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At four bells, Moldenke was the first passenger to arrive at the Titanic's deckside bistro, Der Kroetenkusser. The short walk from his cabin had winded him. Being the first to appear at Der Kroetenkusser was the one certain way of getting the outermost table, the one affording a decent view up and down the pleasure deck. The little table's metal top, however, was no larger than a dinner plate and its spindly, uneven legs made tip-overs an ever-present hazard. To the sometimes obsessively overcautious Moldenke, the table was something to keep a wary eye on. Any unexpected diversion from the norm -- a loud noise, a sudden movement, a fall -- left its mark on his weakened hearts. And with but one lung, snatching the next breath from the air was sometimes exhausting.
 Udo, the pie-faced barman, brought Moldenke a mug of fermented mulce, a tin of phosphate powder and a small bale of smoking hair. He brushed ash from the tablecloth with the back of a paring knife, the handle clasped loosely in a hand that was cadaverous, blue and all thumbs.
"How do you like the hand, Moldenke? Nice job, eh? All thumbs. Imagine that." The nails were partly uprooted and thickened with a white fungus.
"Nice. Who did it?"
"A deformist named Ferry, in New Oleo. If you're ever down that way, get something done. You look so ordinary."
"This mulce stinks. Is it fresh? Delicate stomach. Too much high bologna for supper yesterday. Flying dreams all night."
"Oh, yes. Very fresh. The first mug I've poured."
"You've boiled it to kill the tubularia?"
"For an hour."
"And the shagella?"
"Nothing could survive. Nothing."
"I'm surprised to see such good-looking hair. I thought the French had burned every bale."
"They missed a warehouse on Permanganate Island. I heard the news on Radio Ratt."
"How fortunate. This smoke takes me to places where no word has ever entered, a place where nothing is comprehensible, nothing expressible. I'm quite addicted."
"They say the Captain is, too."
"Hmmm. He certainly keeps to himself."
"I expect he'll be coming in for his four o'clock snack any time now. Otherwise, he stays in his cabin and smokes all day ... roams at night when everyone's asleep. Gets his bearings by the moon. He follows the lunarcentric navigation theories of the great Tycho."
"Pity us all. Odd duck, the Captain."
"This is not for repeating, but on these nightly excursions, he has a dozen sewing needles stitched into the flesh of his buttocks."
"A true rara avis."
"Among the rarest."
Taking a pinch from the bale, Moldenke fluffed the hair with his fingers, rolled himself a cigarette, twisted the paper at both ends and listened to the news on Udo's radio: "President Ratt has indicated that his Bureau of Necronautics will discontinue its re-animation program. Those brought back thusfar have had diminished mental capacity. One of the first to be returned, Gerald R., wears a coat and helmet outfit of lightweight bulletproof chain-mail, carries around a ragged mud-duck facsimile made of stuffed sox and pipe cleaners and uses commodes built close to the floor so that his feet can touch the ground. Gerald sleeps the days away in a pillowed bathtub under a shade tree, a gourd of aqua-vita resting on his fevered chest.... The great inventor, Leuko Vink, vacationing at a Firecracker Sea resort, wants to put artificial suns and moons into orbit in order to illuminate parts of Indiana at night. These luminous bodies would permit night-time harvesting, light up darkened polar regions and disclose pockets of anti-Ratt activity in Indian Apple, Bloomberg and other darkened cities. Vink has assured the President that there will be enough water produced by melting polar caps to turn the Tektite Desert green. The luminous bodies are described as 'free-floating chemical furnaces.' Fed by the oxygen-rich Indiana atmosphere, these glowing spheres of phosphate, radium and fusel oil will burn for five-to-ten Forgettings. It is estimated that about three orbigators and onety-nine zil guida would be needed to complete the massive task, expected to take onety-five to onety-onety vague years, perhaps eighty, Vink affirmed.... More news after this word from the President...."
"The most loathsome man who ever lived."
"I'd keep those sentiments to myself, Moldenke."
