“Want more?” he asked Finli. “I’ve got a couple on my forehead that’re ripe.”
“Nay, I want to make my report, double-check the videotapes and telemetry, go on over to The Study for a quick peek, and then sign out. After that I want a hot bath and about three hours with a good book. I’m reading The Collector.”
“And you like it,” Prentiss said, fascinated.
“Very much, say thankya. It reminds me of our situation here. Except I like to think our goals are a little nobler and our motivations a little higher than sexual attraction.”
“Noble? So you call it?”
Finli shrugged and made no reply. Close discussion of what was going on here in Blue Heaven was generally avoided by unspoken consent.
Prentiss led Finli into his own library-study, which overlooked the part of Blue Heaven they called the Mall. Finli ducked beneath the light fixture with the unconscious grace of long practice. Prentiss had once told him (after a few shots of graf) that he would have made a hell of a center in the NBA. “The first all-taheen team,” he’d said. “They’d call you The Freaks, but so what?”
“These basketball players, they get the best of everything?” Finli had inquired. He had a sleek weasel’s head and large black eyes. No more expressive than dolls’ eyes, in Pimli’s view. He wore a lot of gold chains—they had become fashionable among Blue Heaven personnel, and a brisk trading market in such things had grown up over the last few years. Also, he’d had his tail docked. Probably a mistake, he’d told Prentiss one night when they’d both been drunk. Painful beyond belief and bound to send him to the Hell of Darkness when his life was over, unless…
Unless there was nothing. This was an idea Pimli denied with all his mind and heart, but he’d be a liar if he didn’t admit (if only to himself) that the idea sometimes haunted him in the watches of the night. For such thoughts there were sleeping pills. And God, of course. His faith that all things served the will of God, even the Tower itself.
In any case, Pimli had confirmed that yes, basketball players—American basketball players, at least—got the best of everything, including more pussy than a fackin toilet seat. This remark had caused Finli to laugh until reddish tears had seeped from the corners of his strangely inexpressive eyes.
“And the best thing,” Pimli had continued, “is this: you’d be able to play near forever, by NBA standards. For instance, do ya hear, the most highly regarded player in my old country (although I never saw him play; he came after my time) was a fellow named Michael Jordan, and—”
“If he were taheen, what would he be?” Finli had interrupted. This was a game they often played, especially when a few drinks over the line.
“A weasel, actually, and a damned handsome one,” Pimli had said, and in a tone of surprise that had struck Finli as comical. Once more he’d roared until tears came out of his eyes.
“But,” Pimli had continued, “his career was over in hardly more than fifteen years, and that includes a retirement and a comeback or two. How many years could you play a game where you’d have to do no more than run back and forth the length of a campa court for an hour or so, Fin?”
Finli of Tego, who was then over three hundred years old, had shrugged and flicked his hand at the horizon. Delah. Years beyond counting.
And how long had Blue Heaven—Devar-Toi to the newer inmates, Algul Siento to the taheen and the Rods—how long had this prison been here? Also delah. But if Finli was correct (and Pimli’s heart said that Finli almost certainly was), then delah was almost over. And what could he, once Paul Prentiss of Rahway, New Jersey, and now Pimli Prentiss of the Algul Siento, do about it?
His job, that was what.
His fackin job.
Two
“So,” Pimli said, sitting down in one of the two wing chairs by the window, “you found a maintenance drone. Where?”
“Close to where Track 97 leaves the switching-yard,” said Finli. “That track’s still hot—has what you call ‘a third rail’—and so that explains that. Then, after we’d left, you call and say there’s been a second alarm.”
“Yes. And you found—?”
“Nothing,” Finli said. “That time, nothing. Probably a malfunction, maybe even caused by the first alarm.” He shrugged, a gesture that conveyed what they both knew: it was all going to hell. And the closer to the end they moved, the faster it went.
“You and your fellows had a good look, though?”
“Of course. No intruders.”
But both of them were thinking in terms of intruders who were human, taheen, can-toi, or mechanical. No one in Finli’s search-party had thought to look up, and likely would not have spotted Mordred even if they had: a spider now as big as a medium-sized dog, crouched in the deep shadow under the main station’s eave, held in place by a little hammock of webbing.
“You’re going to check the telemetry again because of the second alarm?”
“Partly,” Finli said. “Mostly because things feel hinky to me.” This was a word he’d picked up from one of the many other-side crime novels he read—they fascinated him—and he used it at every opportunity.
“Hinky how?”
Finli only shook his head. He couldn’t say. “But telemetry doesn’t lie. Or so I was taught.”
“You question it?”
Aware he was on thin ice again—that they both were—Finli hesitated, and then decided what the hell. “These are the end-times, boss. I question damn near everything.”
“Does that include your duty, Finli o’ Tego?”
Finli shook his head with no hesitation. No, it didn’t include his duty. It was the same with the rest of them, including the former Paul Prentiss of Rahway. Pimli remembered some old soldier—maybe “Dugout” Doug MacArthur—saying, “When my eyes close in death, gentlemen, my final thought will be of the corps. And the corps. And the corps.” Pimli’s own final thought would probably be of Algul Siento. Because what else was there now? In the words of another great American—Martha Reeves of Martha and the Vandellas—they had nowhere to run, baby, nowhere to hide. Things were out of control, running downhill with no brakes, and there was nothing left to do but enjoy the ride.
“Would you mind a little company as you go your rounds?” Pimli asked.
“Why not?” The Weasel replied. He smiled, revealing a mouthful of needle-sharp teeth. And sang, in his odd and wavering voice: “ ‘Dream with me… I’m on my way to the moon of my fa-aathers…’”
“Give me one minute,” Pimli said, and got up.
“Prayers?” Finli asked.
Pimli stopped in the doorway. “Yes,” he said. “Since you ask. Any comments, Finli o’ Tego?”
“Just one, perhaps.” The smiling thing with the human body and the sleek brown weasel’s head continued to smile. “If prayer’s so exalted, why do you kneel in the same room where you sit to shit?”
“Because the Bible suggests that when one is in company, one should do it in one’s closet. Further comments?”