Flesh and Gold (27 page)

Tally Hawes bumped into him at an intersection of the grey corridors he traveled to reach his room. “Whose ghost have you seen, Lev? Your hair is on end and you look scared shitless.”

“Someone has been walking on my grave,” Lebedev said. He felt rather as if someone had been doing it on his body.

“I've got no vodka but I can find you some good dope mixed with real tobacco if you want to walk me there.”

“Why not?” said Lebedev, even though he wanted nothing more than to disappear behind a wall hanging or under a carpet. He looked at his watch and saw that it was past midnight. “What more is there to lose?” He would do anything to turn his mind from the swimmer Kobai, the ranked red lattices of embryos, the Lyhhrt as embryo, the wrath of Manador, and the deadly empty game of skambi.

Tally was a veteran employee and lived in oxygen country with the more expensive women, even though she had not been one of them as long as Lebedev knew her. Her windowless room was small and neat as the china shepherdess spreading her skirts on the tiny shelf which matched the ormolu mirror above it. As neat as Tally, herself very much like the china figurine in her swirling skirts and flounces. The chest of drawers was of old dark wood carved with vines and serpents; a red and black Spanish shawl with lustrous fringes was hanging from a hook on the back of the door, but the room smelled of innocence, of talcum powder, like a baby.

Lebedev thought that these possessions looked, if not antique, as if they had been burnished by use and care in many countries on more than one world, and could not be spoiled beside a hard bed or shabby sofa. They made him think of his soup crock, and of the tiny disgusting tethumekh Skerow loved.

“Well, Lev, I can offer you some cheap brandy or tea along with the Zephyrelles.” She offered a silver box filled with cigarettes, took and lit one for herself.

He sat down on the sofa. “I have not seen those for years.” Through the papery walls he could hear the sounds of lives around him, a woman singing to one side, a couple of others talking, toward the back.

“They still mix a good Turkish tobacco with the dope. The house gives them away—to customers, but the rest of us get them anyhow.”

He took one in memory of his youth, though he had lost most of his taste for them, and smiled at the mauve paper and gold tip.

She poured brandy and asked abruptly: “You really were in prison, weren't you? I thought at first you were having me on.

“Yes, I was in prison.”

“You must have done extra hard time, being a rozzer and all.”

“Hard enough.” Right now he wished he were back there. “It put me off a life of crime.”

Tally laughed. “I think you're full of it, Lev. But you were always a decent sort. I don't think you ever came within a light-year of being bent, I think you're still something of a rozzer.”

Lebedev did not look around for the spy-eye. The Lyhhrt had said: /
will protect you
, and Lebedev would let him do it. “Too bad you never had the opportunity to see the beautiful bruises I collected.” He spoke the words more sharply than he meant them.

Someone yelled at the singing woman to shut up, and the two who had been talking began to fight. There were curses and the thump of a head or shoulder knocking against the wall. The same sort of noises Lebedev heard in his own
quarters. He very much wanted to be out of the room, this little capsule of stifling homeliness, loneliness inside Zamos's brothel, and at the same time he wanted something more, much more, than the prospect of being caught and killed stealing Zamos's slaves and dying with the Lyhhrt writhing inside him.

Tally said, “Sorry, Lev, never meant to rattle your skeletons.”

“We are old friends, Tally, and I am not offended.” She seemed to him just a little drunk, and he thought perhaps she had always seemed that way to him. He looked into her eyes and stopped believing that Zamos's people had sent her to entrap him, or the Lyhhrt, to console him. He took her hand. After a moment she disengaged it and opened the clasps of her dress; she took it off and hung it carefully on a padded hanger in her closet, then wrapped herself in the Spanish shawl over her thin silk shift, smoking until he finished his drink and let her undo his buttons.

He came down toward morning at a time when there was not much business and the few remaining customers were being helped or prodded to exits. A shortcut took him through plushier districts along softly lit corridors. The silky notes of lute and violin, and a beam of light spilling into the hall, drew his attention to an arched opening into a round thick-carpeted vestibule with wall hangings and gilt chairs. The heavy door, standing ajar, opened into a perfumed grotto of sunset rose and mauve, of divans and sunken bath fringed with exotic ferns and fleshy blossoms.