Ratt's voice was a hoarse croak, the words spat out like melon seeds: 'There is no value in the common gibnut. Throughout a flearidden history they have done little more than beshit our sidewalks and puncture the flesh of children. I say, eat gibnuts for a gibnut-free world.... and remember this ... the constant gnaw of dingo masticates the toughest bone; the constant drip of water wears away the roughest stone; the constant cooing lover carries off the blushing maid; but it's the constant advertiser who always gets the trade.... Goodbye, people. Goodbye neuts. Keep your lamps trimmed and burning."
The broadcast ended with a high-pitched tone, static, fading voices, then dead air. Udo turned it off. "The transmitter loses power. It'll be back in time for the news."
"A little bit of Ratt goes a long way."
"Again, let me warn you. Re-shape that attitude or face trouble."
"Where did he come from? Who elected him? We don't even know what he looks like."
"They say he's dwarfish, shaped like a rutabaga."
"Deformist surgery. Radical. Used to be a bean pole, they say. And--"
The conversation was interrupted by a great excitement on deck. One of the ship's crew had spotted a dead plesiosaur in the water. Dozens watched the ship's davit haul the rotting hulk from a calm, grey sea in a rope basket.
"Another dead plesio," said Udo, cutting high bologna into die-size cubes, a noisy sawfly encircling his head. "The one they fished up yesterday had a full-dressed American sailor inside, half digested."
"So that's the stink I'm smelling. Holy jebus." The sawfly drifted to Moldenke and encircled his head. He tried to bat it from the air with one hand, then the other, but his reach fell short each time. "Udo! Kill this flying needle before it lances me."
Udo took up the circular chase with a sturdy straw swatter. "One of 'em bit my mother once. Sent her into a blind rage. Before it was over, she unmaned my poor infant brother with a pair of poultry shears and stuck his little balls on a picket fence."
"Arful," Moldenke said. "Plain arful." He lit the cigarette with a damp, sputtering match, breathing in all the smoke a single lung would allow, letting it seep out through rotted teeth. He watched it rise undisturbed before his placid, expressionless face, adding a spoonful of phosphate powder to the mulce, generating a moment's foaming and a mist that soaked into his jumpsuit.
After smashing the sawfly on the wall and feeding it to the ever-hungry, one-legged gull that hopped around browsing and beshitting the bistro at all hours, Udo turned on the radio and returned to cutting bologna.
"One day I'll slip in that gull squirt," Moldenke whined. "I'll crack open my skull on that turtlewood deck, and I'll die. And you, Udo, will go before the court on a charge of malicious endangerment."
"Mais non. The way Ratt sees it, lower animals are not shielded from the law. The gull is the offender here. It's as plain as the nose on your face. Why should the animals get special treatment? he says. 'Have you ever heard of an animal giving a dime to charity?' he says. Anyway, I have a valid waiver. I can't be charged with anything."
"Where do you get these waivers? I've been hearing about them."
Udo put a finger to his lips. "Shhhhh. Time for the news." Though the signal wavered, the gist of the news was comprehensible: "After a ten day sleep, from which physicians were unable to arouse her, former president Dorothy Peters has died from an ulcer of the stomach. In her last years, Peters, a widow, lived alone and in apparent harmony with a housefull of gibnuts. 'You could see dozens of them in the window,' a neighbor reported. When a Sergeant in Charge surveyed the home in the beam of a lamp, bright red eyes peered back. On one occasion, the Sergeant said, Peters opened the door and he saw gibnuts two or three feet long running around in filthy debris. Though dallying with gibnuts was in violation of the law, Peters possessed a valid waiver and the Sergeant took no action...."
"You want a chunk of bologna in your mulce, Moldenke?"
"Not in the mood."
"Pretty hard to get these days, good bologna. Only on Square Island ... in small amounts." He raised the radio's volume. It wasn't the news, but Michael Ratt reading from his concise history of Indiana, Moonlight on the Wabash.
"In those days it came to pass that President Kenny spoke to his aspirants, and he said, 'What shall we do when our currency is so debased as to be worth no more than the paper it is printed on and the ink and dye it is colored with?'
"Taking inspiration from his words, Mrs. Moldenke successfully vulcanized gum tissue onto horseshoe-shaped slugs of pig iron. Then the foetal teeth of stillborn neuts were implanted, nourished and teased into full, orderly growth. A simple, two-stroke fusel oil engine filled the masticating machine's energy needs, so that it could be mounted on the rear of a flatbed pedal truck and taken into the neighborhoods.
