Hugh Cook writes 2003: this shower scene was written for volume nine of the CHRONICLES OF AN AGE OF DARKNESS, the book called THE WORSHIPPERS AND THE WAY. Volume nine is set in the Combat College, a military institution.

In the course of writing a book, often the writer has to write a certain amount of detail to bring the book imaginatively to life. Afterwards, once the book has come to life in the author's imagination, that detail may be necessary to neither reader nor writer.

I can't now remember whether this shower scene does or does not form part of the final text of the published book. But it certainly looks to me, now, as the kind of detailed imaginative piece, taking the plot precisely nowhere, which should really be cut out of a final draft.

SHOWER SCENE


        Progress and improvement! Improved by the experience! Was Senk serious? Perhaps, perhaps not. Maybe Senk was just making fun of the Nexus ethic.
        Eternal progress? There was no such thing. There was only the Wheel. The enternal repetition of the Cycle. Birth, growth, maturity, old age, death, the time of wandering and then reincarnation and a new birth. After twenty millenia of unprogressing repetition, even Senk must be starting to realise that much. But Senk was talking.
        " - one of your responsibilities."
        "What?" said Hatch.
        "You weren't listening?" said Senk.
        "I'm so tired I couldn't break an egg," said Hatch.
        "Then you may go," said Paraban Senk. "It's not important."
        And Hatch went.
        He felt truly tired. Gritty. Cramped. He needed a hammering massage, or, failing that, at least a hot shower. And so very shortly he entered the steamy heat of the shower room. He avoided the stripper - for some reason that device made his skin crawl - and removed his clothes with his own hands.
        "Ha!" roared Bazoo, as Hatch stepped into the shower. "What's this, what's this? The Nara Nulth of the Nu-chala-nuth!"
        "Go whore yourself to a dog," said Hatch, irritated by such idle blasphemy.
        "I'm tired of dogs," said Bazoo. "I want myself a woman. I want a woman who weighs in at half a thousand noks and runs to a thousand incas round the buttocks."
        "What about the breasts?" said Iko Inori Inochi.
        "I've no time for breasts," said Sumo Bazoo. "Once you get stuck in, they're gone, at least as a practical proposition."
        "Teeth, man! Lips! Spit and suck!"
        "What do you think I am? A baby? When I want a whore I want a whore, not a wetnurse. Something to grab hold of. Flesh. Melons. Fat. Flump. Clutches of wobble. Great bags of jiggle. Like this."
        With that, Sumo Bazoo pointed at Hatch as that worthy dared himself into the ferocious waterblast of the needle shower.
        "This! This! My dream! My darling! No, damn it. It's Hatch. Hatch, you hermit! What are you doing in the drench? I thought your denial was all pleasures of the flesh. Inclusive. Yet here you are in our sybaritic squalor. Will you sleep with me, Hatch? Your buttocks are slim but you can bugger my blackheads. Hatch, my darling!"
        And without warning Sumo Bazoo embraced him and kissed him. Hatch, who was in no mood for games, let alone games invasive of privacy's dignity, grabbed Sumo Bazoo by the collarbone and dug his fingers cruel and deep into the most convenient pain-points. Sumo Bazoo pulled away sharply, lost his balance, went down, and lay on his back with his legs apart, laughing like a lunatic.
        "Get out of here," said Hatch without heat, his momentary anger already fading.
        Sumo Bazoo was crazy, and grotesquely abusive of other people's dignity, yet Hatch found him impossible to seriously dislike. Because - because Sumo Bazoo was good. There was no other word for it. He was possessed of an open generosity
        Sumo Bazoo left the showerroom, stark naked and dripping wet, without bothering to dry himself or put on clothes.
        As Sumo Bazoo was still in the Human Amenities Complex, Combat College regulations did not require him to be in uniform, or in anything else.
        There was a whoop from Sumo Bazoo. Then somebody swore. Lon Oliver. Who came into the shower room, still swearing, and stood himself under the stripper, which ripped off his clothes in moments, and pumped his shredded garments down an oubliette.
        Oliver stepped under the needle spray, neighbouring himself with Hatch.
