Flesh and Gold (33 page)

Lebedev, who had been sitting knee to knee with her, pulled away sharply. “Why then, Tally—”

“You think I give a shit? I'm just telling you what they're muttering about. I don't know why they're worried about you talking with Ai'ia and the Doctor . . .” She did not look at him while she said this, and it seemed to him that she was warning him against telling her why. “Sometimes I've wondered if they didn't give you this job just to keep track of what you're doing? You know? Just because you were a rozzer?”

“You have a very good ear. Have you yourself ever thought of looking for another job?” She did not answer and he added, “At any rate, I have just received my notice.”

She murmured, “They'd never kill you inside here after
the flap about that whore.” She turned to take his face in her hands and kiss his mouth with a dart of her tongue. “Goodbye, Lev. Watch your backside.” And she was out of his life in a flurry of lace and lilac talcum.

Kobai had been dozing, and when she woke she found the Lyhhrt standing by the coffin case, unsealing its hasps.
:Iron man, what is that?:

“It is a dead Pinxid woman whose body has been kept working.”

:Her skin is very blue, blue as cold sleep. I think she is far from home.:
She did not ask any more questions.

From his cupboard of marvels the Lyhhrt called out an insectile robot that lifted the Pinxid's body out of the coffin case and placed it in the life-capsule. He covered it carefully with a blue gel of nutrients, reattached all the indicators, and sealed it with a metal plate engraved with instructions for handling the Enclosed Delphine en route to Shen IV.

He sterilized the coffin case with a blast of hot air, checked the spy monitors, which had been set to broadcast clips of him going about various tasks for his masters, and when he was satisfied that he was safe turned to the tank with the genuine delphine in it and placed his hands flat against the glassy surface, as Kobai had done so often.

:Now, Kobai, you are going to sleep, and when you wake up you will be free.:

:Yes!:
She was deeply weary of all the long days in this prison, but her eyes were alight :
I am thirsty for water that is more wild and cold than this . . . I am sorry I said all those mean things to you before I knew what a good friend you are.:

:You are not the first. But I have forgotten them.:

:You are the only true friend I have ever had and I will remember you forever, Iron Man.:

:And I
—
Kobai, dear friend . . . I will remember you as long as I/we can.:

He drained half of the water and added the sedative; she was only too willing to sink into a dream of home, where she saw herself in the tasks that had been a labor and now were a longed-for pleasure, carrying the sea-bladder lantern to light up the vein of gold, with the child against her belly and clasping her breast to suck . . .

With the water barely covering her he pressed a switch that lowered the tank wall into the floor, and his insect robot reached in over the free edge to pluck her out and put her into the coffin case. Before she could gasp, the Lyhhrt had the water-respirator tube in her throat to top up her lungs, and was listening with his sensor:

Lubb-a-dubb-flick-z-dubb-flick-a-lubb-a-dubb
, said the two hearts of mother and fetus. He covered her body quickly with the blue gel and sealed the case with the metal plate informing shippers that the body of Io Adilon of Pinaxer would be outbound on the Miry ship
Aleksandr Nevskii
.

He followed the coffin on its trestle down the dim hallways of midnight to the kiosk of the Dead Reckoner. Her night replacement was a cheerful Varvani named Groad, who was free of morbid interests; the Lyhhrt almost liked him.

“Is that a gift for me?” Groad asked.

The Lyhhrt had learned that this kind of remark was humorously meant. “Only if you want a dead body.”

The Varvani peered at the record number on the plate and keyed it into his registry. “That's Adilon, the one you were flatlining for autopsy. I guess she's dead now.” He checked for heartbeat and did not hear any, the Lyhhrt made sure he would not. “Poor woman. She was alone and far from home. Was she ever a friend of yours?”

“Yes.” The Lyhhrt let the coffin run along the tracks into
its niche with almost reluctant fingertips. He did not know that Kobai would not be discovered and reimprisoned, or that, if properly loaded and maintained, she would connect with the
Blessed Themesta
bound for Khagodis, or that once she was successfully in flight she and the fetus would survive these journeys. He was launching her as any alien child might send out a boat of leaves or bark down a stream that led to a great river.

