Flesh and Gold (14 page)

“A-L-E-K-S-A-N-D-R G-R-I-G-O-R-I-Y-E-V-I-C-H L-E-B-E-D-E-V.” He offered his GalFed Working Permit. The holo showed him with his mouth crooked up as if he had something awful in his teeth.

“You got a short form for that label?”

“Lebedev.”

The woman looked up from the keypad. She was wearing a big locket that glowed and blinked, saying urgently: I'M SHIRLI!—I'M SHIRLI!—I'M SHIRLI! “Don't lip me, chubby. We already got twenty-three applications for that slot, and it's only one table.”

“Excuse my feeble joke, Madame—but none of your bidders seems to be the right one. Your table is shut down, and the table-players are fighting for the machines they usually despise.”

She sniffed. “Where was your last job?”

“In the Investigative Bureau of Starry Nova, Miry Division. Police Inspector.”

She squinted. “Did you play a lot of skambi there?”

“No. That I did in the Starry Nova Institute of Correction and Rehabilitation, Miry Section. As an inmate.” He smiled. “Importing illegal substances. I stole nothing.” He added, “There are a lot of skambi players in prison.”

She kept squinting at him, the gears meshing in her brain almost as visibly as the locket on her chest shrieked, I'M SHIRLI!—I'M SHIRLI! “You have proof of all this?”

He drew a neat packet from his pocket and displayed his employment termination notice with special condemnation, his prison I.D., his ticket-of-leave dated three thirtydays earlier, and was reaching for a birth certificate when she put up a hand.

“Stop. You really think you can handle a table after playing with bread crumbs or whatever?”

“I have visited here many times in an official capacity before you began working at this desk. Your table has a disk shuffler, a scoring display, and a pair of white gloves—and you need a dealer who is not timid.”

She thought for a moment and pushed a button. “Go play a couple rounds on the machines while I check you out. Ai'ia will put away your hat and coat and take you to the Keymaster for tokens. That way.” She pointed to a door different from the entrance way. It led farther into Zamos's brothel. Deeper. Lebedev nodded and went through it.

Skambi is not the most popular game in the Galaxy. It does not fire philosophical discussions and seed libraries the way chess,
ip, go, huka
and
bodoko
do, even though it is a game like
Temple of Brahma
, which is a matter of three diamond rods with sixty-four gold rings of different sizes heaped on one of them, and when they are all transferred in the proper order the universe will vanish,
pfft!
That is a puzzle for mathematicians. Skambi is played across the Galaxy because it has few cultural connotations, no requirement but a good mind, and is only a matter of placing a smaller piece on a larger one in a pile; though the rules are complex and constantly being changed, it can be played with tokens, coins or buttons of different sizes and the same shape, disks of steel—even gold—or pieces of leather, cloth, or plastic, or loops of string, chain, or beads, or with playing cards, tarot, mah jongg tiles or any numbered pieces. Or, by the truly obsessed, with slices of food. A dealer's call, like “Number fifty-seven today, gentle-persons!” begins it.

Lebedev went to admire the old-fashioned table, then into the huge hall where he found the skambi machines crowded by moping Bengtvadi whose friends had left for home on their mother ship,
Zarandu
. No one was willing to share a game, but eventually he squeezed in between an emaciated Bengtvad and a thick Varvani who had pulled one of the
smoke-cones over his head and was smoking
ge'iin
. Wisps of escaping smoke made Lebedev a bit light-headed, but he did not complain to the hulk beside him. The game's vid was holo, and even looked as if real diamond rods were being eternally ringed by gold disks, with sounds to match over a swelling and dramatic music.

“Didn't know you played, Lev. Thought you just ran us in.”

The not-quite-young woman passing with drinks to the table-rooms had straight brown hair cut to the jaw; there were red lights in it beneath the flickering lamps, and it swayed around her face as she balanced. She paused for his answer.

“Hello, Tally dear.” Lebedev looked round at her, turning his head like a teddy bear so that the rest of his body did not move. “I have missed your sweetness.”

She flushed for a moment under her freckles as she had always done at such remarks, and calmed quickly, knowing that Lebedev truly liked her. “You've come to ruffle us about the dead whore again.”

