Flesh and Gold (34 page)

“Stop play,” Lebedev said. “Sir, the substance you are smoking is illegal. You must stop or leave.” His toe was resting on the alarm switch.

South's face was flushed, but he grinned and shrugged. “I'll stay in, Dealerman.” He extinguished the black stick carefully and put it back into its amber case. When he lifted the cone and the biting white smoke drifted away Lebedev saw looming in back of him three or four hulking figures, one of whom was a Security guard he had noticed earlier in the brothel.

Lebedev thought he understood what had happened with South. He was a sanctioned bully who had provoked and then attacked him the first night to ruffle him, then been told to lay off while Lebedev gradually revealed himself. Whether or not he had really given himself away, Zamos
thought he was dangerous and ought to be shrugged off for good. He dreaded the intermission after this game.
:It's coming too fast, Lyhhrt.:

:It is the point of the twenty-fifth hour. I need a quarter hour more.:

West fainted at that moment, and North cried out in Russian, “Oh my God!” He reached for her, and began to gather her up.

Lebedev had jumped up, shocked. His first thought was that the Lyhhrt had struck down a harmless woman, but North, obviously her husband or lover, said, “She's pregnant! I've got to get her out of here!”

He struggled to lift her and at the same time twisted his head toward South, snarling, “You bastard, with your goddam filthy smoke!” South gave him the finger, but by that time Lebedev had toed the alarm and was between them, shouldering back South with his body half-turned to protect his belly. South had had it in mind to give him a knee.

Help came quickly for West and North, and at the instant in which Lebedev realized that he had been enabled to read South's mind, the attention of the Lyhhrt was sharply withdrawn from this tableau. Two eager players filled the empty seats, and Lebedev decided to ride out the intermission, in defiance of the Entertainment and Recreation Workers' Union, and shuffled the disks.

“Citizens of the Galaxy, your number for today is twenty-three. Your wild numbers are forty-six, fifty-one, and twenty-eight.” Lebedev shot his cuffs and dealt his last game.

On the point of the twenty-fifth hour, the Lyhhrt's golden shell presented itself to the Triumvirate.

“You are here to sign this contract,” said the Khagodi.

“No.”

“What do you mean, no!”

“The Doctor has always done everything that Zamos has asked, but in his contract there was no option to renew it, and he does not feel any such obligation.”

“He? What do you mean by ‘he'?”

“The Doctor no longer inhabits this shell. I am a robot. Of course the Doctor is serving according to his oath: other robots are monitoring patients at risk, but after the fourth Standard hour of this coming morning that will stop, and you must find a new Doctor.” While it was saying this the shell reached a hand in back of itself to lock the door and seal it with a laser bolt.

The two Solthrees jumped up and reached out, the woman with a stunner in her hand, the man raising a machine pistol. The robot extended its free hand to flick it away, but did not bother with the stunner; its neutral poison was harmless to metal. The gold shell wrenched away the table where the triumvirate was sitting, and lasered the alarm switch in the floor, then went about the room gutting the communications devices. The Solthree man was yelling and red-faced, threatening with his fists, and the woman shrinking back in her chair, while the Khagodi was thrashing her tail and cursing, but afraid to attack.

“There is no need to be so alarmed. I do not mean to touch you. I have left the lights on and you will be found in the morning. You have cots to rest on and running water as well as the use of a lavatory.” The robot folded its hands for a moment; the three quieted down and watched it sullenly.

It said almost shyly, “Now you must excuse me while I deconstruct myself. I am a marvelous and beautiful artifact created by the Doctor for his uses, but now my work is complete and I am not needed anymore, nor will my master's
skills keep serving you through me.” And with this last word the robot grasped its sunburst head in its two hands and wrenched it from its shoulders.

At the moment that the gold shell began to take itself apart the copper sunset shell presented itself at the Ix's door. The door slid open and the shell stepped into the darkness.

:You bring me good news, Lyhhrt,:
said the Ix.

“I am not the Lyhhrt,” said the shell, and closed the door behind it.

