Flesh and Gold (13 page)

Ned sat on his bed with his gear around him, and noticed for the first time that there was a fifteen-centimeter crust of
dried blood running from right shoulder to nipple on his taklon knit jersey; one of the knifers had got him, and neither he nor anyone else had noticed the shallow cut because the shirt was dark red. The thin material had been designed to deflect such attacks, but the blade had caught it along the grain when he was twisting away and driven a tiny fold of the fabric into its slash; the shirt was not torn even though the skin was cut. In all the excitement he had not noticed the wound; the moment he noticed it it began to hurt. He softened the crust with cold water, pulled off the fabric, washed and sprayed the cut with picrocin and dermatex. Then stuffed his shelves with underwear and sleepsuits, and arranged toothcleaners and depilatories on the washstand. He did not even try to sort out what had happened, but merely pushed it away; when Gretorix directed him to one of the trestle tables in the huge dining hall and the young woman stood up to greet him, he did not want to look at her face.

Zella had dressed carefully, in a light blue leather doublet, slit at the sides, that showed some thigh but not much, dark blue stirrup-hose and cordovan laced sandals. Everything was mixing itself up in her mind, Ned Gattes and his terminal acne, being demeaned by Kati'ik, Sweet and his diamond and his dead end life as a sparring partner for the Spartakoi, whether she might become one like that or be fired, how lonely and out of things she felt in vast surroundings where the other women seemed so experienced and self-assured—hard, anyway—and she was not quite sure whom to trust among the men, whether she could survive a Bloodfight, how soon the Lottery would come up for it . . . whether Kati'ik had it in for her, everything whirling together—she caught a side glance at herself in the mirror that formed one wall of her small room, braid half-fallen over her shoulder
and looking young and naive. But she had fought in thirty arenas, and drawn blood. She stared the image down. And now, hurrying on her way to the dining hall, she knew she was still young and healthy enough to feel a stir of unreasoning hope.

The hope was seriously threatened when she stood up to welcome Ned Gattes. He grimaced when he shook her hand and looked as if he would rather be somewhere else. That look was not the only one that put her off. “You don't look like your holo—oh, maybe I shouldn't have said that.”

He grinned. “Yah! The jaw! That got fixed up, at least for now.”

“I heard someone saying you'd been attacked.”

Ned sobered, and said, deadpan, “Only a flesh wound.”

“Couple one-arm bongos,” said the woman sitting next to Ned, and he recognized her as the one who had tripped over his ankles. “But you got hoicked up by Spartakos. Never figured a mekko would have them kind of brains.”

“Oh, he does,” said Zella. “But I don't know of any one-arms among the pugs. Maybe novelty-fighters like Spartakos.”

The cries and cheers ringing in the dining hall heralded the first good meal in months to the long-starved travelers, and Ned fell to ravenously and would not take up the conversation.

Zella was becoming worried that she would never be able to find her way into his confidence when, toward the end of the meal, she looked up and found him staring at her. She said, “Something you were meaning to ask me?”

The grimace returned to his face. “You remind me of somebody—a bit.”

Zella thought,
Wouldn't want to be that one, whoever
. But she said, “Is that a line?”

He showed teeth. “Only if you bite.” He had Jacaranda
on the brain, he knew that. He was being paranoid, but then he often was, lately, and with good reason. But the moment he had first looked at Jaca—no, Zella, the sense of determination in her face and how her features were set by it, the white skin, the way she moved her shoulders and arms, recalled—

Cut that, Ned, or yer a dead 'un!
His father was always saying that, with a whack, when his mind wandered.

—reminded him of a younger Jacaranda at the time when they were both being seasoned under the hand of Manador.

The antique pornograph had a room to itself adjacent to Level 3 Common Room #15. Most of the habitants had exhausted its treasures after a year in the Palace of Knossos, but many of the new pugs had never seen such a thing, and thirty-odd were crowded around it, faces flickering in its light.

