Demon Princes 01-05 The Star Ki, page 44
5
Drinking whisky by the peg,
Singing songs of drunken glee,
I thought to swallow half a keg
But Tim R. Mortiss degurgled me.
Not precisely comme il faut
To practice frank polygamy;
I might have practiced, even so,
But Tim R Mortiss disturgled me.
Chorus:
Tim R. Mortiss, Tim R. Mortiss,
He’s a loving friend
He holds my hand while I’m asleep
He guides me on my four-day creep,
He’s with me to the end.
To woo a dainty Eskimo
I vowed to swim the Bering Sea.
No sooner had I wet a toe
When Tim R. Mortiss occurgled me.
A threat arcane, a fearful bane
Within an old phylactery.
I turned the rubbish down a dram,
Now Tim R. Mortiss perturgles me.
Chorus (with a snapping of fingers and clicking of heels in mid-air)
Tim R. Mortiss, Tim R. Mortiss,
He’s a loving friend.
He holds my hand while I’m asleep,
He guides me on my four-day creep,
He’s with me to the end.
—Navarth
On the following day Gersen paid a second visit to the offices of the Helion. The dossier on Navarth was enthusiastic and ample, reporting scandals, improprieties, defiances and outrageous pronouncements across a period of forty years. The initial entry dealt with an opera, presented by students of the university, with a libretto by Navarth. The first performance was declared an infamy, and nine students were expelled from the university. Thereafter, Navarth’s career soared and collapsed, resurged, re-collapsed, at last with finality. For the past ten years he had resided aboard a houseboat on the Gaas estuary near the Fitlingasse.
Gersen tubed to Station Hedrick on Boulevard Castel Vivence and surfaced in the commercial and shipping district of Ambeules beside the Gaas estuary. The district roiled with the activity of agencies, warehouses, offices, wharves, buffets, restaurants, wine shops, fruit hawkers, news kiosks, dispensaries. Barges nosed into docks to be unloaded by robots; drays rumbled along the boulevard; from below came the vibration of freight moving by tube. At a sweetshop Gersen inquired for the Fitlingasse and was directed east along the boulevard.
Automatic open-sided passenger wagons served the boulevard, with patrons riding on benches facing the street. Gersen rode a mile, two miles, with the Gaas on the right hand. The bustle diminished; the imposing blocks and masses of the commercial district gave way to ancient three—and four-story structures: queer narrow-windowed buildings of melt-stone or terra-cotta panels stained a hundred subtle colors by smoke and salt air. Occasionally the wagon passed vacant areas, where only weeds grow. Through these gaps could be seen the next street to the north, on a somewhat higher level than Boulevard Castel Vivence, with tall apartment buildings pressed tightly against each other.
The Fitlingasse was a narrow gray alley striking off up the hill. Gersen alighted and almost at once observed a hulking two-storied houseboat moored to a dilapidated dock. A wisp of smoke drifted up from the chimney. Someone was aboard.
Gersen took stock of the surroundings. Hazy sunlight played on the estuary; on the far shore thousands of houses with brown tile roofs stood in ranks down to the water’s edge. Elsewhere were unused wharves, rotting piles, a warehouse or two, a saloon with purple and green windows extending over the water. On the dock a girl of seventeen or eighteen sat tossing pebbles into the water. She gave Gersen a brief dispassionate stare, then looked away. Gersen turned back to consider the houseboat. If this were Navarth’s residence, he enjoyed a very pleasant prospect—though the wan sunlight, the brown roofs of Dourrai, the rotting wharves, the lapping water, invested the scene with melancholy. Even the girl seemed somber beyond her years. She wore a short black skirt, a brown jacket. Her hair was dark and rumpled, whether from wind or neglect, it could not be known. Gersen approached and inquired, “Is Navarth aboard the houseboat?”
She nodded without change of expression, and watched with the detachment of a naturalist as Gersen descended the ladder to the landing, then crossed an alarming gangplank to the foredeck of the houseboat.