Between one moment and the next Lebedev felt an almost paralyzing jolt of euphoria. For a second he thought that either the Lyhhrt or some other source had given him a drug, but after a few gasping breaths, which he masked by coughing, realized that the Lyhhrt had suddenly and for the first time turned his attention to Lebedev's surroundings. “West plays three, but South puts down twenty-eight wild,” he said breathlessly, while the crystal clarity of all the minds around him increased and intensified with explosive force. Oh the power! as if he were a Creator standing on a mountain looking down on all the beasts below.

South, waiting to smash Lebedev as the prelude to a violent encounter with a woman; West, a Bengtvad woman with two new children, a bureaucrat husband, and a mountain of debt; North and East, locked in a hate that was as valuable to them as love; over there a male Dabiri couple spending at Zamos's what they had stolen from the Kylkladi GamePlex, being watched by a croupier-detective and unaware how near their capture was; in back of Lebedev a bartender skimming the till; and, eyeing the barman while she spent the evening on a drink and a token, a richly dressed woman too old to be a whore who had once been one and needed somebody. Anybody.

After this first great rush Lebedev understood that he was feeling all this from a Lyhhrt's point of view strained through his own understanding. Seeing it through a rozzer's eyes, Tally would say. The glow passed as if a bubble had burst. He did not want this kind of power and he had learned nothing that he did not know already.

No. He had learned one or two things: one, a woman named Maggie Melady had come over from Zamos's House and was dabbing rouge on Ai'ia's trembling mouth to prepare her for Manador; and two, Tally had been mistaken when she reckoned that he would not be attacked inside the building. South had complete permission to choose his arena. Lebedev's own lips were trembling as he called, “And South's number five takes the game, good players! That concludes play for tonight!”

South grinned and punched buttons for his cred and I.D. cards; he lit up a dopestick and sat watching, with his friends lurking behind him, while Lebedev racked the disks, sent out the night's take through the pneumatic tube, and slowly removed the dirtied white gloves and the mauve armbands with pink
yeye
flowers.
:Do something about him, for God's sake. What's keeping Manador? Do something!:

:Would you like me to punch his face for him with your fist, Lebedev? I am exhausted from what I have already done. Get away as fast as you can!:

Lebedev twirled his chair about and stood up. So did South. The Security man and the sleepy bouncer from the poor man's gate came around the table alongside him. There was nothing to be gained here by sounding the alarm; Lebedev was in deeply hostile country.

“Good night, gentlemen,” he said firmly, and stepped away from the table.

A thick hand grabbed his arm. “What's your hurry, Dealer?” Almost before he knew it South was pulling at him,
and Sleepy butting him in the back of the shoulder with one hand while the other pulled a steel spiked knuckle-duster out of a pocket, the three surrounding him, hustling him away from the tables and lights toward the shadows behind the gaming machines. Buffeted about, Lebedev could feel the Lyhhrt's fear as well as his own, and tried to dig in his heels and at the same time twist his body away to protect his belly, with the result that he had no leverage to move freely in whatever reckless way he might have found for himself alone.

Desperate to stay out of the shadows at all costs, he wrenched to pull his arm out of South's grip and launched the straight edge of his other hand in a chop against the bridge of Sleepy's nose, but both these moves were muffled by his caution, and did not have enough energy behind them to make the least difference. One heavy hand pushed down on the back of his neck, another clapped his mouth shut so that he could neither struggle nor call out, and the knuckleduster grazed the side of his head. All of this taking place between one breath and the next, and hidden under the lights by the three bodies.

In the instant in which Lebedev went from desperation to despair the room began to boil with the influx of a new crowd. Again he had one of those flashes of revelation that whitened the world like lightning. But before he had time to tell himself what it was, a boozy lazy voice was calling,” Yoo hoo!” and being answered by Manador's whip-cracking accents:

“Hello!
Skambi
table closed already? Is this the way to run a casino?” A new tenday-night flurry of players flowed around the tables; a wreath of young women from the House in brightly colored silk gowns mixed in with a half score of Manador's gladiator clients of all sexes, came swarming through past the poker tables, the latter group
separating themselves long enough to surround Lebedev's escorts and in a few moments—Lebedev could
feel
South being punched in the kidneys by one of the pugs—he was free, pulling himself together enough to be able to bow and kiss Manador's hand.

