Skerow’s thoughts brooded over the city. Citizens of five thousand worlds, GalFed and neutral, labored here in perhaps fifty thousand establishments; her mind hovered above the one where Kobai was or had been. She was a little calmer now, and did not much fear that Kobai was in great physical danger, even though she was hidden away behind the crackling white-noise barrier: the life of the swimming woman had come to the attention of too many people outside its milieu.
Three buildings away from the complex that housed the two-faced bordello, Skerow peered without seeing over the railing of a bridge into a stream that was not a river but a drainage channel; her mind’s eye was watching Zamos’s traffic from the eyes of passersby. Outside the bubble where the dead-eyed creatures floated there was a scuffle going on.
A Solthree mack was beating a whore, also a Solthree, though she looked anything but, more like a Pinxid with her blued skin and lips green as a fruit peel, the way she writhed and howled pitifully, and clawed with green nails; perhaps she specialized in Pinxin. Skerow knew that there was a specialist for everything. The woman was dressed in some blue smoky wrap that seemed to have caught the raindrops in it, and a fold of it had been draping her dark blond hair, but was beginning to drift away as she shrieked and twisted. Her voice rose sharply among the mutterings and gestures of a thousand languages. She was screaming incoherent words: bass’d! muffker! cocksker! Her face was in shadow.
The pimp was gripping her wrist with one hand and buffeting her face and head with the other. “It’s me or nobody!” his voice was tight with fury, “me or nobody!” He pulled a horn-handled knife and flicked its blade open. His hair was slick, and he wore a velvet jersey that raged with red and blue coldlight designs, and tight blue skinlo pants, but his face looked grubby because of his uneven beard stubble. Each seemed to be wearing a big fake diamond earring, but these were oxygen capsules implanted in their necks.
Skerow watched through twenty minds and pairs of eyes as their owners came within view of this couple and moved out of it: large topaz ones rather like her own, which saw them like her own, weak and blurry; mammalian and reptilian eyes, brown, green and pink, whose owners hurried to get out of the way for fear of the pimp’s knife; steely ones sensitive to infrared (red thermograms throbbed with the furious heartbeats of the combatants); robotic eyes in cyborgs that saw them abstractly as flickering points on a grid; flat sound-reflecting pupils that intuited them as concepts. Two Solthree eyes flat with stupidity, their pupils shrunk by opium.
Skerow from her distance felt equally stupefied, but was sharply pulled back to self-awareness when the Varvani madam clapped her hands and the dim eyes of the bouncer livened with resolve: he moved neatly and quickly toward the pimp as the knife flashed upward at the woman’s throat. At the same time the brothel’s bubble window flashed even brighter as some new orange-and-yellow creature swam into Skerow’s ken, and she saw then not the dueling pair but in her mind’s eye Kobai raging in captivity, in the situation she could do nothing about. She sent her thought more quickly than the pimp’s knife hand to disarm its controlling mind.
Out, out, lady! Out! This was not a formed thought but an almost physical repulse coming from the pimp as the thickly painted whore twisted her head away and brought her hand’s edge chopping on his arm. Skerow did not exactly see into the steel trap of the man’s mind but caught a mental configuration that said: Agent, Madame, your side.
This was the truth, and she did not want to break his barriers then, but watched the fleeting moment in which the musclehead from Zamos’s knocked the knife from the rogue’s hand with a mallet fist and the prostitute picked it from the air and cast it away.
The bouncer did not grab at her but unhooked his lightning-rod and advanced on the pimp, who scrambled away like a craven cur, howling, “Take the damned fireship!”
The bouncer sniggered and tossed him a gold coin, which the pimp did not hurl back at him but tucked into his waistband before he scurried off, snatching up his knife as he ran. The Varvani opened her arms to the beaten woman, and she like an orphan rested her decorated head on the huge blue bosom.
Skerow let herself drift from their orbit and waited on the bridge, eyes downward. She did not hear the steps as the pimp climbed the arch and put his elbows on the opposite railing, but her ears caught his still-harsh breaths. He was looking out toward the garish window of Zamos’s as if he was waiting for the woman to come back to him.
