The Hormone Jungle

by Robert Reed

  The Hormone Jungle

  Robert Reed

  Copyright

  Diversion Books

  A Division of Diversion Publishing Corp.

  443 Park Avenue South, Suite 1008

  New York, NY 10016

  www.DiversionBooks.com

  Copyright © 1989 by Robert Reed

  All rights reserved, including the right to reproduce this book or portions thereof in any form whatsoever.

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or locales is entirely coincidental.

  For more information, email info@diversionbooks.com

  First Diversion Books edition November 2014

  ISBN: 978-1-62681-466-0

  More from Robert Reed

  Beyond the Veil of Stars

  Beneath the Gated Sky

  Black Milk

  To Natalie

  1

  I’ve been to Kross, our innermost world, and seen the sprawling strip mines and the fantastic cities and the princes and princesses of Kross, the poorest of them richer than a hundred of me. I’ve seen the high sulfurous clouds of Morning and played poker with its cyborg inhabitants, listening to their human laughter and their matter-of-fact stories about the wastelands below, cruel and unforgiving. And of course I’ve been to the Earth, homeland to us all, and to its sister world, Luna. And then there is Cradle, the first major world to be terraformed, with its violet plant life and its tiny childlike people, happy artists every last one. And there is the multitude of Belter worlds, each unique. There are the worlds of Jupiter, sparse populations and fantastic scenery…I have reached clear to those far-flung bits of humanity in the Oort Cloud and to some of the places set between the major places—those tiny man-built worlds of Kross metals and Titan plastics—and people, knowing my compulsion to travel, ask me which of those landscapes is the most beautiful. The most intriguing. The most complex. The most rewarding. And always, always I smile and look straight at them and explain, “There’s only one landscape that fits the bill. Only one.” Which one? they persist, puzzled and eager and smiling at me. “The human face,” I say. “Of all the landscapes, without doubt, I would claim the human face is easily the best. I would.”

  —excerpt from a traveler’s notebook, available through System-Net

  There are a bunch of whores in the back, playing edible chess. Steward can see them by the light of their big bright skullcaps, and he hears them chattering and then hears them turn quiet, waiting for someone to make a move. Then some of them start to cheer and clap. One of the pawns gives a high squeaky scream, and one of the whores laughs, saying, “You’re mine. All mine.”

  Steward sits alone at a little round table, one of his big hands holding his glass while he sips and thinks that he’s dry enough and the rain has quit and maybe he should go now. He thinks about getting home. He thinks how he hasn’t been busy enough lately because he sure isn’t tired and maybe he should go somewhere besides home. Get some work done. Do those boring chores he’s been putting off till whenever. Like running a check of his inventories. Or testing his security systems for flaws. Or maybe just spending a few hours with his high-placed contacts, sniffing out any news that might mean something to him.

  He hears the front door open and close, then he turns and sees a girl come inside. She’s a strange girl. He knows it at once and yet he has trouble deciding why. From a distance, through the pasty smoke and gloom, she seems pretty enough. With big eyes she surveys the bar while she moves halfway in Steward’s direction. Another pawn screams, and she hears it and jerks and watches the whores for a second, something showing in her face. She’s wearing a sheer white dress with precious little underneath and expensive white shoes and double strands of Garden pearls around her perfect neck, and both hands hold a purse made of some living snow-white leather. It’s a wardrobe for casual wealth. She’s much too much for this kind of place. One glance is enough to prove her wrongness. Even the whores and patrons turn down the volume a notch, watching her settle at a table close to Steward. The barmaid comes and the girl orders a drink. She’s too much. Steward hears a dusky voice. He sees something in the barmaid’s face. What is it? Then he takes a long deep breath, feeling a hollowness high in his chest and smelling a delicate musty scent that makes his head wheel. Something is going to happen, he thinks. Something tells him something is coming. Wait. Just wait.

