Flesh and Gold (10 page)

The tank had been moved into one of the niches beneath a screen; it was the same fishbowl Skerow had seen in the window. Kobai was floating curled up, clinging to the back
wall with her face turned away; the little heart was chained around her neck.

In the arena Jacaranda always fought with dagger, whip, or
chebok
, a kind of mailed fist, and here had nothing like them. She was not enhanced except by a short course of steroids she had discontinued early to avoid being blown up into a parody; the only steel in her was her determination. She could not even see how they might try to kill her, except by poison in the water. Whatever happened, maybe she could find some way to save Kobai, or protect her, or . . .

There was an audience before the showcase, a Miry group accommodated on hammocks and couches, waiting in dreamy attitudes and watching an erotic display of pre-Raphaelite-styled couplings on the Tri-V screen. There were five of them, three men and two women; the men were perfect and empty, the women, the white-blond and the brunette with red highlights, seemed rather too eager. The image of Zamos danced among them, speaking for one moment to them, then turning to address the world.

Piri'iryk guided her, always with the silver talon at neck, shoulder, or armpit, along the walkway behind the scenes, among stages and huge robots that manipulated scaffolding to the hatch that led into the bowl of the tank like the neck of a Florence flask.

“Are you ready?” Piri'iryk asked with no particular tone of voice.

“Yes.”

Piri'iryk summoned Barr to pull open the hatch door; a waft of air smelling of salt seas rose from the opening.

Jacaranda did not think then about anything more than the next moment, but fitted on the mask and slipped down the opening. The water flowed around her into the hot creases of her skin; above her head she heard the thud of the hatch closing.

I never feel truly stupid in my life until this monster come into my water and scare me up the wall, and I am just about to give her a two-finger in the eye when I see the eyes are not real but some kind of mask she is wearing that gives bubbles. When I reach for it she hold her both hand together like so:
friend
, and touch my hand.

Then she grab me by the two teats! I don't think she will be my friend. I guess this is the one that ask for me after all the time, but she will not get me. I am going to take her two hands and crack her head open with them like an oyster, and she knows it.

And what happen but I get this smell coming off her skin. It is the smell of one really scared, even if she is not running, and looks like a tough one. Afraid of me? It look to me like there is something about her I know . . . I don't think she is afraid of me . . . I take her hands off me, but not in a bad way, and keep hold of one, to say:
Friend, yes?
And she nod the head, what I guess is yes, so I say to my own self, if this pretend-fuck is what I got to do so nobody get hurt, that's it—

—and next thing, the whole world boil up and go bee-BLOOP!

The fury blazed through the water like an undersea earthquake, and flung the women against the wall of the tank. There were claws and teeth attached to it, and black flaming hunger. In the half second it paused, disoriented, Jacaranda recognized it: a serpent from the Copper or Cyprian Sea of Thanamar II. It was powerfully telepathic and brutally half-sentient. She pushed Kobai aside and clamped her teeth on the tooth-stay of the mask to withstand the crackling of the savage mind. The helmet, a cheap barrier to low-grade esp, was useless against it. Solthrees called it “devil's wife”: it was
a hermaphrodite that bred parthenogenetically and used its male function for gene renewal when its numbers diminished. She had watched bouts where the devil's wife was fought by dagger fighters who were willing to risk everything.

At her first dodge a claw caught her down the outside of her thigh and the blood slinked away in a curling trail. She shuddered in the pain, the bubbling fury, with Kobai's jolting terror driving through the beast's esp; dived through marbled water under the hook-toothed jaw, clasped the long neck between her knees and slammed with the heels of her hands hoping to reach a nerve complex. She had fought underwater but never without weapons and could not get enough purchase to do this.

She wanted to push Kobai up into the neck of the bowl where she might have protected her but that was impossible. The devil's wife writhed, the bestial form of hell-broken-loose, and she rode it as the hag rides the nightmare, feet tangled in the laces of its gills. Her own determination hardened to a knife-shape in her spirit, and when the claws raked her back she did not feel anything. She did not let go even when the flimsy helmet broke off and the full force of the black mind hit her inside the arch of her skull. She tasted the iron of her own blood in the water.

Kobai had pulled herself up into the chute as soon as Jacaranda thought of it, but when she saw the helmet falling dived down with a flick of her muscular tail, picked up the helmet, and smashed the devil's wife in the eye.

The fake jewels tearing through the eye's precious layers loosed a cloud of blue-green copper-based blood, a bulge of grey-pink tissue and a psychic shriek that brainburned its way out to the white-noise limits of the brothel. The blue-green and the red blood mixed and blackened into a cloud in which all were blind for one stunned moment.

Jacaranda could not break the serpent's neck. Still gripping the snaking torso with her legs she took one deep breath and tore off the mask, grabbed gill tendrils with both hands, shoved them into her mouth and bit. The devil's wife bent its head against its side and crunched the back of her neck between its jaws. Jacaranda died without a thought.

Kobai smashed out blindly; the twisting serpent's tail slammed the side of her head and the thrust drove her to the tank wall where she flattened gripping the plasmix with palms and soles in the opaque water, stunned, waiting to die. The water darkened further as the devil's wife lost blood, and the mind of the beast began to darken.

