Flesh and Gold (25 page)

“Yes?”

A tall young Khagodi man she did not know, wearing a helmet and a messenger's badge on a swag of leather, was standing beside her. “Madame, there is a gentleman who
would like to speak to you on an urgent matter. He is waiting in that tearoom.”

Skerow glanced along the fellow's pointing arm, noted the darkness of the archway leading to the tea shop, and was instantly suspicious. She said firmly, “I am not going to lose my place in this line, carrier. If your gentleman's concern is so urgent, he may come to me and speak.”

“Madame, he cannot.”

“Then, fellow, he must do without my advice.” Skerow stepped forward in line, and the messenger took a step to keep abreast of her. “It is no use staying with me. I am not coming.” One of the non-ESPs was looking at her oddly, but she turned away to glare at the carrier.

What happened went quickly then. She realized that she was going to be touched physically, but her reflexes did not move her soon enough to dodge the pressure that came on the inside of her wrist, of something cool and moist. After one twitch of repulsion she turned her hand out wonderingly and saw the dermcap melting on the thin skin, diffusing into the throbbing veins beneath.
I have been drugged
, she told herself, as if the
I
were somebody else.

She watched the half-crushed globe for a blurred moment, and looked into his eyes; he was her height. “You must come, Madame,” he said.

She nodded, and went along with him toward the arch. Now it was full of light.
My pupils have expanded
. Inside there were three small eating tables suitable for her height and five or six others at lower heights, with chairs to match, for squatters. Shadowy figures were crouching at them. The hard center of her being fought to see clearly, but the languor swept her, not unpleasantly, not unpleasantly enough.

There was a bowl of liquid on the table in front of her; its surface seemed to ripple like moving lips.
No, Skerow, no!
The mindvoice was not quite her own. She shuddered inwardly and drank.

“You must come now,” said the young man once more. He had changed his shape imperceptibly, and now he seemed to be writhing like the priest representing the Endless River Serpent at the spring dances of Southern Vineland. With an arm around her shoulder he led her willingly, lovingly, to a portal where she took one step into another dimension, a universe that was the inside of a bubble, colors and music flowing over its glassy surface, whose lights above her came from a thousand stars, whose floor was a pool of pretty blue water. She stood on the ceramic edge, waiting for the one she knew would rise from the water, her dead daughter Bathetto. They would look into each other's eyes and talk together forever.

The love rose swelling in her spirit, it drummed against her forehead and pressed out the tears. So many years of sorrow in alien places far away from even her desert and its moons . . .

Skerow!

The hard daily self that called to her was encapsulated in a bubble of its own, sealed away from her dream.

The being rose from the blue center of the water with massive head turned toward her and heavy jaws grinning. His eyes gleamed bright topaz, and the prismatic colors played over him so that he seemed almost to be part of the bubble's diaphanous wall. The air was full of perfumes.

“It is good to see you, Skerow!” Thordh cried.

Skerow's love collapsed in folds like a struck tent. Even so, she was not surprised. The quarter-century acquaintanceship with Thordh was an unshapely, unfinished part of her life's experience, something she always knew that she must face—but never so pleasantly! “I am glad to find you
in good health, Thordh. Even though you are dead.” She was laughing and crying. A needle of half-conscious and never-acknowledged feeling pierced her between the hearts: a terrible relief that what she was facing was not Bathetto. She was free.

“Death is not so bad when you get used to it,” said Thordh.

She found herself chuckling. She would never before have accused Thordh of being a witty fellow. She warmed to him. “How pleased I am to be with you!” Free.

Skerow!

He stood up in the water so that his serpentine tail rode the ripples of its surface. His upper lip folded over his beautiful teeth in a rictus of desire. “I have always loved you, Skerow, even though I have never spoken my love.” The colors flowed over him as if they had a life of their own, and she could feel her passion uncoiling in long swaths that followed the lines of his body.
Free
.

