Skerow hissed, “There is nothing at all to be done then?”
“Judge Skerow, you may be correct in your belief that there is a suffering person illicitly held by Zamos’s establishment, but you know,” he looked hard at her, “that you cannot go near it, and I cannot do anything except by catching them bloodhanded.” He took out his daybook and switched it on. “If you can tell me whatever you know, or even think you know, I will consult with Lieutenant Strang and we will try to keep an eye on that place.”
“I am sure she came from Khagodis. The Nohl she told me about was certainly a Khagodi—she thought I knew him. No. She was sure I must be associated with him. Experimental animal! We import most of our technology. How could we produce those kinds of experiments—animals that look like Solthrees!” Almost absently she held her hand out: Eskat landed on it in one leap from Tony’s shoulder, and ran up her arm to his usual perch on her head. “Even creatures like Eskat are rarely bred nowadays because it is considered cruel, and I would never own a tethumekh if my brother had not given him to me more than fifty years ago . . .”
Ramaswamy waited. Skerow was feeling quite dim, but tried to focus her thoughts. “She called me an ‘out-there-do-nothing,’ had no idea where she was or who I could be—except a Khagodi—said I was to tell Nohl, Lord Big One Upthere, that if, no, when she caught him, there would be nothing left of him, nothing for the dung-fish to chew on. I’ve never seen one of those, but I know they exist, under a slightly different name . . . There were others like herself in her mind, I think, perhaps one Solthree . . . and, the fish we call scrapfish. I think they come from the Volcanic Isthmuses, an equatorial country. Some people there actually eat them, but Isthmus-men like to eat all kinds of poison. Since she called me a do-nothing, she must be some kind of worker, or even slave . . . she is hand-oriented, and would have been working in the waters of that country . . . what I think is that she’s a gold-picker. Yes . . . a gold-picker. I wouldn’t swear to it in a court of law, but that’s what she is.”
“I don’t understand, Judge Skerow.”
“You know gold, Sergeant. In the Isthmuses, where you’d find the scrapfish, the veins of gold that swell up from earthquakes break off in lumps of almost pure gold and roll into the seas, where the currents wash them down smooth as pebbles. People pick them, as they do on any world where gold is, and we get quite a bit of it that way—just picked up. Ourselves, we are not big gold users; we manufacture a few instruments and some bits of jewelry and export the rest. But in the same way that non-ESPs believe they can become telepathic if they take mind-altering drugs, there are Khagodi and some other peoples who believe gold enhances their esp if they eat it in compounds. That is only because it makes them toxic—just as with the others.”
“Then there is likely an illegal trade in gold compounds, same as any other head drug,” said Ramaswamy.
“Maybe so, Ramaswamy, and I am also sure that Kobai is a victim of illegal trade—in people. And if so, then I am forced against my will to believe that a respected man like Thordh must have been involved in all kinds of that trade, along with any other Khagodi smugglers to or from this world. And by all my Saints and Ancestors I want it stopped.”
“We will do what we can,” said Ramaswamy.
An Aborigine
It was noon. Skerow felt that she had not eaten and not slept: rightly, because she had taken IV fluids and lain for hours in the drowse of shock. She thought vaguely that she ought to bestir herself, if only to show Tony that he need not worry about her. Although the Assizes were over, he had plenty of other work: he dealt with international cases as well as Galactic ones, though in this cold laboring world the nations were huge mining and industrial companies.
There were no aboriginal peoples on Fthel V: Khagodi called it tikka, meaning Five, and all of the names given it by other worlds were analogous. The world Khagodis had a name, but in one basic way it was similar to Five. It too was a colony world, and it had no paleoanthropology.