        "Soap," he said.
        Fine jets of soap lathered him, and lathered Hatch as well. The soap jets were one of those things - and there were not many of them, but those that existed were irritating in the extreme - which did not quite work as advertised.
        "Sponge," said Oliver.
        A perennial joke. There was no sponge service, at least not in this shower, though such things existed in the heartland of the Nexus. Oliver, lithe and limber, reached round behind himself and began to scrub his own spine with the back of his hand. As he vigoured away, he began singing a Free Corps song.
        Hatch had to stop himself from protesting.
        Oliver was free to sing whatever songs he wanted, and that was the fact of it. In the classrooms of the Combat College, the most oppressive official etiquette restrained all behaviour, but the law of the Human Amenities Complex was geared to absolute relaxation.
        But Hatch knew Oliver was not relaxed or relaxing. Oliver was possessed of a bloody hatred for Asodo Hatch, and that was no secret to Hatch or to anyone else. Oliver was a Free Corps fanatic, and Hatch, who had the ear of the Silver Emperor, had for years consistently used his position to implacably oppose, frustrate and thwart the activities of the Free Corps.
        Then Gomo Impala entered the shower.
        "Oliver, man!" said Impala.
        Oliver broke off singing. Impala was his friend, his sidekick, his main main.
        "Free met and well met," said Oliver.
        The Free Corps greeting.
        "Well met and free," said Gomo Impala, giving the traditional response. "Free life and free shooting. What scores?"
        "Today?" said Oliver.
        "Or ten years ago."
        "Today, a seven," said Oliver. "The Scala."
        Hatch could not help but hear. Hatch had never got better than a six on the Scala. Fighter skills - well, he'd never attained the Higher Mastery, and never thought he would.
        "A seven, good," said Impala.
        "And an eight," said Oliver.
        "An eight?"
        Oliver opened his mouth, turned it to the needle jets, accepted the pain of the hard-driving water, prolonged the pain. Then jerked down his head, swallowed, shook himself.
        "Eight with the medium," said Oliver.
        The medium. The medium-armour Planet Class Solar Defender: the prime vehicle for space warfare anywhere near the gravity well of a a sun or a planet.
        "So sa say!" said Impala in admiring surprise. "An eight! Tell me a nine!"
        "I will," said Oliver.
        "Seriously?"
        "On the Mega," said Oliver.
        "My man!" said Impala, laughing in admiration.
        A nine? With the MegaCommand? Hatch did not know whether to believe that. Surely - I mean, really! A nine! With the Mega? No chance. No way. But even so ... it was less than fun to listen to all this.
        If alone or in other company, Hatch would have stood under the driving water-needles for another tenth of an arc. It was his habit. He liked to know when he had showered. Liked to feel the force of the shower all through the evening. His body glowing. But with Oliver here, no.
        Hatch abruptly side-stepped, slid across the tiles, which were of blue-tinted plax, slid from wet tile to dry and let the dry kill his slide, and then took the single pace which brought him under the drier. Its hot airblast began immediately. Automatically.
        A woman entered. It was Shona, Shona the Robust, Shona the Valorous, Shona the Strong who could kill a man with her bare hands or take him to bed and leave him dead from sheer exhaustions. She had been named for the slender nymph-goddess who is the patron of archery, but what the stripper stripped looked more like the patron saint of discus throwing and the shotput.
        "Ha!" said Shona, muscling into the shower. "Room! Room!"
        And Gomo Impala made way for her, she having taught him respect the previous year by breaking his arm in three separate places after he refused to make good his gambling debts.
        "Wah!" said Shona, as the needling water hit her. And she did a quickdance on the spot, slapping her thighs with her hands in a matching tempo. "Wah! So good!"
        "So someone's happy," said Oliver.
        "And why not, pretty boy?" said Shona. "You want to make something of it?"
        "
        88
        Shona says to Oliver: what did you do with the Gan and the Fez? Oliver: I gave them someone they could both hate. Shona: who? Oliver: the Frangoni.
        Hatch no longer tired, listening intently. The Frangoni were his people.
