Flesh and Gold (6 page)

Neither Strang nor Ramaswamy could be reached; she transmitted the recording of her conversation to their comms. When she finished this her mind of a sudden became wonderfully clear.

Hathe
—
that woman tried to kill me. Really tried. Did her best. And I burned her brain to smoke and sea-wrack. This man is some kind of demon. I am sure he ordered the death of Thordh, whom I knew for twenty-five years, and who died horribly in my own sleeping room. He tried to tempt me to do terrible evil. No, I was not tempted, but I let him speak to me. I listened
.

She began to shake, her teeth rattled, the sore on her tongue flamed. She seized at herself as she had done when she was under attack out on the walkway, forced herself to let her mind slip out of gear, to relax long enough to find a flask of the mildly sedative herbal tea that most of the time calmed the strung-out nerves of powerful Khagodi ESPs.

The latch hummed on the outer door, and it slid open. She crouched staring.

The person who faced her was the servant who replaced the towels, drinking bowls and water purifiers, and left fresh flagons of bath oils, salts and softeners for her skin. A small grey-skinned hominid in a blue robe, whose sex, species, world of origin she did not know. Thin-boned and hairless; soft pinkish eyes rested on her in a moist-rimmed gaze.

Drugged on something strong
—by choice or force? . . .
perhaps Kobai has been drugged, taken away to some even more terrible place or killed
—
just because I found her?

She pushed away these panic-thoughts sparked by her state of delayed shock. The servant, who looked more like a Solthree than a Khagodi, and more like a female than not, was staring at her with something of fright in her face. She whispered in
lingua
, in an accent unknown to Skerow, “I came to freshen your basin for you, Madame.”

“I think I would like to sleep a little now,” Skerow said weakly.

“It takes only a moment, and the water would be sweet.” She was wearing a cheap mesh white-noise helmet, not for her own privacy but to show she could not receive the thoughts of others. After a pause, she added, “These flasks are safe-sealed.”

Skerow looked at her closely, but she was only waiting with a drudge's patience, explaining local standards to the outworlder. Skerow pulled herself up sharply: her brains were surely still out of order. “Thank you, go ahead.”

She watched the stale water being gulped by the drain, and then the fresh flowing into the clean basin, mixing the oils and crystals into swirls. On impulse she asked, “What world do you come from, dems'l?”

The servant stopped in mid-motion and stood without
moving, as if she were a robot that had been turned off. For a moment Skerow wondered if she might not actually be a robot; then she said quietly, “Why not take off that uncomfortable helmet for a moment?” The small grey creature took off the mesh cap with a submissive gesture, and Skerow forced herself to ask the question again.

And with obvious effort, the servant made herself answer: “This world, Madame.”

“You were born here?”

“Yes.”

“And your parents?”

“Here. We have always lived on this world.” As far as Skerow could tell, her consciousness and memories of parents and world were genuine, though not sharply detailed.

Skerow whispered as if she were a conspirator: “Do people ask you this question often, dems'l?”

“No one has ever asked it of me before.”

“Thank you for speaking with me. Don't forget your cap.”

The servant pulled up a cloth that had been looped into her cord girdle and wiped her head with it before replacing the helm. “Yes. It was a relief to be free of its weight for a moment.” She gave Skerow a little dipping curtsy as she replaced the cloth, and her eyes cooled and seemed to flatten. “May all good go with you, Madame.”

And Skerow was left alone with her thoughts—or against them.

In a day of twenty-eight stads the man she had worked with for a quarter century had been revealed as a criminal and murdered; the woman who had seemed to be one of her two or three friends on this world was shown to be a murderer; she herself had barely escaped with her life and done terrible violence on her attacker; she had discovered that there was a species of intelligent life which she had never heard of living on her home world, a member of which was held captive; the
working world she had believed to be without indigenous life, and which was part of Galactic Federation Headquarters, had turned out to have something very much like it; and both of these kinds of life were very much like slaves.

“The first version was better,” she said to the empty air.

She sank into her basin, extended her siphon and let the water flow over her eyes and mouth.