The Khagodi did not know their home world or people; they knew only that thousands of years of exploration and digging had yielded no buried family lines of descent, not even for tethumekhs and other wild reptiles. The ancient skeletons of thumbless animals had unrelated structures and inimical chemistries. There were branches of Khagodi religions that considered these conclusions heretical: the Diggers and some of the Inheritors contended that no one had yet dug in the right place; but the Watchers and Hatchlings, who believed that their ancestors had been delivered by burning gods in enormous eggs, were probably a half step nearer the truth. Whatever their religion, Khagodi did not believe in lost gardens of innocence, or any other kind of ignorance.
Skerow’s home had few gardens and many mountains that rose fiercely out of the desert. She missed its thin cool air and vast blue skies by day and the white salt light of its two moons by night. No matter how powerful a yearning for warmth and tropic greens might sweep her at times, her visits to equatorial lands left her suffocated by the heat and moisture that winds and storms would not blow away. Dismal worlds like Fthel-tikka gave her part of her livelihood, and beyond that only piqued her curiosity with their degraded cities.
Dutifully she set her mind toward work. Eskat scratched her head. There were documents to be collated with those prepared by Tony and Sama, and reports to write . . . now Hathe would no longer help with ledgers and trial records.
Would you like to spend the night here and use the extra basin?
Would I still be alive if I had? You must suppose so, Skerow, since she would not likely have wanted your dead body in one of her tubs! Hathe! How could you have given yourself in that way? And Thordh—what price did you sell yourself for? Dear Saints and Ancestors, let me not become a complete cynic in less than one day!
—But Kobai! How could she have come there? Can there be people on Khagodis breeding and importing slaves?
Work was out of the question. She opened her personal copybook and called up what she had last set down:
o
this desert
I drown in moonlight
This is as near as can be described in general terms the form of the seh written by Khagodi in the Northern Spine Confederacy: three lines of one, three and five syllables in any order. It is not the only form of poetry produced in the Spines, but certainly the one considered by critics in equatorial lands to be the most dry and frigid.
What Skerow was thinking was: alone in moonlight. She erased and rewrote the last line with these words.
Now I can never show this to anyone, she said to herself. Far too revealing. Nevertheless she considered it in a steadfast way, and added:
at noon
I
see the burning star
When the sky is very clear more than one can be seen. She thought for a moment, went back to the first seh and wrote:
o
this desert
I burn in moonlight
She was content with this but now, having used up the idea of burning, did not know what to do with the second seh. The comm buzzed, scrambler-tone. There were very few now who knew her scramble code.
“Skerow!” said the voice.
“Yes. Who is speaking?”
“A friend.” This was a male Solthree’s sharp but seductive voice.
“Do you have a name, friend?”
“Not yet.”
Her fingertip hovered over the recording button, but once activated it would trip a signal on the caller’s panel. Unless he was calling from a cheap public comm. She pressed the button very gently.
No reaction. “What do you want, then, aside from befriending me?”
“Skerow dear, would you like to become a senior magistrate?”
“I believe I already am one.”
“Are you earning as much as Thordh?”
“No. But he is dead, and not earning it either.” He would have gotten the code from Thordh, who used the same one.
“Thordh dead, Judge?” the sharp voice s
niggered. She was being mocked.
Where is Thordh, Judge? Where? In the courthouse hall after the trial: a thin dark Solthree with a microphone and an insolent face, plucking at her robe and pushing a microphone at her. Mocking her.
He is indisposed, she had said. Now she refused the temptation of a flippant answer. The man was dead, murdered, perhaps at the order of this person or someone like him. “I don’t care to pay Thordh’s price for advancement.”
“For showing a little mercy?”
This was not one with whom she would discuss justice. “I was thinking more of the dying.”
“Really? You believe he was killed?”
—I’ll kill you for this!
She was already hanging up when she realized that the particular pronunciation of killed was very near what had rung in her mind, from one raveled tag-end of thought, out on a busy street. But there was nothing to be gained now by speaking longer.
Neither Strang nor Ramaswamy could be reached; she transmitted the recording of her conversation to their comms. When she finished this her mind of a sudden became wonderfully clear.