Lebedev, Gold Copper and Silver

Moist from the bath-house, Lebedev found that his hammock had been replaced by a bed, too late for comfort. He sat on it and regarded the silver flask. He was trying to find a point at which he could have turned away from this course of action. It was not the particular moment when he had agreed to harbor the Lyhhrt for a day, he thought, but that instant when he had conceived the plan of risking everything and installing himself in this place. Half his motive was to expiate guilt for sending Jacaranda in here with insufficient defenses.
As if you had more, Lebedev, you schmuck
. And here he was.

He opened the flask and smelt the liquid. It had a mild “chemical” smell, like a doctor's office. He poured it into a tumbler; it was brilliantly clear and very slightly viscous, like glycerine. Not to make a drama of it he drank it, rinsed the cup and flask, and lay flat on the bed. He did not think it deserved a
na zdrovya
.

The cleaning robot, embarked on midnight rounds, paused in the dim grey corridor outside Lebedev's door, and several latecomers who could not see straight banged into it and
cursed. “Executing self-repairs, self-repairs,” the robot muttered apologetically. When the curses had been replaced by snores and no one was stirring about, it extended a limb to push open Lebedev's door and opened a hatch to let out what looked like a giant tarantula. The tarantula scuttled into the room and shut the door behind it, and the robot rumbled off.

This spider shape scrambled up on the bed and switched on an imager and a small intense lamp, then whisked the covers off to regard Lebedev's huge repulsive body with its lens eyes, minutely examining the vast expanse of hair and skin.

It palpated and listened for resonance, found the area chosen for entry in Lebedev's abdomen above the groin crease, extruded a nozzle to spray the skin and its own limbs with sterilizing liquid. Now the abdomen of the spider-machine split and the Lyhhrt reached out holding a tiny case of minute medical instruments in one pseudopod; he opened this, selected an almost invisible scalpel, and made his cut. This was merely familiar landscape: the flashing blood, the slithery layers of tissue, the webby membranes suffused with capillaries that flowed red at every touch, but beyond that—

The Lyhhrt tightened his resolve and quickly—

—quickly

insinuated his body into the cavity, into the new universe between the external and internal oblique layers of the superficial muscles, steeling himself to control his hideous terror of the burning heat, the acid bite of the tissues, the drumming heart, the blood singing in its vessels as its thickly streaming cells swarmed through them, their bitter taste of iron, the bubblings, rumblings, pulsings, spasms—but his tormented nerve endings were already stimulating the secretions that would thicken his integument to insulate him from the horrors of this alien hell.

Clutching his remote-control system and his instrument case while he cut through tissues, snipped and tied off thready blood vessels, and fought through the fat cells in waves of nauseating tastes and smells, he forced pseudopod after pseudopod into tiny spaces until he was almost as attenuated as a membrane himself. Finally he was able to pull in his last tendril and use his controls to let the spider seal the wounds with collagen adhesives.

Then the spider's lens eyes cast about the room. There was no disposal chute here, and the Lyhhrt, with a flinch of regret, sent his beautiful machine scurrying up the side of the waste bucket and dropping in, where it expired with a magnesium-flare of light into white ash.

Lebedev snorted gently, dreaming of his year in prison, a happy time in retrospect.

He woke with a sore belly that was swollen by the damage inflicted on it rather than the Lyhhrt's mass. All of the mass was tucked to one side to minimize damage between the muscle layers, but did not make Lebedev look or feel grotesque. He had lost a couple of kilos in the last tenday out of anxiety, the way he had gained the earache. Except for the soreness and the tiny scar he could almost believe he had imagined everything.

:Not quite,:
said the Lyhhrt from his torment.

“If I go around muttering to you like this everybody will think I'm as crazy as I think I am.”

:I do not expect you to mutter at me except to inquire about my condition in this terrible place.:

“It wasn't my idea,” Lebedev said.
:And you seem to be your usual self.:

:Your conversation with the woman Tally Hawes indicates that you are to expect an attack. You must avoid violence.:

:I intend to.:
Lebedev set about cleaning his teeth.