Gersen knocked at the door. There was no response. Gersen knocked again. The door was flung violently open; a sleepy unshaven man peered forth. His age was indeterminate; he was thin, spindle-shanked, with a twisted beak of a nose, rumpled hair of no particular color, eyes which though perfectly set gave the impression of looking in two directions at once. His manner was wild and truculent. “Is there no privacy left in the world? Off the boat, at once. Whenever I settle for a moment’s rest, some sheep-faced functionary, some importunate peddler of tracts insists on pounding me out of my couch. Will you not depart? Have I not made myself clear? I warn you, I have a trick or two up my sleeve ...”
Gersen tried to speak to no avail. When Navarth reached within he hastily retreated to the dock. “A moment of your time!” he called. “I am no functionary, no salesman. I am named Henry Lucas, and I wish—”
Navarth shook his skinny fist. “Not now, not tomorrow? not in the total scope of the future, nor at any time thereafter, do I wish to make your acquaintance. Be off with you! You have the face of a man that brings ill news; a gnashing black tooth grin. These matters are clear to me: you are fey! I want nothing of you. Go away.” With a leer of evil triumph he swung the gangplank away from the landing, re-entered the houseboat.
Gersen returned to the dock. The girl sat as before. Gersen looked back down at the houseboat. He asked in a wondering voice:
“Is he always like that?”
“He is Navarth,” said the girl, as if this were all that need be said.
Gersen went to the saloon, drank a pint of beer. The bartender was a quiet watchful man of great height with an imposing stomach, and either knew nothing about Navarth or did not choose to reveal what he knew. Gersen gleaned no information.
He sat thinking. A half hour passed. Then going to the telephone directory, he looked in the classified section under Salvage. An advertisement caught his eye:
JOBAN SALVAGE AND TOW TUGS—CRANE BARGE—DIVING EQUIPMENT
No job too large or too small.
Gersen telephoned and made his needs known. He was assured that on the morrow the equipment he required would be at his service.
The following morning a heavy ocean-going tug drove up the estuary, turned, eased into the mooring next to Navarth’s houseboat, with a bare three feet between. The mate bawled orders to the seamen; lines were flung up to the dock and dropped over bollards. The tug was moored.
Navarth came out on deck, dancing with fury. “Must you moor so close? Take that great hulk away; do you intend to thrust me into the dock?”
Leaning on the railing of the tug, Gersen looked down into Navarth’s upturned face. “I believe I spoke a few words to you yesterday?”
“I recall very well; I requested your departure, and here you are again, more inconveniently than before.”
“I wonder if you would give me the pleasure of a few minutes’ conversation? Perhaps there might be profit in it for you.”
“Profit? Bah. I have poured more money out of my shoe than you have spent. I require only that you take your tug elsewhere.”
“Certainly. We are here but for a few minutes.”
Navarth gave a pettish nod. At the far side of the tug the diver Gersen had hired was climbing back on board. Gersen turned to Navarth. “It’s very important that I speak to you; if you would be so good as to—”
“This importance exists from a single point of view. Be off with you and your mammoth tug!”
“At once,” said Gersen. He nodded to the diver, who touched a button.
Under the houseboat sounded an explosion; the houseboat shuddered and began to list. Navarth ran back and forth in a frenzy. From the tug grapples were lowered and hooked to the houseboat’s rub-rail. “Apparently there has been an explosion in your engine room,” Gersen told Navarth.
“How can this be? There has never been an explosion before. There is not even an engine. I am about to sink!”
“Not so long as you are supported by the lines. But we are leaving in one minute and I must cast loose the grapples.”
“What?” Navarth threw up his arms. “I will go to the bottom, together with the boat! Is this your desire?”
“If you recall, you yourself ordered me to leave,” said Gersen in a reasonable voice. “Hence—” he turned to the crewmen. “Throw off the grapples. We depart.”
“No, no!” bellowed Navarth. “I’ll sink!”
“If you invite me aboard your boat, if you talk to me and help me compose an article I’m writing, then that’s a different matter,” said Gersen. “I might be disposed to help you through this misfortune, even, perhaps, to the extent of repairing your hull.”
“Why not?” stormed Navarth. “You are responsible for the explosion.”
