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SARKO
Fri April 22, 1994 Volume 1 : Issue 2 ISSN 1022-1069
I have visions of us all out there with
Brillo pads trying to scour the brightness
off of it.
Neighbor of the world's first
stainless steel house.
Sagaponack, Long Island, New York.
CONTENTS, #1.2 (April 1,1994)
013 <1.6> The New Launch Field August 31, 1993 Ha Wo Che
014 <1.0> "In Chinese medicine" August 31, 1993 Ha Wo Che
015 <1.2> Tivot & The Bishop 4 Apr 20, 1993 Ha Wo Che
016 <2.0> Sui Kwai Tseng Shunck Station September 1, 1993 Ha Wo Che
017 <1.3> Tivot & The Bishop 5 September 13, 1993 Ha Wo Che
018 <1.0> Tung Wan St in the East Barrows June 23, 1993 Shatin
019 <1.1> "Pandora Boks, a form four student..." June 23, 1993 Shatin
020 <1.0> The Exhaulted Fart June 25, 1993 Shatin
021 <1.2> Jethro Tickle September 8, 1993 Ha Wo Che
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Shatin, NT Hong Kong
---------------------------------------
The New Launch Field
south and west
a short walk north from the San Hing,
jutting blunt between
Tai Kwai Wan's clear smeared green
and the stagnant sludge of Sek Hau Wan
lapping at the promenade
fronting scrubbed glass shops
Moyne Carbunk -- a master at port,
would remember for a pint of Hooker Dark
fucking Floxies -- he'd smile
never making clear, talking of
calloused Teep-craft berthed
beside bile-coloured Dauk ferries
and flimsy looking Floxie Traps
bobbing in their slips,
chipped and fading plimsoll marks
rising and falling
beside a maelstrom of hawkers
selling the fruits of creation,
the stink and stress
sitting dull and thick
in the stivy humidity
---------------------------------------
In Chinese medicine
fresh Goblin liver is a popular cure for constipation
which explains the Swathu and pidgin Cantonese
most Goblins speak
---------------------------------------
Tivot & The Bishop 4
Tivot and the Bishop started out at a nervous
pace, wishing they were invisible. Junkies and homeless
from a dozen worlds, living their forgotten lives of
diarrhoea and smeared snot, huddled and dozed in doorways
and in empty cisterns set at odd intervals along the
street. Ghosts moved through them, heading back to hell,
nursing assorted pains of over-indulgence, hardly
noticing the city around them, solids competing with the
past, ancient buildings, and lives overlapping till the
blurred, melding into a bumfuzzled soup, impossible to
discern or displace... any particular, any time or place,
as if there was some kind of cognition beyond the
kneejerk instinct dragging the past on through in clean
straight lines... It's an illusion of course, all done
with mirrors....
The true geometry of the ether is mighty screwed
up folks. The path, the true path that ghosts follow,
like any information not confined to a carrier, can't be
shown in any of those lovely equations foisted on you in
school; best fit curves that obscure, unable to parse the
bump 'round the mitered corners of the envelope, like a
water balloon that flattens on impact, but never
breaking, gathering itself together before continuing....
Watch closely when you see those fat women
squatting outside any chickenshop at dusk and you can
see... It's sometimes visible, but seldom _seen_, as they
poke decapitated oil cans full of burning joss paper.
Yeah you guessed it, it's the ash, the ash tracing the
ether, defying chaotic distributions, bending space and
even time ever-so-slightly for just long enough to slip
in the symbolic for that brief burp, long enough to
reveal its secrets....
"Shouldn't we call Gothot?" Bishop said.
"Use your head. I'm always telling you--"
"Not a good idea huh?"
"Anyone could be listening, anyone, and then what?
We'd be dead meat Bishop. If we're gonna get outta this
you got to start using your head."
"Sorry."
"Dead meat, remember that."
"Dead meat."
They found the entrance to the shunck and started
down the broad spiral ramp. An uneven row of bubs,
sloppily welded to the wall, lit the ramp, looking like
fuzzy grease covered crystal balls.
"Did Barf say anything?"
"'bout what?"
"Dunno, maybe some big score?"
"You know Barf. He always had something going. It
was all talk. You know, Barf talk."
The ramp ended in an enormous circular chamber with
a seamless domed ceiling. A panoramic multer of some Mooter
landscape, colours bleeding beyond the human eye, spanned
the chamber, encased in a generational accumulation of
urban smegma. Huge nets of half dead bubs hung from
the ceiling at odd intervals in the multer's canopy along
with the remains of a handful of mummified birds.