She sensed now the blood-thirst of the watchers, the terror of the beast that could act only as nature allowed, the dizziness as she sank into unconsciousness. A voice filtered into what awareness she had left, through the serpent's dying mind:

Who has done this? Get her out of there NOW!

Words she did not understand.

You fool. You absolute bloody fool. You will be smashed. THATDELPHINE'S A BREEDER AND SHE'S PREGNANT!

Jacaranda was found in much the way Ned Gattes had envisioned, half in the gutter before the brothel door. Her white drowned body was scarred with wounds that had drained pink, her spangles dulled like the scales of any hooked fish. By then Ned was wrapped in sleep aboard the Zarandu's shuttle along with Skerow and twenty-five thousand other souls bound outward across the Galaxy from Galactic Central.

It was a Lyhhrt who told Manador what had happened to Jacaranda; she did not know which one it was among the
physicians, surgeons, and lawyers. “How do you come to know this? Who are you, anyway?” Her skin was blue and dewed with sweat.

“I cannot tell you that.” The Lyhhrt had taken a Kylklad form and looked like Death's angel in feathers of silver filigree.

“Damn you, was it one of yours who did it?”

The Lyhhrt stood still for a moment in this shape, which it made more graceful than the true one. “I allow for your grief and anger, Madame. You are well aware that such a question is inexcusable.”

She was. “There is one of you who works for Zamos. That one knows, and so do you.”

“I cannot—

“You cannot tell. Oh yes,” said Manador. “But I will find out.”

THREE  

Khagodis:
Skerow on Raintree Island

On Khagodis the Diluvian Continent forces its way up through the belly of the equator between the Greater and the Lesser Archipelagoes and pushes into the Great Spine mountain chain that twists to the north and south. With the mountains running up just east of its center, it looks from space like the body of a sleeping animal covered by a green pelt that stretches whitely over its backbone. From this heaped backbone the Great Equatorial River flows west toward the Greater Archipelagoes and the Isthmuses; in its tangled chains the river islands seem to be sailing upstream.

Every year in the winter season the Organization of Poems and Their Authors holds its conference in the Orchard Gardens of Raintree Island. Poets and other artists come from all over the world to attend it.

One of these was the first public function Skerow attended after returning to her home world; her duties on the Assizes Circuit would not begin for another thirtyday, and though she was fearsomely weary and felt as if her brain
was boiling, the government-supported Raintree Conference was one of the few opportunities for her to see authors from her own country, local travel being both slow and expensive.

On this evening there had been a barbecue of fingerclams and water-bracket given by the Island hosts; a group of seventy-five was gathered under the lobe trees licking its collective fingers and watching the sunset. The sky was suffused with rose and mauve, with the fragrance of
sessu
vines, and the moons were huge and creamy over the flickering river and the deep green humps of its islands. One of the host poets was reciting, by esp, for though Khagodi poetry need not be an esp form, people do not vocalize much among themselves. . . .

. . . he was moving in the river to his lover

he was moving, moving in the river in his lover, as

their sworn-to-die attackers swarmed around
them
,

swarmed

in the sedge with the reeds above them bending

down toward the currents of the river

Do not leave me! cried

the lovers, crying

in the reeds of the river

while the spears of bloody vengeance

hovered, hovered in shadows among the brambles

and the points of their reflections

quivered in the river's mirror

and lover clasped lover

he in his vital brilliance, she in her awesome power

hers the greatness of power, his the tension of
brilliance
—

Skerow's mind wandered away from this recital, yet another old-fashioned retelling of the Great River Epic, and she watched as a heavy seed pod dropped from the lobe tree with a thud; its shell split and it extruded four root legs and wandered off crookedly in a vain search for sunshine. Eskat crawled up and down the back of her neck and beat the knob of his tail on her head for attention, but she was thinking of Kobai swimming frantically in another kind of great river.

Every once in a while the poet, a shallow and rather foolish fellow named Fasethi, raised his voice in a series of tremolo squeaks, to illustrate how brilliant, how tense his lovers were.

At the edge of this distraction, Skerow sensed the faint touch of a mind seeking her attention. She had been so preoccupied by recent events that except for a few old friends she had spoken to almost no one in the last day or so; this inquiring mind was that of a stranger, a woman not a poet but the friend and guest of one.
:Skerow . . . ?:

:Yes, Lady.:

:My name is Thasse.:
When Skerow could not bring herself to answer for a moment, she added,
:Thordh was my husband.:

:I know . . . He mentioned your name.:

:Did he? Not very often, I am sure.:
The woman was a form unseen in the darkness. Skerow could not tell what her size or appearance was, or the color of the drapery she wore against the evening breeze blowing off the river's current.

:He . . . never spoke of you. He never spoke of anything but our cases, Thasse.:

:Yet you have seen him more than I throughout our lives. Tell me, did he truly disgrace himself?:

:That is not my business to know. His death was a tragedy,
and it is being investigated . . . Thasse, would you like to withdraw aside so that we may speak more freely?: