It was there that Truck began to incubate the vision that was to influence his final deployment of the Centauri Device. Day after day he had to ignore the beseeching hands or listen to the alligator shoes (licking, licking the filthy untreated concrete floors) or pick his way between the O/D cases of the streets. He felt sympathy for someone other than himself, which was unusual — and more: he came to realize that it was Earth money that had built the shacks of Avernus and Earth speculators who owned them.

Further, he remembered Sad al Bari, where he had looked at the losers and, in effect, congratulated himself on escaping all that. But was it any more than a matter of degree? From a terminal H habit on Avernus to a streetsinger's pitch on Sad al Bari to My Ella Speed was an upward progress, maybe — but he'd consumed with the best of them, and he was no stranger to alligator shoes, either. Somehow, he'd never seen himself as quite so much a part of it — would he begin to regret his THC sundaes and his adventures on Morpheus?

People take what scraps of personal memory they want to believe in and erect a house of experiential straw. Pater had set light to his, and Avernus was fanning the flames.

He shared with Tiny Skeffern a one-room plastic shed and left it once a day to preserve his fictional Openerism. His window hurt at the edges, where the flesh was inflamed, and it still terrified him to look at it; but he hung on grimly, waiting for a word from Grishkin and thinking up ways to double-cross him when it came.

He made an unconvincing Opener, being embarrassed to undo his cloak in private, let alone public; as a Novice, he was not allowed, nor would he have wanted, to take confession; and so his sole cover-activity was the distribution of sect literature (brown bundles of which, printed on that crude paper which always seems to smell of excrement, filled the hold of his ship) among the bars and leprotic brothels of the port. It was a threadbare deception and when, after about two weeks of it, he met an earlier acquaintance, it was put paid to entirely.

TEN

'He Doesn't Even Know What Year It Is'

Afternoon on Avernus, and a thin sour drizzle beading the plastic walls. Main Street, Egerton's Port was poached and muddy. Outside the Boogie Shuffle it was all AdAc habits, mainly one-time port ladies dreaming of the teen-age barbie dolls they had once wanted to be or the fine skinny corpses they would one day make — their eyes fixed on the underside of the lowbrow clouds and the rain falling into their open mouths. Truck went in, past the vapor sign that said GET HER SOME AND WATCH HER BITE YOUR FINGERS OFF, and found a party of engine-room mechanics from some visiting military vessel — haunted by the thought of explosive decompression a thousand light years from home and already three parts smashed — dancing apishly about to a hologram recording of Tiny Skeffern doing Eight Star Crawl at the Palace.

He climbed onto a table.

'Open yourselves to the Universal Principle,' he whispered, hoping they wouldn't hear, 'my brothers.'

Vast appreciative catcalls.

'I have here — '

Openers aren't supposed to fight; so when Legiron Crab — a tube-reamer out from the Knuckle system and shortly to lose his left arm in the gallant wreck of the Seventeeth Susan — decided to have a look under Truck's cloak, Truck went for a pressure point in the neck so as not to make it obvious.

'Oy,' said Legiron, quite unperturbed, 'get your fingers out of me throat. I haven't got no nerves anyway.' (Some weeks before, a bos'n's mate — driven past the point of dispassionate logic by Legiron's talent for messing up anything more complicated than deck-scrubbing, had beaten him repeatedly about the skull with one of the larger wrenches used in shackling down Dynaflow Drivers; and been dragged off ten minutes later by some quarterdeck officers still screaming 'Lie down, you pisshole, lie down,' to no avail, leaving Legiron to scratch the back of his neck reflectively, well on his way to becoming a myth.) 'I just want to see what you got.'

And he grabbed Truck's wrist, his hairy great forearm distending like one ultimate Universal Muscle. Truck, fearing a fracture, kneed him in the hurdies.

'Now you went too far, matey!' cried Legiorn, massaging his offended morals. 'Off you go.'

Suiting actions to words, Legiron flung Truck halfway across the bar and out on to Main Street, his Opener tracts fluttering expressively round his head. Which was how he came to find himself down among the lady losers of Avernus, a hard pelvic girdle making inroads into his kidneys, a small breast interfering with one ear, and face to face with Angina Seng, the girl spy from Sad al Bari IV.

'Captain,' she said, hands on bony hips and smiting curiously down on him (as if it really was a coincidental meeting), 'you must keep doing something nobody likes.'

Truck rubbed some rain into his face to get the circulation moving in his brain. He thought of going back into the Boogie Shuffle and killing Legiron Crab.

'I don't know you,' he said, 'and I'm not a Captain' — he accepted her strong hand without grace and added cunningly — 'my sister.'

But it was his turn for not fooling her. 'It won't wash, Captain Truck. I'd like to talk to you.' She brushed his cloak down absently, wiped some mud from his cheek. Looking at his window: 'My, you haven't actually got religion, have you?' He fussed about with his cloak, clicked his tongue. 'Well, Captain?'

'Oh yes' — scathingly — 'at the Israeli Embassy, I suppose. We could have some nice talks with the General.'

'There's no IWG representation on Avernus,' she said, now becoming interested in the vapor sign outside the Boogie Shuffle. 'And I haven't worked for that cow since you and I last met' Her face was struggling with two expressions at once: the curled lip of disgust or disdain, certainly; but behind the eyes something else — that intimate understanding of vacuum only a port lady has, some remote pain he couldn't quite put a name to. She tugged her wet coppery hair back from her face, her body slumped sullenly over folded arms. 'I hope she — '

A shrug. 'Are you coming?' And she walked off down Main Street. He was fascinated.

She took him to a shack on the edge of the port and gat a rickety folding table strewn with twisted half-empty tubes and hard dried nubs of cosmetic while he mooched about looking for something to eat. They stalked one another in the rainy light. She brushed her hair, examined minutely her face (thin lines of an internal tension too secret to be politics or anything other than running-down clockwork of a port lady's life); looked his reversed image over covertly when he was occupied with the fridge.

'What have you got?' he asked round a mouthful of something local. 'Another sponsor, eh? Jesus! What is this stuff?'

'It's off, I think. Here, let me taste it. How did you know, Captain?'

A weary little room. He stared oafishly round it at the cast-off underwear and open cupboards, the scuffed walls. How old was she? Was this all of it? Coming too close to her soul — continually in transit between such rooms and always arriving late — he shivered. He was fooling himself if he thought he knew the half of it.

'It was a joke. I don't want to hear anything about it. Last time was too painful.'

'Look, Captain, you obviously don't want to give it to General Gaw. I could put it in safer hands. I could arrange a meeting.'

His naïveté didn't extend that far; around that point, it degenerated into a sort of sly ferrety awareness. 'You don't even know what it is,' he told her. She pursed her lips (a hit, a hit!). 'No, wait. Ill meet him.' He paced up and down, munching. He could check one or two things at least.