He paused for a moment to look inside. There were three fair-haired naked children lounging on the bath's edge, two girls and a boy. They turned their heads to look at him with insolent eyes.

Suddenly they jumped up laughing, joined hands in a little
circle to dance three or four steps to the melody, and draped themselves around the pool again, hands on mouths to muffle their giggles.

Looking sharply he saw that they were not pink and gold, but darker and greyer in the creases of their skin, and not young either. They were a form of the O'e, and in this instant he envisioned them forever trapped in their thin false childhood. He could not see how he might save them.

Shen IV:
The Minotaur

“Hey!” Ned Gattes woke up in a closet, a former lavatory, in the Labyrinths of Zamos's Palace of Knossos, on Shen IV. Zella was breathing into his ear and her cold hand was rapidly warming in his hot creases. He relaxed; Zamos's people would not have awakened him that way. “Oh. I like that.” He twisted to look at his chronometer. “Not time to get up . . .”

“There was a cleaner mech came in here.”

“What? Why didn't you tell me? Those machines can report us.”

“This one won't. It came to fill up on water for its scrubber. When it smelt us it just went away quietly. I've seen it happen before, it won't bother us.”

“Um . . .” He thought of the robot cleaner crouching nearby when he was listening to Spartakos's declamation, and pushed the thought from his mind again.

“Ned?” Zella kissed him.

She cared for him, trusted him, had waited for the peak of her right moment to make love to him. Ned Gattes stretched a little to ease the sore point where his shoulder blade was grinding into the granite basin; then nudged his mind toward
youthful excitement and sex at midnight, and rolled over into her open thighs.

“That's better . . .”

They were out of there before dawn, mixing with the fogged-up stragglers trying to wake into energetic life by stuffing themselves with seed cakes and bitter chicory, squeezing fingers in their ears against late-razzing bugle-bands that echoed fearfully in the vast lengths of the halls.

Signifying the break of dawn, the cooling systems beneath the floor began to whine, at first, and then roar before they settled into the steady vibration that made the floor seem almost alive. News of treaties and wars and new worlds to fight them over flickered on the walls. The beggars, whose presence had been masked by the evening crowds, were yawning and stirring, ready to play on the guilt of penitents with updowns and hangovers. Robotechs in antiqued silver, fancier than the one Zella had seen, rolled inconspicuously along the walls and entrances laying down liquid films of cleaner that they wiped up after themselves.

“We look too much like mechanics down here,” Ned said. “We gotta flame these scrags we're wearing and get something that fits.”

“I don't know where to find scrip in these places,” Zella said. “You want my cashcard?” She dug for it in her belt pouch.

He hesitated. The thought had lingered in his mind that Zella's defection did not need to be permanent, tempers would cool, Kati'ik would be displaced sooner or later and if he himself was caught Zella did not have to be involved and could safely return to her work. This idea was his way of trying to protect her, the only way he could think of. “Not yet,” he said at last. “Let's save it.”

“Where we going?”

He was looking about, in a relaxed way, not staring or curious. Not desperate. “I want to find a GoldMine office . . . you probably know where they are better than I do.”

“I've never done anything but fight down here. They're usually around the boozers and brothels.”

“We went by a lot of those last night, but I don't want to go back.”

“I'm sure there's more than one GoldMine, this place goes on long after you want to stop. Down that way there's a branch of The Pig and The Peppercorn that caters to New and Old Earthers, where new-dogs hang around. But I'm not going in there. Some pug off a night shift might know me.”

“No, we won't even go close to it.” They had been moving cautiously near the walls behind the path of a robomech, and now Ned took Zella's hand and slipped into the ever-growing stream.

Restaurants and drugsters set their sound systems going, spielers unfolded their bailies and players tuned viols and lutolins. The sound level rose, but still kept its separate filaments of percussion and melody; Ned and Zella could hear above their heads a troubadour clearing his throat and singing in a warm baritone, as if to himself:

Rain falls softly on the city
. . .