At the far end of the chamber, barely visible
through the gloom, the long blue glow of a pressure curtain
flickered.
Both fell silent as the brooding blank ball of a
flasher with municipal insignia dropped from behind a net
of bubs to make sure they weren't going to loiter.
Bishop swallowed hard, stuck his hands in his
pockets and started walking towards the curtain. Holos
showing adverts for deodorants, prayer wheels, beef
jerky, non-milk desert toppings, moth balls and finally,
shunck schedules materialized as they approached the
curtain. Five minutes, it said.
The adverts continued. The solemn holo of a
Floxie with soft eyes, appeared in a rust robe, barking
softly. A cascade of weapons, plasers, flashers, mashers
and wink field generators appeared as the Floxie barked and
Soobish pictographs slowly rotated beside the exploding rocks,
buildings and animals.
A saucer eyed Mooter replaced the Floxie. Bottles
of heroin, nip, crease and a confusion of neural simulators
floated at his sleeve with a scrolling progression of
prices. You could buy anything on Canter.
Three minutes, the schedule said.
Tivot glanced behind him to see the silhouette of
an old man, wearing a filthy creased snot smeared black mac
and highlace poly-boots, shuffling slowly off the ramp.
The flasher swung beside him as he fell against the nearest
wall, taking large asthmatic breaths. The flasher darted
closer and paused:
"Loitering is prohibited in public transportation
terminals per city code IIIBN 12A4700 by order of the city
Provost. Please discontinue stated activity or face
criminal charges. Thank you."
The old man didn't seem to hear. The flasher
bobbed slightly for a pre-prescribed pause:
"Loitering is prohibited in public transportation
terminals per city code IIIBN 12A4700 by order of the city
Provost. This is your second and final warning. You have
ten seconds to discontinue stated activity or face criminal
charges. Thank you."
The old man began to convulse violently, hacking
up blood and wine that spilled rhythmically onto the front
of his coat.
"You have been found guilty of loitering per code
IIIBN 12A4700 by order of the city Provost...."
The chamber flashed blue as the flasher discharged
a warning bolt into the old man. He shuddered and keeled
over flat on his face. The dull sound of bone hitting rock
filled the chamber.
"You have been found guilty of loiteri--" A door
opened in the curtain. "by order of the city Provost...."
Tivot and the Bishop hurried into the shunck and turned
around in time to see a second charge emptied into the old
man lying dead on the floor before the door and curtain
closed with a woosh.
#
The shunck deposited them at the main terminal, a
broad stone floor below an expanse of honeycomb arches and
preterit echoes. A shock of cool thin air from the heat
exchangers at each end, raised goose bumps as they stepped
onto the platform.
Tivot and the Bishop cut straight through the
labyrinth of pasty somnambulant statues, making for the
launch bays at the far end of the terminal, stepping on
toes and bumping into a dozen hangovers.
Here and there crew members from any one of a
hundred ships slept on benches, sucked coffee from foam
sponges, chewed on twin sticks of yau cha kwai or glazed
crullers and mumbled to themselves about hangovers and
imagined alcoholic indiscretions from the night before,
through day old beards and disintegrating braids,
unclipped toenails and unbrushed teeth as they rubbed
itchy athletes feet against posts and door jambs.
Most wandered aimlessly around the terminal, as if
it were a track for sleepwalkers, wearing worn jumpsuits,
bright coloured flight socks or long loose robes to keep
their genitals warm.
Hector was in landing bay forty-four. Forty-four
was notorious for being the crappiest bay in the field.
The ramp and cargo loading systems hadn't worked for fifty
years. The nutrient pumps had lousy pressure and sometimes
couldn't pump more than two or three thousand liters
without slowing down or altogether stopping for hours at a
time.
Barf loved forty-four because you could get it at
half price if you bitched enough. Barf was a master at
bitching.
"I hope we haven't been followed," Tivot said,
glancing nervously down each bay as they passed.
"Followed?" Bishop stopped dead, looking about
wildly, then grabbed Tivot by the shoulders. "
They're waiting for us aren't they."
"I didn't say we were being--"
"Tell me, I can take it Tivot."
"Just keep your--"
"I don't think you appreciate the gravity of the
situation we're in Tivot," Bishop said, weighing each word.
"They could be anywhere, waiting to pop us like they did
Barf."
"Come on," Tivot groaned. But Bishop wouldn't
budge.
"Don't look! There's someone standing next to
forty-four." Tivot started to turn his head. "Don't look
or he'll know he's been made!"
"Bishop--"
"Oh God, we're gonna die!"