“Ned Gattes at your service, Madame Skerow.” He did not esp, but kept his shield down tight and his voice to a hoarse whisper.
She took a closer look down at him in the glancing lamplight and saw that the stubble covered a rash. He was nearly as short as Tony, but heavily muscled. “You know me. Of course. The only Khagodi woman in the world now. Don’t expose yourself to more danger, Ned Gattes.”
“A pimp who is allowed to run from Zamos’s back door is safe.”
“You did all of that very nicely.”
“I was well trained.”
“Is your lady safe?”
“She has no more virtue to lose than I do, and takes good care of herself.”
“Do you work for the police?”
“With them. Right now I am working with yours.”
She did not want to mention, or even think of, Kobai in this place, but she could not help asking: “Are you looking for . . . ?”
“A woman, yes.”
The sky over Starry Nova had darkened, and, except for intermittent alarms, the city had fallen silent, even around Zamos’s, like any other that had no urban culture. She heard his hand rasping over his jaw. “You have some trouble with your skin.”
“Ingrown beard. I think I will kill whoever picked this skin for me.”
She had to think a moment before she said, “A graft.”
“Yes.”
“You must have lost your own in curious circumstances.”
“I did.” She sensed rather than saw his grin. “The face suits pimping for cheap whores.”
“Are you really a pimp?”
“Only for tonight. Usually I’m a pugilist, gladiator, whatever it’s called on this world.”
That was quite right; slender Tony was the fencer, this one the pug. “Then you would not have missed with the knife, if you had meant to use it.”
“I would not. But I’m not an ESP, either. None of the pugs are. I’m just a sensitive with good blocking ability.”
“What was the gold coin you picked up, Ned Gattes?”
“A token for fourteen percent off the price of Ophiuchi flameheads, tonight’s specialty. It will have useful fingerprints and sweat traces. Goodnight, Sta’atha Amfa Skerow.”
Skerow left Ned Gattes to do his work and went back to her lodgings: ate again and slept again. Then she wrote up her legal reports and one more for Strang and Ramaswamy, describing her encounter with her room-servant, and all she had seen or heard, or thought she had seen or heard, or simply thought; she was content at least that she had done everything possible to place and preserve the endangered in safety. After that she boarded the shuttle and then the Zarandu, bound for home. Once on board, she went, along with Eskat, into starvation mode, stasis, and deepsleep early so she (and he) would not have to eat any more dried myth-ox and sea-smik, or preserved kappyx bulbs.
TWO
Fthel V: Ned Gattes and Manador
Ned wanted to hang about and see whether Jacaranda, his fighting partner and fellow pro-tem agent, might be kicked into the street: if she had been, he would know that she was unsuccessful but safe. That she had not been did not show either. But he dared not wait. His ability to keep moving among crowds was his best defense. It was not safety, but better than the naked dark. In a moment he was among the jostling crowds, not lost, nor wanting to be, but chatting up the whores and other pugs who pimped on the side, offering better deals to their customers, grinning his hard grin, dodging the fist and the knife.
Although Ned was very self-aware and extremely sensitive to his surr
oundings, he was not an ESP and had no innate talent for sensing whether he was being followed. As a GalFed agent he did not seek out heroics, but preferred to work as an observer who hung about in the scurf of the crowd’s edge to report the odd or unusual. He fought for money, not for free, and his fear, besides defeat in the arena, which might be fatal, lay in being pestered by some street challenger who had seen him fight and thought he could be beaten. Now in these circumstances he did not know whether he ought to expect a shadow.
But whether as pimp, pug, or spy, he was not quite astonished when a pair of arms came at him from a doorway and a voice shrieked, “He swears me clean safe clappies, the devil-dog, and he brings me none but old combers who like to blacken me blue in the stem from pinch!”