I drown in moonlight

I drown
.

Zamos's Brothel: Skerow and Ned Gattes

Having slept exhausted until the evening, Skerow prepared herself a listless rehydrated meal.

It was a grisly irony that, because the Khagodi population had halved in one day, the availability of its food supplies had doubled. But the foods were still the same freeze-dried strips of myth-ox and sea-
smik
, the same preserved
kappyx
bulbs. This irony induced a mild sadness in Skerow, but it did not dull her appetite for better stuff than was usually available to interworld travelers. She had tasted a few foods grown on other worlds and liked them, but so far had found no one who liked myth-ox, sea-smik, or kappyx, so there was no question of trading.

There had been no messages on her comm when she woke, and she shrank from calling Strang or Ramaswamy to press for news. Thoughts of Kobai haunted her, of the help she had been unable to give, the near impossibility of giving it now. She was afraid that her whole trail of connections was no more than a story she had told herself, with no evidentiary basis at all.

She laid it out once more:

The first sign had been that Thordh excused himself from sitting on Boudreau's trial because of “indisposition”; then Boudreau's defense counsel, Sama, had behaved oddly when she heard about Thordh; Boudreau's reaction to a change of judges was extreme because of his stated expectations of being let off by Thordh and his claim to Sama that this had been done twice before.

The strange Solthree “journalist” with the microphone had pestered Skerow in the corridor; the flicker of thought—
and I'll kill you
—had caught her in the street—or only the tag-end of a half-heard conversation? Kobai had flashed on her like a dream, with her certainty of recognizing a Khagodi.

The day and its events had been growing darker all the time, with the murder of Thordh, the news that he had already been under investigation by GalFed for misconduct, and her reading of the tethumekh to discover his murderer (Eskat darted his little tongue at her sea-smik, and she absently shooed him away, but on taking thought offered him some). And the battle with Hathe that seemed to close the incident, all in the space of one day. . . .

Kobai, who was no vision or dream, was called an animal. An experimental animal whom she believed to be a victim of illegal trade.

The bribing voice on the comm that stirred echoes of the rude journalist and the threat thought; last, the servant who claimed to be an aboriginal on a world Skerow had always believed to have none.

There were three stories there: Thordh, Kobai, and the servant. Thordh's had a clear line line that could be substantiated by police work, more clearly if Hathe could be examined. That story was separate from the others. There was evidence enough that Kobai existed, but Skerow did not
know how to prove she was a person. She had noticed the servant—for the first time in all of her visits—only because Kobai was on her mind, and made her think of indentures and slavery; she was afraid her attention had endangered both of them.

She washed out her bowl and shelved it, she mopped a spill of water from the rim of her basin, she paced and wrung her hands. Eskat jittered on her head, squeaking. She called up her report in its ledger, hissed at it and shut it down again. She looked at her face in the mirror and rolled her eyes at it. There was nothing to do but get out of this place.

She stalked the streets. Away from its blistered port area Starry Nova looked from above like what it was: a city that had been built by computer simulation. Skerow watched it through the eyes of buzzer and hovercar pilots: its concrene warehouses and glastex offices stretched beyond and beyond, their square clusters occasionally varied only by the cancerous spread of a factory with landing pads and transport terminals on its roof. Beyond the factories and warehouses were more and more that stretched out like amoebas with ever-narrowing arms gesturing at the mines with their engines and satellite towns. The cloud lowered ever closer and darker toward the winter season.

Down in the city center, the rivers of life flowed along the wet pavements, past the shops flickering with coldlight displays, shouldering the little squat runabouts that carried the mandarins of industry and policy on errands of civil or personal service; these did not pause at the narrow fronts of the stopover hotels or the grimy restaurant faces, each advertised by one yellow lamp. Establishments like Zamos's had private back roads for them, covered with arcades of imitation shrubs, and richly draped and carpeted entrances. The
poorer people, bold and shy, who slipped past the gross Varvani or the comatose bouncer in the street doorway beside the window were most of them on their way home to slots in the wall of a workmen's hostel.