Tivot pried Bishop's fingers from his arms and
turned to see some dweeb from a tramp freighter wrapped in
a blanket, dozing on the floor of the corridor.
"It's just some..." Tivot said turning back to
Bishop. "Bishop?" But Bishop was gone, vanished into the
terminal like a burp echoing for a brief moment before
evaporating into a forgotten indiscretion.
"Fucking idiot," Tivot mumbled as he stomped back
towards the terminal, peering down each launch bay in the
hopes of finding him huddled in the shadows like a pathetic
little gargoyle. "So help me I'll kill him," he said
stalking into the main terminal, peering under benches and
behind litter bins. Bishop was nowhere to be found.
It was nearly dawn, the fuzzy glow on the horizon
growing as vendors and hawkers from a hundred worlds
started to silently file in from tramp freighters sitting
in their launch bay camp sites. Others stumbled bleary
eyed from the platform fresh from their damp corrugated
ghettos in the city. They moved with the silent
anticipation of the impending day that cuts across culture
and species, branding them commuters, clutching their
bundled wares to be piled high in stalls and spread neatly
on blankets the colour of ash and emerald.
"What do you seek?" This came from a plump woman
bundled like a mummy in strips torn from bright flowered
sheets. Wisps of greying brown hair escaped from her
wrapped head floating as if weightless in the cold air of
the terminal.
"Have you seen a wiry little guy come through here,
'bout this high with dark brown skin and grey stubble?"
The woman nodded wisely, speaking with a fuzzy Erdu
accent "Use your eyes not to see but to bear the fruits of
vision. That is where you will find your wiry little man."
Tivot looked at her as if she had two heads. "Oh
God, a fruit! That's all I need, a fucking fruit!"
The old woman just smiled and nodded as Tivot
stormed off to check the shunck schedules. A schunk
dropped into its cradle before the schedule cycled
through to tell him that the schunk was leaving in one
minute.
The door opened with a gasp, the pressure curtain
rippling blue at the expenditure as Tivot bolted the last
ten meters before the door closed.
Tivot collapsed onto a bench, sandwiched between
two older women already returning with their day's
shopping at the market with bags of misshapen vegetables,
hard haggled coils of foul smelling sausage links and round
reed baskets stuffed with ducks and blue skinned Silkies,
peeking and peering about, unaware of their fate.
It just didn't figure, Tivot thought, why would
anyone want to pop Barf? This was crazy. Barf was a worn
out piece of shit, running equipment and people for some
worthless archaeological dig to places that no one but a
bunch of poseur academics would be interested in.
Barf wanted to be a dragon, hording treasure and a
harem of virgins, that he could never do anything with, in
a cave guarded by the bones and rusting armor of his
rivals. But at best Barf was a second rate pack-rat, a
goblin hording worthless junk, chicken bones, shards of
eggplant, empty matchboxes and dried up June Bugs between
cracks and under floorboards that rotted as the noonday sun
hit the eves.
Barf was a piss artist and a loser. He didn't own
or know anything or anyone of value. It must of been a
fluke, there could be no other explanation.
By the time the schunk reached the city, Tivot's
pale pink jacket was infused with the insistent smell of
Moack and stuffed Calor Links.
---------------------------------------
Sui Kwai Tseng Shunck Station
I.
a small disused well
where the station now stood,
started life
as a Mooter cistern,
ringed by a half-moon of spires
where a small boy
fell to his death
some one hundred
and twenty years before
his ashes sit forgotten
on a tilled shelf
twenty leagues to the east,
in a concrete cemetery
at the foot of Gao To San,
between dead flowers sticking
from scratched coke bottles
stuck in puddles of wax,
in front of a sad round photo
bleeding greens and reds,
wearing wire-rimmed glasses
and a smile, for the camera
II.
Floxies, ever respectful
of the dead,
were known to drop
chickens,
curly-brown meeps
and the odd stray dog,
down the cistern,
barking thrice by rote,
to appease
the spirit of the boy.
The Swathu and Hakka
respected the Floxies,
even though ghosts
didn't know
the difference
between the real
and symbolic.
Such a waste
to throw away
good food.
A little paper money
burnt at dusk
and a small shrine
would have done
quite nicely.
III.
The station was in the midst
of major site work,
trying to solve
for the fiftieth time
in as many years
the seepage
that shorted
anything electrical.
The cause
had never been determined,
and the solutions
had become bizarre
as the decades rolled past.
At the moment
they were drilling holes,
four centimeters
in diameter
and fifty meters deep
into the granite floors and walls,
at half meter intervals,
twelve thousand in all,
to be filled
with an undisclosed substance
to wick the water out
from the rock face.
