Flesh and Gold (20 page)

He said softly but very clearly, “That move is not allowed until the last round, Madame. Would you like to play another disk?”

The thin smile again. “I'll play another disk.” She put down the six, and a few moments later the three that won the pot.

He swept the disks from the table. “Another game, Madame?”

She dipped her card into its slot to collect the payoff as she rose. “Not yet. I will see you, Lebedev.” She disappeared into the smoke among the gamblers.

While he sat waiting for another South and breathing hard, Tally Hawes came by with her tray of fancy drinks and nudged his shoulder with her hip. “Friend of yours, Lev?”

“I hope not,” Lebedev said. “It's bad enough having her for an enemy.”

The moment he opened the door to his room he smelled her cool sharp essence: ozone and lavender.

She was lying in his hammock with her legs crossed, swinging slowly, fitting a dopestick into the carved holder.
She drew in on it sharply, it flared and lit. “Why are you really here, Lebedev?”

“I told you. I was in prison and I cannot afford a ticket on the
Zarandu
. Who else would appreciate someone like me but Zamos?”

She sat up and touched one of the pasteboard walls. Two of them were within reach. Looked about at the small chest where he stood his soup crock, the open niche with its sink and water-closet, neither bigger than two cupped hands. There was no more air in the room than two persons could breathe. “You have come far down.”

He thought there was satisfaction in her voice. Plenty of times as Inspector of Police he had ruffled Manador about some of the odd clients who wanted to hire her pugs privately.

“What have
you
come here for, Manador?”

“Today on my monitor there was a vidsnap showing how she died. She was made to fight a devil's wife underwater. It bit through her neck and killed her. Did you see that, Lebedev?”

“No.”

“There was a pretense of having a doctor examine her, a Lyhhrt.”

“The doctors in Zamos's brothels are always Lyhhrt.”

“The day after she died a Lyhhrt came round to tell me. I don't know if it was the same, but they are all the same. He knows who did it, who gave the order, and I think you do too, Lebedev.”

The image of Zamos appeared from nowhere and swept his purple-draped arm through both their bodies. “Enjoy yourselves! Do all you ever longed to do!” he cried. “You're here to live your lives to the full!” He disappeared.

Manador stared at the place where it had been. “What was that?”

“A kind of mascot, I suppose. A signature at Zamos's, supposed to be the founder. Have you never been here before?”

She turned her look on him and said, “I don't gamble for pleasure. Why did that holo come in here?”

“Officially, because something is wrong with the circuits. Actually, I believe, to let us all know we are under surveillance, a warning that all we do is known. The eye is—don't look—up in the corner behind you, among the water pipes. A very small one, hard to see.”

“Is there an ear?”

“None that I have been able to find.”

She stood up flicking her dopestick in the basin and said in her cold deep voice, “Then you are still looking, still working, aren't you? Was it you who sent her in here, Lebedev?” She reached out a hand and dug her fingers into the ruffle of lace at his throat.

“I—” He grabbed at her wrist but it was hard as steel. His inhibition about harming a woman made her stronger than South, who had been drunk and enraged. “Someone will come here and you'll be the one that's in trouble.”

“They'll think we're screwing.” Her eyes were like midnight, and her green mouth, full like Jacaranda's in a narrow face, was close to his. It smelled of fresh mint, as if her lips were leaves and her sharp green tongue a growing point. “Don't they do that here?”

A snake's head, that tongue. It touched the hairs at the corner of his lip. He shuddered and pulled roughly out of her grasp. “Stop that!”

She did not back away. “Do I offend you, Lebedev?”

He shook his head as if he had been freed of a spell and straightened his shirt. “I am not a Pinxid man.”

She grinned. “There are no Pinxid men. Now, what about her, Lebedev?”

“You were her handler. Didn't you know everything she did? Didn't you warn her?”

“I didn't send her here to die. I hope you get to see that, Lebedev, how she died. Maybe they'll show you, before they kill you.”

Lebedev did not believe an ear had been planted in his room, but he was not sure and he dared not shut her up. “You should have called the police and shown them the vid-snap.”

