Flesh and Gold (18 page)

She spoke this aloud, and the sound bounced off roof, floor, and pillars. She was absolutely certain that even now their combined minds, fused and focused, would be fifty times more powerful than her own.

There was a sullen emptiness. She broke the bubble and it collapsed into a filmy sac, plucked out a red pellet, and dropped it into her mouth. It gave off a warm and redolent spice.

:That's good . . . :
Hrufa's thought was a curl of smoke.
:You haven't forgotten how you brought me the sesshipods, even as a child.:

“I remember it very well.” She manipulated the pellet on her tongue as if she were a seducer perfuming her mouth.

:You never loved the
tethumekh.:

:I treated it as if I did. I truly loved you, when my mother died and we all felt lost because my father insisted on living so far away . . . I am sorry I never had the heart to come here when I became lost again.:

:Skerow! Skerow!:
the minds swarmed around her. She did not know anyone else among them, and for a moment resented their intrusion into the private moment, but took another pellet. This was a cool blue one, tasting of menthol.
:Give us more!:
They encircled her, their texture hardened, like a headache. A draft of wind puckered the protective windstreams, and she smelled the afternoon rain. “The storm is coming.”

:What is lightning when we want life and blood? Why did you not have lovers after you left him? You have nothing to tell us!:
Skerow did not know any of these who were so greedy for her life.

“What must I do or give for you to tell me who killed my tethumekh?”

:How to do that? Everyone wears the damned helmets nowadays.:

“I believe you know how.”

:You say yourself you did not love the beast.:

“The one who killed it is more than willing to kill me,” Skerow said.
:I would never bring you lovers even if I could. Do you need to know of all my fearful experiences, all the torments I have seen and felt, to do me this one favor?:
She noticed that even with ventilators the moss was encroaching on the stone, and realized that she was speaking aloud to distance herself from these minds. She was near tears for them now because they had lost, all of them, their self-images, and become so shameless.

They were almost abashed, but they did not answer.

:I will give five thousand
pistaba
for someone to come and drink the nectars, eat the foods, listen to the music for you until you are ready to sleep.:

One old man, once hearty and gracious, struggled to free his self from the formless group.
:Die, you mean, not sleep. Do not undignify our scraps of life with euphemism.:

:And will that surrogate have lovers too?:
Lokh, quite undignified, asked slyly; he had always been sly.

:I cannot force a person to do that.:

:That was my joke. I am not too old and crazy to make a joke.:

:You are not too helpless to make one, grandfather.:

She heard a spatter of rain at that moment, and then a lightning bolt. Thunder broke, the rain fell in sheets; she would find more relief from her frustration in letting it storm around her than in waiting among these Saints. She thought of how often the heroes in the River Epics descended into the vaults of the dead to take counsel of the spirits, and how difficult it was to make them give it. She tucked the little package of pellets into her sling-bag and stood watching the rain. It would clear in a few moments, and likely start again in a few more, until sunset.

Eskat had trembled so fearfully at every disturbance . . .

She cast the net of her thought out over the city, but her sorrow removed her so far from the purity of contemplation that she caught nothing but the knucklebone-tossing games of children playing in the rain. No other mind gave back the resonance she was searching for.

The Ancestors gathered round her and watched.

:Truly, Skerow, we cannot find—:

Were they so old and powerless? Individually they were, yes. She realized that none had real power, and not one would admit it.

“Together—”
:Together you make one powerful mind, and I will not die, damn you, until I have done what I promised myself. You know you have the power, don't you? Don't you?:

Lightning-flash, thunderclap! children running for home, now.

See there
—: She did not know who spoke.

A spark.
:It's a mind somebody knows.:

:It is the Solthree.:

:He has static in his helmet
—
:

:You can't see him!:

:The helmet is defective
—
he
—
:

:
—
crushed the little beast. But nobody's eye saw him.:

“Who is he?”