The rational being;
that if they had failed
to keep the water out
then it shouldn't
be difficult to fail
at drawing it
into the station
and achieve
their original objective,
a dry station.
IV.
The City Provost,
Mr. So Shu Kong,
a bureaucrat
who fancied himself
a scientist,
changed the character
kwai from ghost
to another
meaning expensive,
on all maps,
signs and municipal archives,
before the station opened.
The locals never forgot
and shunned the station
like the plague,
walking the four blocks east
to Lo Tsuen
or three blocks south
to Ngau Wu Tok
The fung shui
by some freak chance
was not only
open to ghosts,
it actively courted them,
like a giant roach motel
trapping them
to bounce off the walls,
wailing their frustration
and anger
through the ether.
---------------------------------------
Tivot & The Bishop 5
The yellow signs were blinking out with the dawn,
one by one, as the girls emptied into the street, bleary
eyed and dishevelled, heading into the morning for home.
Domesticated Trolls lumbered along, pushing
enormous bamboo brooms, dumping the larger chunks of refuse
into clunky bashed flashcans floating behind drunkenly like
a dinghys tied behind a sailboat.
Tivot headed for Barf's favorite haunt, the
Exhaulted Fart. If there was beer, Bishop would be
nearby. It was an immutable law, one of the few things
that could be counted on in the universe.
Being wary of police, Tivot got off at Sui Kwai
Tseng, three blocks east of the bar, hoping, that the
construction and seepage had knocked out the security
screens and the flashers that always seemed to be lurking
about in dusty corners of every station.
Painfully the Tivot climbed the stairs pushing his
way through the air curtain into the heat. His once sharp,
pastel suit, a classic Australian George Raft Revival, hung
limp and wrinkled in the choking humidity. Vagrant eyes,
lacking spark, looked through all in short sweeping blinks
through a haze of sweat, looking creased, matted and slept
on from hair to toe.
A Barlowian rat, nigh on a meter in length, eyed
Tivot, thoughtless, from under a huge stack of empty beer
kegs, it's short sinewy limbs covered in brown grease and
smeared sewage from Tai Sek Wan. The rat was an escapee
from an empty Caarack Trap, being loaded with Prince
spaghetti to be sold along the Mooter trading lanes
washward of Haystack.
The rat sighed, out of reflex, and didn't attack,
choosing to nap instead. An hour later it would neatly
sever the hind half of a French Poodle, pissing on a
freshly cleaned pile carpet left out to dry, not three
meters away.
Once Tivot was on the street he knew he was okay. The
daylight had brought substance to the streets. There were
no shadows holding memories of your footfalls, no
opportunity for the silence to swallow you whole if by
chance you dropped your guard....
A threshold is reached, as too many waking thoughts
crowd the ether, drowning out the matrix, forcing any
freedom back into the shadows, exchange, suddenly limited
to the broad and bulk, large enough that evaporation at
the borders isn't noticed.
Real exchange, contemplation and dreams would
never stand a chance, having to take refuge with vampires
and other aberrations in their daylight refuges.
Can't really trust anything in the morning can
you? Forget all that crap you've been fed, the true face of
evil only shows itself in the morning, in those bright
pinched faces moving briskly through the pain and amnesia
after being wrenched from their dreams, memory erased and
replaced with a residual uneasiness and a cheap facade
passed off as the real world....
Glass smooth stone walls blinked blue and melted
into shop fronts; soba, congee and noodle shops, vegetable
stalls and pawn shops as the morning shift moved in.
Middle aged women, wearing white t-shirts and shorts,
touting faded red, white and blue plastic weave bags,
staked out spots beneath pedestrian flyovers where a few
hours before there were carts selling satay, feeding smoke
into the gloom, darkening the concrete.
The contents of the bags were carefully laid out,
buckets of flowers, knobby joints of ginger, bunches of
garlic, stacks of umbrellas, socks, t-shirts, toys and
clocks, beeping and buzzing to draw attention, anything
that could be unloaded on people still half asleep,
stumbling into the day.
---------------------------------------
Tung Wan St in the East Barrows
Two buildings down, between the prone, sleeping
forms of the homeless, a lone shining Hyundai dropped from
the corridor to unload one, plump, Henry Limeston, wearing
a white apron.
With a creak he opens a trio of locks with a crack
and a tumbling of clicks before sliding a rusting gate from
the storefront of his small Tack shop. In the store
window, a Green River Steel Fork saddle sat astride a
pathetic plastic horse, attempting to gleam from under six
months deposit of dust.
