ga Bú

ga Bú (High Curse) by Paul Robison

PART ONE

  1.

BACK IN THE OLD DAYS---oh, about the turn of the millennium---Automats had not been games of chance. At any rate, Arkady told himself, they hadn't been thought of that way; and maybe, in the days when an Automat was no more complex than a few simple coin relays and a corps of people shoving food into small cubicles, the places had actually worked.

Nowadays, however.......

Well (Arkady tried to be fair), maybe the Automatics really did work---for most people.  Which proved nothing except that Arkady was not most people, a fact that he supsected from time to time.

The ready-plate still glowed cheerily at him.  A perfectly lovely and enticing picture of natural rhubarb pie looked, to Arakady, as attractive and and inapproachable as any Holy Grail in the business.  He'd slipped his unicredit card in the proper slot, and although the card was a temporary substitute (Arkady had acquired, at a shockingly early age when he came to think of it, the fixed habit of losing I.D. and unicredit cards) he was certain it was within the conventional limits of machine error.

The rhubarb pie glowed.  The slide did not open.  The unicredit card sat in its little niche doing, apparently, nothing whatever; the Automatic hummed away as if it didn't have a single thought in its rapid relay mind.

When the humming changed to a slow chuckle, Arkady came to the conclusion that he'd had enough.  Rhubarb pie was a great food----especially after eight months on a space station, on which rhubarb was not considered a vital in-stock item---but a nice cup of hot tea was, clearly, going to have to do.  Collecting a cup and a slice of lemon from a nearby shelf, and remembering (to his own slight surprise) to recover his card, Arkady moved down toward the hot-liquids sector of the wall.  He had just about reached it when the two monster became perceptible behind him.

"Arkady Renko, right?" one of the monsters said. He was easily eight feet tall, Arkady thought as he turned around---in reality, perhaps six feet five against Arkady's five feet eight and a half, but who cared about reality?---and Angelo's immediate, and irresistible, reflex, was to answer:

"Wrong.  Dead wrong, sir."

The monster blinked.  His partner---maybe only seven feet, eleven and one half inches high, but looking even more evil and threatening----said in a rasping voice which did not inspire confidence:  "Don't kid us Renko."

"I'm not...." Arkady's voice had suddenly become contralto.  He swallowed once, hard, and for occupational therapy slid his cup, the lemon slice still inside, under the nearest slot.  "I'm not kidding," he said in a lower tone, and put his card in the available niche.

"You're Renko," the first monster said.  Arkady supposed they were really human beings, but the big bruisers didn't really look like his personal concept of humainty.   They were even bigger and more threatening than Brock Jigger, the Navigator with whom Arkady had just finished spending eight of the most uncomfortable months of his life.  Arkady began to wonder whether Brasilia had developed a large and powerful criminal class since he'd left for Space Station 1; whatever was going on, the other customers in the place were paying even less attention than Arkady would have thought possible.  A very small old lady at a table piled with dishes of creamed spinach gave Arkady and the monsters one brief look and returned to her---Good Lord! Arkady thought---eighth plate of the slipper stuff.  Maybe it was good for her.  But if she'd had any sense, she'd have seen what was happening and......

Ripping his mind away from a fascinating picture of two monsters covered with creamed spinach and bellowing as Arkady and the tiny old lady made their triuimphant, if hurried, escape, Arkady focused on the monsters again.  Behind him, in the wall, liquid splashed joyously.  Arkady's teacup was filling up.