Infinity Gate by M. R. Carey

Author:M. R. Carey [M. R. CAREY]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Orbit
Published: 2023-03-28T00:00:00+00:00

34

On Tsakom, in the squalid little steel-weave hut where he now lived and worked, Orso Vemmet contemplated – with very little respite – the wreckage of his career.

His state of mind was similar in many ways to Paz’s after the explosion. The scale of the catastrophe that had engulfed him numbed sensation and made thought impossible. He sat for days at a time in the insta-build, staring at the world through a soot-and-carbide-smeared window that was set in its frame so it wouldn’t open, or sometimes through the rents in the walls which let in the stagnant air with all its freight of industrial alkalines. When hunger forced him, he joined the convict rabble in their stinking canteen, a vast acreage of bellowing voices and raucous laughter, floored with spilled food – the fresher slicks still liquid and slippery, the older ones crusted over. He chewed dry bread and swallowed sour soup laced with bulk-up supplements and antibiotics. Then he went back to the insta-build, where three drones were now stacked on the bare floor, to sit some more.

The factory workers found Vemmet hilarious. He had sent a comm-stat to his old station asking for his clothes and personal possessions to be sent on, but the message had been ignored. The supervisor at the factory, a Zippeniu mellivore named Astor, had vaguely promised to sort out some overalls for him, but until they arrived Vemmet had only the outfit he’d been wearing when he first came here – a formal gown in shiny purple rashif silk with a watchmaster’s half-sun insignia picked out in gold thread on its left shoulder. So the factory workers bowed to him when he came into the room, called him “eminence” and “lordship”, pretended to wipe the table down for him by spitting on it and dragging their filthy sleeves across its surface. Sometimes the show of respect ended in a beating, sometimes it didn’t. There was no way to tell what he was going to get on any given day.

“You’ve been pretty bloody lucky so far,” the supervisor told Vemmet bluntly when he complained. “Doesn’t even look like they’ve broken anything. But they’re going to keep messing about with you as long as you’re entertaining, so it ends when they get bored with you or when you’re dead. Nothing you can do about it either way.”

“But…” Vemmet pleaded, “but you’re in charge.”

“Yes I am. And they fucking hate people who are in charge, so I keep my head way down. You’ve got to understand, Watchmaster, it’s different here than where you’re from. If one of these bastards kills me he just gets another ten or fifteen years on his sentence. Or else he’s executed, which they call winning the lottery. They don’t care. You can’t make them care. So you’re on your own.”

On the ninth day, a colossal ursid walked across to Vemmet’s table while he was eating. Vemmet went on picking at his food, head down, hoping the bear-man would go away, but instead he gave Vemmet’s shoulder a smack.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.