It'd been damn near a month since he'd sold his
last saddle. With so few horses left it was no surprise.
Practically his only income came from selling whips, crops
and quirts to the hundreds who frequented the shop weekly.
Henry and his wife, Pink Limeston knew what the
whips were being used for. There were no drovers on
Canter.
Begrudgingly they carried the largest line of
crops, whips and quirts in the hemisphere and were the
planet's exclusive carrier of the popular Dandelion
Drovers' Whip. They resented their little store becoming a
haunt of the S & M crowd. And yet, they had to eat.
Henry and Pink watched them parade through the
store every day, bright eyed girls of seventeen, fresh from
school, eyeing Australian Cattle Whips, middle aged shoe
clerks, gaunt pickpockets with street gang insignia,
Hookers and Pimps from as far away as Bambi buying Benson,
Elko or Nebraska Quirts by the gross, expressionless female
executives, impeccably dressed, tucking silk whip crackers
into Alligator purses, Nuns of St. Francis back-ordering
Western Mule Skinners, Hardhats from Fa Peng construction
sites asking for Black German Braided Rawhide Whips as if
they were Twinkies, librarians from Chueng Po Tsai hefting
Jacksonville Drovers' Whips with a practiced eye.
Henry tried not to think of the tens of thousands
of whips he had sold and what they were being used for.
But they wouldn't leave him alone, haunting his dreams,
tormenting him, as he saw _his_ whips and quirts falling in
slow motion onto thousands of exposed buttocks. Crack!
Crack! Crack! The masses of asses moaning their ecstasy as
tears stream down swollen faces to drip into the raw
bleeding wounds, the salt burning, nerve endings screaming
as couples, his customers, fuck for as far as the eye can
see, climaxing en masse, in a deafening shudder, roaring
through Yaw.
Henry would wake, bolt upright, in terror. You see,
he believed that he was responsible, had unleashed a
terrible scourge on the world. There would be
retribution....
"These hea whips, ah fa haases," he would explain
in his thick Whitingham accent to anyone who'd listen.
"Yea see, haases, got thick hydes," he would try to
impress, too timid to explain that the quirts and crops he
sold weren't made for human flesh.
Henry was a kind man who didn't believe in using
crops even on horses, let alone people. . . but no one
would listen.
A heavy canvas hose was dragged from the store and
engorged with flow, narrowed and aimed, hosing down the
street. The cool clear water washing away the night's
debris, the residue of a thousand feet and thoughts. Candy
wrappers, crumpled French Ticklers oozing drying sperm and
scat, crushed glass, lottery tickets, spit and green lumps
of phlegm, all dissolving, before it can mix and fuse in
the sun. The water cuts, and darkens, pushing along like a
broom, a swath of the loose top layer, in front of the
store.
---------------------------------------
Pandora Boks, a form four student from the Mrs Wu York
Memorial College, working in a 7-Eleven one block east of the
Tivot was closing the sale on a box of Hydrox to the Ma Tao
Wan sewage disposal magnet, Poo-Lae Park. Poo liked to lick
the creamy white middles of the cookies at his desk and throw
away the cookie. This was a boss's prerogative. Pandora
starred at Poo's crotch, enjoying the effect, while Poo
squirmed, passed over the money and quickly left, allowing a
large male mosquito, an ungainly mess of wings and legs, to
escape with Poo as he left the store trying to convince himself
that she was too young. . . .
---------------------------------------
The Exhaulted Fart
The Exhaulted Fart sat squat and unrepentant
between a Fundie soup kitchen which was actually a front
for a militant rosicrucian group selling hallucinogenic
marshmallows and a dust encased chinese dispensary offering
such counterfeit black market rarities as reindeer antlers,
Gotterdam tails, Coalhol Ginseng and dried tiger penises,
all on the East side of Tung Wan Road.
The bar had been in operation as long as Barf could
remember, which could be anywhere from ten days to a
hundred years. Barf had liked the place because the beer
was cheap, it was fumigated on a regular basis and the name
was warm and retentive. Bishop liked the Bar because Barf
did.
Tivot sat down at the bar and slid his card into a
slot to activate the bartender who twitched slightly as it
powered up and ambled over to sneer and pour Tivot a draft.
The beer was thin but cold in the hot still air, the mug
breaking out in a sweat.
As his eyes adjusted to the dark he glanced about
the room, looking for Bishop, but he really didn't care
anymore. Bishop could just go fuck himself as far as Tivot
was concerned. If the stupid piece of shit wanted to run
off and get his ass blown off it was his own fault and no
one elses. I'll be damned, Tivot thought, if I'm gonna
chase his hairy ass all over the strip. Tivot took a
mighty hit of beer and brought the mug down on the counter
with a solid satisfying thunk.
