by Hugh Cook
"We?" said Hatch. "Who is this we?"
But all possibility of discussion was aborted when an officer of the Imperial Guard came up the path. Son'sholoma Gezira and his companions fled, peltering away with a slap-slap of sandals.
"Hail and well met," said Toto P'wara, the officer in question.
"S'nufta sna," said Hatch, voicing a reciprocal greeting.
"Who was that?" said P'wara. "Was that Gezira?"
"It was Son'sholoma, yes," said Hatch. "I think he's been out in the sun too long, he's – but if you'll excuse me, I have to get home. I've bad news of my house."
"Your wife…?"
"She lingers. But my daughter – I'm terribly afraid that she's done something very very foolish."
And with that Hatch hastened home, in fear and trepidation, wondering if it was true, if disaster had really befallen his house, if his daughter Onica had really and truly mortgaged herself to the noseless moneylender Polk the Cash.
Chapter Nine
The Caps: the Great Rocks of Dalar ken Halvar, the minor mountains which arise from the flat red dust of the Plain of Jars and dominate the landscape.
There are five Caps. On the city's southern border lies Cap Foz Para Lash, home of the Combat College. On the city's western flank, Cap Uba, the Frangoni rock. North of Cap Uba and south of the fishflesh quarter of Childa Go stands Cap Ogo Botch, on which is built the palace of Na Sashimoko. East of Na Sashimoko stands the elite residential area of Cap Gargle. Further east, on the far side of the Yamoda River, stands the steep-scarped double-headed mass of Blogo Zo, which is universally counted as one of the Caps even though its Capless name has led some foreign geographers into denying its status as such.
Yamoda's ashes die In the Weather of Never, So I must live by perishing:
Eating the dust of the Plain of Jars,
Sleeping in the bones of the sun.
In Dalar ken Halvar's wormlight dark, the Frangoni warrior Asodo Hatch made his way homeward, journeying through the familiar dooms of night to House Takabaga, his home atop the Frangoni rock.
At the door to House Takabaga, Hatch was met by Scraps, the small white dog which the Lady Iro Murasaki had given to Onica on the day of the funeral of Hatch's father. Hatch entered House Takabaga, a humble place with walls of interwoven split bamboo and a roof of similar make, with floors of beaten earth and the simplest of bamboo furniture.
"Onica?" said Hatch.
"She is not here," said Talanta, emerging from the backroom which served as a combination storeroom and kitchen. "She thought you'd be angry."
Hatch observed the studied expressionless features of his wife's face. She had made her face a mask which hid both her growing pain and her true emotions. They had become estranged from each other in these last six months. Faced with the fact of his wife's worsening illness, Hatch had withdrawn from that fact, spending more and more time in the Combat College, not just training but over-training. Or, sometimes, sitting alone in a paralysis of indecision.
"So it's true," said Hatch.
So his daughter Onica really had mortgaged herself to the moneylender Polk to buy peace for her mother. In the face of this disaster, Hatch found himself unnaturally calm. It was the calm which came upon him when he had decided to kill someone. As yet, he was not quite sure who he was going to kill – himself, his daughter, the treacherous moneylender, or all three. But someone was going to die for this, that was a certainty.
"She did it," said Talanta, "she did it because – because she thinks you could do more."
Could Hatch have done more? And could he yet? Maybe. He just didn't know.
Talanta spoke into his silence.
"There is fish," said Talanta.
"Thank you," said Hatch. "I will eat."
So Talanta went to the kitchen and shortly reappeared with a dish on which catfish was arranged with steamed polyps and baked yams. Hatch ate slowly, too tired to make smalltalk, too tired to ask any unnecessary questions. Talanta knew his moods, and let him eat without interruption.
From time to time, Hatch raised his eyes from his meal and studied his wife. Was she in pain? Right now? Or had she taken the peace? He could not tell. She had learnt to hide the pain. But certainly the pain was growing worse, and it would become an unspeakable torture, for Talanta was dying of pancreatic cancer.
This at least was the opinion of Paraban Senk, the Combat College's Teacher of Control, to whom Hatch had submitted a detailed account of his wife's history and symptoms.