Hathe—that woman tried to kill me. Really tried. Did her best. And I burned her brain to smoke and sea-wrack. This man is some kind of demon. I am sure he ordered the death of Thordh, whom I knew for twenty-five years, and who died horribly in my own sleeping room. He tried to tempt me to do terrible evil. No, I was not tempted, but I let him speak to me. I listened.
She began to shake, her teeth rattled, the sore on her tongue flamed. She seized at herself as she had done when she was under attack out on the walkway, forced herself to let her mind slip out of gear, to relax long enough to find a flask of the mildly sedative herbal tea that most of the time calmed the strung-out nerves of powerful Khagodi ESPs.
The latch hummed on the outer door, and it slid open. She crouched staring.
The person who faced her was the servant who replaced the towels, drinking bowls and water purifiers, and left fresh flagons of bath oils, salts and softeners for her skin. A small grey-skinned hominid in a blue robe, whose sex, species, world of origin she did not know. Thin-boned and hairless; soft pinkish eyes rested on her in a moist-rimmed gaze.
Drugged on something strong—by choice or force? . . . perhaps Kobai has been drugged, taken away to some even more terrible place or killed—just because I found her?
She pushed away these panic-thoughts sparked by her state of delayed shock. The servant, who looked more like a Solthree than a Khagodi, and more like a female than not, was staring at her with something of fright in her face. She whispered in lingua, in an accent unknown to Skerow, “I came to freshen your basin for you, Madame.”
“I think I would like to sleep a little now,” Skerow said weakly.
“It takes only a moment, and the water would be sweet.” She was wearing a cheap mesh white-noise helmet, not for her own privacy but to show she could not receive the thoughts of others. After a pause, she added, “These flasks are safe-sealed.”
Skerow looked at her closely, but she was only waiting with a drudge’s patience, explaining local standards to the outworlder. Skerow pulled herself up sharply: her brains were surely still out of order. “Thank you, go ahead.”
She watched the stale water being gulped by the drain, and then the fresh flowing into the clean basin, mixing the oils and crystals into swirls. On impulse she asked, “What world do you come from, dems’l?”
The servant stopped in mid-motion and stood without moving, as if she were a robot that had been turned off. For a moment Skerow wondered if she might not actually be a robot; then she said quietly, “Why not take off that uncomfortable helmet for a moment?” The small grey creature took off the mesh cap with a submissive gesture, and Skerow forced herself to ask the question again.
And with obvious effort, the servant made herself answer: “This world, Madame.”
“You were born here?”
“Yes.”
“And your parents?”
“Here. We have always lived on this world.” As far as Skerow could tell, her consciousness and memories of parents and world were genuine, though not sharply detailed.
Skerow whispered as if she were a conspirator: “Do people ask you this question often, dems’l?”
“No one has ever asked it of me before.”
“Thank you for speaking with me. Don’t forget your cap.”
The servant pulled up a cloth that had been looped into her cord girdle and wiped her head with it before replacing the helm. “Yes. It was a relief to be free of its weight for a moment.” She gave Skerow a little dipping curtsy as she replaced the cloth, and her eyes cooled and seemed to flatten. “May all good go with you, Madame.”
And Skerow was left alone with her thoughts—or against them.
In a day of twenty-eight stads the man she had worked with for a quarter century had been revealed as a criminal and murdered; the woman who had seemed to be one of her two or three friends on this world was shown to be a murderer; she herself had barely escaped with her life and done terrible violence on her attacker; she had discovered that there was a species of intelligent life which she had never heard of living on her home world, a member of which was held captive; the working world she had believed to be without indigenous life, and which was part of Galactic Federation Headquarters, had turned out to have something very much like it; and both of these kinds of life were very much like slaves.
“The first version was better,” she said to the empty air.
She sank into her basin, extended her siphon and let the water flow over her eyes and mouth.
I drown in moonlight
I drown.
Zamos’s Brothel: Skerow and Ned Gattes
Having slept exhausted until the evening, Skerow prepared herself a listless rehydrated meal.