The initial shock of finding Barf in the alley was
starting to wear off -- the adrenalin thinning. If the
locals were in on it he'd have been killed or arrested by
now. But the question remained, who popped Barf?
Behind the bar, a holo display for Jrett Ale
showed a Dit in armor, sans helmet, brandishing the
freshly severed head of a Teep soldier in one hand and a
frosty mug of Ale in the other. Tivot stared at the
head, as it endlessly dripped blood, fueling the Dit's
huge grin. Tivot couldn't tell which the Dit was happier
about, the head or the beer.
In walks Jethro Tickle, of all people, looking
pickled and not a little worse for wear, wearing a Denim
Sharkskin suit, which Tivot thought looked pretty sharp,
even though Tickle's amorphous physique made it tough to
cut much of a figure, or any figure for that matter.
"Well fancy, fancy, it's the Tivot," Tickle said,
baritoning and vibrating the bottles on the bar. "On
Canter yet. I thought you were in Jushrutt running
pineapples or harem girls or something."
"Archaeologists from--"
"Pebble Boxes? Goddamn things are no good," Tickle
said, hustling the Tivot off of his stool and into a
sperm-stained mauve colored booth, liberated from the back
of the Aqua Pimpernel on Dundas street in Sin Yan Tseng
where it had sat for seventy-five years and some change
before the Pimpernel was trashed in the Rice Cooker riots
in '086.
"No choice, gotta eat. It's been real tight
lately. What about you?"
Tickle took a big hit from his mug, and wiped his
mouth with the back of his hand. "Jack shit lad, ain't been
doing jack shit. That new Combine the Floxies got running
outta the Whor'r been drying up all the small runs between
here and the San Zi."
"Thought I heard something 'bout you running three
loads of--"
"How'd you hear about that?"
"Secrets are like diarrhoea. In the Bays, ships
whisper in their sleep. . ."
Tickle shook his shaggy head and laughed. "That was
just a mercy fuck, just a payback. 'supposed to be on the
hush."
Tickle downed his beer in one long draught, before
ordering the next round. Neither said a thing as they
waited for the beer to arrive.
Tivot wasn't exactly sure what his next move was.
That was no zip gun that popped Barf. It took something
almighty big to burn his head clean like that. Tivot
didn't want to do anything until he had some idea who the
players might be.
"You still got that 'ol shit-box Kechaun?" Tivot
said.
The shark-fin shaped Kachauns were a bitch to
handle in atmosphere. Their broad flat shape tended to act
like a sail when floating on their plates. The smallest
gust of wind could send a Kechaun smashing into the
blast-flange, severing loading arms and dump-hoses running
into the floor. Just about everyone working the belt had
at least one good Kechaun story.
"Yep, we had the old girl moored in a lower Bay at
the Ozamiz field last month. You know Ozamiz, the air is
still as death. If you fart, the stink'll hang there for a
week. So we only put a couple of light lines on her.
Damned if a freak gust hits her blind. The lines snap and
she starts spinning like a top. Scarred the shit outta the
Tower. They thought she'd gone twinky or something. Tore
a two meter chunk of concrete and re-bar outta the flange.
Damnedest thing you ever saw.
Control freaked and wouldn't give us a window until
we did a deep IIS to see if she was really sane.
Pain-in-the-ass. The damn thing took two days. Cut our
margin for the load in half."
"Wish I coulda seen their faces. . . ."
"Was almost worth it. Ozamiz and their fucking 19%
tariffs. . . I hope the dick-heads pissed in their pants."
The beer arrived and Tickle went ahead and ordered another
round to save time. "Check it out the next time yer there.
Bay 87. No shit, it was a good two meter chunk right by
the gates." Tickle raised his mug, "Here's to the bastards
pissing in their pants," before downing the pint in five
noisy gulps.
Tivot took a sloppy gulp and paused, "You're a
gambling man, right?"
Cagey old Tickle gave a Clark Kent twinkle and
picked wax from one hairy ear. "Whatcha gett'n at?"
"Barf's been babbling about something big going
down but the old shit's keeping tight--"
"What, you think Barf's trying to squeeze you out
or something?"
Tivot hesitated just long enough for Tickle to
catch. "Or something. . . You have your ear to it. You
hear anything?"
Tickle was already half way through his next beer,
sizing up Tivot through the thick wet glass of the mug.