"Bring out yer money," cries the driver.
"Americans hurry down driveways carrying bucketfuls of worthless millions, dumping them into the maw of Mrs. Moldenke's wonderful machine, staring down its throat into a green soup of gluey pulp. These are hungry Americans, pleased to trade money for food.
"When they have emptied their buckets and the maw is full, the machine moves on. As it goes, it dumps from the rear twelve-pound cubes of a doughy, white material, quite like bean curd, except sweet and rather cheesy.
"The Americans gather them up, like farm hands behind the hay baler, stacking them in sheds and on porches, where the winter would freeze and preserve them.
To its credit, the masticator killed only once. A girl in Indian Apple, Hattie Porlocks, was feeding it peanut brittle and gum drops instead of money, when it bared its fangs like a starved wolf and bit off her head. A constable had to follow the machine for blocks before it spilled Hattie's head, intact, though cubed into a block of money curd."
"I don't remember that," Moldenke said. "It's my mother he's talking about. None of it ever happened. It just sounds like it did. What kind of news is this?"
Udo shook his head. "You're just not savvy, Moldenke. Ratt preaches the following gospel: No news is good news. All news is bad news. So any news will do. They tell me these reports are simply randomly generated word salad, not necessarily related to any actual event. Ratt's books were written the same way, by some sort of machine."
Moldenke chewed on the curled end of his stringy mustache. "It's a mystery to me why so many settlers have put their faith in Ratt. Nothing I'm hearing from him bodes well for any of us. It's time someone took some action."
Radio Ratt concluded the broadcast: "That ends this hour's news. President Ratt reminds you to report any loose necronauts, drink lots of mulce, and keep those lamps trimmed and burning. We know not the hour ... we know not the day."
"Here comes the Captain," Udo said.
Holding his hat in front of his face, Captain Smith turned into the bistro with a slight gimp, his whites so heavily starched they rasped when he walked. He sat in the shadows at the far end of the bar, lit his hair pipe and began reading a pre-edible copy of Ratt's Manifesto.
Moldenke turned his attention again to the plesiosaur, whose neck, twenty meters long, supported a head of relatively minute proportions. There were four paddlelike limbs and a short tail. Its mouth was filled with a foul-smelling brown paste and its ancient flesh hung like drying laundry from the bones. When a sudden gust of wind swept the odor past Moldenke's nostrils, his arm twitched involuntarily, his elbow slid off the edge of the table, and he was thrown from his chair. His head struck the hard deck with the sharp kunk of a mallet pounding a peg. "Fuck a duck and holy jebus. Look at this table. You can't even lean on it!"
"Watch that mouth, my man. Here comes Ophelia Balls, the ship's artist."
Ophelia appeared with her sketch pad and a sizable bag of charcoal sticks. With her came a faintly medicinal odor and a discernable warming of the air. She walked as if her legs were independent of one another, the result of deformist surgery in which the right and left legs were removed, then re-attached in the other's place.
"Join me for a mulce, Ophelia?" Moldenke accomplished a little sliver of a smile without showing too many teeth. "Careful of the table. It's a toddler. It loves to fall over and spill everything."
She accepted the offer and sat down, beginning to capture a charcoal likeness of the plesiosaur. Her jump suit, freshly starched and ironed, fit loosely on her skeletal frame. She had long, black hair, a soft forehead, dreamy eyes, and wore a Vink thinking hat tilted rakishly to one side.
Moldenke pinched his nostrils closed. "I wish they would dispatch that plesio. The stink is unbearable." There was a ring of pinpoint scars around his mouth, as if his lips had once been stitched together.
"So many dead ones," Ophelia said. "Floating by all day. It's President Ratt, shooting them from his yacht ... It's a disgrace. Haven't you read about it in the papers?"
"I can't. Something in the ink, or the paper. I break out in fulminant hives, head to toe."
The tip of Moldenke's cigarette caught fire. He wet his thumb and a finger with mulce and dampened it. "This hair is fresh, it's moist, yet it wants to burn like dry leaves." He had a sip of mulce, then spit it back. "This needs more phosphate!" He added another spoonful.