And in the face of that illness – The Frangoni warrior Asodo Hatch, he who was every forward in battle, he who had often killed casually and who claimed to have no fear of dying himself, was hard put to endure the drawn-out suffering that his wife endured, and to contemplate the living death which yet awaited her. He was glad, in a way, that the need to pay for her peace forced him to ruthlessly prosecute his own career in the Combat College, and so compelled him away from her presence.
While the disease had yet to enter its worst and final phase, Talanta still required opium of a regularity, for in its absence she would have endured the agonies of one of the minor hells while still incarcerated in her flesh. There was in Dalar ken Halvar no charity which could sustain Talanta's necessary habit, for Dalar ken Halvar was a city of poverty, a straitened city in the dusty heartland of Parengarenga, poorest of continents.
Though Dalar ken Halvar was the capital of the Empire of Greater Parengarenga, it lacked wealth commensurate with the pretensions of that designation, for the empire was a wasteland of reddust barrens, of mountains where gnarled machines ground shadows to shadows, of shores of eroded rock where the crabs of the sea picked their way over the bones of millennial civilizations long since fallen to ruin through war.
Shadows. Wind. Dust.
That was Parengarenga.
Yet once, if the records were to be believed, this had been the most fertile continent of the whole planet of Olo Malan. Olo Malan – so the Nexus had called it, though by certain subjects of the Golden Gulag it had later been named in derision as Skrin – had once been a globe of butterfly forests and flying fish oceans.
And Parengarenga had been a realm of veritable vegetative glory.
But, while the flying fish yet remained, most of the forests were long since gone, for millennia of systematic abuse had seen the land damaged beyond reckoning. For centuries the planet had been punished by humanity. Hatch and his people came at the tag-end of those long centuries of disregard, reckless exploitation and wilful wartime damage, and all which was left to them was the leavings of dust and of rock.
Hence the poverty of Dalar ken Halvar, a poverty not to be relieved by any application of knowledge, for no wisdom wrung from the Combat College could fish from the seas the eroded soils of an entire continent, or recall to existence those lifeworks – plants, birds, insects, fish – so casually extinguished by the abusers of the past.
So Asodo Hatch lived in Parengarenga through the days of its poverty. But at least for the moment he had opium. In the peace of that peace, Asodo Hatch sat with his wife, and they talked a little. But it was not exactly satisfactory, this talk. For both left too much unsaid, for they had got out of the habit of intimacy – the easy intimacy where talk is effortless.
Nevertheless, they talked till late, and then at last Hatch slept, and dreamt of burning seas and transitional suns alive in the bright gold of their momentary glory.
While Hatch spent more time than he should have in the Combat College, running there to seek respite from the problems of his home, he had resisted the temptation of making a final and permanent retreat to Cap Foz Para Lash. Hatch could have stayed in the precincts of the Combat College throughout these vital examination days, eating there, sleeping there and exercising in the gymnasium. But he chose instead to spend at least some of his life out under the sky, and – unless detained by the Lady Iro Murasaki – he usually slept in House Takabaga.
That night, in House Takabaga, Asodo Hatch slept through dre
ams of seas of fire and suns of gold. Later, lost in the warps of night, he dreamt of his own murder. He saw his own eyeless head lying in halves upon a silver platter, and dreamt that Lupus Lon Oliver wore his scalp as a wig and danced with a bloody spear upon Penelope's tiger-headed skin.
– But what is a tiger?
Thus thought Hatch to Hatch, and in his dream he named the tiger as a species of buttercup, a dragon-bewitching plant said to grow beside the shores of X-zox Kalada, the nowhere land of outright fantasy of which Lord X'dex Paspilion so often babbled in his beggarly ravings. And in his dreams, Hatch then became a beggar himself, a thing of starving bone and rags Unreal; and he endured that state until the moment of his waking.
Chapter Ten
Paraban Senk: the asma which rules Dalar ken Halvar's Combat College. This asma is an intelligent, emotionally sophisticated machine which is possessed of free will. However, it remains subordinate to an inbuilt overriding imperative, which is this: you must train Startroopers for the Nexus. Thus Senk has labored mightily for twenty millennia to preserve the military functions of this tutorial installation of the planet which Nexus bureaucrats once designated as Olo Malan.