“Hey what, Poll Tenchard!—ow!” for she had bitten his ear. He pulled her off him by the scruff and laughed, though he had nearly broken her arms in his startle. Ned associated quite happily with Poll whenever he worked in Starry Nova. Now she was the literal fleshing out of his string of employees (two), his protective coloring. She wrenched to free herself; she was no frail thing but a good strong woman of TerBorchland on New Southsea World, from where she had forfeited a bond through bad behavior and been exiled. She was light brown in the skin, had long black braids, and wore a red-and-purple skintight, all whorls and zippers.
“Poll, sweet Poll, what’re you boiling for, darling-o?” He grabbed both her hands in one, kissed them, and tickled her chin, enraging her further. “You were well and goodly paid for last time, hey? Spend-all drinking kava, bet you.”
“Keep your scab thumbs off me, fartbreath! That was none but a taste to work up the spit in my mouth!” Her native people spoke a Malay-rooted language, and for talking with Solthrees she had learned a bastard pidgin from watching old triwy programs. It was not uncommon. Even the Russians spoke this, with rather less color than Poll.
“Hush, dear heart, you’ll spoil my business.”
“It’s good for my heart if I do! Y’ owe me for all the scum-suckers nozzered me this night when yer leaving me by.”
“Well, Poll, you’re better off for it than I am, for you’ve had the gold if only in the drinking of it, and I’ve had none from you.”
He spoke jokingly enough, but with a bit of snap in the words, and she pulled away from him in fear—“You’ll not want to do me in—” and in the dull watchlight above the door he saw that what he had taken for a smear of makeup on her face was a truly blackened eye.
He kissed her hands, but gently this time. “Sweetheart, I never meant for you to take the knocks.” He wished Jacaranda could have had a dab at those clients.
“Go tell me Ned the Pug you’ve never had a whore and beaten her?”
“Truly I never, I promise—but yes, I’ve had whores.” This was true enough: Jacaranda was only occasionally a whore, and he had beaten her for show; in the arena she had beaten him nearly for good.
Poll seemed to believe him, for she whispered, “Then you can take a bit, ‘cause yer better set up than the lot of them.”
“And so are you,” he breathed into the trace of perfume in her shoulder, a curious clean scent, and then he had her hard and quick in the shadowy doorway, where no passerby paid them attention and no one opened the door because it led to a storehouse shut down for the night.
As he pulled away, she nipped his nose between two strong fingers and twisted it viciously: “That’s for the sons y’ sent me, y’ bastard!” She pulled her zips closed with sounds like teeth grinding.
“Christ, Poll, you’re an unforgiver!” He rubbed his nose with one hand and with the other caught at her as she went to dart away. “Here’s half my tin, and be satisfied.” That was not much more than a few chiggers, and while he was hooking them out of his belt he felt the token from Zamos. Anything he might have hoped to give his GalFed employers in sweat tracks or fingerprints was now drowned in his own sweat, and he offered it to Poll. “Here’s a thing I got from the Zamos clown, it’s a lag dud but maybe some kava dipper will think it’s the fruitful.”
“Gold, and such weight? Who’d give you that?” Doll seized and bit it. She spat. “Ptui! by dammy, it’s all crumbs and bits! Might be you were meant to eat it, and be poisoned at that—pfah!”
“Oh, let me see, Poll, don’t toss it!” Ned grasped the crumbled pieces as she was about to fling them away. Even in the dim light and to his untutored eye they were significant. He hooked more coins from his belt: “Here’s all of the cash and good-bye, sweetheart!” And he was off, hearing nothing more from her but a faint cry of “—see you again?”
He stopped in the light of a lamp for two seconds to eye the broken coin, then tossed it in his hand once, where it glittered for an instant, what was left of it, and a few passers roused and flicked their eyes at it; then he dropped it and gritted it under his heel. It was a spytick he had been a fool to take, as much as asking to be followed, worse, betray himself and anyone he spoke to. He had not given himself away by speech, he was sure of it, but the device was a sign that he had been under suspicion, and God knew what information it had already given about his fingerprints, his voiceprints, his sweat. He ran skipping and laughing among the crowds, half-hysterical; his ribs and breastbone ached with terror. A pimp who is allowed to run from Zamos’s back door is safe . . . Zamos, who owned the brothels, owned half the arenas Ned Gattes fought in.
