Flesh and Gold (23 page)

Along the hallway another odd thing caught his attention, a dark corner where none had been before. A recess where transworld common booths were lined up, usually well-lit, had gone dark, and while he was turning his head to look he got a hard nudge from his side and a shove from the back, so that he stumbled into the corner knocking against the booths. He did not know either of the two shadow-grey figures that were rumbling him. One was a Varvani with limbs like oaks, the other a course-haired Solthree woman just as broad. The Varvani caught his upper arms from behind and the woman whispered hoarsely, “What do we need to do to make you talk, Gattes?” and thumped his belly hard. “Let's take a trip to Front Office.”

Ned retched but managed a kick in the knee that sent her staggering, kicked back into the Varvani's shin, stamped on his foot and when his arms were freed slammed the heel of his hand into the woman's nose. Neither of the attackers was more than merely dented, and he had no time to catch his breath before they grabbed him again, but the light came on suddenly and a beautiful voice said, “Hello?”

The Varvani and his mate turned their attention from Ned and gaped at Spartakos, gleaming in fresh and blessed light. His arms reached out, longer than arms ought to, and the pair shuddered away from the threat of his touch. “You get out, now,” he said pleasantly enough, and they scrambled away.

Ned tried to make sense out of all this. “What are you doing here, Spartakos? You making a specialty of saving me?”

“Once I was a slave in Rome and in spite of that I broke my chains!” the robot declared ringingly, then dropped his style to a less dramatic mode and said, “You are not hurt badly, are you, my-friend-Ned-Gattes? You will be sure to report this time, won't you? Now I must go before I draw more attention. If I seem to have distressed anyone I will be shut down.”

Ned called after him, “Who were those thugs, Spartakos! Is this whole goddam place after me? Who were they, God damn you?”

Like a stream of mercury Spartakos twisted to face him. “Don't curse me, Ned. They are bouncers from a whorehouse down in the Labyrinths.” And he was gone.

Ned hurried back, half-limping, to put ice on his bellyache. Zella was dressed and waiting at his door, and he pulled himself up and smoothed his face for her.

She touched his mouth. “Who've you been kissing, Ned Gattes?”

“Do I still have that stuff on my mouth? It wasn't anybody
I slept with.” He forced a grin. “Don't wait for me, I'll be down for supper.”

He gulped a painkiller and sat trying to think. Tanks, swimmer, slaves.

He thought those dun-colored people must be slaves. In all his years as a gladiator he had never seen—or never noticed—them except once he now vaguely recalled in Starry Nova, and maybe in one more Zamos arena. He knew he could not prove that they were not cheap immigrant labor of the kind long frowned on but never completely outlawed. But it was not his burden to prove, only to observe and report. He thought he must be like a great many other people who were not aware enough to realize that they were being served by slaves. Or did not care.

The ideas kept pushing at him. The warped fish, the slaves, swimmers, tanks.

Clones that we make here
. The swimmer, the woman, was it possible? All those labs, cloned zoo animals, clones for research. Why not?

Is that what they think I know? . . . now maybe I know it
.

Time to get out
.

He dressed quickly in the best clothes he owned; all of his money and credit were in his belt, nothing in the company safe. His weight allowance coming out here had been very small, and he was a traveler, always had been. He thought of Zella, with a flash of desire, and his bruise throbbed. She would be waiting to go to dinner and he did not know what to tell her. He closed the door behind him.

“Your shadow ain't stickin' to you anymore, Ned,” Barley called, going down the hall with Smugger and the cyborg woman Ching Yi. “She got buzzed by one of them robot bird things to go to the office.”

“I told her I'd see her at supper—”

“Looks like you won't. You coming to the boozer with us?”

“I'll be along in a while.”

“Dunno what she did that made them call her at dinnertime,” Barley said.

Smugger was ready with a suggestion, but Ned did not rise. It was possible that Zella had been called down for some minor infraction. Just possible.

He ran.