Udo brought Ophelia a mulce. "With or without, ma'am?"
"Without."
"Don't be afraid of the foaming, Ophelia. Phosphate's like fertilizer for the brain," Moldenke offered. "I see you're wearing a Vink thinker. Vintage, too."
"It's been in the family awhile."
"You don't see them much any more. I had one as a lad, but it went duncy over time. Had to bury it in the garden and plant horseradish over it."
"This one's addled now, depending on the situation and the weather, but when it was new, it made Grandma Balls the smartest girl in Pisstown."
"Pisstown ... Pisstown," Moldenke said. "I knew a Pisstown Balls. When I was driving one of those big pedal wagons during the first false-year of the Unguent War, running mulce and phosphate to the fusel oil camps. Roe Balls. His name was Roe Balls."
"Yes, a second cousin. A wagon overturned and a barrel of mulce fell on top of him. It burst and he drowned."
When Ophelia bowed her head slightly, in reverence, her Vink hat came to life, going from dull gray to bright green, the soft psuedocrania moving mole-like beneath the duck-cloth fabric. "Moldenke ... Moldenke. I know that name...."
"Agnes Moldenke, my mother. You've probably heard of her. She's quite well known...."
"Of course, the inventor of edible money. Your mother?"
"None other."
"What's in the money? What's it made of? Can you tell me? I know it's a family secret, but--"
"It's never been disclosed, even to me."
"Where is it made?"
"That, too ... is a well-guarded secret. And completely proprietary."
"I'd so love to meet her."
"I'm sure you will very soon. She's ill today, as she often is. Rather stubborn case of leukorrhea, accompanied by pinworms. The worms cause no end of trouble by their habit of coming out around the anal region during sleep, leading to painful scratching and restless nights. She is able to remove them with a swab of cotton on an applicator rod. During this infestation she has been listless, anemic, and confined to bed, where she works on her memoirs whenever her strength permits. Well, as if that wasn't enough, just this morning, after completing the sentence, 'Capella the goat is a favorable sign to seamen afloat on the deep, rolling brine,' she ran the metallic point of the pen into her finger, making a small wound which bled dramatically. Some of the ink was drawn into the bloodstream, and that, she fears, could lead to infection.... May I roll you a smoke, Ophelia?"
"Yes, I'd love one. But I thought the French had--"
"They overlooked a warehouse somewhere. It was on the radio."
"Oh, really."
Moldenke rolled Ophelia a cigarette as the Titanic's horn sounded the call to prayer.
"Oh, dear," Ophelia said. "Time to give praise to Harvey. Just because Ratt worships at his altar, why should we be compelled to?"
Udo, placing another bale of hair on the table, said, "I've been warning Moldenke. Now I warn you, Miss Balls. Like it or not, Ratt rules. Think twice before you say these things publicly."
"Oh, bosh. I wonder if he even exists. He's all over the papers, he's on the radio, but has anyone ever seen him in the flesh?"
"Could be a construct," Moldenke said. "The term President may refer to a construct and not a person now. How could we know?"
"I've seen him," Udo said. "In the flesh. In Bum Bay, right in front of Neutrodyne Hall, getting into his pedal car."
Ophelia filled her mouth with smoke, then drew it into her nostrils. She giggled. "The Rattmobile."
"How good it was," Moldenke said, "when Sinatra and President Kenny were alive. It was a big country. So sparsely populated, a new face, or a new arrival, was reason for rejoicing. People turned their wagons inward and came together in the circle of firelight for safety. They cut down the forests, laid railroads, roofed barns and husked corn."
"This is marvelous smoke," Ophelia said. "I have the urge to prattle."
"So do I," Moldenke said. "You first. Tell me about yourself."
"All right," Ophelia said. "I had a striking collection of names. After my parents' death, I was adopted in infancy by a neutrodyne couple, the Camulettes, who gave me the name Ophelia. When Camulette died, his widow turned me over to an American settler family by the name of Fallo, who changed my first name to Sally. This name I held until age 13, when the Fallos died and I was taken in by an uncle of Mrs. Fallo, a Mr. Pester, who made me his heir and changed my name to Hester Pester--a ridiculous combination, I thought--so I induced the court to change my name to Wild Rose. But at the age of twenty, I married a German named Ochs, and although he pronounced it 'Oaks,' nearly everyone else called it 'Ox.' I was Wild Ox for as long as the marriage lasted, and until I married Mr. Balls, my brother, when I returned to my original name." She paused for another puff of smoke. "What about you, Moldenke?"