:Won't tell his name to himself, will he?:

:He's the voice in the street that says:
—AND I'LL KILL YOU FOR THIS!
And the voice in the hall that says:
—WHERE'S THORDH, JUDGE SKEROW?
and on the comm:
IS HE DEAD, JUDGE? WOULD YOU LIKE TO BECOME A SENIOR MAGISTRATE, SKEROW DEAR?
He kills and says:
BE MUCH MORE OF A PLEASURE KILLING THE BIG ONE.
He would have
killed you, yes. He crushed the tethumekh only because he could not reach you.:

Skerow stood pressed on one side by the rain and on the other by the green spheres. “You did not believe me.”

:What would you have given us then?:

Skerow's mind closed and refused to answer.

:Are you angry? You were asking us to break through another person's defenses.:

:I ought to have given without asking for anything. I am not angry, I feel ill. Who would have thought that man, that demon, would be on this world?:

:The police have got hold of him.:

:I daren't look
—
they would know me.:

:The Crazy Ancestors may look. The police are trying to shoo us away!:

No one shoos away twenty-five thousand years' worth of Ancients. Skerow smiled. She felt herself smiling, but she did not try to join the group mind. She was grateful that the demon had fallen beyond her reach before she did him violence.

:That one's name is Ferrier. Hears the Law say, “Ferrier, come with us!”:

The rain had stopped, and a wind was picking up the clouds.

Skerow said,
:He is one of those charged with paying our people to steal gold.:
She dropped one of the pellets into her mouth; it had gone suddenly dry.

:Yes,:
said Hrufa,
:Nohl was one of those who worked for him.:

:You know that Nohl,:
said the hundred and twenty Ancients,
:the one that left the Deltas to look for his fortune and married her in the Isthmuses
—:

“Stop!” cried Skerow. “That cannot be the same Nohl.”

:You have been out of the River for a long time, Skerow.
Your Nohl is not simply Mister Nobody,:
said Uncle Lokh.

“Ancestors,” Skerow whispered, “could it be? In court the poisoned witness was called Sta Farre Samfa.”

:In back-country Vinelands dialect that is “Citizen Unknown”.:

It seemed to Skerow then that all that had happened, everything, since she had first seen Kobai in Zamos's window, had been leading to this moment.

:Who is this one coming now?:
Hrufa asked, and Skerow realized how sharply she and the Ancients had excluded strangers from the Hall; no one had ventured in, even for shelter from the rain.

Skerow recognized this one.
:It is the Bailiff's Clerk.:
She stepped forward to meet the fellow as he approached; he had taken off his robe to hurry through the rain, and was twitching the drops off his skin.

“Have you come to arrest me now, Clerk?” Skerow managed to ask this harsh question mildly.

“No, no, Madame! I have come to beg you to speak to the witness. He will testify to no one but you!”

Nohl

Skerow had wanted to bring Nohl to justice, but Justice had come to him first.

She could not tell his age; he seemed ancient. He was crouching on a huge waterbed that crowded the small hospital room, wrapped in a tangle of instruments and tubing, shrunken and twisted with pain, belly swollen with poison; his left eye was invisible in a heap of inflamed flesh. Breath hissed in his gill slits, he opened and closed his mouth continually in his efforts to talk; his tongue was pale and thin.

“You expected me to die,” he said. “They all expected me to die.”

“I very much want you to live, Nohl,” Skerow said, “but you must be careful what you say now, to protect your rights.” Now that she had found him she was afraid that he might speak outside the boundaries of the case where his words would be lost in legal jungles and the case damaged so badly that no justice could be done. “I will present your testimony to the legal teams of both sides when you have given it, but you must answer their questions afterward if you are able.”

“If the poison and all these tangled procedures don't kill me first, they may ask away,” Nohl said with a sneer.

“You must explain why you are accusing me, but you need not incriminate yourself.”

Nohl swallowed air chokingly and cried out, “I will speak! I will! What will you do to me, kill me again with stronger poison? Blind my other eye with another red-hot iron?” His only eye was swelling with blood, like Thordh he sweated bloody tears. “I am no longer accusing you, and I will explain.”

