Flesh and Gold (29 page)

Ned bit down on his panic and forced himself to take slow breaths that did not satisfy his need for air. He picked himself up achingly, and after a moment his oxygen capsule switched on. He dared not breathe too deeply or it would be used up before he could move far. He was shuddering in the freezing cold.

Shen IV had no moons, and the lights in its night sky were those of stars or other worlds, doubly bright because the air was so thin. Ned saw that the square of concrete was a buzzer landing pad, marked with tire tracks and fuel drippings. The area surrounding it was thick with ground trees furred with small grey leaves, twisted stems of wood swarming over the terrain ankle-thick as far as the eye could see. On the far side of the massive building was the long stretch of wharfs lining the seacoast.

His pursuers had not followed him out. He looked up at the huge arched windows on the upper floors; they were full of life and warmth. No one could see him out here, and
not many were eager to save him. Tomorrow if he survived the night he would fry in the sun's furious heat when it reached the peak of noon. Trying to calm the fear clawing inside him like a cat in a sack, he climbed the steps again and looked around. He saw a narrow stone pavement along the wall, half overgrown by twisting branches. It led away from both sides of the door and neither direction looked better than the other. His capsule sounded a warning ping! that told him he had only half a Standard hour's worth of oxygen left. He went down the steps to his left calculating that it would bring him to one of the Labyrinths' entrances.

The wall was still faintly warm. He kept it at his back, sidling along the narrow passage to avoid stray branches; parts of the flagstones were cracked and forced up, and some of the blocks of the wall had cracks thrusting with grey lichenous growths.

When he passed several broad porthole windows set into the wall and found them completely dark he realized the direction he had chosen was wrong. He had reached an old section that did not seem to be inhabited at all. The capsule pinged again. He rested for a moment and heard the hiss of the airlock door, and a sound like oxygen tanks banging against it, then several voices. His trackers had not given up.

He kept going. Zella was far away somewhere on this world, so far away he could not find her, would not think of her. Ping! He stopped again but heard nothing of the searchers; perhaps they had gone in the other direction, or the sounds had come only from his imagination.

Suddenly the wall disappeared; he stumbled backward reeling to keep balance and found himself in a shadowy recess. There was a door here but the stems of the ground-trees had woven themselves across it. He crawled over and tried to wrench them away, but they would not move, felt at the door, but could not find a latch. Ping!

Three lights flashed on, in off tones of primary colors. They were set into the walls of the recess at points half a meter above his head.

“Traveler—”

He jumped. The voice came from speakers beneath the lights, but the image appeared just beside him. It was the old hologram of Zamos—Ned had not seen it on the floors above—shaking his beckoning hand free of his sleeve in a dramatic gesture, sapphires and rubies glittering on his wrist. He looked deeply faded and aged, like a weathered statue; the three transmitters were coated with dust and salt from the offshore winds, and the image was eroded. It spoke again.

“I am Zamos at your service, always ready to guide you. Do you need help, Traveler?”

Ned hesitated for only a second. He needed help. “Yes.”

The figure said, “Guest of Zamos, this is an emergency exit. Have you become detached from your tour group?”

“Yes!” The word hissed through his chilled teeth. It was true enough.

There was a moment of silence while the computer controlling Zamos weighed the answer to his question. Ned listened for the sounds of the hunters, and thought he heard a faint cry.

“If you wish to return to your tour, please place your Zamos Tours Identicard against the sensitive plate in the left side of the doorway.”

Ned swallowed and said, “I don't have it with me.”

“You may also use any other I.D. bearing your retinal pattern. Always keep your Zamos Tours Identicard on your person at all times when you are with us.”

Ned fumbled the I.D. disc from his belt with thick stiff fingers and pressed it against the faintly glowing square in the lintel. After a moment the door slid open, grinding fiercely on unused runners.

He heard the snort of a buzzer's engine starting up and the bright flash of its searchlight over the dark cold terrain. He had no idea where he was going but stepped quickly over the tangled branches into a dimly lit airlock with dust and dead leaves in its corners. The door closed behind him and another opened in front; he came through it into a broad corridor where the air was warm but musty.