His body swam the air so that it twined about hers without touching. “You are the woman with whom I truly longed to share my Lineage.”

“Yes, Thordh . . .”

“How I wish you were the mother of my children!”

Antidote!

She was swimming off the edge and into the depth: the depth not of freedom but of nothingness.
My children
. The words tasted like iron, and her passion, so deeply sexual, subsumed itself into those other and even deeper passions of mother-love, wife-love, that had burned in her unrelieved for thirty-five years. The sore of her being burst and flared its poison into her longing; it set her afire with fury from bone to skin. With infinite slowness and all her strength, before she sank forever, she shook herself free, pulled away
the hand with which she had been about to caress Thordh, drew air into her constricted chest and hissed, “That is damned nonsense!”

—
damn you, the antidote!

The fading light of her mind sharpened for a moment: before shame at even the thought of delivering her private self to Thordh had time to flood her, she realized that she had been not only drugged, but poisoned. Then her field of vision darkened with a blue-grey stain, the iron burned in her throat, the cramp hit her, she twisted and involuntarily swept Thordh with her tail. She felt a sting and thought it was death. The stain blackened all of the light.

“Skerow, wake up! You must wake, Skerow!”

I am awake
. She was just dimly aware of lying in the basin in that strange place where she had found Thordh. Thordh was—not speaking to her but lying beside her on the ledge . . . no, it was not Thordh but someone vaguely reptilian and green-grey, wearing a suit of cloth or leather colored like a Khagodi man's skin. Not a Khagodi even . . .

“You must rouse and stir yourself, move about and circulate the antidote! Do wake up, Skerow!”

I have never been free
.

“No one is,” said Evarny. “Now—”

Evarny?

“Yes, yes! Try to rise up, get a good breath of air. The Security people are here now, and there will be an ambulance in just a moment.”

“Security? Ambulance? Whatever for?” She noticed several more shadowy figures, these quite recognizable as Burning Mountain Security forces. “What has happened, Evarny?”

“You were so near, so near death! I was calling and calling you!”
“I thought it was my own self calling me. What are you here for?” She asked this of the ambulance crew, who were pushing in a proper wheeled stretcher, well padded and broad as a barn door, not like the makeshift cobbled together when she had collapsed in Starry Nova. She felt quite cheerful and lively.

“You are going to the hospital right away to make sure the antidote has worked properly, and they will probably want to keep you a day or two for observation.”

“I'm damned if they will! I am going to Ossta's to eat crock-bull shank and drink white-thorn!”

“No, Skerow. Ossta will put her crock-bull shank into the cool-safe and save her white-thorn for one or two days more. You have been poisoned with karynon and must be watched.”

“Karynon—the aphrodisiac—ugh! I had to try poor Lebedev for smuggling that.”

“Poor! I hope you gave him life in prison!”

“No no! He was quite innocent.” The attendants were lifting her up in slings; water poured off her. To herself she seemed heavy as lead now. She had one more side glance at the creature who had pretended to be Thordh. “I had to send him to prison for a year, a heavy punishment for smuggling a few
trogga
of contraband barley and.” She had meant to add, “chickpeas,” but fell asleep on the word, and knew nothing for a day.

She woke lying on a waterbed like the one Nohl had been on when she heard his deposition; her ears were ringing, she felt dim and nauseated, grateful to see the iv connected to her arm so that she did not need to eat. When she remembered karynon and Thordh she was doubly nauseated, and by the time Evarny appeared in her doorway her first impulse was to cry out, “Don't say anything!”

But his first words were, “Your doctor tells me that you are doing well and may leave here tomorrow.”

“It does not matter now. You must find another judge. I am resigning, I am afraid in disgrace.”

“You are not in disgrace. You have been attacked, and I feel deeply guilty for pushing you to sit on this trial. Everyone wishes you well, and Ossta will visit you soon to tell you so.”

“I am sorry you feel guilty, because I would never blame you. You saved my life. What happened, Evarny?”