"Not a thing lad, only the scuttle on the net, but
nothing on the street. Curious it is too. Been in-system
a good square fortnight and everything is lid tight. What
you think Barf might be up to?"
Uh oh, Tivot thought. This was starting to get
onto shaky ground. Like most Trampers, Tickle was an
unknown quantity. Tivot would run into him on and off over
the years, drink beer and trade common scuttle heard on the
net. Information, real information, was guarded jealously.
By asking Tickle for information, Tivot was coming
dangerously close to breaking the unspoken Tramper's Code.
Ask no questions and give no answers. Especially
questions, which were always more valuable.
"Damned if I know. The last time Barf had
something going we almost lost Hector. I don't want to go
through that again."
Tickle thought for a moment. Tivot was stupid, but
not that stupid.
"Person to see is Luce."
"Luce? She's here in Canter?"
"In last week, word is, waiting for a berth."
Tivot starred at the severed head in the beer
display swaying slightly in the Dit's hand. For a second
it looked like Barf's face, staring wisely like some John
the Baptist from a silver platter. Tivot could almost
swear the thing was smiling. . . . "I gotta see a man
about a horse" Tickle said, "Wanna come?"
---------------------------------------
Jethro Tickle
Tickle was a tramper like Tivot, running illicit
cheeses from Carthusian monasteries at St. Bruno and
Massabesic to the trendy nouveau riche on the regions of
the belt controlled by the High Right and Pentacostal
Alchemists, scattered like buckshot towards the core.
Tickle was a loophole. He didn't belong to any
grand scheme or natty sub-plot. His whole existence was
relegated to the position of a colorful transitional
character. It's tough work. A brief mention and the rest
was left up to Tickle. Most would just take what was
offered, do what was expected and live out their lives in a
blur of cameos and cattle calls, growing bitter with
disappointment before giving up altogether to go back home
(playing their last role as the prodigal son), to take over
the family softwood chopstick business. Not Tickle.
Tickle could see in the grey area, ominously marked
"unknown" like on an ancient map of Africa, an opportunity.
Tickle understood only too well the great unspoken
law that freedom is directly proportionate to the size of
your audience. As the audience grows, so do the
constraints. As long as no one knew what he was doing he
could get away with anything.
Unknown to the Tivot, Tickle had been quietly
building a small empire on the opposite side of the belt.
He made a killing in Bambi with a 24-hour cheap sunglasses
delivery service, cornering the market in a neat 3 years.
He sold the franchise rights and used the capital to build
a string of floating casino's strategically placed near
University centres washward of Canter, sucking off student
book and beer money, into pachinko and mahjong parlours,
slot machines, crap tables and roulette wheels that paid
off in research papers, letters of recommendation, altered
grades or transcripts and for the lucky few, whole degrees,
all through the auspices of the little known but
all-powerful hermetical Tenure Cartel.
Perhaps this would be a good time to say a little
more about the Cartel. Here' goes,
The Decline and Fall of the Tenure Cartel
By the time that Tivot and Tickle were having their
little chat in the Exhaulted Fart, the Cartel was centuries
old, having grown from a mythological circle of five to
some dozens of thousands, scattered across human space. No
university, no college, no think tank, research lab or
library was free of their denizens, fallaciously ensconced
into the hallowed ranks of tenure by dint of the brute
grammatical force wielded by the beings that be in the
boardrooms and bathrooms of the cartel.
Members rarely knew each other and never
acknowledged their shared secret if they did.
Communication within the cartel was almost entirely done
through info-rich codes embedded in bibliographies in
contorted publications like the PLMA which everyone
subscribes to but never read.
Prospective initiates were contacted through
cryptic messages incorporated into notes written on graded
papers and instructed what papers to write until their turn
would come to be gently guided through grad school and
their first tenure track positions, receiving papers to be
published under their own names to eventually climax in an
orgasmic burst until they were finally granted tenure.
Some histories claim the origin of the Cartel to be
the insight of a Floxie Sufi poet from Colhol who was tired
of the life of a wandering scholar.
The Floxie had been eking out a living for
decades, going from university to university, trying to
interest people in his poetry which were no so much
poems as autonomous heuristic processes that pulled
information from whatever host it happened to reside on
and generate poems from whatever it could find.
According to the story, an entomological taxonomist
at a university in Piglet asked if he would ghostwrite
chaotic cladistic filters. The work was relatively easy,
the filters being quite similar to his poetic processes,
and the money was good.
It wasn't long before the poet had more work than
he really wanted and started to pass out work to fellow
artists in need of money, which evolved into a network that
later became the cartel.