“Careful, Navarth. That’s at the very verge of slander! Remember, there are witnesses.”
“Bah! What you have done is piracy and extortion. Writing an article, indeed. Well, then—why didn’t you say so in the first place? I too am a writer! Come aboard; we will talk. I am always grateful for some small diversion; a man without friends is a tree without leaves.”
Gersen jumped down upon the houseboat; Navarth, now all amiability, arranged chairs where they caught the full play of the pallid sunlight. He brought forth a bottle of white wine. “Sit then; make yourself at ease.” He opened the bottle, poured, then leaning back in his chair drank with pleasure. His face was placid and guileless, as if all the racial wisdom had passed through leaving no perceptible traces. Like Earth, Navarth was old, irresponsible and melancholy, full of a dangerous mirth.
“You are a writer then? I may say you do not correspond to the usual image.”
Gersen produced his Cosmopolis identification. “Mr. Henry Lucas,” read Navarth “Special writer Why do you come to me? I am no longer heeded, my vogue is a memory Discredited, penurious. Where was my offense? I sought to express truth in all its vehemence. This is a danger. A meaning must be uttered idly, without emphasis. The listener is under no compulsion to react, his customary defenses are not in place, the meaning enters his mind I have much to say about the world, but every year the compulsion dwindles. Let them live and die, it is all one to me. What is the scope of your article?”
“Viole Falushe.”
Navarth blinked. “An interesting topic, but why come to me?”
“Because you knew him as Vogel Filschner.”
“Hm. Well, yes. This is a fact not generally known.” With fingers suddenly limp Navarth poured more wine. “What specifically do you wish?”
“Knowledge.”
“I suggest,” said Navarth suddenly brisk, “that you seek the information at its source.”
Gersen nodded agreement. “Well enough, if I knew where to look. But what if he is off Beyond? At his Palace of Love.”
“This is not the case; he is here on Earth.” As soon as Navarth spoke he seemed to regret his ingenuousness and frowned in irritation.
Gersen leaned back, his doubts and misgivings dissolved. Vogel Filschner and Viole Falushe were one; here was a man who knew him in both identities.
Navarth had become uneasy and resentful. “A thousand topics more interesting than Viole Falushe.”
“How do you know he’s on Earth?”
Navarth made a sound of grand scorn. “How do I know anything? I am Navarth!” He pointed to a wisp of smoke on the sky. “I see that, I know.” He pointed to a dead fish, floating belly upward. “I see that, I know.” He raised the bottle of wine, held it up against the sunlight. “I see that, I know.”
Gersen reflected a moment in silence. “I am in no position to criticize your epistemology,” he said at last “In the first place, I don’t understand it. Have you no more explicit knowledge of Viole Falushe?”
Navarth attempted to lay his finger slyly alongside his nose, but miscalculating, prodded his eye. “There is a time for bravado and another for caution I still do not know the point of your article.”
“It is to be a judicious document, without exaggeration or apology. I intend that the facts will speak for themselves.”
Navarth pursed his lips “A dangerous undertaking. Viole Falushe is the most sensitive of men. Do you recall the princess who detected a pea under forty mattresses? Viole Falushe can smell out a slur in a blind infant’s morning invocation to Kalzibah. On the other hand, the world revolves, the carpet of knowledge unrolls. Viole Falushe has given me no cause for gratitude.”
“Your appraisal of his character then is negative?” asked Gersen cautiously.
Navarth could control himself no longer. He drank wine with a grandiose gesture. “Negative indeed. Were I to give all orders, what a retribution I could create!” He slumped back in his chair, pointed a skinny finger toward the horizon, spoke in a hushed monotone. “A pyre tall as a mountain, and Viole Falushe at the top. Platforms surrounding for ten thousand musicians. With a single glance I strike the fire. The musicians play while their whisky boils and their instruments melt. Viole Falushe sings soprano ...” He poured more wine. “A wistful vision. It can never be. I would be content seeing Viole Falushe drowned or dismembered by lions—”
“You evidently are well acquainted.”
Navarth nodded, his gaze fixed on the past “Vogel Filschner read my poetry. An imaginative youth, but disoriented. How he changed, how he expanded. To his imagination he added control, he is now a great artist.”
