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 Sarko is a journal of fictional works-in-progress published bi-monthly in ascii format by d.i.h. press. Sarko is distributed on the net as Literary Freeware. You are encouraged to copy and distribute for non-commercial purposes. Unless otherwise stated Sarko is copyrighted (c) Brad Collins. All Rights Reserved. Sarko is registered in Paris as ISSN 1022-1069. This is not public domain, it is Literary Freeware. You are encouraged to copy and distribute these texts for non-commercial use as long as this notice is attached. These are completely original literary works by Brad Collins, who bears all customary responsibilities for its contents and arrangement. The characters and events portrayed herein are fictional; any resemblance to other characters living or dead is entirely coincidental. If you don't have have ftp access. Send a message to sarko-request@mach.hk.super.net. and in the subject line put: Sarko-Announce -- to be added to the announcement list Sarko-Distribution -- to recieve each issue by mail. Sarko-Request X.X -- if you want to be mailed a specific issue To paraphrase the Prisoner, I am a man, I am not a listserv.... 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Brad Collins brad@mach.hk.super.net snail mail: dih press PO Box 1010 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========