Flesh and Gold (24 page)

A score of carts served kebabs of grilled meat and seafood from flaming braziers. Ned and Zella bought and ate them on foot surrounded by porn shops, sex parlors, and antique markets selling genuine fake Mickey Mouse watches and pre-Columbian pottery, as well as phony Khagodi gold nuggets and suits of imitation feather armor from Kylklar.

At one of the parlors a thick Varvani woman spieling on
a bally backed by blinking fluorescents leaned down to leer into Zella's face.

“Gentle-johnny blaggering ye, lovey? Hook on with us!”

Zella stared up at this apparition wearing a black top hat, a clown's mouth of orange lip rouge, and a spread of gold sequins on her huge double-teated breast.

“Johnny's treatin' her good,” Ned snapped and hustled Zella away to buy ointment and cover-ups for her face.

Zella was yawning, too weary to feel insulted. “If you didn't have to put out in there, it might be a good place to get some sleep.”

“When Security wants you they'll always figure you'll hole up in a whorehouse or a cheap kip. They ruffle those places first.”

Zella closed her eyes and leaned on Ned's shoulder, letting him guide her. “What are we going to do, Ned? We can't just keep running.”

He sat down with her on a public bench. His mind was trying to sort out the pieces of the kaleidoscope surrounding them: loud-voiced strollers, singers twanging their lutolins, flickering neons, kebobs sizzling over reeking braziers; pushing at the problems inside his head, whether there were really created slaves or he had made it all up in his head and where to find a cheap—or preferably free—doss for the night; finally he shoved it all away. Whether Zamos was creating or enslaving people, where they had come from, what it might have to do with the job he had done for GalFed delivering Jacaranda into Zamos's brothel, who the swimming woman was, the significance of Spartakos, what those thugs thought he could have told them, everything twisting in his mind until it felt full of wormholes—

What do I know? I did a job for Galactic Federation before I came here, the Zamos people want to know what
GalFed knows, and I don't know . . . only that I've got to keep dodging
.

“We have to find a comm-line to the outside,” he said. “Come on, Zel, we're going to get run over or run in if we sit here long enough. Look—open your eyes and look over there—there's a bar, not very high-toned. We'll go in there, order a drink, not the cheapest, pay for it, and after a while sidle around the back where all the cans are. There ought to be a door leading to a service alley for cleaning machines. If I'm right, we can find an old closet to hunker in just for the night, and if I'm not, we're out of luck and gotta start over.”

She let him pull her up and fend off the crowd for her to slip through. He was right, but she hoped she would never come to like sitting in thick sweet dope-smoke drinking brackish ale, or threading her way in the dimness past solitary drinkers wrapping themselves around their mugs, and pushing through a room where a whirring machine spewed lavender perfume to counter the smells of the urinals, thrones, and gratings in the floor.

The alley was cool and dark; a few old bulbs cast yellow stains on the shadows. Ned paused at one narrow door and pulled at its latch gently, but it would not stir. After a moment he heard grunting and giggling. He shrugged and moved on. Behind other doors he listened to rattling dishes, fistfights, and an Orpha chorus singing to kettledrums before he found an entrance he dared try.

He winkled a fingernail into the latch and the door slid open with a scream of runners that made him glance about quickly, but no fleck of dust stirred in the long corridor to either side of him. “What is it?” Zella whispered.

“I think it used to be a lav,” Ned said. “Looks like it's been here about three hundred years and long before Zamos.” He was exaggerating, but not by much. A dusty bulb, switched on and off by a pull-string, showed an
irregular-shaped room with odd angles butting into it. It had not been cleaned recently, but did not have the filth of centuries. The cracked terrazzo floor was grimy but dry, and a large oval basin of imitation marble was sunk into it; there were two sinks of different heights, a wash-tub and a doorless cubicle with two urinals, also of different heights.

Ned warned Zella back, stepped over the lintel and peered about; nothing jumped out at him. He crossed his fingers and pushed the tap button; with a fearful squeal it gave out a stream of rusty liquid that began to clear after a moment. He turned to beckon to her: “Your chamber waits, m'lady, your bath is drawn—not quite, I don't think you'd want to wash your face in that stuff just yet, but if it keeps running it might be useful. Look, here's a tarp folded up in the washtub, it might be clean enough inside to keep us from the dirt. Where do you want it?”

She pointed to the sunken basin and before he had finished smoothing out the tarp had slipped down and arranged herself in its cradling shape. The moment she stopped moving she was asleep. He looked down at her, neatly angled in the rumpled slate-blue pants and jacket, one hand beneath her face and the other curled alongside. The wounds on her cheek had dried and under the covering makeup were dull pink spots. Now that he knew her she seemed so utterly different from Jacaranda that he could not at all find the similarities that had struck him so deeply when he first met her. The look of her dissolved, if only for the moment, the fears and worries crowding his mind; he pulled the lamp string, folded himself down beside her in the darkness, circled her with his arm, and slept.

Zella woke with a start from a dream of a clawed bird dropping shrieking from the sky, not only an image of Kati'ik attacking but an omen of every danger she had ever feared.
Her hands and face throbbed, but not fiercely; the dermatex she had painted them with dulled the soreness.

She became aware of Ned's arm resting on her and the whisper of his breath stirring her hair. There was nothing familiar about waking here; thumps and stirring from the walls around her, the still and dusty air, and the hard basin beneath the rough tarp she was lying on. All of them emblems of the danger she still did not know the nature of, the unnamed peril she had been drawn into because she looked something like—only something like!—the friend of Ned Gattes named Jacaranda, who had died so horribly.

The door squeaked, and Ned startled but did not waken. Zella began to tremble and tried to shrink down farther into the basin. Her heart was churning like a milk separator.

