The Translated Man and Other Stories - Chris Braak [61]
Thirty years, he thought. Thirty years of service. No one could say he didn’t deserve it. No one could say that Elijah Beckett had been anything other than absolutely dedicated to the Crown, though he’d never been given a medal, never seen any reward but the simple satisfaction of having a job and doing it well. He had earned the right to spend his last remaining years (how many? Two? Three?) in a quiet, narcotic stupor. If three decades of indefatigable determination didn’t bestow upon a man the right to give up, then what did? How much more could the Crown expect from him?
Beckett’s breath came in ragged gasps and tears, he realized, were streaming from his eyes as he collapsed into the chair. Hours without a drop of fang had left him vulnerable, and now the utter hopelessness, the meaninglessness of his time of service had forced its way into his mind. Despair, now a housebreaker, burgled him of the last bit of energy that had kept him on his feet.
Done. This was the only thought left behind. Done, and an image of himself, warm and safe and full of drugs, gently letting go of those last few ties that kept him connected to his city. Like the corona of a dying star, all that was left of Beckett boiled away, a brief flare, then nothing but cold, dark iron.
This iron was the essential core of Beckett’s being: hard, brittle, unyielding. As the years had passed by, the old coroner had found himself giving up more and more of all of the peculiar idiosyncrasies that delineate a man who lives a life from a man who simply has one. Again and again, in the face of terrible threats to his homeland, it had been only Beckett’s unflagging tenacity that stood between life and death. Even as he realized he didn’t believe in heresy, even as he came to learn that his efforts mattered little to the Empire, he remained tenacious.
So it was out of the habit of personality more than anything else that Beckett clamped down on his despair. He gritted his teeth and took a deep breath, and pushed it all away. No. He clenched and unclenched his fists. No. He closed his eyes and bit his tongue. No. There’s work to do. With an act of will so long habitual that its extraordinary power was forgotten, an act that Beckett had become so accustomed to that he had no real inkling of the strength it took, or what it cost him, the old coroner willfully seized upon his despondency and cast it out from his mind.
He looked up at the trolljrman, who had remained an expressionless spectator to Beckett’s existential crisis. “Do you have paper? A pen?”
The trolljrman flicked its crest in a gesture of assent, and then glided ponderously out of the room. Beckett’s stomach growled, more insistently this time, and so he regarded the covered dish on the table before him. Beneath the cover he found a game hen, cooked in the fashion of Corsay mudlark; it was stuffed with fruit and pepper.
Beckett took the small knife and fork provided for him, and set about devouring his food with a less miraculous but no less vital act of will; in what would surely be an insult to the meal’s cook, Beckett did not at all notice the subtle interplay between mango, Corsay djang fruit, and white pepper.
Twenty: Charterhouse’s Dilemma
While the psychestorm raged across Trowth, Alan Charterhouse sat in his room, on his bed, shuddering while his mind slowed back down to normal speed, after being virtually consumed with the obsessions that mathematics represented to him. It was not an altogether uncommon phenomenon that, as he worked, the essential details, the basic needs of daily life, should fall out of