"Sometimes, after smoking, an aura appears around my head -- seen only at night and only in the deepest dark. Moreover, it throws the phosphate of potash from the top of my eye-sockets. I find it on my face at bedtime. In order to keep well, given these precursors, I must have food containing phosphate to quickly and surely rebuild brain tissue. Fresh mulce is very good in this regard."
"I nearly married a neutrodyne once," Ophelia said, sighing. "The wedding day stands out in my mind. Preparations had begun weeks before, brushing my body with mummy oil, dusting it with lavender. Following neutrodyne marriage customs, I placed pads of linen in my eye sockets and shut the lids over them, so that they protruded unnaturally. I douched with lavender broth. It was the purest kind of joyous anticipation. But we would never marry. Billy was hanged on a spurious charge of defacing a Harvian temple by throwing excrement at its windows. Some local vagrants and tatterdermalions were guilty of the act, but all were in possession waivers. Billy, worshiping in the temple at the time, was not. For many months he was sorely missed. I carved a small likeness of him from a knot of camphor wood and ended my virginity with it. I left it inside so that I would feel pain with every step and be reminded of my loss."
"When I was a boy, my mother sewed my lips shut as a punishment for spitting on her night-blooming jasmine. I didn't eat, drink or speak for three days, until my sister, Hetty, discovered me in an upstairs closet and snipped the thread with scissors.
"Time for vespers," Udo announced.
All over the ship, sacks of greasewood burrs were passed from hand to hand. With the exception of Ophelia, each passenger took a handful, made two small piles on the deck, then knelt on them.
When Moldenke had taken his allotment, he passed the sack to Ophelia.
"I'd rather be hung with barbed wire than be subjected to this," she muttered, passing the bag on to the barman without taking any burrs.
The recitation began: "We know not the hour, we know not the day, yet we watch and we wait, our lamps trimmed and burning.... We watch and we wait for Harvey's returning." They pronounced the words in rote fashion, without tone or inflection.
When the horn sounded again, teams of ship's stewards swept the burrs into dustpans with push brooms and re-filled the sacks while others held them open.
"You should have knelt, Ophelia," Moldenke said. "You could get into trouble."
"Harvey this, Harvey that. I won't be a part of it. I refuse."
"Don't say I didn't warn you," Udo said.
A tall, stoop-shouldered American approached the table hat-in-hand, a broad smile on his face, a parasol over his shoulder. "Gerald Hilter. I write a column for the Observer. You may have read it. 'Hilter on the Seamy Side'." He extended a hand that was far too heavy for its size and much too cool when shaken.
"Sorry, I don't read the paper," Moldenke said. "But, please, sit down and smoke hair with us. I'm Moldenke, of the Indiana Moldenkes." He rolled Hilter a hair cigarette. "When the moonlight falls upon the Wabash and all that."
"I'm Ophelia Balls, ship's artist. Out of Pisstown."
"Oh, yes. I once wrote for the Pisstown Telegraph. Great little paper. Great little town."
"Here, Hilter," Moldenke said, holding the cigarette upright between two fingers. Stoke up on some of this primo hair."
Hilter removed the beeswax plugs from his ears. "Just to keep the earworms out. They tell me the ship's infested." He had a strong pull on the hair. "Oh, my dear, this is very good smoke."
Moldenke, too, had a strong pull. "It's a puzzle how we even framed our thoughts before we had access to these lovely, fragrant, resin-scented vapors."
Ophelia said, "It gives you second sight. You finally understand the truth about things."
Taken with Ophelia's charm and good looks, Hilter tapped his parasol lightly on the toe of her clog. "If an inch were added to your height, my dear, you would be too tall. If an inch were taken away, you would be too short. Another grain of talcum and you'd be far too pale. A touch more of rouge would make you too red."