The machine measured about four meters by three and glittered with the sexual symbols of fourteen human species from twenty-five worlds in a thousand shades of color and intensities of flashing light. It housed six peepshows with touchy-feely and Orpha
dugak
music on the Varvanian
wabu
, eight erotic computer games with sound effects, a two-meter-square screen that played holo cartridges, and a three-dimensional Tri-V that programmed itself with innumerable variations on the same theme.

Ned was standing near the crowd, for safety, but a little apart, to avoid being jostled. He wanted to put an arm around Zella, not just only to make her an unwitting ally, but the part of his mind that equated her with Jacaranda balked: every man who touched Jacaranda paid, one way or another. When he finally did bring himself to circle her waist, she relaxed against him with what seemed to him—relief?

Something had gone wrong with the Tri-V and perhaps
because it was so old no one had bothered to have it repaired. Its colors did not coalesce: each person in its dramas had become a close cluster of three images in red, blue, and green, and each gesture was tripled as three, six, nine hands groped for their shadowy pleasures.

The cyborg woman said, “Shit, even I've seen all this junk and the thing's buggin my eyes out. Where's all the cartridges with the good stuff?”

The man with the bad nose job was digging into a rack of cartridges below the big screen. “These things are so old I can't even read what they say.” The fluorescence of the titles had rubbed away.

A Khagodi with a tri-split tail picked a cartridge off the floor. “This one looks new.”

“Yeah!
Sisters
, it says. Yeah. Every man should have one. What I—”

“Just cut it out, Smugger, and get going,” the cyborg said. Smugger gave her a leer and slotted it in.

Sisters
opened with the camera eye looking from above at a woman lying on a bed, lit in dark red, infrared. She woke up, turned on the light. It was . . . not sure yet, but . . . she looked into a mirror, yes, it was Jacaranda. Red curly hair, white skin, small tight build. Ned's heart bumped and he began to sweat very cold.

The woman opened the door; a big man was waiting for her. She went down a hall with him: he stood by while she went into a room where a Lyhhrt in a workshell gave her an injection. There was no sound but the pornograph's crazy music, and the action was tightly edited.

“Ain't they gonna do anything?”

The woman, still shadowed by the bruiser and just as blank-faced as he was, went to a second office, where a Kylkladi man with dyed green feathers, wearing spectacles, put a thin gold chain around her neck. The camera moved
along with her but did not shift from its over-the-shoulder point of view.

“Aw, let's get offa this an find somethin with some action!”

“Shaddup,” a woman said. “I wanna see what happens to her.”

Another man said, “I think this kind of looks like a snuff act. I remember one where they put a chain on her like that.”

“Yeah? Then let's get on with it!”

“Sure, you'd say so!” the woman snarled.

Ned was rigid, streaming with sweat. Zella pulled away and whispered, “Are you all right?”

His headshake was the barest of gestures, he raised a hand to be let alone. His eyes were locked on the screen, he could not blink.

Zella was staring at him. Then she said, again in a whisper, “You know her.” It was not a question, and he did not answer. She said, in a louder voice, “Why wouldn't she fight?”

“Maybe she didn't know what was happening—or maybe it ain't gonna be that a-tall.”

A Kylkladi woman in purple feathers led the red-haired woman to a store-room where she she removed her clothes and put a corset decorated with spangles, gave her an impervious helmet and a mask in the shape of a scallop shell, and led her down even more halls, all the while touching her on neck, shoulder, or thigh with a feather or a silvered talon while they passed between rows of staring people of strange species.

“That's a whorehouse.” The others did not answer, and the pornograph fell silent as the gamesters came around to look at the screen.

The scene flicked to a theater with screens, holo receptors, and the camera facing an apron stage where a gigantic Florence flask was waiting; it was filled with liquid, and another
tube led into its belly. Swimming inside the flask was a hominid female with a deep red skin, and a tadpole-shaped tail as long as her legs; there was a gold chain around her neck. Her eyes were huge and dark; she stared out for a moment and then retreated to the wall and turned her face away.

“I never see one of them before.”

“Some animal they breed for games.”

The red-haired woman dropped down the neck beside her; she was wearing the shell mask and the impervious helmet. The water blurred in a flurry of bubbles. When it cleared the two were staring at each other; the red-haired woman raised both hands and grasped the aquatic woman's breasts.