  There are a dozen patrons, tops. They’re a scrubbed and liquored lot, all Terran, of all shades, wearing rumpled clothes and uncertain smiles. The whores not playing chess are sitting with them and drinking with them and laughing when they think it’ll do them some good. Steward looks at all the faces, measuring moods, and then he looks above them and takes in the bright old-fashioned holos advertising beer, and the swirling smokes rising through the holos and toward the high-arched roof. Buildings in the Old Quarter are dead and durable and typically more than a thousand years old. This particular building is made from dead woods commercially perfect and tarnished steel pulled into elegant shapes, and the bright green moonlight pours in through the glass roof and softens everything it touches. Normally this place is lit up by its own lights. Steward has been here with clients and with people who never quite became clients. It must have been the storm, he thinks. Someone must have turned off the lights so they could watch the storm pass, and now they’ve forgotten to turn them back on. Half the sky is eclipsed by a tall stone building. A line of floaters cross the other half—saucer-shaped craft carrying their passengers from place to place—and he notices a rainboy higher still, its bright body streaking towards the Gulf. He breathes and thinks how he should be working. He isn’t a man accustomed to idleness. All the years he has lived in Brulé City, and still he can’t be comfortable or contented or even relax for long. Like now. He looks down again and turns toward the girl, not really thinking about her, concentrating on his inventories and security checks and whatever; yet all of the sudden his head is full of her pretty face and the poreless skin and the white of her dress showing the brilliant cool green of the moon.

  The barmaid returns with a simple fruit drink.

  Steward watches the two of them and sips his own drink and wonders what is strange about the girl. He knows what’s wrong. She doesn’t belong in this place, not at all. But there’s something strange too, and he can’t for his life identify the trouble.

  Opening the leather purse, the girl removes a single green glass bill. The barmaid looks at the girl while she makes change, and then she spies Steward staring at them and decides that he must want something now. She comes over and asks if he’s thirsty for another one. He says, “Thanks, no.” He swirls his chilled liquor and asks, “How’s it going tonight?” without ever actually taking his eyes off the girl.

  “You see the storm?”

  “I was in it,” he offers.

  “That’s right. You came dripping in, didn’t you?” She is a big woman with a flat round face and big hands showing the miles. “You see it too, don’t you?”

  “What?”

  “The girl,” she says, laughing in a funny harsh way.

  Steward looks up at the barmaid and waits.

  “Or don’t you?” She has an odd expression. She’s curious or she’s angry or she’s amused about something. He can’t quite tell. “I’ve seen them on World-Net a few times but never here. Not in Brulé.” And then she blinks and says, “What do you think?”

  “I’m never sure,” he says.

  “Well,” she tells him, “if you thought you were in a storm before, you just hold on. Okay?”

  “I’ll try.”

  “Wait and wat
ch,” she warns. Set next to the girl in the white dress, the barmaid seems huge and graceless and nearly ugly. “She should have never come in here.”

  “No?”

  “I wonder why she did.” And she leaves him, working her way to the back and the chess-playing whores.

  Steward tries to piece it together. Nothing fits. So he looks down at his glass and sees a big swallow waiting for him. He tilts the glass and looks through its thick bottom while the girl glances from face to face to face. She’s got a nervous quality. Mostly it’s hidden, but sometimes some of it seeps out around her edges. Like now. She sips her own drink, fruity and dark, without shutting her eyes. A thin dark mustache forms on her upper lip, unnoticed for a moment. Then her tongue darts, pink and moist, and Steward has to take a breath. He wonders what the barmaid has seen. He wonders why a girl of her apparent worth and character is in this kind of place. She sure didn’t come out of the rain. That’s his excuse. A couple of whores had made their sales pitches when he arrived, and he thinks about whores and money and breeding and how anything can become dull when you get too much of it. Maybe that’s it, he thinks. Maybe she’s waiting for a sales pitch or two. She’s come to see how the census figures live and love. Sure. And the big barmaid is simply…what? Jealous? Offended? What?

  Steward lingers for the moment, curious.

