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.

If they have cells for souls, no one's to blame.

Outside, it's a reflection of the Snort it claims to serve: fans of rust where metal touches the walls; wet and dirty and down by the river.

Inside, John Truck. Well, he's been here before. Or in places very like it.

He was alone in a charge room with the echo of his own waking cry, the sole and total literacy of the hinterlands scratched and daubed on the pale green walls around him. This is where they write their only books: Picking Nick was here, busted for speed; Og, caught holding for a friend. All coppers do it with their mothers; if you get off, Angel, tell The Rat I didn't. Stuff and screw and stuff again. Novels of rage, futile exposed addressed to lawyers, relatives, and life; vomit and other things in corners; a cold steel door with rivets and only memories of paint through being kicked so often in silly resistance.

Truck was strapped on a bench, vertiginous from the anesthetic, already bleak and bored, wondering if the General had caught up with him at last. From beyond the door came a continual scrape of footsteps, a whole army of offenders filing past. Faint voices, the odd shout, some smashed loser who had or hadn't come down: the King's guests, paying their forfeits without the fun of the party. It was way past dawn.

He lay there for some time, silently fighting the crab lice in the restraining jacket and staring at the ceiling. People came to the door, changed their minds and went away again. Angel and The Rat and Fast Harry passed on their advice in disconnected misspelled prose, but he'd read it all before. When the door scraped open, he was half asleep. Imagine his surprise, to find Doctor Grishkin, the flabby priest, bending solicitously over him.

Cooped up in Ruth's apartment with time to consider that meeting on Bread Street, he had begun to feel a metaphysical uneasiness, even alarm, whenever he thought of Grishkin. He would have been hard put to explain why. Nevertheless, it was amplified unreasonably by the actual apparition or avatar of the man. Endeavoring to dispel some of it, he stared up into the round, lunar face where he could almost see himself reflected in a faint cheesy film of perspiration and muttered:

'I thought I told you to sod off?'

It was hardly a body blow (One of these days, Truck, he told himself sadly, somebody is going to discover the real you under all this foulmouthed repartee — a foulmouthed teddy bear); and a mistake even to imply he might be continuing their previous exchange. The doctor had reversed his cloak, but not his stance. Black, with a thin gold stripe. Very fetching.

'Captain, it is a little more complex than that. If you could bring yourself — If you could co-operate — '

His little eyes gleamed extravagantly. Things, amorphous and juicy, shifted to and fro behind his windows like the slow stirrings of some core, some hub — something real, at any rate — which existed quite apart from his benign and greasy faith: inexplicable urgencies of the psyche mimicked in the motion of the gut, demands that perhaps only Grishkin could fully comprehend and Truck completely fulfill. Faced with such ambition — such enigma and compulsion — Truck's bravado slipped a little.

'Don't tell me you're a copper. I wouldn't have believed they had it in them.'

Crucified by someone else's crabs (he hadn't yet accepted that they were now his although they evidently had — the eternal misunderstanding), wrapped up, in sweaty rubber and flat on his back besides, he wasn't at his freshest; it was a stupid thing to say. But the good doctor merely smiled. He was no copper and both of them knew it. Truck hunched one shoulder.

'That was a stupid thing to say. Why are you here, then?'

Any port in a storm.

Grishkin beamed. He waddled very rapidly round the room once, touching the walls here, tapping them there.

'Captain,' he said as he went, 'you've been detained before. You aren't a fool. For an offence such as this, for a narcotics offence' — he spread his arms, the palms of his hands upwards; he stared up at the conjunction of wall and ceiling — 'no one could reasonably expect a lawyer. But the twenty-fourth century admits — indeed, insists upon — your right to religious representation. Why else should I be here?' He nodded several times to himself, murmuring 'Just so, just so,' as if he were thinking of something else altogether.

'How you got in here I don't much care; get to the point, Grishkin.'

The Opener thrust his face close to Track's. He seemed to have had late nights recently; there were pouches of slack, slightly discolored skin beneath his eyes. He licked his tiny lips and then whispered earnestly: 'To open certain avenues to you, to — '

'Grishkin, if you — '

' — to offer you a way out, Captain.'

Truck felt absurdly disappointed. He chuckled sourly, thinking of the General.

Grishkin made a gesture of impatience and turned his back. 'Captain, you are a difficult person to feel concern for!' When he turned back, some of the urgencies contained behind his windows had escaped into his facial musculature, pursing his mouth intermittently and drawing his forehead into two thick long labia of flesh.

'Captain,' he said, 'there are questions other than that of personal satisfaction, of ideology. I need an agent; if you like, an interpreter; possibly even more. Do you understand me? You are the last person in the Galaxy who speaks the language I am interested in. My doctorate is not in theology or medicine, but in archaeology; do you take my point?'

Breathing heavily, he leaned closer, supporting his gross bulk with a hand placed each side of Truck's head. Beneath the perspiration, his skin was grainy, matte.

'It is no laughing matter. The local penal system can be circumvented. If you agree to act for me, you will be released. If not — a narcotics offense, Captain — it speaks for itself.'

He levered himself upright.

Truck? He was invincibly ignorant of his Time and Place, only beginning to recognize the nature of the tides. He sniggered. 'Can you circumvent IWG Fleet, doctor?' he asked. 'Can you circumvent General Alice Gaw?'