With a regal sweep of his mug across the horizon, Moldenke said, "All of history was a lie, all of science ... everything." One of his eyes drifted from its focal point, then returned. He went on with his smoke-induced tirade. "Documents lied ... witnesses, governments, journalists, mothers, lovers, enemies, families, friends, religions, all lied."
Hilter spat a little bloody curd onto the deck. "Lung worms again." He blew his nose into a handkerchief, then looked closely into the wog of mucous. "Worms in this, too. I should see the ship's physician. "
"A good man," Ophelia said. "Very competent. Good manner. They say he looked after Michael Ratt's scarlatina during the Chaos."
Burping acidly, Moldenke said, "I've always had hope that someone, sometime, somewhere would mount some opposition to Ratt, but I don't see, hear or smell any signs of it."
Hilter's long goatee rose and fell in a newly-stirring breeze. "How can he lead us, inventing reality as he goes? A grand experiment is underway, I think. The grandest of all time."
Moldenke squeezed a piece of his sagging throat between thumb and forefinger. "When the experiment is over, we'll be sacrificed, won't we? It isn't the dying that bothers me but that in precious few years, considering my celibate lifestyle, not only will my body be gone, so too will be all memory of me. I will no longer even be referred to in conversation. I'll be long gone."
"What does it matter?" Hilter said, dragging on the cigarette. "When we have this lovely hair to smoke.... oh, I do think I'm approaching cricket consciousness. Zeep zeep ... zeeeeeeeeeeep."
Ophelia giggled and had another puff. "I died once," she said. "Poisoned by a bad conch fritter. My fever spiked, my brain boiled. I died, they say, technically speaking, although there was life. In a few days, I came back."
"Zeep zeep."
Moldenke rolled the rest of the bale into cigarettes. "What do you remember from the other side?"
"Time is more fluid, ever changing, ever elusive. You always stop just short of knowing exactly when. Who, what and where, perhaps, but never when. Distances are great as well, and fusel oil is in short supply."
"Zzzzzzzzzzzzz. Zzzz."
Udo raised the wick on his fusel oil lamp and busied himself slicing greasewood fruit with a sharp citrus knife and singing, "Edelweiss, Edelweiss, du grüsst mich jeden morgen, sehe ich dich, reue ich mich, und vergess meine sorgen...."
The Captain stirred from his reading and sang along: "Schmücke das heimatland, schön und weiss, blühest wie die sterne. Edelweiss, Edelweiss, ach, ich hab dich so gerne." A serving of high bologna and a foaming mulce sat untouched in front of him, attracting sawflies.
Moldenke's teeth ached, each in its characteristic way. Even the cool air blowing across them when he opened his mouth brought on a wave of agony. After rubbing hair ash on his bleeding gums, he spat into his palm and made the motions of hand-washing. Then his eyes ran water. To clear them, rather than bring anything as unsanitary as a handkerchief or a sleeve in contact with them, he blinked one eye, then the next, never the two at once. The behavior was typical of the many forms of dyskinesia that plagued chronic hair smokers and phosphate addicts.
Moldenke glanced in the Captain's direction, saw him gulp bologna, swill mulce, then rise abruptly to leave, his hat, as always, held in front of his face. Though he slipped once on a gull squirt and nearly fell, he hurried to his quarters along the pleasure deck.
"That gull will hang for that," Udo said.
"Don't be silly," Moldenke said. "A poor, dumb animal?"
"You, too, are a poor, dumb animal, Moldenke. All of us are. Sometimes, we forget."
As the afternoon faded hesitantly into twilight, Udo spotted one of the Titanic's white-gloved officers strutting purposefully toward the bistro with a sack of burrs. "Look there ... Officer Montfaucon. He's got a bead on you, Ophelia."
"I told you to kneel," Moldenke said.
Hilter shook his head. "This could be very bad."
A heavily muscled veteran of the Pisstown Chaos, Montfaucon had lost an eye in that ambiguous scuffle, near the end of hostilities. Now he kept a gull's egg, changed daily, in the vacant socket. Other than a slight protrusion, the eggs fit well and benefitted greatly from the incubation.