  He is a tall man who doesn’t look tall when he sits, his long legs folded beneath the table. He has a dark complexion, deep dark brown eyes, and surprisingly bright red hair—curled and cut close to his scalp. His face is thin and wind worn, bones giving angles to his cheeks and chin. His arms and shoulders are thick and toned by exercise and an athlete’s genes. He’s wearing a simple shirt and trousers and shoes that are little more than slippers. He’s still very much a young man, barely fifty. People who meet him tend to label him as being private or aloof, or even shy. But if they learn how he was born and raised up in Yellowknife, up in one of those crazy Neoamerindian Freestates, he becomes an instant creature of mystery. Everyone has heard stories about the Freestates. Everyone has an opinion. Steward’s long silences, once judged to be shyness, are now reason for respect. He is a warrior, after all. The various Freestates have been fighting their wars for the last thousand years. Yet no one dies. Not typically. What brought Steward down to Brulé City? What kind of man can make that transition? They stare at him, saying nothing, not daring to ask him anything personal. Suddenly, little noises make them nervous. It’s almost funny, he thinks. Almost. They want to know how these strange endless wars are fought. They want details. Nothing personal, but they’ll ask Steward the methods of the fights. Pain. It all revolves around pain, he’ll explain. Then he will tell them some good studies on the subject, their titles and their authors, and sometimes he will tell them the exact catalog codes so they don’t have to wade through World-Net. Most don’t bother. Most don’t care enough. Pain is an ample answer. The rest of it—honor and trust and relentless bravery—is likely beyond their reach.

  He sighs and goes back to studying the mystery girl.

  She isn’t watching anyone anymore. She’s got her eye on the doorway and both hands around her glass, and she drinks and licks away the thin mustaches as they form. Steward pulls a weathered round box out of his shirt pocket and opens it and finds a long ornate needle laying between the folds of a soft cloth. He twirls the needle in one hand and eases the pointed tip into the meat between two fingers, into a tender region, then twists the needle until the pain is white-hot and coming up his arm. Inside himself, in a secret place, he makes a hollow and fills the hollow with the pain. And now he feels none of it. He puts the needle back into its box and the box back into the pocket and finds that his head is absolutely clear and that his senses are heightened to their limits.

  It’s a Yellowknife trick, channeling the pain.

  It’s funny. The mystery girl and Yellowknife seem joined somehow. He has to consider things for a minute before he remembers a certain girl with the same blonde hair and those big eyes. Sure. Not nearly as pretty, but the same kind of looks. Steward remembers the circumstances. He had been out on a boy’s patrol. He and his Shadow, Chaz, had separated in a woodland not far from the main compound. He had gone into a glade like a real warrior, sober and alert, and then all at once he had stumbled onto the girl. She was several years his elder. She had been watching him and hiding. He was embarrassed not to have seen her sooner, but remembered her name and said it several times. She confessed to having noticed him in the past, smiling in a funny way; they were talking for a little while before Steward thought of his duties. By then it was too late. The spell was broken. He was no longer a warrior, young or not, and something else had begun to take shape while they sat talking in the long grass. It was cool that day. But when they were naked and pressed together both of them were sweating hard; and when Chaz came looking for him, walking past him, Steward put a hand over the older girl’s mouth and said nothing and waited before continuing with the deed. It’s all right, he had told himself. I’ll feel guilty about everything later and that will make it all right.

  But of course it hadn’t. It never does.

  And now, thinking about the Yellowknife girl while he watches this girl, he feels the old guilty ache as if he’s let himself down, and Yellowknife, and his poor, poor Shadow. Sweet Chaz.