:Please eat bland foods. Your digestive system disturbs me.:

:You're lucky, I'm not very hungry. All that consoles me is, today, whatever else happens, is the last day of dealing skambi:

Down in the vaults where the Dead Reckoner worked, the stevedores had come to collect coffins and flat-line cases for loading. “Ahoy, Recordmaster!” one of them called.

“What now?”

“This cadaver you're shipping to Pinaxer, the
Nevskii
doesn't run the shuttle out there this route.”

“Well I have it down, Doctor got it ready and it says right here, Pinaxer, bound on
Nevskii
.”

“That's wrong, and you better check.”

“I'll call.”

When the copper figure with the sunset face appeared, the Reckoner cried, “These fellows say you've made a mistake with that Pinxid woman, Doctor, no stops at Pinaxer by the
Nevskii!
If that's the case, we'll have to burn her here.”

“Impossible. She has a reserved space on tier eighty-six, slot five hundred and twenty-two. She is to be delivered with supplies to the Sector seven-eight-seven Spacelight on the Outer Instar Route, and a shuttle will collect her from there.'

“Yeh, that's the place she's to be stowed in, the numbers check. We do connect with that Light, so I suppose we'd better take her along,” said the stevedore.

While the Lyhhrt's copper shell was walking back toward his office the Ix's door opened and blackness stood within its darkness.
:Lyhhrt, have you signed the contract?:

“Not yet.”

:You will sign it before midnight:

“We shall see about that,” said the Lyhhrt, speaking through his shell.

:You will sign or I will crack that shell of yours, Lyhhrt:

The Lyhhrt picked up his calls from the office and once again there was a summons from Administration. “NOW!” it screamed, in the person of the Khagodi woman, whose eyes were inflamed. There had been arguments among the Triumvirate, he thought. He checked his attachments to the cardiographs, encephalographs, and sphygmomanometers, and switched his logic into the humble matte-grey shell.

“You are going to sign that contract before midnight,” the Solthree woman said. “It has occurred to us that you were trying to play a trick with your hour of freedom, your prayer-time when you were free of your oath, not of your service. We see through you. You will sign or we will hand you to the Ix for a gift.”

“The Ix has already told me all about your plans. Has he become your new Keymaster? Or is your Triumvirate now a Quadrumvirate?”

“Watch your arrogance, Doctor, or your people will suffer!”

“A thousand pardons!” the Lyhhrt said cringingly. “I will come to you in all humility on the point of the twenty-fifth hour.” His shell backed away from them as if it had been in the presence of majesty.

During the afternoon Lebedev had no communication from the Lyhhrt and only the merest flutter of movement.
:Sleep, Lyhhrt, sleep.:
There was no answer. He was mildly surprised that he felt so much at ease about providing the Lyhhrt with a home away from home, and it struck him briefly that the Lyhhrt had willed this, but he found his mind unable to dwell on it. After a mild supper of scrambled eggs on toast and even a glass of soy milk to placate the Lyhhrt, he dressed himself in the same suit he had worn on the day he had applied for work at the Gamblar and went out to deal the last round.

“Dear friends and gentle hearts,” said Lebedev, “the number today is twenty-nine.”

During the shuffling for the third game he saw a familiar face—unpleasantly familiar. The brute he had fought with on the first night sat down in South's position, still wearing his business uniform with its little company crest. Lebedev had not seen him since that night, and began to feel real urgency.
:The violence we need to avoid is running at us,:
he told the Lyhhrt.

:Hold him off as long as possible. I have work to do.:

It was while they were playing the second spindle that South pulled down the smoke-cone, pulled a case of
ge'iin
sticks out of his pocket and lit one. Lebedev's heart sank. Whether this was a deliberate provocation or not, he was forced to act. Smoking
ge'iin
was unlawful in Starry Nova's public rooms not only because it was a powerful narcotic; its allergens were also powerful, and mixed with the air pollutants of a port city, often fatal. West was already coughing and covering her mouth and nostrils.