Lebedev smiled. “Your drinks are melting.” He dropped a token in a slot beside the game and drew out a very small Polish vodka. “I came to look for work.” He tossed off the drink.

“Work?”

“A job.”

“That's a very strange joke.”

“Have you not noticed I have been away for a year?” She stared at him, as if she were not quite sure she really knew this Lebedev. “Yes. All that time I have been in prison. Far from the sunlamps of the Gymnasion. Disgraced. Abased. Everything.”

She gave a hard grin. “I've got to hear that story—how you got on in there with all the poor mumpers you dusted
and stowed away.” She swept off in a whirl of russet velvet and lace. Lebedev laughed and placed a SayNo wafer under his tongue to dissolve the vapor of alcohol, though it would have been hard to notice through the fumes of ge'iin escaping from the smoke-cone.

“Mister.” He turned. The soft voice belonged to the woman Ai'ia, who had led him to the skambi machines. She was slender, grey-beige in skin, hairless and wearing a black silk wiglike headdress woven with pearls: an impervious helm. He had not noticed her, with her strange near-beauty, when she led him to the Keymaster; in the dimness with his eyes on the footing he had only been aware of the floating hem of her caftan, patterned in oriental waves of seafoam and sky.

“You said something, Mister?” this vision asked.

Lebedev became aware that he had been staring. “I am a romantic, dems'l. I was admiring your beauty.”

Her smile was not an expression of anything in particular. “I come to tell you that you may try out at the tables.”

“Thank you, dear.” He rose and followed; she moved before him carefully, with a learned grace, and seemed conscious of being observed.

The skambi table stood in a niche of its own under a bright light; it was star-shaped and had five seats between the points, each with an individual LED display set into the table in front of it. Three brass rods rose from the center, and the thin disks piled in the mixer were centered and rimmed with brass; they were real mother-of-pearl with streaks of blue, cerise, and yellow-brown, and inside every one of the sixty-five was a tiny alarm that shrieked if it left the table's circumference.

There were four people already sitting impatiently at the table. One was a Bengtvadi woman wearing plain working clothes, her long narrow head tattooed with complex clan
insignia; her wrist was looped with a cord carrying an unlimited GoldCred disk. The second was a blue-pelted Dabiri man with an elaborately waved tail. The remaining two were a Solthree couple, a businessman in a dark green brocaded zip with fancy epaulets and his company's logo on the breast, and a thin fluffy young woman all mascara and lip rouge.

Lebedev found and pulled on the white dealer's gloves which had been folded in a little drawer beside him, along with a pair of armbands, purple with pink
yeye
flowers; he leaned over the table to wind the crank that traditionally mixed the stacks, and withdrew the first disk to appear in the slot.

“Number twenty-eight today, gentlepersons! Enter credit I.D.s and wagers on your panels. Numbers fourteen, thirty-nine and fifty-one are wild.” He punched numbers to light up the displays, gave one more wind of the crank to send the disks into the players' racks, set the clock, and threaded number twenty-eight on the first spindle, belonging to the Bengtvadi woman on his left.

“West plays twenty-five, North twenty-two, East nineteen, South eighteen,” the game went on to fill the first spindle with twenty-four disks, the second with twenty, and battled on to the third, where the winner would be the first player who stopped the game with an unbeatable piece or, when all pieces were gone, made a similar move from one disk to the other.

“South passes, West fifteen, North—sir,” to the Dabiri, “five is disallowed if you have a higher number in hand that is within minus five of fifteen, Cruxan Standard Game Rules”—the Dabiri snorted, tossed his mane and played twelve—“but that move will not lose you a point on this round, courtesy of the house, sir, East plays eight, South—” he looked hard at South, the businessman, who was offering
3: he was almost certain that this player was holding number 6; he had noticed in his earlier examination that 6 had an odd little dent on its brass edge that was visible only in the bright light. “Sir, do you wish to play three?”

“Question!” the Dabiri and the Bengtvad cried in unison.

South flushed deep red. “You calling me cheater?”

Lady East shrank back, and Lebedev spoke quickly before North and West could put in another word: “Oh no, sir. I thought you were intending to play six. The symbols are somewhat alike.” His foot was poised over the alarm button.