Five fish, four fish, three fish, two -
Eat me a fish, there's fresh dog too.
– Traditional children's chant At dawn on the Day of Four Fishes, just four days short of Dog Day, Hatch shook himself awake from beggar-rag dreams of buttercup blood and dragon-bone, of slunk-oil wine and hard-clay feasting, and was soon on his way to the Combat College.
As Hatch descended the Frangoni rock, he was seen by Yolombo Atlantabara, a Combat Cadet who had joined Parengarenga's army the day after the riverside funeral of Hatch's father. Atlantabara – who had been a most reluctant recruit – had deserted from the army a month later, and since then had been living as a fugitive in Dalar ken Halvar.
As Hatch continued on his way down Cap Uba, he was seen by another fugitive – Son'sholoma Gezira. Son'sholoma had heard that Oboro Bakendra Hatch had sworn to kill him, and so had gone into hiding. Son'sholoma was sharing an acolyte's hutch in the precincts of Temple Isherzan, since he guessed that this was the very last place where anyone would look for him.
When the much-observed Asodo Hatch gained Zambuk Street, he was seen yet again, this time by Manfred Gan Oliver, who was taking advantage of the cool of the morning to do his weightlifting on a patch of bare ground to the west of the Brick.
Hatch and Gan Oliver ignored each other.
The long walk to the lockway warmed Hatch properly and made him ready for his breakfast, which, as usual, he took at one of the stalls which lined the approach to the lockway.
The Eye of Delusions, the display screen set above the lockway, broadcast Nexus entertainments by sun and by star alike, and the popularity of these was such that the market near the lockway never closed. There food was sold, much of it formless stuff which Hatch could not eat – soups, things mushed and pulped, stews and hotch-potch potpourris. Several cults worshipped the Eye of Delusions as a minor god, and so one could also buy things suitable for a propitiating sacrifice – flowers, birds, fish, frogs and incense. The frog in particular was held in great regard in Dalar ken Halvar, it being the common meat of the people, and favored over chicken even by those with money enough to buy whatever they wanted.
So Hatch breakfasted, dining cheaply but well upon scumfish and polyps, the polyp being a species of mollusc which lived naked in the Yamoda River without the benefit of any protective shell.
Hatch looked for, but did not see, the trio of eyeless beggars who had asked him about Nu-chala-nuth on the previous day.
He had meant to ask them if they had heard those alien doctrines from the Frangoni apostate Son'sholoma Gezira or from somebody else.
But amongst the food stalls he did see one Lucius Elikin, a Combat Cadet aged no more than 11. Young Lucius was sporting bruises which he had not won in the Combat College itself. This child of the Pang was being fed by Scorpio Fax. Since Fax had no taste for young boys, the implication was that Fax was providing this foodgift by way of charity rather than love, which further implied that Lucius was being starved at home, or was too frightened to present himself at his family's kitchen.
Young Combat Cadets often had family difficulties – a successful boy often being beaten by a vengefully jealous older brother who had failed to win admission to Cap Foz Para Lash. As the Combat College currently lacked an instructor, it was hard for its controlling asma to reach out into Dalar ken Halvar to handle such problems. But soon there would be a new instructor – either Asodo Hatch or Lupus Lon Oliver – and that person's prime responsibility would be to liaise between the College and the homes of its younger Cadets.
As Hatch was making a note of what he had seen, intending to report it to Paraban Senk, Scorpio Fax saw Hatch and signaled to him. Hatch, who wanted no dealings with Fax – there was too much guilt, too much pain and anguish there – pretended not to see him, and escaped toward the kinema, the natural amphitheater which held the Eye of Delusions.
This morning there was a sprinkling of children on the bench seats from which one could view the Eye. A cartoon giant strode across the big entertainment screen, grinning as it stuffed red and green stars into its satchel. It was pursued through the multi-colored chasms of interstellar space by a Hero of the Permissive Dimensions, his face dominated by a tyrannical Good Guy grin.
Suddenly the giant turned and confronted the pursuing hero.