  Now the girl isn’t staring at anyone or anything. She seems halfway lost, her big eyes round and glassy and one hand playing with the empty glass while the other one lies on her white purse. Steward starts to use his senses now, focusing on her until there is nothing else but her in his mind. Her scent is thick in the air. He has never experienced that exact scent, and yet it seems familiar. It has a certain power. A real punch. Those big eyes blink and he thinks about them and everything else and something goes click in his head. She can’t be, he thinks. Is that what the barmaid saw? he thinks. So he breathes and blinks and turns his attention to the back of the bar, to all the whores sitting around the big chess set and the barmaid talking to them, telling them something about flowers. “Flowers,” she says, and for an instant Steward doesn’t make the connection. He can’t help but think about blossoms. Roses and carnations and so on. Then he remembers the word’s other meaning. Twenty-five years in Brulé City and never once has he seen her likes. Not before tonight. Where’s she from? he wonders. New Brasilia? The Jarvis Seamount? Quito? If he had to guess he would guess Quito. That’s where you find most of the Flowers. Damn! he thinks. What’s a Flower doing way up here anyway?

  Is she absolutely insane?

  Or what?

  She had a name when she was alive, and then another name when she turned into a Ghost and was only partially alive. But then the Magician gave her this body and a Flower’s life, plus a third name. Miss Luscious Chiffon. And she’s loyal to the new name as if she’s had it all of her life, the past hidden away by the Magician’s tricks and her glad for that as well.

  It’s a functional Flower name, sensible for commercial reasons. Miss Luscious Chiffon. She has fine, butter-colored hair flowing down on her wide shoulders, and a face and figure that are even better than the dress and gloom allow. But she’s glad for the gloom, of course. Maybe they know what she is and maybe they don’t, and won’t, but if the place was bright and they saw her baby’s skin and her feral blue eyes a few of them would be sure to point and say, “There goes a Flower. Would you look?” and that would make it all the tougher. If it was possible to be tougher at this point.

  She came in here to escape for a few minutes.

  She sits without moving, thinking about everything at once and trying to collect herself in the process. They’ll be looking for her soon. She can be sure of that much. And if the boy didn’t show at the rendezvous point, maybe he isn’t going to make it at all. She feels angry and betrayed. Now she has to escape on her own. But how? A Flower would be noticed in a tubetrain. Floaters can be traced in a dozen different ways. The Quito boy was bringing several people with him, plus a fast unregiste
red floater, and they might have gotten out undetected. Might. But where was he? I did my part, she tells herself. I did everything expected of me, and more, and he wasn’t waiting like he promised and I watched and that damned rain came over, me hiding in that shelter beside the pad, and I thought he must have wanted the storm for cover, sure, only no one came even still. So it’s a mess, she thinks. Everything is a mess. It’s gone sour and now I just need to sit and think. I’ve got to get it straight in my head somehow.

  Dirk and Minus are probably back at the apartment now.

  Dirk is screaming. Minus is sniffing for clues. They’ll be chasing me once they get their bearings, and they can have me cornered in no time. If I let them, she thinks. I can’t let them!

  God!

  Sweet sphincters of God, what a mess!

  And now, to make matters worse, the gloom isn’t helping like she had hoped. The barmaid in the back is talking to the whores, and the whores are starting to talk among themselves. She hears someone say “Flower,” and her thigh starts to ache. The ache is like a warning. No one points, but the patrons are looking at her in a different way now, their smoke-washed faces showing curiosity and lust and a trace of anger too. A real resentment. Brulé City is a conservative town. It’s got restrictions on things that are ordinary in Quito. “People are always people,” its people might say. “Furred or finned or covered with machinery, they are still people.”

  Some of the men show glancing interest in Miss Luscious Chiffon.

  She has a palpable urge to seduce one of them and coax him into taking her home. She needs a sanctuary for the night. She imagines Minus out in the shadows, crafty and armed, and she tells herself that she needs an ally. But who would be best? There are ways to find out. After all, she is a Flower and it has its advantages. She looks around the room, at the men and the women too, trying to judge their relative worth. Smile, she tells herself. Smell enticing. Maybe a hero will come out of the crowd. Sure, she thinks. The Magician gave you these gifts. Use them. Turn this mess around somehow.