Labyrinths

It was cool down in executive country but Zella was sweating, waiting for Kati'ik to turn her head one hundred degrees and direct her bird's hard stare over her slant shoulder.

“So, Sztoyko, you cannot fill a simple request.” She shifted to align her body with her head.

“What do you mean? I told you everything I knew, everything Ned Gattes told me.” She hugged herself to hide her trembling.

“He did not tell you very much. I asked you to continue watching him because I expected you to bring me more information, and he must have been sufficiently frightened by the attacks on him to confide in you. You have brought me nothing—”

“What did you expect of me? There was nothing to br—”

“—because we know there is good reason to be suspicious of him!” Kati'ik's claws rattled a tattoo on the inclined screen of her terminal. “And you are of the same species, are you not? It should have been as easy to draw the secret from his mouth as it is to pull the
yayu
grub from its hole in the
ouil
tree. Someone is telling lies, Sztoyko.” She drew closer. “I know your lover is, and I wonder if you are. Perhaps you have not been sufficiently frightened.”

“I don't know anything about your grubs and trees.” Zella held herself tighter to gather strength. “I told you everything I got from him, I did. I can't tell for sure when a person's lying, I'm not an ESP. But Ned Gattes is a real pug who's all scarred up and does nothing but fight in arenas, he can't be a spy for gamblers when he has no more money to bet with than I have, never goes near a greenboard to see how the money's running, and he never uses a comm line to talk to anybody. I think that story's just a lot of shit—”

“Take care!”

“—and what would you do if you found he was a spy?” She was really angry now, recklessly angry she knew, and couldn't pull back. “You've already knocked him down and beaten him up, what else would there be left to do but kill hi—”

The gold-clawed hand shot up and encompassed her jaw, and the shrill voice came down a dangerous octave. “You are talking too much, dems'l.” The talons closed in, she raised her arm to push them away, but they had pierced her skin and she felt the little streams of blood running down. “You have the richness of this world to benefit you and you do not know how to take advantage of it.” Kati'ik's feathers were erect and quivering, Zella sensed the thudding heat of the bird body, its smells of flesh and dust.

She grabbed hold of the pearl-feathered arm but her hands were clawed away, she tried to scream through teeth that had been forced to clench. The flat beaked face, like deeply yellowed ivory, was close to hers, the eyes pierced like claws. “There are some who never learn . . . perhaps it is time to hold the Lottery for a Bloodfight. We can still find some use
for so froward and ungrateful a person as yourself! Now get out of here!”

Zella pulled away, gasping, but did not run; she could feel herself turning red and then white. Her anger was so pure that she did not feel the pain in her jaw or her deeply scratched hands.

Kati'ik forestalled her words. “Any story you may tell anyone will be treated as just that, a story. Keep that in mind!”

Zella whispered, “Now I know you're a liar,” and turned away past the door; its iris hissed behind her. The moment her eyes left Kati'ik's the pain hit her; it was all she could do to keep her hands from her face or from touching them with each other, just walk along as if everything was normal. Most of her own kind had gone to dinner, and there were not many about and no one who noticed, but she supposed she was not the first one to come from that office with a scratched face. She gritted her teeth, she could feel her eyes hot with fury.

Oh Zella, how did you ever get into this? You've let her do it again, you damned fool! She can manipulate you into saying or doing anything! Christ, I'm bleeding! What am I to do now? Try to think, Zella!
In her blind haste she slammed into a shape, a man, arms came round her, Ned crying: “God's sake, Zella, what happened to you!”

The terror swamped her. “What are you doing here? Are you after me too?”

“Oh Zella! I just came to see if you were all right. You scared me running off like that. Christ, look at your face! What happened? Who did that?”

“She wouldn't believe anything I said, just went crazy and ripped into me! What am I going to do, Ned? I can't go back there, she's setting me up for the Lottery and a Blood-fight!
I have nowhere to go and no money—what'll I do?”

“You'll come with me and we'll do something about it!”

“Come where? Where are you going?”

“To the other side of the world if I can find it, I don't have anything worth going back for and I'm not hanging around here to get beat up again and let you get clawed to pieces.”