It was a grisly irony that, because the Khagodi population had halved in one day, the availability of its food supplies had doubled. But the foods were still the same freeze-dried strips of myth-ox and sea-smik, the same preserved kappyx bulbs. This irony induced a mild sadness in Skerow, but it did not dull her appetite for better stuff than was usually available to interworld travelers. She had tasted a few foods grown on other worlds and liked them, but so far had found no one who liked myth-ox, sea-smik, or kappyx, so there was no question of trading.
There had been no messages on her comm when she woke, and she shrank from calling Strang or Ramaswamy to press for news. Thoughts of Kobai haunted her, of the help she had been unable to give, the near impossibility of giving it now. She was afraid that her whole trail of connections was no more than a story she had told herself, with no evidentiary basis at all.
She laid it out once more:
The first sign had been that Thordh excused himself from sitting on Boudreau’s trial because of “indisposition”; then Boudreau’s defense counsel, Sama, had behaved oddly when she heard about Thordh; Boudreau’s reaction to a change of judges was extreme because of his stated expectations of being let off by Thordh and his claim to Sama that this had been done twice before.
The strange Solthree “journalist” with the microphone had pestered Skerow in the corridor; the flicker of thought—and I’ll kill you—had caught her in the street—or only the tag-end of a half-heard conversation? Kobai had flashed on her like a dream, with her certainty of recognizing a Khagodi.
The day and its events had been growing darker all the time, with the murder of Thordh, the news that he had already been under investigation by GalFed for misconduct, and her reading of the tethumekh to discover his murderer (Eskat darted his little tongue at her sea-smik, and she absently shooed him away, but on taking thought offered him some). And the battle with Hathe that seemed to close the incident, all in the space of one day. . . .
Kobai, who was no vision or dream, was called an animal. An experimental animal whom she believed to be a victim of illegal trade.
The bribing voice on the comm that stirred echoes of the rude journali
st and the threat thought; last, the servant who claimed to be an aboriginal on a world Skerow had always believed to have none.
There were three stories there: Thordh, Kobai, and the servant. Thordh’s had a clear line line that could be substantiated by police work, more clearly if Hathe could be examined. That story was separate from the others. There was evidence enough that Kobai existed, but Skerow did not know how to prove she was a person. She had noticed the servant—for the first time in all of her visits—only because Kobai was on her mind, and made her think of indentures and slavery; she was afraid her attention had endangered both of them.
She washed out her bowl and shelved it, she mopped a spill of water from the rim of her basin, she paced and wrung her hands. Eskat jittered on her head, squeaking. She called up her report in its ledger, hissed at it and shut it down again. She looked at her face in the mirror and rolled her eyes at it. There was nothing to do but get out of this place.
She stalked the streets. Away from its blistered port area Starry Nova looked from above like what it was: a city that had been built by computer simulation. Skerow watched it through the eyes of buzzer and hovercar pilots: its concrene warehouses and glastex offices stretched beyond and beyond, their square clusters occasionally varied only by the cancerous spread of a factory with landing pads and transport terminals on its roof. Beyond the factories and warehouses were more and more that stretched out like amoebas with ever-narrowing arms gesturing at the mines with their engines and satellite towns. The cloud lowered ever closer and darker toward the winter season.
Down in the city center, the rivers of life flowed along the wet pavements, past the shops flickering with coldlight displays, shouldering the little squat runabouts that carried the mandarins of industry and policy on errands of civil or personal service; these did not pause at the narrow fronts of the stopover hotels or the grimy restaurant faces, each advertised by one yellow lamp. Establishments like Zamos’s had private back roads for them, covered with arcades of imitation shrubs, and richly draped and carpeted entrances. The poorer people, bold and shy, who slipped past the gross Varvani or the comatose bouncer in the street doorway beside the window were most of them on their way home to slots in the wall of a workmen’s hostel.
Flesh and Gold Page 4
