BOOK NINE - !’RHOIDS¡

 

 

CHAPTER TWENTY EIGHT  -  “THEY’RE EATING IT!”

 

 

 

Don't rawth me... seen you looking at that pawnshop sign. Never rawth a rawther - that's ol' Al's advice. In the Andromeda, I never had to worry 'bout the light... had me one of them side rooms, six oh four, with a scapescreen, think you're in the country or on a beach; Gylax Ep, maybe, if you kept your jammin' nostrils shut. Open and, well... back in Tao City, no question!

I'd go back to a side room in three shakes of a quottle's tail if the Regency finishes processing my claim and I could afford one of them scapescreens again. Maybe an Antarr, with the high resolution...one of those 4D’s you can look back into the past on instead of just 3D…  it could be used, coupla solyears old, I wouldn't mind so long as it works.   I hardly ever uss the sound either. Doobydie ain't what it uss to be but there's touts and methers rich enough that they order new models when they come out... everything!... junk perfectly good screens or moodboxes or unilators. Or take 'em into the pawnshop and don't even argue with Clodagh, just take what she gives 'em and get the jam off the jammin' Baawl. Keeps her sign flaming day and night like the worst case of 'roids you ever had, Guns and jammin' Money.. old Hurt words for Gats and Skilk... like one of them upside-down crosses they used to crucify Rassoul, then his Old Believers on centuries ago, during the bad old days. Guns and money, reds and green like... I'll draw you a picture...

 

 

 

 

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Crucifixion, intifaq? Flashing all day... when it don't matter, then all jammin' night. They draw gas plasma out of one of the three suns of Doobydoo and pump it into all of those advertising beacons in the sky... Yamsu, the dwarf, I think... and set 'em flaming. Rawth... the pawnshop's nothing next to those giant ilaams up in orbit, can't hardly navigate a bird through the trisolar system without crashing into one. Which brings me to what we were talking about, the other day... how Rateyes, Turpin and Broonzy got that sack of rawth boneship off the ground and through a snake to Bezend, the center of the galaxy, almost. What I was talking about, OK... gorl me if I like to talk. I've got plenty to talk about.

I may be an old jim, but I know more than you'll ever dream of knowing, and I've had more good snatch, too!

Anyway, Rateyes had this plan, and he'd been working on this old boneship in Tony's junkyard, taking parts... Turpin tells me... out of you don't want to ask where. Got to where they could lift the bird off the ground, but you can't ride snakes without a working system of refrigeration and refraction, and your coolant ain't free. At least, not for most joes...

It was Marina who figures out that the same gases that power up the big, orbiting ilaams could be drawn off and compressed into the pipes and used to regulate the temperature... sort of. Now, of course, she's on the Baawl... just like her mother.  They didn't go to the Excelsis, here, after Andromeda... they went to the Emperor, down thataway, both of 'em.  Wouldn't think any heather could make the right change for one of her tricks, let along figure out all them pressure and refracting indices that go into status engineering. But she's smart as a whip... that one! Says she'll make her pile o' soys and get the jam off the Baawl... and I've heard that before, too. Doesn't happen!

Still, if any graduate from the jammin' Andromeda could make it off the Baawl, it'd be Marina. Guess that's why Rateyes named the boneship after her.

Anyway, Broonzy got Marina… the ship… off the ground out of Tony's.  He wasn't half bad as navigator when he wasn't drinking... and off they go, wobbling up into orbit. No lights, no radio and... because the pipes were dry... the four of them are stuffed into survival suits, surplus from Clodagh’s, have to be centuries old. So they barely make it to the first ilaam off to starboard of the approach to Tao City spaceport, which just happens to be this enormous, loud green monster sixty some times as wide as the boneship, shaped like about what you'd expect... hurling off fake-fiery red and yellow puffs of gas… ANUS-BEST-US!

 

          "What the jam is that?" Turp points, talking through the suit radio, which is old and crackling... sounding like one of the most decayed of the chimes they’d committed to chasing at the portal to Bezend at the other end of a four-snake transit.

 

"Hemorrhoid cream," Rateyes answers, wincing.  He was a customer, you know... had a fearful case of the 'roids. Said they come off his racing quottles days but, with Rats, the truth was always a wee bit shady... even when there wasn't any point to lying.  Anyway, he told Turp to go out and start sucking it down.

 

"Why do I have go out there and suck?"