“Yeah! It's about time!”

“Shut up!” Zella hissed, surprising herself. Ned tightened his grasp on her shoulders as if she were his lifeline. He could not bear to watch, nor force himself to turn away.

The aquatic raised her arms in a startle, then without violence plucked the other woman's hands away, and the devil's wife came boiling out of the tube. When the thrash of bubbles settled down the beast had already slashed the woman along the side of her thigh, the screen zoomed close and the ribbon of blood seemed to be splashing the eyes of the viewers.

“I know that! It's a devil's wife.”

“And he can keep her too.”

“Them things got esp,” the cyborg woman said.

Smugger called, “Hey Barley, I bet you never fought one of them!”

The man who had brought up the talk of a snuff act answered, “You can bet your eyeballs, pignose, and I never saw one of them killed either. She don't have much chance with no weapon.”

The woman had wrapped herself around the serpent's
neck and was trying to choke it, but could not get a tight hold on it. Clinging under the jaws, she tried with one arm to push the aquatic toward the neck of the flask. The sea-woman did not understand at first, then pulled herself up and away, but when she saw that the claws of the devil's wife had raked the fighter's back, and the helmet had broken away and fallen to the floor of the tank, she dived down from her shelter, snatched up the helmet, and slammed it in the beast's eye.

Then the serpent's blue-green blood mixed with the red and turned the water smoky, but before it was completely obscured the red-haired woman had dropped the mask, shoved her face into the serpent's tangled gills and savagely bitten into them. As its blood billowed again, the devil's wife twisted its head and bit her halfway through the neck. The screen went black.

There was a moment's silence, and Barley said, “Looks like she fought.”

Zella murmured, “She was trying to protect the other one. I wonder what happened to her.”

“If she'd died they'd'a showed it,” Smugger said.

Ned thought that was probably true. He scrubbed the tears from his cheek in a one-handed gesture.

“Hey!” said Barley. “I think I know that woman! Didn't she use to be a pug? I never recognized her without the gear. She used to be one of that blueface woman's string on one of the worlds in Central—that funny name, Starry Nova. She had a funny name too. Like, Jambalaya.”

“Hey, Ned, didn't you come from there?”

“Jacaranda,” Ned said. “Yeah. I knew her. She was a good fighter.”

He walked away blindly, arm still around Zella.

So there just happened to be a holo with Jacaranda getting ripped to death. It was the Khagodi that picked it up off the
floor, but all forty-six of them shipped out with me. So this classy armful I got here looks like Jacaranda. If I went to bed with her would she kill me in my sleep? No, I don't think she would. If the Weird Twins had wanted to stick me with those daggers I'd have been dead as soon as they jumped me. They'd have driven them up through my belly. I would've died anyway from everybody pushing me at them if that robot hadn't saved me. A robot! “Are you still my friend?” I sure as hell need one
.

That spytick I was dumb enough to take. Means they
—
THEY
—
want to know. Something. Something about the delphine, because we were interested in her, and we never found out anything, but they don't know that, whatever we know may be too much. So they don't want to kill me
—
yet. Just scare me to death. It wasn‘t GalFed, I bet, that sent me here, they just hooked on, and I don't dare try much spying in this place. But I'll die of a broken neck if I have to keep twisting my head around looking to see who's coming at me next. I can't stay here
.

I gotta get outa here, gotta get out. Out
.

Fthel V:
Lebedev

Two days after the body of Jacaranda Drummond was found, the
skambi
dealer of the Gamblar at Zamos's brothel in Starry Nova was offered a much better slot in the Kylkladi GamePlex on the other side of the world. The following day a Miry applied at Zamos's for the vacated place. He was a small compact man wearing a short
zaxwul
pea jacket and a Russian peaked cap with a button on top; his eyes were black and heavy-lidded and his grizzled beard was cut close.

“A.G. Lebedev . . . yes,” said the hiring officer, a thin artificially
red-headed woman. “Full name, please, spell it.”