They paused to listen while the dull roar of the ventilators hit the backs of their heads, and thought of the upper stories where the sun beat down so hard.

Rain falls softly on the city . . .
Rain falls gently in the country
Sweetly it falls in the wilderness
—
And savage the rain behind my eyes . . .
Savage rain, O savage rain
. . .

“It used to rain like that in my country when I was young and growing up savage.” Zella said.

“The rain in Starry Nova wasn't anything you'd much want to remember . . . where I grew up was savage.” Ned thought for a moment. “I guess I can see you as a fierce person.” Although he spoke seriously he was careful to smile when he said this.

She clasped his hand tighter. “I grew up in a farm commune, I'd been engineered strong. I was heavier then, a chubby teener. My mother's side-husband got too interested in me. I knocked him out. He calmed down, everything went on well enough, but I was afraid of how angry I got, of enjoying it. The place got stifling. I had to get out.”

The Pig and the Peppercorn was a small bar faced with little smoked-glass window panes, beyond them a basic low boozer full of smoke and ugly customers. Ned stared through the windows and then at Zella. “You've really been inside there? I sure wouldn't hurry into that place.”

“Why not? I just wanted to see everything. I do know how to discourage attention I don't want.”

“Yeh.” Ned laughed. “I guess now I'm with you I could go in.”

Next door there was a Bettor's Parlor, and past that the GoldMine, an Interworld public office where all comers could borrow money on their working cards. Ned did not go in but stood hand on hip a few paces away from the door, tapping the brass-colored cashcard disk against his teeth.

A thin dark reptilian detached him?self from the pillar of which he had seemed to be part of the carving and sidled up to him. “Cashing in a card, you-boy?”

Ned considered him: one of a species he had not personally met, he thought he recognized a Sziis from his shadowy way of moving; he seemed to be going sideways no matter where he was heading. “Are you paying?”

“I'll get you one third more, same cost,” said the Sziis.

“I'll take it.” Zella pulled at his sleeve, but Ned had always used private agents for getting money, and took her hand to reassure her. He had been tumbled by Security only once, and then talked his way free. He and Zella followed the Sziis, who was wearing what looked like a tube of silver scales and was zigzagging along like a lightning bolt, to a hole-in-the-wall advertising duty-free cigarettes; it had a tiny square window filled with gold-tipped Zephyrelle dopesticks in pink, blue, and mauve papers, but sold none.

Stepping inside Ned found an office with just enough floor space to accommodate four squatters of various species playing skambi with cashcard disks and smoking something that made Ned dizzy and was not Zephyrelles. The Sziis handed over a cashbook and while Ned was counting the leaves said, in an offhand way, “I can get you anything. Anything you like.”

“No, thanks,” Ned said, “I think I have enough!”

The Sziis stared at him with black bead eyes, and licked his mouth with a pink tongue thin as paper. “I can get you work. Nice work for a good healthy boy.”

“I bet you can,” Ned said, grinning and skipping away. “Wake up in an alley in my skin—if I get to keep it? That kind of work?”

He found Zella waiting outside, split the cashbook in two, and pushed half into Zella's hands.

“Oh no, Ned, I don't need all that.”

“Oh yes you do! We might get separated, and there's all kinds of bad luck you can only get out of with hard cash. Like this stuff we're wearing, that says: ‘Casino Pugs on the loose.' Now we can find some new feathers.”

“Feathers are the last thing I want,” Zella said grimly.

“Silks, then. You can show me the best stores.”

“Down that way there's a good one I remember, but I don't like the women's clothes they have. I'll look around.”

“Don't go too far.”

“No. Let's meet under that balcony.” She pointed to a balustrade at the top of an escalator leading to the floor above. She put an arm around him and he kissed her. “I don't want to be far from you, Ned. I hope I never do.” Her face shone on him like the sun, and for a moment he almost forgot the hostility hidden among the moving people around him like snakes in a thicket.