The moment his foot touched the floor the colored lights quickened to life above him down the hall, startling him, and the image of Zamos beckoned once again. Ned glanced ahead and back; there was darkness in both directions. He followed.

Fans began to hum, and the lightstrips lit before and faded after Zamos as he floated down a hall floor gritty with dust and spattered with long-dried stains. Not far away thousands were eating, drinking, gambling, coupling, singing, dancing, fighting . . . Zella was very far away. Zamos's step was noiseless, and his own seemed too loud.

Zamos pointed to a dark open doorway. “There you see a demonstration of cattle cloning for species of twenty-three worlds. We have been engaged in such work for over two hundred years Standard.” At his gesture a dim light illuminated an empty room littered with twisted shelf supports and warped glastex tank panels. Ned felt cold again. Here the silence behind Zamos's flat synthetic voice was palpable, unreality deeper with every step.

“And here you see scientists attending a course of lectures on the deadly virus-molds that pollute the jungles and tundras of Kemalan Five and Six.” A door opened into a wilderness of toppled lecterns and scattered books and cassettes.

Ned listened for the clamor of his followers and said aloud, “This is crazy. What am I doing here?”

Zamos's image turned and looked him in the eye. “If you follow me, Ned Gattes, you will be safe.”

“I am crazy,” said Ned.

“Here is the highlight of this tour,” Zamos said. He raised a finger and a door slid open. The hallway had ended.

Ned was hit by a hot burst of stinking air. In the ceiling yellow lightstrips brightened, and he saw the barred cages. A roomful of them.

“It is the very heart of Zamos,” said the image. “Here we create life that—” Ned stopped paying attention to it. He was standing by the bars of a cage where two naked figures lay bedded on straw, snoring faintly. They were the pair of one-armed fighters who had attacked him, nested like spoons with their long single arms crossing over each other, their greyish bodies glistening with sweat. A clumsy apparatus wound with pipes and studded with dials and gauges hung overhead and dropped water and food pellets into pans.

“—have engineered many new species easily bred for cattle or hunting . . .”

In a clear-walled enclosure beside them a hairy male figure with its arms tightly wrapped around its head twisted in a dream and thrashed out with thick blunt feet like hooves; the walls had many kick marks. It flung out its arms and Ned saw the pale curved horns, the squared bull's snout of dark red hardened flesh that was not truly a bull's and not quite half-human, the heavy pelt spreading over the head and shoulders like a bull's hide. Ned wanted to wrench his eyes away and could not. He had seen a creature like this at a mall freak show, bellowing in terror, and thought it was a strange species, but this naked half-man had genitals like his own. It opened huge bovine eyes for a moment, saw nothing, and whipped at the straw with a sinewy tail; then raised the thick clubbed hands to wrench at its horns as if it would
tear them from the skull, and burst out with a lowing cry of agony that was smothered by the thick plastic walls.

“—and so you see—”

“Shut up!” Ned yelled. Zamos's image stopped speaking. “You promised to lead me to safety, Zamos. Which way is it?”

“I will take you there this very moment,” said Zamos. Ned followed him past the cage of some whimpering female creature all breasts and buttocks, with a minuscule head and limbs, and then something completely different with too many heads. After that he went down a narrow hallway lined with dials and control panels, and faced one more door.

“You may open that door for yourself,” said the image of Zamos. “I am leaving you here, Ned Gattes. I am pleased to have met you. You need not reply. I don't exist here except as a hologram.” Zamos bowed with a flourish and blinked out.

Ned pushed the door aside. Beyond it was a small round office lined with one huge cylindrical monitor screen in five panels. It was dead and cracked in places. The one light came from the ceiling and reflected off the lenses and antennas of a cleaning robot.

Ned stared. “What is this?”

“Did you enjoy the tour, Ned Gattes?” the robot asked in a crackling voice.

“Is this some kind of joke?” Ned saw his reflection on the slick surface around him, warped by the cylindrical shape. He was sweating from the heat in the room of cages. “What are you?”