As he did so he realized what his flash of perception had told him: that the Lyhhrt had been saving his energy for the last-ditch effort of giving illumination—or at least information—to his rescuers.

“How gracious of you, Lebedev!” Manador said. She had gotten herself up in black leather and a flat brimmed hat; with her pale-blue powdered face and dark red mouth, she looked like a vampire who had tasted some good times.

“For you, any time,” said Lebedev, and they both snickered.

The Lyhhrt became urgent.
:Now hurry and get us both out of here!:

Lebedev did not have time to enjoy the scuffle in which Manador's guard was attending to South & Co., but he paused to whisper, “Ai'ia? You have her?”

“Any time, for you, Lebedev,” Manador said coolly.

Lebedev nodded and turned; then he found himself surrounded by a crowd of revelers who were laughing and giddy and for one moment, it seemed to him, innocent. Next moment he was inside a freight elevator rising to the rooftop. As its door opened he smelt marginally fresher air and on the roof saw the Lyhhrt's plainest workshell with its metal hand holding the bottom rung of a ladder that hung from a hovercraft puffing warm jets of air around itself.

The skin of his stomach began to itch. The Lyhhrt said,
:Yes, Lebedev. In a short while both of us will be free.:

It was not long afterward that Lebedev woke up to find himself in the clean sparely furnished room of a hostel run by the AlphOmegan Ecumen, a grab-bag religious organization
that provided priests, shamans, rabbis, mullahs,
tin-katui
, Blessed Sisters, and many others to give service and counseling. Lebedev picked himself up and got dressed; he did not miss the presence of the Lyhhrt, but thought that for a while the world would seem opaque rather than transparent as it had been with that mind alongside his own. He recalled the last words the Lyhhrt had spoken when he said good-bye:
:The “I” that you know will no longer exist, Lebedev, but I/we will not miss it. Farewell.:

His head ached where the knuckles had grazed it, and his mind felt battered and dull from contending with so much fear.

It was not until he was out in the street that it struck him: the Lyhhrt had put the inhibition on him to keep him from revealing information and now he could not quite think, let alone tell anyone, about it.

He had a moment of fresh panic. Unaccountably he felt an urge to reach into his pocket and pull out the little card that gave him notice. The We-regret-that-we-no-longer wording had not changed, but when he turned it over he saw that something had been written on the back. He brought it close to his eyes and squinted under a street-lamp whose light had become watery as the dawn rose in the stark grey sky. The tiny exquisite letters engraved on the square of parchment said:

Barley Soup

At once a long stream of numbers tumbled into his mouth: the Lyhhrt's security account code through which he was to repay money advanced by Manador. He stood staring at the card and after a moment said to the empty air: “Zamos is creating slaves in the vaults of its brothel.”

A few days later when he was reading the local news in
the
Intergalactic Herald Tribune
Lebedev found the item about the strange doings in Zamos's Gamblar. Not the dustup, which was not strange at all, but the discovery that three high administration officers had been found sealed in their office and in a hysterical state, along with a mysterious heap of machine parts. In another room, sealed from within in the same way and believed to be the quarters of a mysterious alien from another galaxy, there was nothing at all but a ceiling, a floor, and four walls dusted with a white powder presently being analyzed. Business had dropped off for a day or two but then increased due to a surge of curiosity-seekers. Lebedev by then was safely on the other side of the world and had no curiosity about that place whatever. He never went near another game of
skambi
.

Shen IV:
Portside City

In Portside City Ned was debriefed by his GalFed contact, a shrill-voiced Kylklad woman named Tui'ireet.

“I am most satisfied with your work in Zamos's establishment,” she was saying.

“Thank you,” Ned said. He would have liked to add that he hardly knew what he was doing the whole damned time, but did not think that would improve his record.