Montfaucon stood at rigid attention, the tip of his nose nearly touching Ophelia's. "Not kneeling for vespers, eh, Miss Balls? Brand new ordinance, you know, just came down from the President. There's really no choice here. Appropriate punishment is very clearly prescribed. As soon as this ship reaches home port, you'll do some time in the French Sewer. Unless, of course, you have a waiver from the Ratt administration."
"I do have one." Ophelia produced a well-worn, well-folded, edible-paper form from the brim of her Vink thinker. "Here, sir."
Montfaucon examined the form. "It's old, but not quite expired. After this, you've got only one more free pass. My apologies, then. No punishment for you this time."
"Thank you, sir."
Montfaucon now stood nose to nose with Moldenke. "You. Do you have a waiver?"
"A waiver? Where do you get them? How do you--"
"No waiver?"
"But, Officer, I was kneeling. Everyone around here saw that."
"Yes, I know."
"Then...?"
"Don't you read the papers?"
"He's referring to Ratt's new initiatives," Hilter said.
"Initiatives?"
"Share the guilt. Share the punishment," Montfaucon said. "Crime is not a failure of the individual, but of the culture. As long as someone is held accountable, and punished accordingly, that's jolly good for the commonweal. Everything must always be in balance."
"She goes free and I...?"
"She has a waiver. And you do not."
"I'll get one. Are they available on board the ship?"
"From the purser."
"Simple enough, then. I'll go to the purser's right now."
"The office is closed, and will be until morning."
"I'll go then, in the morning. I suppose there'll be forms to fill out."
"Stacks of them."
"And the cost?"
"It changes day to day, person to person. Sometimes dramatically. You make an appeal. The purser is the judge."
"Then let's be reasonable. I'll go to the pursor first thing tomorrow and make my manners. If I don't get the waiver, then ..."
"No more blather. Act like a man. What's the offender's name?"
"Ophelia Balls. She's standing right there."
"You're the official offender. What's your name?"
"Moldenke. Of the Indiana Moldenke's. You've probably heard of my mother, Agnes. She invented edible money. I'm sure, with that kind of fame and prestige, a waiver ... can be antipated."
"You loathesome puke, hiding behind your mother's skirts. Let's get down to business here." He dumped the burrs into a pile.
Moldenke tried to calm himself by looking at the moon, gibbous and dull. "It's a bit red this evening," he said, hoping to mollify Montfaucon with casual, oblique talk. "A red moon, they say, makes it a good night for love ... and mercy. Then, of course, when the moon is grey, they say, it's a good night for catching plesios."
Montfaucon farted, dry and vengeful, without odor. "The offender will now remove every stitch of clothing and sit in those burrs until he is good and bloody."
Hilter peeled the pages of his notebook. "Officer ... you don't mind if I make a few jottings here. I'm a columnist for the Observer. It seems to me, everyone should know about Ratt's new vision of crime and punishment. Don't you agree?"
"Indeed I do. Jot away. The Ratt administration, as we speak, is in full agreement with fair and truthful reporting."
Moldenke stood nude, shivering, looking down at the pile of glass. "Now? Sit now?"
"Yes, now," Montfaucon said, his grimace more a smirk. "And pray."
Moldenke placed his hands on the deck and lowered himself slowly onto the burrs.
"No props, please, Montfaucon said. "Full weight! Clap those hands! Full weight or I'll crack your skull with my bat."
Moldenke clapped his hands, falling with all his weight into the burrs, mincing his buttocks. Two of his hearts fluttered wildly. He cried out, "Mother!"
"Pray!" yapped Montfaucon.
Moldenke complied, whimpering: "We know not the hour, we know not the day, yet we watch and we wait, our lamps trimmed and burning.... We watch and we wait for Harvey's returning." The recitation emptied his lung. He gasped for breath, swallowing air like a fish.
"Everything is in balance now," Montfaucon said. "You may go about your business." He marched up the pleasure deck, stepping over a dead plesio.
Using one bar rag to cover his privates, Moldenke stood and let Ophelia pull away the burrs that had imbedded themselves.
Hilter said, "The way Ratt sees it, all pain rises from a single spring. Your pain is my pain. Mine is yours. It's a cornerstone of his thinking."
Moldenke said, "It falls short ... of thinking...."
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