“Artist? What manner of artist?”
Navarth dismissed the question as irrelevant. “Never could he have arrived at his present stature without art, without style and proportion. Do not be deceived! Like myself he is a simple man, with the clearest of goals Now you—you are the most complicated and opaque of men. I see a corner of your mind, then a black film shifts. Are you an Earthman? But tell me nothing.” Navarth waved his hands as if to intercept any answer Gersen might feel called upon to make. “There is too much knowledge already in the world; we use facts as crutches, to the impoverishment of our senses. Facts are falsehoods; logic is deceit. I know a single system of communication: the declaiming of poetry.”
“Viole Falushe is also a poet?”
“He has no great art with words,” grumbled Navarth, unwilling to relinquish control of the conversation.
“When Viole Falushe visits Earth, where does he stay? Here with you?”
Navarth stared at Gersen unbelievingly. “This is a sorry thought.”
“Where then does he stay?”
“Here, there, everywhere. He is as elusive as air.”
“How do you seek him out?”
“That I never do. He occasionally visits me.”
“And he has done so recently?”
“Yes, yes, yes. Have I not implied as much? Why are you so interested in Viole Falushe?”
“To answer this would be to inflict a fact upon you,” said Gersen with a grin. “But it’s no secret. I represent Cosmopolis magazine and I wish to write an article on his life and activities.”
“Hmmf. A popinjay for vanity is Viole Falushe. But why not put your questions to him directly?”
“I would like to do so. First I must make his acquaintance.”
“Nothing is easier,” declared Navarth, “provided you pay the fees.”
“Why not? I am on a liberal expense account.”
Navarth jumped to his feet, suddenly full of enthusiasm. “We will need a beautiful girl, young, unsullied. She must project a particular quality of scintillance, a susceptibility, a fervor, an urgency.” He looked vaguely here and there, as if in search of something he had lost. Up on the dock he spied the girl whom Gersen had seen the day before. Navarth put fingers to his mouth, produced a shrill whistle, signaled the girl to approach. “She’ll do very well.”
“Is this an unsullied young scintillant?” asked Gersen. “She seems more of a guttersnipe.”
“Ha ha,” cawed Navarth. “You will see! I am weak and cachectic, but I am Navarth; old as I am, women bloom under my touch. You will see.”
The girl came aboard the houseboat, and listened to Navarth’s program without comment. “We go forth to dine. Expense means nothing, we shall exalt ourselves with the finest. Prepare yourself then with silks, with jewels, with your most precious unguents. This is a wealthy gentleman, the finest of fellows. What is your name once more?”
“Henry Lucas.”
“Henry Lucas. He is impatient to proceed. Go then, prepare yourself.”
The girl shrugged. “I am prepared,”
“You are the best judge of this,” declared Navarth. “Inside then, while I consult my wardrobe.” He glanced at the sky. “A yellow day, a yellow night. I will wear yellow.”
He led the way into his saloon, which was furnished with a wooden table, two chairs of carved oak, shelves stuffed with books and oddments, a vase containing several stalks of pampas grass. Navarth reached into a cabinet for a second flagon of wine, which he opened and banged upon the table, along with glasses. “Drink.” With this he disappeared into the next room.
Gersen and the girl were left alone. He examined her covertly. She wore the black skirt of yesterday, with a black short-sleeved blouse, sandals, no jewelry or skin tone, which on Earth was not currently fashionable. The girl had good features, though her hair was a tangle. She was either extremely poised or vastly indifferent. On impulse Gersen took a comb from Navarth’s washstand and going to the girl, combed her hair. After a single startled glance she stood, quiet and passive. Gersen wondered what went on in her mind. Was she as mad as Navarth?
“There,” he said at last. “You look somewhat less of a ragamuffin.”
Navarth returned, wearing a maroon jacket, several sizes too large, a pair of yellow shoes. “You have not tasted the wine.” He filled three glasses brimming. “A merry evening in prospect. Here, the three of us; three islands in the sea, on each island a castaway soul. We go forth together, and what shall we find?”