Something bearing a light—an arm?—reached in through the open doorway, and paused suspended. She shaded her eyes with her hand but could not see what was beyond it.

A very heavy moment passed. The light dimmed and withdrew. From the backlighting in the alleyway she saw that the intruder was a servicing robot, who had sensed life and left it undisturbed. The door drew closed on its shrieking casters. Her heart was still jumping and she felt the sweat on her face like a sheen of ice. She could not move for a moment.

The danger of wanting excitement, like a narcotic, she knew it now, everything her family on New Southsea had warned her about. She grinned into the darkness and raised her hand to pull down Ned's zippers.

EIGHT  
  
Exits

Khagodis:
Skerow and Evarny

On Khagodis, in the hot heart of the Diluvian Continent, International Trade Consortium and Goldyne fought each other slowly through the long demanding trial. The crucial witness Nohl—who had lost his knife to Kobai's people the gold-gathers, his eye to the gold-buyers, and most of his life to the sellers—poisoned and wounded though he was, did not die, but stubbornly clung to his terrible existence. Since he had sworn three times to his testimony, and each time more cantankerously, he was left alone; there was nothing more to be gained either by prosecuting or by murdering him.

Nohl had insisted on speaking unprotected by counsel or helmet, and an ESP notary had confirmed that his statement was the truth as he saw it; the confirmation bore no more weight than any other lie-detector test but was there if only to say that he was telling the truth when he claimed to be guilty. His evidence was haggled over by the opposing forces
with as much emotional as climatic heat, for its implications, and its hints of accusation.

Skerow was sharply on the alert for any suggestion that she had been remiss, or that Nohl's accusation against her had become a rumor or implication of corruption. There was none; the testimony was being treated like any other.

But Skerow was forced to declare Nohl's account of Kobai and her people inadmissible. There was no evidence whatever to show that the Consortium was actually kidnapping intelligent persons or that Nohl was enslaving them. It was not part of the charges against Goldyne's theft and selling of gold. Her consolation was that there were world and interworld authorities who would be deeply interested in it, particularly on Fthel V in Starry Nova, where the story as she knew it had begun.

Nohl was only one of a sleazy group of would-be crooks engaged in stealing gold and making its owners pay to borrow it. In that limited perspective the matter was clear enough to the court. If Skerow had been younger and less experienced, they would have seemed to her a crew of rogue Khagodi disgracing themselves and their world for the Federation to jeer at. Now she accepted that there would always be such rogues on the fringes. It was the knavery of a powerful judge like Thordh that she found so painful still.

As this excitement was ebbing, one of the three chief lawyers for the Consortium, an ancient Khagodi woman, did not return from the midday break, and was found dead in her quarters. An eddy of fear rippled through the court, but Skerow had known the old woman in a formal way for many years, and for just as long had heard the rumors of her struggle with a rare form of leukemia.

To give the lawyers time to regroup, she declared the afternoon session adjourned, and called out over the whispers
of the congregation: “We shall recess for next after tomorrow,” grave and sober as ever, though she shared the irritation of the whole Court over a day and a half of doing not much in the tropic city of Burning Mountain at the nadir of its summer.

If Nohl had not been poisoned, the trial would not have been brought forward into the hot season, she was thinking—and he would not have confessed either.

But all that she had learned from Nohl told her nothing of Kobai, who in her mind was still suspended, helpless, in the window of Zamos's brothel, burning in her imagination out of a night of rainfall in Starry Nova.

While she was hanging up her robe in her office and delivering her daybook to a clerk for downloading into Files, Ossta the Court Officer popped her head through the doorway and said, “Skerow my friend, would you like a good hot supper at my rooms in town? They're not far away from here and I have a fresh crock-bull shank and a good jug of white-thorn essence.”

“Thank you so much, Ossta, that sounds delightful.”

“Meet me about sundown, then, in the front courtyard here, and we can walk over together. There is a roasting spit on the roof of my building and the sunset is so pretty from there.”

Skerow had an unpleasant flashback of Hathe saying:
Share the evening meal with me
, Hathe who had nearly killed her, whom she had so nearly killed, and pushed it from her mind. She had known Ossta as a girl, back a number of years it was better not to count, when they had both studied Law. “I'm sure I will enjoy it, Ossta! Now I am going to Central Telegraphy and try to make contact with my sisters. I have not even had an opportunity to tell them I am staying on. Will you leave an answering message for me?” She knew that she would be truly grateful to avoid the Court Refectory,
which served food far too much like the sea-smik, myth-ox, and preserved kappyx bulbs her digestion had been burdened with in Starry Nova.

The communications center of Burning Mountain was inside the station where Skerow had disembarked from the ferry. It was not within walking distance of the courthouse, and Skerow was obliged to take the flatbed omnibus, pulled by a pair of massive and foaming
thumbokh
, that bounced roughly on the cobbled road; there was a Standard hour of heavy riding on this in deeply oppressive heat, but she was relieved to be free of the close atmosphere of the Court, to watch persons leading ordinary lives in workshops and at market stalls.

The Hall of Telegraphy was a smaller sister of the one in Port Manganese, a round stone building centered with a tower of antennas; most of the outworlders using it here were attached to the Interworld Court, and half the rest were journalists who observed them. Arches in the thick walls led to small dingy shops where travelers could drink tea or wine, finger tired-looking souvenirs or order take-away food for the journey.

Skerow found her place in line at the railing, composing in her mind the message she would send, watching while the whickering fans stirred the hot dusty air under the dome, and two non-ESP outworlders at her elbow quarreled over who had come first. She pulled off her helmet because her skin felt as if it were writhing with sweat beneath it, and after a moment felt a mental touch, then became aware of someone approaching her.