        Shona: I gave them a committee.
        Oliver (incredulous): A committee?
        Shona: A committee for the leaders. Fez and Gan. To solve their own problems.
        Oliver: that's a nonsense.
        Shona: On my committee they get paid. Immense amounts. They all love money. So while the leaders talk they get paid.
        Gomo Impala (indignantly): You bribed them!
        Shona: What would you have done?
        Gomo Impala: I took hostages.
        Oliver: It wouldn't work. They're fanatics. The kind of people who throw their babies onto swords. What do they care if you take hostages?
        Impala (defensively): That's what I did.
        Shona: You mean you actually had this test?
        Impala: Yes. I just said so.
        Shona: But you're not doing your graduation exams!
        Impala: The test isn't part of the exams. The Combat College asked everyone the question because it's looking for answers.
        Oliver: You read minds?
        Impala: I asked! I asked why I have this weird question coming at me out of nowhere! And when I asked I got told. The Combat College gave me that programmed priority routine. I am a Combat College so I must train Startroopers so blah-blah-blah, come on, you know the routine, it's - "
        "It's worried about the Ganfez?" said Oliver.
        "It's sweating blood," said Impala. "In just a few days it has to recruit a new class. How can it do that if the Ganfez have every street an abattoir?"
        "It's feeding on rumour," said Oliver scornfully. "What else can it do, boxed down here in the mountain? It can't see, can't hear, can't touch, can't feel."
        "It sees at the gate," said Impala.
        "And hears at the gate," said Oliver. "Beggar talk. Rumour. Gossip. So a few Gan killed a few Fez, so what, who cares? The machine's warped. It's been stuck down here for too many thousands. When I'm instructor I'll talk it some sense and settle it down."
        When I'm instructor.
        Said with absolute confidence.
        Hearing that youthful arrogance, Asodo Hatch felt old. He decided he'd heard enough, and, now hot and dry, he walked to the nearest dispenser, which gave him a clean set of fresh-fabricated coveralls sized to his requirements.
        As Hatch was dressing, someone else entered the shower room. It was Umka Ash, a second-year student who was habitually silent, watchful and withdrawn, and who had no close friends that Hatch was aware of.
        "Ash," said Hatch, greeting his fellow Frangoni in the Code Seven Commonspeak of the Nexus. "How goes it?"
        "The purple is purple," said Ash, answering in Frangoni. He meant: life is much the same as always.
        Then Ash stepped into the shower and Hatch dressed.
        Lon Oliver watched Hatch and made no secret of it. Amongst the peoples of Dalar ken Halvar, it was generally taboo for one man to see another's nakedness. But the students of the Combat College had by and large adopted the standards of the Nexus, at least in their dealings with each other. Besides, Oliver was in a mood to be deliberately rude. He was spoiling for a fight.
        Hatch had been in a fight or two in the past, and had not always got the better of his encounters if his scars were anything to go by. Yet Oliver envied him those scars, for he knew they were the consequence of war, real war. Hatch had the advantage that he had done it for real: he had placed his life on the line for real in the deserts of Parengarenga.
        Yet as he left the shower room, Hatch betrayed his fatigue. It showed. He was an old man, or old at least by the standards of the military machine of the Nexus; and in terms of age, Oliver had all the advantages.
        "Doing anything now?" said Shona, as Oliver stepped from the shower.
        "Yes," said Oliver, hoping Hatch was still within earshot. "Combat drills."
        Meets Lon Oliver in a place not visible to Combat College [place where instructor got killed] and fights him. A fellow student, Shona by name, breaks up the fight.
         assesses finances 88 copying documents, placing in file, duplicating. How much pay do I have? Senk: if I were a Hospital, could offer you .. medical experiments.
        The People: the Nu-chala-nuth 88 The People have a ridigly hierarchical 88 [faufreluches ?? spelling ?? 88 ] system at variance with the Open Recruitment policies of the Nexus. In defiance of the teachings of the Ecumenical Council of the Common Church of the Metacosmic Mind, the People cleave to their faith in an exclusive revelation.