"Because Broonzy's navigating…" Rats points out.

"And because Marina's too small," Broonzy volunteers. "And Rateyes is useless..."

"Hey!"

"The membrane's soft - still more than a hundred, Kelvin, out there," Marina tries to cheer Turp up. "Same rawth they use for coolant; good to a couple hundredths of hundredths a degree above absolute zero. Pliable… feels like the artery in Broonzy's neck, just larger!"

“Go jam yourself,” the novice navigator replies.

 

Broonzy’s still wearing a scarf due to that incident in the Al-Gool and he rubs at the half-healed punctures beneath it; reminded anew of his brush with Old Mort and of his discomfort as Rats pulls a plasma sucker out of some cabinet where it had been bouncing round, crashing into rawth and getting itself good and dented. About the size of one of those vacuum cleaners they're supposed to use on the rug in the halls here on the Baawl hotels ‘bout every other Gargarday or so, but never do... more or less the same principle as the big, rented job they mounted on Marina... the boneship, not the girl... when they went to Bezend, chasing after chimes. Easy to operate... point and shoot or, rather, what's the opposite of shoot? Those technical terms... they're first to fall out of memory when you get old. Not firing something out but drawing the target in... sucking, that's lama presto. Turp had to get out of the boneship, tether himself to keep from flying off into one or the other of Doobydoo's suns, point and suck. Nothing to it, is what Rateyes said...

 

"Just aim, point and suck, faq? Punches a tiny hole in the membrane, plasma streams back into a containment chamber in the sucker and, when we need it, sprays out again."

"What about the gases?" Turpin thought to ask.

"Uh… problem with those," Rats allows, "they build up and you're going to have to vent them once in a while by pressing this button, here. They're inert… argons and neons, xenons, lotta colors but no real heat. It's like one of them light shows kids go to... you'll dyn it! Rawth... you'd better not dyn it so much and bool off that one of us has to go out and pull you in. Try these..."

Rats has found a pair of thick, pitch black sunglasses on elastic, which he places over Turpin's helmet and Turp weaves down the deck to the airlock which Marina closes behind him. Then Broonze shoots his buddy out into space with only these ancient ropes tethering him to the boneship. I wouldn'a have done it... would you? But the ropes hold and Turp swims up, right by that hemorrhoid ilaam, and begins sucking plasma, which occasionally vents off fierce, billowing clouds of bright gas that, unfortunately, draw the attention of a Regency cruiser whose Science Officer goes into a rawth-froth at the sight of an ilaam apparently starting to deflate and vanish.

 

Sometimes I take the mag off the Baawl... quarter fare for retirees, you know, and go into Tao proper, just to lift a few. Al ain't no rat... don't let anybody tell you I'd do someone into the Regency if it wasn't evil jam, like a gum mon man on kids or that bad baroor, killing people at the Andromeda... but I don't mind drinking with shurts. Hey, an old man ain't likely to be jumps by a pack of jammin' prekts outside any shurt bar, understand? I know who's who, and one of 'em knows this swab for the Regency who just happens to be pulling duty on that cruiser... it was P-128, I recall, see I'm not entirely ready for the long sleep to Shkooktown just yet! And he just happens to be on the deck on that particular day that Rats and his crew drew up the boneship to perch, like a jammin' mosquito, on that ilaam, sucking down the plasma of that flaming ANUS-BEST-US! logo.

"Cap'n… you're not going to believe me," had ventured the Science Officer, who was a deep mongo, by the way, one of those very excitable combinations like... I don't know, poodle and baboon?... "but somebody's eating that rawt'hole ilaam."

 

"Eating whose rawt'hole, Officer?" the Captain mishears.

"The sign! That big, flaming red and green monstrosity people have to see when flying into Tao City's spaceport! It's shrinking.  Disappearing! There's some little keeft, eating it up!"

"Hate that thing!" The captain glares at the ilaam through his magnification port with sheer disgust. "Rawth! I suppose we have to do something about this…"

According to this acquaintance of an acquaintance, the swab on deck, the red-assed Science Officer actually replies: "Willful destruction or vandalism of orbiting ilaams has been criminal since some Rassoulians went bool over the Reverend Long Jim's sim-brothels…"

The Captain sighs. "Communications Officer… notify the Regency. And hail those idiots out there… tell them to stop, or something. Maybe this is just some wretched fraternity initiation… yoots!"

 

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