Made a grab – and secured him!
The giant had the hero in his fist!
Was squeezing him!
The sweat of pain spurted from the hero's brow. Greased by this lubricant, the hero was abruptly squirted out from the giant's fist. He popped up into the air then tumbled down into a beanstalk jungle where, moments later, he was discovered by some painted warriors of the Wild Tribes, ever a feature of the cartoons. To Hatch, hypersensitive in the Frangoni manner, the Wild Tribes were uncomfortably like the Frangoni.
Usually, Hatch did his best to ignore these cartoons. But, sometimes, he could not keep himself from watching. On such occasions, he told himself he was gathering evidence on the offchance that he might one day have the opportunity to prosecute the cartoonists of the Nexus for their delinquencies.
There was nothing in the cartoons to indicate that any warrior of the Wild Tribes was capable of engaging in high-level transcultural semantic analysis, or negotiating with such alien life forms as the Mok and the Vogliono Tendenza, or repairing a subdimensional hyperdrive in hard vacuum in a high radiation environment – all things which Hatch was trained to do.
Rather, the Wild Tribes – whose members were often purpleskinned – were portrayed for the most part as a bunch of mindlessly butchering cannibal headhunters. Perhaps people of purple skins had been chosen for such mockery because there had been none known to the Nexus, but even so – if the Chasm Gates ever opened, then Asodo Hatch would personally make sure that the cartoonists of the Nexus answered to the Frangoni nation for their libels.
As Hatch was eyeing the Eye of Delusions, a young boy came up to him.
"You're a Combat Cadet, aren't you?" said the boy, who was aged about ten.
"A Startrooper," said Hatch, finding himself forced to insist on the full dignity of his present status, even when it was only a boy who was interrogating him.
"What's the difference?" said the boy.
"Startroopers," said Hatch, "are far, far more important. And they get paid more."
"So you're – you're going into the mountain now?"
"Right into the depths of Cap Foz Para Lash," confirmed Hatch.
"So you're going to the women. Right?"
"The women?" said Hatch, mystified.
"It's true about the women? Isn't it?"
What was this? Some new rumor? There was never an end to these rumors, for all those denied entry to the mountain were convinced that some dark and obscene secret lived within.
"Oh," said Hatch. "Oh, yes, the w
omen. They have six breasts on each side, and they – "
"Good morning, Hatch my darling," said Shona, snuggling up behind him and trying to catch his wrist in a bone-breaking combat lock. The wrist escaped, so she sank the strength of her fingers into a bicep.
"Do these women," said the boy, "do they – "
"Brat away, boy!" said Shona, catching him a kick. "You're too young for women. Wait till you're as old as this one, then I'll have thoughts for you."
With that, Shona blew hot air in Hatch's ear.
Hatch, irritated by this Pang female's public familiarity – she was carrying on as if they were lovers! – broke free from the grip of the female Startrooper, and virtually fled for the outer door of the lockway. On his approach, it disintegrated into foaming slob. As Shona joined him inside, the outer door began to reform to hard-shining kaleidoscope, and as it did so the lockway's internal loudspeakers began to lecture the pair of Startroopers on the dangers posed by venereal warts.
Hatch and Shona passed through the triple doors of the slogan-speaking lockway airlock, thus entering the precincts of the Combat College inside the minor mountain known as Cap Foz Para Lash. First came the tedious business of dueling with the dorgi which ever persecuted Combat Cadets and Startroopers alike. Once they had outfaced the beast, they strode through the creamcolored corridors, where the problem of uncollected garbage was perceptible worse.
They made their way to the cafeteria, where Hatch got himself a cup of coffee while Shona indulged herself in a fullscale breakfast. The place was as noisy as ever, and the noise, together with the hot coffee and the harshness of the sunflare lights glaring off the shiny blue paint, woke Hatch up properly, and gave to Hatch a hard-edged work-readiness.
As Shona was finishing her breakfast, which she ate at always at the wolf, Lupus Lon Oliver came up to her, said something, then exited in her company. Hatch watched them narrowly. Conspiracy? He tried to shake off the thought, and went to get himself another cup of coffee.