There were one or two watchers impatient for a game; South swallowed his anger and drank most of a large mauve liqueur garnished with zimbfruit slices. He muttered, “I suppose I did mistake it—I seem to have a six here.” North and West wisely did not argue, but settled back into the game and their drinks: the Bengtvadi tossed back her pepper vodka, peppers and all, the Dabiri lapped at straight gin.

South lost the game by one point, whether or not because he had been prevented from playing his three would never be clear. As soon as the game was over he retrieved his credit chip, stood up, and marched off leaving his companion staring at his back. She rose as if to follow, then glanced aside at Lebedev and he shook his head very slightly; she nodded, snatched up her feather boa and left to chat up someone else: she did not want a thick lip.

Tally, pausing to refresh drink orders, murmured, “That's a rough one, but he drops a lot of money, in the house too. He give you any trouble?”

Lebedev, looking across the room, saw that South was lingering near the poker tables. “He might have if we had been alone.” The vacated places were already filled by eager players, and the Bengtvad was snapping her fingers for more pepper vodka. Lebedev wound the crank and said in a croupier's voice, “Number forty-three today, gentlepersons!”

It was nearly evening by the time his afternoon shift ended; Lebedev slotted the disks and glared at his gloves in disgust: “Feh. Such beautiful things and all so dirty.”

“Mister.” He turned to find Ai'ia at his shoulder. “Keymaster says you are in, Mister. You get a tenday's pay, and find cheap room and board next door with other employees.”

He stood up stiffly. “Also I would like a little time to pack and move.”

“You ask Keymaster for that.”

“It is a change of clothing and a soup crock,” said Lebedev. The Keymaster's office was up one floor, and he found the rank of chutes; as he stepped in and turned round to find the UP button, the closing door was wrenched back open and the flushed face grinned at him savagely.

“You're gonna get it, you sonofabitch!” said South and pushed inside with his fists clenched. “Last time any fucking ESP screws me!”

Lebedev did not try to explain that like other policemen he was not only not an ESP, but had had an imper circuit tattooed under his scalp. He kicked South in the knee, punched his face as he hunched over in reaction, and sent him a hard blow to the groin with his other fist when his head shot back. The doors closed and the elevator rose with a hiss of pneumatics.

South snarled in pain and his nose ran bloody, but it did not end there: he was a head taller, and for all Lebedev's pudginess, had an advantage of ten kilos in weight. His cupped hands were on their way to breaking Lebedev's eardrums just as Lebedev was aiming the hard edge of his hand at the bridge of South's nose; one hand caught Lebedev a clout on the ear but his own hand in its trajectory knocked South against the door, slamming the buttons. The elevator paused without opening and fell whispering down its shaft.

Lebedev hooked South's leg from under him, both fell, South got his hands around Lebedev's throat and Lebedev gave up his Police Inspector's aim of hurting without doing harm and did his best to tear South's ears off his head. South's grasp loosened a little and Lebedev twisted and bit him hard on the thumb. South yelped at the moment that the elevator cab landed, the doors opened and Lebedev pulled his strength together for a last burst and rolled out.

He lay stunned in a dimlit corridor with his arms and legs splayed, only just aware that his enemy was on hands and knees, reaching out for him. The closing doors caught South's wrist edge on, he yelped again and pulled his hand in quickly. Lebedev heard, through his ringing ear, the muffled cursing and pounding on the doors as the cab rose. Lebedev gasped and could not move for a moment; his other ear caught the ringing of the first as if it were a contagion, he felt South's very fingerprints on his throat, his tongue seemed to want to take leave of his mouth and crawl away. South was a strong and very angry man who must have done hard fighting in some theater of war, and if he had not been very drunk, Lebedev knew he would have found himself dead.

He heard, or thought he heard, the elevator stopping and beginning to descend. South had more fight left, but he did not. He rolled over and got to hands and knees, spent another moment gasping there, and pulled himself up painfully, one hand on the wall. He looked round: there were no other elevators at this level. There must be stairs. He did not want to go up, or in any other direction that South might be going. He could not see anyone and the distances of the corridor were dark. He blundered along trying to look as if he knew what he was doing, searching for a ramp or stairwell.