“As well as I can gather, it was very much like what happened with Thordh, except, of course, that the aim was to discredit you, not kill you. No one seems certain of the criminal—but I think there are some guesses. Of course they would have preferred to buy you—”

“They had already tried.”

“Yes, and given up. One of Ossta's clerks had been tampered with and set to watch you. When you announced to the world that you were going to the comm center, she called ahead to the brothel—yes, a quite legal brothel, no others in the city, where the trap was waiting for you. If you had not gone to the Station then, the plotters would have found another way to bring you to them. You were given a hypnotic to make you suggestible—also quite legal but only if done on the premises—and a dose of karynon, definitely a banned substance and a criminal offense. It is a poison that will kill unless it is taken with a timed antidote. The fellow who impersonated Thordh—”

“Tik! Please do spare me—”

“Your behavior was perfectly decorous and unexceptional—quite exceptional for someone poisoned with karynon! That fellow impersonating Thordh was found to be an illegal immigrant of a source and species not yet determined—”

“I can guess,” Skerow murmured, remembering the beige-grey woman who had sweetened her bath in Starry Nova. “Even on Khagodis . . .”

“Hm? At any rate the place is closed and its proprietors arrested.”

“Was it a Zamos brothel?”

“It did not advertise itself as one, but I would not be surprised.”

“That bubble I was in was very much like . . .”

“It was a dream chamber, where a customer may legally take hypnotics and have assisted dreams.”

“If I was not meant to be killed, why did I nearly die?”

“Because things go wrong. Your tormentors forgot to take into account that you are a Northern woman of small build, and gave you an overdose for one your size, and the antidote is not meant to work immediately.”

“And how did you come to be on hand at the right time?”

“I had come here to see you and called the court to find out if you were still there. I was told you were at the Station, and I was staying at the Station Hostel, so I looked about, and—and—I was sufficiently familiar with your mind, I tried and tried to reach you before—before—”

“All right, Evarny,” she said gently. “I have been saved. Just one more question. What did you come to see me about?”

“Ossta is coming now, and my wits have strayed. Let me tell you tomorrow. I hope you will not mind that Ossta has invited me to share your dinner.”

“Not at all, I will look forward to it. Good-bye then, Evarny.”

He paused and turned at the doorway before he left. “Thordh was such a fool not to have made himself your friend.”

The sunset was as fine as Ossta had promised, and Skerow stood in its red light drinking the white-thorn out of a thick glass cup and listening to the tapping of the goldbeaters' mallets from the jewelsmith's across the way. “Now tell me why you came here, Evarny.” She had a tiny irritating chip of discomfort in her mind at having accepted his presence with perhaps too great an ease after all the years of separation. Even as if their minds were swimmers lying alongside each other in some ocean depth alone. Even as if they were married still, when they were not, not. Ossta had moved away to speak to others cooking at the communal fires, almost, it seemed to her mind now grown doubly suspicious, more deeply cynical, by prearrangement.

Evarny said, in regard to nothing in particular, “My wife and I have been separated for quite a few years. She had had nine children of her own when I married her, four of them are still alive, and later she wanted to move back to Eastern Sealand to be near them. I mention this—I will say why later. Your sister Nesskow called me because your family has not been able to reach you. Communications are poor . . . because . . . Skerow, it is hard to tell you this, not many know it yet, but the whole world will think of nothing else in a few days. There has been a quake, a land-splitting in the fossil sea some ten thousand
tikka-siguu
from your house in Pearl-stone Hills, not a great and terrible one, only a half score injured, your house is safe . . . But the quake has cast up a huge mass of metal that your provincial authorities believe to be an artifact, very ancient, possibly alien, they think perhaps a ship, perhaps even a key to the mystery of our civilization. The area has been cordoned off and evacuated, including Pearlstone Hills, because there is a fear of contamination as well as curiosity-seekers tramping all over the place. Until
they excavate and open it—I don't know when you will be able to go back.”