“No, no! What are you saying? You mustn't let me pull you away. As long as I'm not there you'll be all right, and they'll . . .” It struck her that there was something not quite right in what she was saying, that her mind was stunned with fear and anger. “They'll think of something else, won't they?”

“They already have.” He was walking her down branching corridors, hurrying her a bit. “Come on, Zel, got to find you a place to clean up in—looks like one over there, yeh.”

“All right. I see it.” Her eyelids were heavy, in spite of the pain—or maybe it was because it was so wearying. She whispered, “I didn't give you away.”

“I knew you wouldn't.” He pushed away at the guilt for the harm he had not done her and could not have prevented. “I'll be waiting here for you.”

The blood came off her clothing easily, but there were those four claw marks, one to the right of her jaw, three to the left; they would leave scars she would not have minded so much if she had been able to fight. And her hands hurt worse because she had to move them.

Is that you in the mirror, Zella, all bloody and inflamed? The one that just a couple of days ago was content to live and work here?

You have the richness of this world to benefit you, and you do not know how to take advantage of it
. . .

She paused at the door to steel herself against a vision that there would be no Ned, that he would have run from her tormented face. But he was there.

“Come on now Zel, we've got to look for food, even if you might not be hungry after—”

“But I am hungry!” she said, astonishing herself. “But how do we pay? I have a little money, but I won't show a cashcard.”

“We'll get some money out of those cards later. I have enough of the fruitful for now, just tell me where.”

“There's an escalator.”

Ned took his last look down the long high-ceilinged corridors, at the country of the Spartakoi he had tried so hard to join. A few fast eaters who had finished early were coming out of the dining room at the end of the hall. The old sergeant, Gretorix, was trudging along with head bent, earnestly listening to some point Gobo the coach was making, head turned up and long arms waving. Farther back three Khagodi were arguing with each other in silence, also with gestures, their forked tails swinging and thudding, the breaths whistling in their oxygen filters. Near them a cluster of children who had eaten earlier were scuffling and thumping each other with toy cheboks and yelling, “You're blee-eeding!” in ringing voices. Beyond them the halls were empty.

He stepped on the moving ramp and Zella followed. On this floor the air was cooler, there were restaurants, theaters, lounges, museums, boutiques, open arenas, luxury apartments and suites, pools of a thousand sea creatures, and botanical gardens. In the rose-gold light of the evening sun through stained-glass windows three thousand people from nine worlds were thronging the arcades on their way from dinner to theater, gallery, or party, and not even the servants wore the clothing of working gladiators.

But Ned and Zella did not stop at this floor, and some of the party-goers joined them on the walkway down. Zella resisted the impulse to try to curl herself up and shrink into Ned's shadow; Ned put his arm around her gently and not
like a pimp who had just beaten his whore. Their travel companions were too absorbed or too googoo-eyed to notice.

No one got off at the next floor, a second-class tourist's version of the one above, with smaller apartments, parks and fish pools, fountains not so arching or rainbowed, and less expensive stores. The ramp wound down, past floors reachable only by service elevators, into the Labyrinths.

There was nothing dark or mysterious about the Labyrinths. The entrance was a maze of screens and baffles, but beyond them the sound flamed out from a vast market filled with milling crowds, splashing fountains, bars, casino lobbies, mariachi bands, strolling singers, and merchants hawking souvenir balloons, nose filters, and seashell necklaces. The walls above all these establishments were lined with screens of news clips, advertisements in flashing lights, coldlight stills, maps that said YOU ARE HERE in twenty-seven languages, and, just below the ceiling, streamers giving the stock quotations of ninety-three exchanges as well as betting odds, point spreads, and last-minute results from a hundred and seventy-five kinds of games, fights, and races halfway across the Galaxy.

Zella had come down here six or seven times; Ned had known places like this on three worlds. “Somewhere to dodge in,” he said, and gave Zella a hug. “That's a chemmy over there, let's eat and get some stuff to fix your face.”