Skerow's thoughts brooded over the city. Citizens of five thousand worlds, GalFed and neutral, labored here in perhaps fifty thousand establishments; her mind hovered above the one where Kobai was or had been. She was a little calmer now, and did not much fear that Kobai was in great physical danger, even though she was hidden away behind the crackling white-noise barrier: the life of the swimming woman had come to the attention of too many people outside its milieu.

Three buildings away from the complex that housed the two-faced bordello, Skerow peered without seeing over the railing of a bridge into a stream that was not a river but a drainage channel; her mind's eye was watching Zamos's traffic from the eyes of passersby. Outside the bubble where the dead-eyed creatures floated there was a scuffle going on.

A Solthree mack was beating a whore, also a Solthree, though she looked anything but, more like a Pinxid with her blued skin and lips green as a fruit peel, the way she writhed and howled pitifully, and clawed with green nails; perhaps she specialized in Pinxin. Skerow knew that there was a specialist for everything. The woman was dressed in some blue smoky wrap that seemed to have caught the raindrops in it, and a fold of it had been draping her dark blond hair, but was beginning to drift away as she shrieked and twisted. Her voice rose sharply among the mutterings and gestures of a thousand languages. She was screaming incoherent words:
bass'd! muffker! cocksker!
Her face was in shadow.

The pimp was gripping her wrist with one hand and buffeting her face and head with the other. “It's me or nobody!”
his voice was tight with fury, “me or nobody!” He pulled a horn-handled knife and flicked its blade open. His hair was slick, and he wore a velvet jersey that raged with red and blue coldlight designs, and tight blue skinlo pants, but his face looked grubby because of his uneven beard stubble. Each seemed to be wearing a big fake diamond earring, but these were oxygen capsules implanted in their necks.

Skerow watched through twenty minds and pairs of eyes as their owners came within view of this couple and moved out of it: large topaz ones rather like her own, which saw them like her own, weak and blurry; mammalian and reptilian eyes, brown, green and pink, whose owners hurried to get out of the way for fear of the pimp's knife; steely ones sensitive to infrared (red thermograms throbbed with the furious heartbeats of the combatants); robotic eyes in cyborgs that saw them abstractly as flickering points on a grid; flat sound-reflecting pupils that intuited them as concepts. Two Solthree eyes flat with stupidity, their pupils shrunk by opium.

Skerow from her distance felt equally stupefied, but was sharply pulled back to self-awareness when the Varvani madam clapped her hands and the dim eyes of the bouncer livened with resolve: he moved neatly and quickly toward the pimp as the knife flashed upward at the woman's throat. At the same time the brothel's bubble window flashed even brighter as some new orange-and-yellow creature swam into Skerow's ken, and she saw then not the dueling pair but in her mind's eye Kobai raging in captivity, in the situation she could do nothing about. She sent her thought more quickly than the pimp's knife hand to disarm its controlling mind.

Out, out, lady! Out!
This was not a formed thought but an almost physical repulse coming from the pimp as the thickly painted whore twisted her head away and brought her hand's edge chopping on his arm. Skerow did not exactly
see into the steel trap of the man's mind but caught a mental configuration that said:
Agent, Madame, your side
.

This was the truth, and she did not want to break his barriers then, but watched the fleeting moment in which the musclehead from Zamos's knocked the knife from the rogue's hand with a mallet fist and the prostitute picked it from the air and cast it away.

The bouncer did not grab at her but unhooked his lightning-rod and advanced on the pimp, who scrambled away like a craven cur, howling, “Take the damned fireship!”

The bouncer sniggered and tossed him a gold coin, which the pimp did not hurl back at him but tucked into his waistband before he scurried off, snatching up his knife as he ran. The Varvani opened her arms to the beaten woman, and she like an orphan rested her decorated head on the huge blue bosom.

Skerow let herself drift from their orbit and waited on the bridge, eyes downward. She did not hear the steps as the pimp climbed the arch and put his elbows on the opposite railing, but her ears caught his still-harsh breaths. He was looking out toward the garish window of Zamos's as if he was waiting for the woman to come back to him.