Viator

Squatting on the floor, her bare arms and legs sticking out from what could have passed for a ratty shawl and a vest of dirty blond hair, she looked like a feral child, and, though he realized she could alter her expression by a shade and then seem much less the savage innocent, that didn’t soften the comprehension of what he was doing, and he felt a distant displeasure, angry that she was forcing him to control her. He shouted, slapped the blankets, and that confused her. At length he dragged her onto the bunk beside him and showed her how a zipper worked—not that she would retain the information—and pushed her head down, hoping that she knew what came next. She did. Clever girl. But as he lay back, shutting his eyes, he saw the photograph that was about to be mounted in his permanent scrapbook, the shot that would fix for all time the image of derelict ex-human living in the shell of a wrecked ship with other derelicts and getting sex from a creature who was a pedophile’s wet dream and had less than a room temperature IQ, a photograph so vivid, he could smell his own decaying spirit, the soul rotting in the rotten flesh, and he went limp, shoved her to the end of the bunk, where she sat a moment bewildered, spittle on her lips, then tried to crawl up beside him, and he shoved her back again, cursed at her until she scooted down onto the floor, huddling in a corner by the sink, staring fearfully at him. Tears started from Wilander’s eyes and he understood that the emotional sponsor of those tears was neither regret nor loss, but a febrile self-pity based on a knowledge of what he was becoming. That daydream of his, playing Moses to the whistlers’ Israelites, he envisioned it differently now; he pictured himself reclining on a mattress of boughs, surrounded by whistler women, using them whenever the mood struck, eating the berries and meat they brought him, the lord of a flyblown forest kingdom, purveyor of a petty colonialism, his hair lengthening to a moss-like robe from which his penis would occasionally protrude; growing older and weaker until he could do nothing more than digest a few berries and wait in dread for the whistlers, gone past innocence under his tutelage, to kill him with their teeth or the flint knives he’d taught them to make so they could be more efficient in the hunt. He flicked off the light and turned onto his side, facing the walls, wishing the world would hurry up and end. He thought he had been another kind of man once, basically good, not perfect, but he couldn’t remember how it had felt. The wind gnawed at the iron bones of the ship, its harsh voice falling silent for an instant as if it were choking, having to dislodge a fragment from its throat, maybe a chunk of chian or shaumere, and then began to feast again.

Ten

“…what about Mortensen…”