. Since his appearance, she had developed little muscle tremors; her face was drawn and white, her eyes were fixed on him.
'I want my stuff, Veronica,' she said. 'I want it.'
Veronica smiled at Truck. 'Pardon an old man's sentimentality, Captain. I say "my" little dogs, but of course I really only feed them. Angina liked what I gave her so much that she came with me when the General withdrew her patronage. It was quite lucky for Angina that we both — left — the General at the same time. The same Moment, eh, Angina?' And he rolled his lizard's eyes to show a thin rim of white veined like hairline cracks in ancient china.
'I want my stuff, Veronica, you bastard,' said Angina, and her voice was perfectly empty.
'Oh, my dear, we all want our stuff. But we have to be patient, don't we?'
He took a pace backward into the gloom. Only a ghost, only a thin spirit hanging on, an echo of habits past and a withered kingship under the earth. Truck shot out a hand and grasped the loose wattled skin of his throat. It was like touching a dead, damp leaf. 'What are you doing on Avernus, Veronica?' He felt sick. His fingers trembled with the effort of gripping that awful flesh. Only a ghost: but even in eclipse those old junk pores still oozed some stink of mold and darkness. Yellow teeth snapped at him. Veronica's breath rattled, but his head was already dead.
'I'm the paymaster, Captain. Ben Barka needs me as much as the old cow ever did. They all need what I sell, to keep their agents enthusiastic and faithful. Sometimes, ideology isn't enough. The law, the administrators on both sides, why, they're some of my best customers (I'd say "most regular," but all my customers are that) — '
'What sort of rubbish is this? What's behind that door?' Truck released his grip, flung the eroded bag of bones away from him. It chuckled.
'You're finished, Veronica.'
'Don't knock it until you can do it, my boy.'
He wasn't even trying to get away. He took out a small pewter pillbox and slipped something into his mouth — the merest delicate flicker of a black, saurian tongue. 'The General cut off Angina's supply the day after you refused your services on Sad al Bari, Captain. She's an impatient woman. What could poor Angina do?'
Truck looked at the girl. She had slumped against the mesh, mechanically repeating. 'I want my stuff, I want my stuff.' She hooked her fingers behind the wire and pulled herself upright. Her facial musculature was cracking up, assembling grotesquely inappropriate expressions — a sentimental smile, a port lady's breezy come-on — but her eyes were calm.
'There, Truck: nobody's protecting you now. I go where the junk leads. Can you say you honestly didn't know? It's a rotten Galaxy, and it doesn't belong to you or I. That bastard' — nodding and grinning and gasping at Veronica — 'and the General and ben Barka have it cut up between them. What scraps they leave go to Doctor Grishkin in return for absolution. Politics, religion, and dope: they keep us happy with Hell.
'Veronica, I love you, come in the dark with me and well — Oh, Christ!'
She dashed forward and, before Truck could move, grabbed one of his Chambers guns. She held it in both hands, whimpered, and blew the wicket-gate to pieces.
There was a writhing motion in the gloom. Chalice Veronica cackled madly. 'Down, girl!' He produced something small and black and shot her between the shoulder blades with it. She screamed and fell over, still scrabbling toward the twisted, melting mesh.
Veronica scuttled triumphantly after her. John Truck stepped between them and put a single bolt into Veronica's wet black mouth. The back of the king's head flew off like shell from a rotten egg, but his eyes knew that it's always a pusher's market. Truck stirred the heap of dry reptilian bones with one foot, then knelt beside Angina Seng. There was a hideous, smoking hole, but she was trying to say something.
He turned her over.
She looked up at him, quite lucid; blinked. 'I could have gone for you,' she said. She touched his hand. 'That little guitarist in the Spacer's Rave said you'd eat me. I wonder if you would have?' Blood came out of her mouth. She moaned. Faintly: 'Grow up, Captain. It's time someone helped us all. Get rid of the bastards. Stop avoiding the issue. They've no right to do the things they do to us — '
He thought she was dead. He was crying. About a minute later, she said: 'If you go in there, don't breathe too hard, and don't get close. It's Paraphythium D-20.'
She didn't say anything after that. She'd given him everything she could. It was an act of faith. For some reason, he kept thinking of Ruth Berenici.
He kicked his way calmly through the wreckage of the wicket-gate.
Behind it lay a cylindrical filter tank about thirty feet high. It was chilly and dun. Years of scalding reactor winds had formed the dull laminae on its walls.
There, he discovered about half a dozen people squatting in a semicircle around what appeared to be a bundle of old sacks and wool.
Every so often, one of them would stand up unsteadily, go over and take a deep long sniff at it, then sit down again. He leaned on a wall to watch. None of them took any notice of him. He recognized them from streetcorners and the concrete aprons of spaceports on familiar planets — faces you knew without ever having seen them before.
The membranes of his nose itched.
After a while, moving like an automaton (no more capable of feeling, or so it seemed, than one of Pater's holographic images), he went closer to see what they were sniffing. On went the rite: up, shuffle a few paces, sniff, hold the breath, shuffle back; up, shuffle, sniff, as if Truck wasn't there. In a way, he wasn't.