        The People believe in reincarnation, in the Wheel of Life which 88 and to them the 88 Nexus 88 belief in progress 88 is nothing but idle folly.
        In Hatch's room, some dust had settled on the idol of the Great God Mokaragash. He genuflected before the effigy, then, with care, removed the dust from the ebony with a damp rag. According to the official specs, the Combat College was dust-free, yet in practice there was dust everywhere.
        On the screen, for example.
        Hatch folded away the rag which he had used to clean the idol of the Great God Mokaragash. It was now yalosh-valosh, a sacred item which could not be used for a secular purpose - certainly not to clean one of the barbarous devices of the othergod people of the Nexus. But Hatch had ripped up a pair of coveralls, so was well prepared.
        The cloth was white, the white which he never liked to wear. Not for reasons of ritual, but simply for reasons of personal taste. When Hatch cleaned his screen, the damp white cloth became faintly tinged with the red of the fine dust of the Plain of Jars. The Combat College had been designed in the expectation that it would open onto one of the aseptic streets of a Nexus citadel. But of course that was not the case, and even the triple-gated airlock of the lockway was not proof against the red dust infiltrations.
        At the lockway itself, the dust would often mask the Eye of Delusions, which appeared to attract small particles to itself in a way which was nowhere accounted for in the official specifications. But the Eye had its own following, and its hardcore fans were happy to pay small boys to scramble up a ladder to rag away the dust.
        "Access," said Hatch, watching his own personal screen, which was smaller than the Eye of Delusion and flat rather than convex.
        Nothing happened.
        "Access!" said Hatch, pitching his voice to Command.
        The mosquito which lived within his screen awoke, the screen with it. It displayed, as always, his duties for the rest of the day:-
        
         1. None.
        As expected.
        "Screen," said Hatch. "Examination scores."
        "Whose?" said the screen.
        "Mine," said Hatch.
        The screen hardened to an array of words and figures. But even as it did so, Hatch closed his eyes.
        "Cancel," he said. "Cancel display."
        "Done," said the screen.
        And when Hatch looked at the screen it showed nothing but two brightwhite diagonal lines, the universal Nexus default code for an otherwise blank information display screen awaiting further instructions.
        Calling up his examination scores had been a mistake. He was glad he had not looked at them. A poor result would damage his morale, whereas good scores might give him dangerous illusions of inevitable success.
        88
        Knows it will be hard to defeat Oliver. But would like to know that Oliver has been boasting. Would like to assure himself that the brash young man is just that - brash and overconfident. Accesses records of Oliver's training in illusion tanks. Time: incredible.
        Question: how did Oliver spend the last Festival of the Dogs? Answer: at the last Festival of the Dogs, almost a year ago, Oliver was doing an optional study course entitled:
        The Causes and Consequences of Political Fanaticism.
        He sacrificed the Festival of the Dogs to political studies! The man was warped! And he spend the twenty days of the Walkabout holiday inside the illusion tanks: doing advanced studies on the Galactic Class MegaCommand Cruiser. That was easier to understand. Oh yes. That could almost be considered fun. At least for someone like Oliver who was enthralled by the high-tech drama of the war machines of the Nexus. The MegaCommand Cruiser: a fantastic machine for deep space warfare. Three on-board asma. And other things to paly with: right down to a thousand marines. A toy, a fabulous toy, near infinite in its intricate complexities. And Oliver, according to his boast, had made himself a near-perfect master of those complexities. Scores: Hatch did not look at Oliver's scores for the Scala Nine singlefighter or the Planet Class Solar Defender.
        What he wanted to see was Oliver's score on the Galactic Class MegaCommand Cruiser.
        The alleged nine was unbelievable.
        But there it was.
        A nine.
        To be precise, on his last outing with the MegaCommand, Lupus Lon Oliver had scored 9.0033764. There were other figures, the statistics on the rest of Oliver's adventures into the illusion tanks. Hatch looked at the screen and found the figures blurring in front of his eyes. He closed his eyes. Fragments of mathematical formulae danced across the mind's darkness. He was exhausted. 88 Shuts down the screen. 88 Leaves.
        Nears gates.
        

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