“Police! I've seen enough of the police. And I couldn't have let them set their filthy eyes on it if I'd wanted to because it wouldn't record.”

The words struck him a blow. He whispered, “The murderers have sent you a message and you've led them straight to me!”

“Have I?”

“You did it deliberately. You came here, showed yourself, bribed the housekeeper, and drew a line from Jacaranda to me.”

“You should have let me play that four, Lebedev.” She shrugged. “I didn't come here to betray you. I came to find out who really killed Jacaranda, what the Lyhhrt has to do with it, why Lyhhrt know all about this. Anybody wants to know what's between you and me tell them I want to hire you for a bodyguard, because I love your hairy body, Lebedev.” She sniggered. “Nobody will bother me, I have six of my good pugs outside playing
ogga-dippa
on the machines. It's a game that's even stupider than skambi.”

Lebedev said, “I know nothing.”

“You'll find out, because I'll be back to learn. And if you can't tell me then I will betray you.” She turned back with her hand on the door latch. “I truly loved her, Lebedev.”

“Yes.” Lebedev nodded and looked for the love in her
face. “You truly loved Ned Gattes for a while, but you were not overly scrupulous about sending him to Zamos's Spartakoi.”

She said in her cold voice as she pushed the door aside, “Ned's a good lad. A little clumsy but lands on his feet.” She paused. Stuttering a bit she said, “Trying to save some animal—some damned animal—that's how she died, Lebedev!” and was gone.

“Wait!” But by the time he hauled the door open she had disappeared into branching corridors, or perhaps the nearest shadow.

He was long getting to sleep and dreamed that his wife Roza was sitting in front of a mirror putting blue Pinxid coloring on her face, green on her lips, and leering up at his reflection. He woke startled with a spilling erection and tears in his eyes.

After that the sleep he sank into was a depth of sadness.

Next day he woke gritty-eyed; while he was brushing his teeth the key-jingling Housekeeper hammered a fist on his door.

“Your doctor's appointment, stad oh-ten! Visitors forbidden in rooms, next time you get fined!”

He snarled, “Didn't she pay you enough?” He had forgotten the appointment. The Lyhhrt had saved his life, but he did not like Lyhhrt better on that account; he recalled what Manador had said about Jacaranda being examined by a doctor, but thinking about it made him none the wiser.

In the basement between the dormitories and the main building, coldstrips in the ceilings lit the hallways with diffuse white light, and down the length of the uncolored, discolored composition walls and floor there were no pictures or carpets; Lebedev did not miss them. He felt at every step
that there would be someone coming up behind him to hook a claw into his collar or lay a heavy Varvani arm across his shoulder.

As he pushed into Employees' Bath, the door hit an obstruction and he heard a cry. He peered around it and found Ai'ia cowering between the door and the shower-stall curtain. She was wearing a wire mesh helm and a coarse robe with no more color than the walls; her face was darkly bruised on one side, her eye swollen. When she recognized him she clapped both hands over her mouth and squeezed herself farther into the corner; she had dropped an armful of towels and a net bag of crude soap-balls and did not try to pick them up.

Lebedev realized that he could not possibly have hurt her so badly by opening the door. He held his hands up and out, and whispered, “What is it, Miss? Who has hurt you?” He stayed in the shadow behind the open door so that neither of the spy-eyes directed at the ranks of showers could spot him.

“Oh—” Ai'ia stammered, “Oh mister, please let me go!” Her normal skin seemed near bruise-colored and vulnerable.

He bent to pick up the towels and soap. “Ai'ia—”

“Don't talk to me, Mister!” Her whisper was painfully urgent. “They have been beating me up for talking with you, they will make me fight in dirt and fuck with beasts if they catch me again!”

Lebedev felt the particular helplessness of one who has had authority and lost it. He gave her the towels and soap and stepped aside.

After his bath he stopped at one of the stand-up tables in the cafeteria and gulped a cup of chicory that had probably been delivered from the
Zarandu
along with the coffee shipments for clients. He wondered what the O'e were given to eat.

The labyrinth of narrow service alleys that ran alongside the deeply carpeted and gold-lit halls, and which Lebedev as an employee was expected to learn, led into obscure branches that were often poorly marked; some of them were lit by dusty and flickering electric lights.