“You must take an oath.”

“Damn you, I will swear by anything you like, only quickly, before the poison kills me!”

“Let Madame Ossta bring in the Court Recorder. You need swear only by your God.”

“No one is likely to put much faith in my honor,” Nohl said bitterly.

Let me begin at the beginning, it is not all that long a story. My marriage was not as rich as everyone believed. Earthquakes and volcanoes had shifted the terrain the estate was on, and by the time I came to share in it, it was half-sunk in swampland, and the beautiful parks and gardens were ruined
from flooding. My wife had no better a name in her family than I did in mine, and no other inheritance than the land. We hadn't the means to keep it up, and no one wanted to rent it. We were so poor that when my wife's house collapsed there was no money to repair it, and we were forced to live under one roof. She had some sort of female disease in her parts and we could not even have children.

Yes, yes, I am getting to it! I have put it together so in my mind, all these horrible clockfalls, let me tell it as well as I can!

Nothing I ever did would work out for me, except to come near putting me in prison. There was nothing for it but to try to sell the estate, anything to get some money out of it, to keep the roof over our heads, to buy food. I went to one of my cousins in the Deltas to find a buyer, those misers would never lend me a half-pista though God demand it, and when they were done ridiculing me, they sent me to the Consortium.

Now I tell you I sold it cheap, and there were faceless men of twenty worlds who plowed it with their feet before they gave me a seal to bloody my thumb on for the money. I kept the house and a hundred siguu of land each side around it. I shored it up, and fought off my wife as best I could with her ailments and whining, and with doctors and lawyers and stonemasons there was little more than enough left to buy a pisspot.

And damn me, no, I'm double-damned already, but by the Unhatched Egg no more did I know what was going on in those swamps and shores until someone comes to me that the Consortium sent and says, Nohl, you know the land and shoreline so well, we'll pay to have you oversee our crew taking care of a stock of aquarium animals we're storing in the bay.

I agreed to this as readily as you'd think, and they sent me
a crew of rough fellows with good esp and long prods, one was a countryman and the rest some outland bullies. We arranged nets to keep them in one area, and they dropped in a load of their creatures.

The beasts were good-natured enough, but—my belly! my eye! let me have something to ease me!

. . . That's better. What was I saying? Yes—good-natured enough, but I'd never seen aquarium animals like them, I tell you. They had no fins or flippers but hands and feet, yes, hands. Real hands like yours or mine. They made nests to sleep in out of the sprigweed, and filled puffbladders with seastars to light themselves. They made nets to catch fish, and used shells for knives. They would have killed us if they could.

It was they who found the vein of gold. One day when one of them got angry at something we did or said, one of the females reached up and flung a lump of it at us, and we realized there was a bloody fountain of it coming up with the hot currents, pure and worn down by the sea until it shone. Gold! All that gold! Coming out from under the skin of what used to be my land! Would you have told the Consortium about it? Why do I ask? Of course you would! But you do not need, the Consortium did not need gold as I did!

Well, I had all those fellows with me and they did not care to waste all that gold any more than I, though I give credit to my Khagodi landsman that he took some persuading. We set those undersea creatures to gathering the gold. They were willing enough, it kept them busy and the stuff was only a plaything to them.

Of course even up in the Isthmuses you cannot just spend lumps of gold, we needed someone to handle it for us. One of my crew found that brute Ferrier. We knew he was an agent of Goldyne. And I knew that Judge Thordh was involved
with Goldyne. Ferrier used him to get me off the slavery charge, but he was no friend of mine and we were not any kind of associates, we were both only stupid dupes and conveniences for the agents of great financial empires we never knew anything about.

I was earning good money, and happy enough to have it, but every two or three thirtydays the Consortium would come in airflight cars to drop new batches of the undersea folk and cull the old, and those Folk were becoming restless. They had a signaling language that they spoke with their hands, and when we came to feed them they would rise up half out of the water and speak with us. We taught them how to swallow air and speak with their mouths as we do. This is as true as it is that my head is bare and my mind unguarded.