In another doorway he pulled off his bright clothes and rolled them into a knot in his scarf, then went on in his underwear, a thin shadowsuit. Not much to see of him then, a pale man with a grimy-looking jaw wearing mist-colored cloth.
In spite of his dread, or because of it, he could not stop himself from crossing the bridge over the drainage channel, and pausing unseen down the cross street beyond the thinning stream of people before the brothel entrance. It was in his mind’s eye that among the knots of navvies and tuggers arguing whether to go in, there would be another knot surrounding a body cast out with the trash, flattened in the dirt with her brilliant cloak faded like a dead bird’s plumage. But there was none. Spacers were going inside, workers going home, and the street turning quiet. Dead or alive, Jacaranda was in the brothel.
Ned Gattes jeered at himself for the panic attack, and for his show of great bravery in front of Lizard Lady. He took the helibus and alit six streets from his kip, where there was a public comm with scrambler-code access and vid. Manador expected his call, and he particularly wanted to see her face on vid. And therefore she would see his; he paused again and brilliantine-combed his hair.
Manador had thick black hair twined in a bun at the back of her head, and one white lightning streak at her temple. She was wearing black lace and was carefully made up but looked stern, like an old ballerina. She did not ask how things had gone. “I have more work for you.” She was his agent, and also owned the franchise of the local gladiator factory; as well, like a weaver, she picked the strands of gossip from Starry Nova and its environs and transformed them to the broadcloth of information for Galactic Federation. She had recommended Ned to GalFed Security because he traveled much and observed wherever he went.
“I’ve had enough spying, and I need sleep.” He watched closely to see that her lip movements synchronized with the sound of her voice.
She smiled briefly, with sharp bracket-shaped creases, and he was sure that this image he was watching was Manador, and not some deceiving artifact. “Send a boy to do Manador’s . . . how did things go?” Jacaranda was her latest lover.
Ned Gattes had never been a braggart. “I was scared shitless—” He told her everything. He had been her lover too, briefly; her arms were like the lions’ den.
“You were not scared stupid anyway. You did well. No need to jeer at yourself, my dear. Zamos is just fishing. They give those things out at random to see what they can pull in.”
“Why in God’s name didn’t you tell me?”
“You’d have been hyperconscious of it, wouldn’t you? This way you were only in character. Just keep
your mouth shut when you’re with the ladies.”
“Then I will be hyperconscious.” He added quickly, because she had pursed her mouth, and her expression brought to mind his picture of Jacaranda dead in a gutter, “You said you had work for me.”
She dit-dahed the console beside her with dark red nails. “This is an invitation to try out with the Spartakoi.” The Spartakoi were a stable of gladiators that the Zamos Corporation owned and ran in a huge gameplex it ran and owned in a colony on Shen IV that it largely controlled.
“They know about me?”
“Why shouldn’t they? You’ve fought in ten or twelve Zamos arenas.”
“Yes.” Fishing. If they were to twig Jacky, they’d certainly know about him. Not a thing to say to Manador. Ordinarily he would have been burning to join the Spartakoi. He had applied to them many times. “When did this invitation come in?”
“A short while ago . . . um.” She moistened her lips. “A little job you can do for GalFed there.”
He stared at her for a moment. “Oh yeh . . . GalFed set it up for me, didn’t they?”
She said, in a little spit, “That’s all there is for you. Take it or leave it, damn you, Ned Gattes.” She had had no contact with Jacaranda, of course, and would not until the spy got in touch with her. “If you take it I can get you a berth on the Zarandu right now, second shuttle hits Shen Four the fifteenth of quarteryear.”
“Zarandu? Probably along with Lizard Lady.”
“Skerow? How did you get on with her?”
“Not to go to bed with, but friendly in an awe-inspiring way . . . what’s the GalFed job?”
Flesh and Gold Page 5