Lebedev stumbled here, seized by one of the intermittent fits of dizziness caused by his unbalanced inner ear, and intensified by the oppressiveness of the air. In the trembling light of one of these corridors a door was pulled open abruptly in the moment that he was about to pass it. He glimpsed something metallic grasping its edge and then heard the thump as the door rebounded in its socket and was pulled back again. The vibrations it caused sparked the light into a moment of brightness that lit up the figure in the doorway for one moment and subsided.

Lebedev saw a tall being that sparkled inversely with darkness and gave off black spatters with painful bursts of intensely white and spectrum lights deep within them. It crackled with static, it was as if lightning were black, and the universe split.

Yet this creature was physical, and wore a lattice of platinum joined with jewels that repeated its own deep sparkings; through openings it extended or, even, broadcast its six limbs like jolts of electricity. Lebedev could not tell its features because every spark of it seemed an eye.

His mind went quite blank and for an instant he stood locked with the apparition in an alphonse-gaston stance. The ceiling light went dim again, but he could see that the brilliant shadow with its spears of light was reaching out its central arms as if to caliper his head.

The hairs of Lebedev's head and beard rose and crackled with static; he thought of the tip of Manador's green tongue, but could not pull himself away. Whether or not this alien being was satisfied with what it found in Lebedev, it withdrew
its points of darkness and shrank back behind the doorway.

Lebedev smelled a sharp tang of ozone, and was briefly dizzy again. Another figure came forward from the dark room; he saw that it was the Lyhhrt doctor, now filling the doorway, who had pulled the door back for the chimera.

The Lyhhrt was wearing what Lebedev recognized as his workaday shell, an unadorned casing with features only suggested; he looked at Lebedev and said, “Please go to my office. I will see you in one moment.”

Lebedev went past the doorway without looking back and found his way to the office. He felt as if part of his mind had been burnt out.

It seemed a very long moment that he spent trying to pull his consciousness together. He sat down in the fitted chair and stared at the cabinets. They were as solid as cheap foam-plast could be, and their lines did not waver.

When the Lyhhrt came in Lebedev said, “That person is of a species I have never seen. Is it a member of Galactic Federation?”

“No.”

Lebedev thought he might push a little bit. “It does not seem quite . . . physical.”

“You think so?” The Lyhhrt fitted an instrument to one of its fingers and a light to another, and began to probe the recesses of Lebedev's ear. “Nevertheless it is an egg-layer.” When he saw the way Lebedev pulled away and turned his head to look at him, the Lyhhrt repeated, “An egg-layer. Truly.”

Lebedev felt as if he had been given gifts by the Greeks. Information from the Lyhhrt, who rarely gave any, and of the wrong sort. He wondered if the Lyhhrt was not out of kilter in some way, and hoped the way did not involve what was being done to his ear.

“Your ear is healing well,” the Lyhhrt said.

Lebedev said, “I get dizzy.” He saw in his mind the Lyhhrt's attitude, standing in the doorway behind the chimera, head bent forward, with something intimate—no, deferential—in it.
Attitude? Idiot! A machine with a lump of slime in it!

“That will pass.” The Lyhhrt reached out both hands to him and Lebedev went rigid with a jerk, because the unbelievable egg-layer had made a similar gesture. “I want to look at your other ear, Lebedev, that is all. Please do not be so skittish.”
What would that nightmare have been measuring me for? What would those two have to talk about?
He knew it was a common belief, sometimes substantiated, that Lyhhrt too long isolated from their fellows in those metal carapaces went off balance. The silver finger poked at his mastoid bone. “Your oxygen capsule socket is very poorly installed.”

“In the police force they don't give you fancy.”

The Lyhhrt pinched his earlobe, and he jumped.

“I want a blood sample,” the Lyhhrt said.

There was something odd and unmodulated in the Lyhhrt's voice, and two words that came together in Lebedev's mind:
blood/egg-layer
. Once again he pulled away and turned to face the silver man-shape with its beautiful articulating features. “Why? Why do you need blood when my ear is nearly better?”