Few believe the story. Neither the name of the
poet or any of his processes have survived. All 24 of
the surviving poems attributed to the poet were written
within a one year period in or around the Bambi along
the Colhol pispint, making It more than likely that this
mystical archetype was the creation of one of several
discordian text-file groups that were active at that
time.
According to most official histories, the Cartel was
originally masterminded on Earth in New York at N.Y.U. in
the twenties by a young Biblical Frisic footnote scholar
named Geoffry Manship.
By all accounts, even in his youth, Manship was
rather vapid and droll, prone to smoking Capri cigarettes
and wearing cheap K-Mart tweed jackets with naugahyde
elbows, polyester slacks, penny loafers, perpetually
broken black rim glasses and affecting the manner of what
he thought a professor should be. Fortunately Manship's
habilimentary shortcomings did not extend to his
scholarship, which was erudite, verbose and astonishingly
prolific.
Manship's PhD was in historical linguistics which
didn't stop him from writing a monograph on medieval
friesian flora & fauna which was shortly followed by a
book on early modern cabalistic canine oncology and then
a massive history of teutonic knot tieing.
These books were instantly attacked and
dismissed for having the arrogance to work outside the
boundaries of his credentials.
Manship was completely at a loss. His work was
of the highest caliber. He just couldn't understand what
he had done that was so wrong. In the end he decided to
continue, hoping that eventually his work would be read
and judged on its own merits.
His next book was on glazing techniques used
during the Spanish civil war. It was more than his chair
could stand and Manship was quietly taken aside and told
that one more academic indiscretion like that would loose
him his tenure.
Manship was mortified, but not cowed. His
interests were too broad to be confined to one discipline
and he tried to sell his next book, a study of plimsoll
marks on World War II cargo vessels, under a pseudonym.
This of course was impossible, as all academic
publishing is based on who you are and not what you have
written. Short of forging a complete set of credentials
and contacts for his non de plume, there was no way for
him to publish.
It was at this time, that a graduate student by
the name of Lacey Koo asked Manship for help in choosing a
thesis topic. Miss Koo was a talented teacher but had
little talent for scholarship. Manship had seen hundreds
like her, washed out of graduate programs only because
they weren't brilliant researchers.
It didn't take long for Manship to put two and two
together and gave the plimsoll monograph to Lacey which was
eventually followed by another two more books and some
twenty articles, all written by Manship and published under
Koo's name.
Koo eventually was granted tenure on the basis of
Manship's work who was happy to have his work published.
It is thought that Manship eventually helped some twenty
others in over twelve fields to get tenure. The seeds of
the cartel had been sown.
However, the first true cabal didn't appear for
many more years. There are still vaporous tales, whifting
and sneaking about the net of a certain Old English Scholar
nearly thirty years earlier and the secret society of five
that had tenuous affiliations, not really more than
etymological suspicions of residing at SUNY at Stony Brook.
Yet, all accounts sniffed along the grapevine
place the society firmly a full five years after the
campus had been blown into a crater in the late nineties
over the choice of food service. The campus became a nice
freshwater lake, famous for it's enormous bass.
The locals, those who survived the blast, were
later polled and predominantly preferred the lake over the
stuffys pontificating in their concrete bunkers.
Secret histories of the Cartel have surfaced, with
no claim to accuracy or standard spelling, telling of
titanic battles fought in the early years of the Cartel,
when some papers generated by the cartel were met with
rejection slips and whole books were left unpublished.
They told of the romance and danger of the great heros and
heroines typing furiously long into the night, often going
without meals and risking eyestrain, all so some scholar
they would never know or meet could get an office with a
nice view and send their children to collage for free.
What was unknown to the underground scholars was
that there was another Cartel, even more secret and
possessing omnipotent powers undreamt of in the ivory
towered campus' across civilized space. But that's another
story.....
As the years passed and Tickle's fortune grew, he
carefully concealed his double life from Tivot, nursing
along the Kechaun Ferry he'd gutted and retrofitted as a
lightweight freighter, popping up from time to time to make
a few gratuitous runs here and there in the Uitlan,
spending days at a time drinking beer in dingy dives like
the Exhaulted Fart, belching and farting along with the
other trampers, even going so far as buying the occasional
blowjob down on the strip to complete his cover.
The scam had been going on so long that Tickle
didn't really know what was real any longer. Was he a fat,
fucked up lowlife Tramper who dreamed he owned casinos or
was he a rich fat member of the nouveau riche dreaming he
was a Tramper. . . .
========End Sarko Volume 1 : Issue 2========