“I am the last Lyhhrt on the world Shen Four. Perhaps the last on any alien world.”

“I don't believe you.”

“Do you not? I know that you are a Galactic Federation agent.”

“Why do you think that? Who told you?”

“I sent for you, fellow! Or let us say that I/we did so. This entity received special permission to split, and my other half is on his way to the home I will never know again.”

“I don't understand. Anything.” The robot/Lyhhrt extended a folding limb and pushed forward a round stool for Ned to sit on. It was big and low to fit Varvani, but he sat down on it.

“Listen. Zamos made us sign an oath to serve them, and then made us their slaves. It is because we are so timid and fearful, and we would have been hideously destroyed.”

“A lot of people think you're frightening!”

“We do our best. We served Zamos for a hundred and twenty-nine years. At the beginning they taught us everything, and we learned so fast they say now that we know too much.”

“You made all those monsters—and the O'e.”

“We helped develop the technology that made them. At first we were subtly tricked by Zamos, because the Research Foundation was set up for us, and Zamos wanted to sweeten its name. Those of us who worked here became separated from our fellows and lost touch with the Cosmic Spirit. We were so fearfully lonely. Our minds became as warped as those of Zamos's people. Zamos wanted to know how far they could go in making undifferentiated protoplasm become animals and persons, anything they could control. And we were so out of control that at one time we even thought that we might make independent organic bodies for ourselves instead of these metal ones. Disgusting thought!

“We told ourselves that we were serving humanity, and perhaps we did, a little, but we have committed terrible wrongs, and I know it is not enough that we tried to minimize the harm.”

Ned said bitterly, “Nobody could minimize any harm to Jacaranda, and that swimming thing was—was more—”

“Yes, was more important. Jacaranda was aware of the risks, and we did our best to warn her.”

“Did you,” Ned said dully.

“The swimmer was the only definite evidence of a coerced being.” The Lyhhrt said. “The O'e could be called indigenous, or a world of origin could be faked up for them. But the swimmer's species is known. It was created from your genotype of human stock on your own Old Earth, by the founders of Zamos, some hundreds of years back, not us, and bred for a few generations, then became sterile. The genetic data were saved, the type modified and cloned again and again because it had once been fertile. Slaves created on demand are immensely more valuable when they are self-breeding. This one is. She is pregnant.

“Once we realized her significance we had her put in the brothel window to attract Skerow. We were desperate to find ways of attracting attention to Zamos's crimes before they destroyed us in a manner just as terrible as the one we feared so much. We showed you on that machine, the ‘pornograph,' what happened to Jacaranda in order to warn you that you were known and must take care. We were afraid to speak out against Zamos though they broke the oath they forced us to make. We hinted! Waiting and waiting for anyone to notice! Is no one outraged? Do all of you people of flesh want flesh in your power?”

The O'e woman's lip rouge burned on Ned's mouth. He had thought too often of Jacaranda and Poll Tenchard. But he did not think Zella would be flesh in anyone's power. He felt confused and gritty-eyed, not in shape to debate with Lyhhrt.

“But no—”

A hoarse voice outside the door yelled, “Gattes! Gattes, say something, Gattes! Tell us you aren't in there!” The door rang with kicks and another voice snarled, “Move away!”

“O God, they've found us!”

“I am unjust,” the Lyhhrt went on, as if nothing had happened. “You are not all that bad—”

“Listen to that!” Ned said through his teeth. “You said I'd be safe here, and now we're both trapped!”

“No, no! You will escape quite easily! You must hear me out, it is my last chance to repent! We did not sink entirely into sin, because—”

There was a sound Ned could not quite identify. “They're going to come—”

“—because at the time we discovered the swimmer Kobai in Starry Nova we were able to find Skerow and Lebedev as well as you and your friend Jacaranda, who were not only willing but insisted on taking risks for us. Perhaps in places I do not know of there are others!”

The edge of the door began to spark, to shrink and soften, and in a moment the plastial was running in drops like rain down along the edge, and a voice cried, “Idiot! Don't touch it yet!”