“It’s your basic look-but-don’t-touch, evidence of forced employment.”
Code for slavery. “Come on, Manador, they’ve been trying to pin that on the big Zed as long as I’ve been alive. That’s a cold trail.”
“They don’t talk to me about it. Take it or leave it.”
“I suppose I’d better take it.”
“I’ll book you, then. I’ll have the faxpax on the Spartakoi waiting onboard for you with new I.D. and access numbers. Learn and burn. And get a shave before you let any of them see you. You look like a wharf rat.”
He did not know what a wharf rat was, but got the drift. “Um, you’ll let me know about Jacky?”
“You’ll be gone by touch time.”
“I guess so. Good luck.”
She did not answer, but before she signed off he noticed faint blue spots on her cheeks to either side of her nose, and on her forehead above it. She was sweating in the manner of a blue Pinxid woman made up to look like a Solthree.
Instead of going back to his doss near the helibus station, Ned Gattes took a cab to the Sol3City Athletic Club he usually avoided. There he sat in the steam bath to befog his mind, and finally fell asleep in a stopover bunk among sweaty and familiar pugs who might fight him to the death in the arena, but would not kill him in his bed.
Zamos’s Brothel: Jacaranda and Kobai
Yah-ee! That damned white light push and push me down in that water don’t belong to my sea! Like waking strange on a shore where the wave wash you farways and you get the Up-there fellow come by you with the zapstick in case you think of going too far. Some thought.
This is what happens: one time after Poor Stupid Om bites the air that dung-clot Nohl Lord Big-One Up-There come down along the home sea with the tin hat he calls Ferrier and a lot more fishbelly faces, put the sting in you like the pinfish, you blink out in a bad dark like bang-the-head, too much like Big Dark Dead, and when you think to wake up, you lucky one, it’s this place with more stick-you and big light in the eye and feel like it go through the skin, right out to craziness. There is nowhere to go because it is see-through but not go-through, bang your nose a lot before you learn. Big white bulb faces shove at you from other-side, water wash you around to where they want to get you, big slug hands reach down in, twist your tail. This place is one big bottle with us water-drinkers inside, and outside is even a bigger bottle of air for air-drinkers.
Here in this water they put stuff I don’t know what, it smell like what Doctor fellow puts on a hurt. It make the food taste something like, you bet. Not to think I ever get off the feed—at home that is same as saying you will not work and asking to get gutstuck with the Long Knife and hold-me-down with a bog stone till good-bye Kobai. They throw you down chunks to eat like an animal, but the food here is not so bad—I like the memsa worms and the halfway-gone oyster meat better than sea-smik from back home. Slave don’t get to pick anyway, do we?
Bip-bip! your folk is always in a hurry to hurry Kobai. If you want to work with a slave you can torment till yourself is heartsore and your arm ache, but you go by slave time anyway.
The light. For making you do what they want. And the zapstick, and the needle with doctorstuff to make you go down but not out. Fingers. You want to go big-out when Doctor comes and pinch here and poke down there, say: She’ll do.
Some ones here speak by hand like the Folk, and it tell you not much, but you find out what this place is for. It is a bottle where all kind of peoples like you never saw come and give gold to swim around air and water, play this-here/that-place with all kinds of other peoples, and hard to figure out all what they think is that game. But by your Big God Upside, I know one downright rule is: the one who gets gold is not one who gives that-place or this-here. It is the one who own the bottle.
There is up and down here: up is where they grab at you and down is where the bottle goes through a hole in the floor where they walk, and you fall into a place where they get to look at you with all the others and say: Give me that one. Nobody ask for me, yet. No one here even look like me, human. They are all kinds of colors, all kinds of hand, foot and grabbing parts, but none like me, or even Nohl or Tinhat Ferrier.
Only every one time or another—and Peoples, it is very hard to say what this is like—there is a being that comes to sight. First I think I am going crazy like poor Om, and my food wants to come up my throat, and then I think maybe I am only going blind because this Being is in pieces of big blurry colors like if you have three eyes and they don’t work all together. Sometimes it comes near where I am in the bottle and even halfway through without breaking it or spilling water. I bang my head really good and hard trying to get away from that. Later I get to find out it is only an image, like the idea in your mind of something that is not there, and if you have a right type of eye it is not in all the pieces and colors. This image has a big round head like Ferrier’s, not kind of going back shape like mine, it moves the mouth and others make please to it, like some god or Big Lord Upthere. Maybe the one with the money.
Now here comes another new being. Something like Ferrier that wears the clothes over its skin. It has the big head same as the image that speaks, and teats like the big blue booby that bring the customer in and same like what I have, but has got no tail. It is real, and not an image. It is also blue and green. Some kind of monster. For sure is not human.
The Varvani woman’s heavy hand led Jacaranda by the shoulder through the Showroom where the plasmix columns ran from floor to ceiling, illuminated from within and filled with the waters of alien seas. There were locking passages between them that drained and empited as the life-forms varied. Some of these glowed or flickered with strange phosphorescence, but Kobai did not; the deep matte red of her skin absorbed light as if it were black—or perhaps it was her mood that absorbed the light—and only her eyes were vivid. Though they were very dark and large-pupiled, and sealed by hairless lids so transparent that the veins in their whites could be seen, they belonged to a Solthree human woman, full of life and no mistaking her; if she did not recognize Jacaranda as a fellow-being in the first glance, it was because she did not know many forms of humanity.
The cylindrical tanks rose up in their columns of light through openings in the ceiling to the floor above, an open set of rooms where the spherical dream-chambers were clustered; where in a cool white light women and men wearing furs and feathers of their own or of other creatures gave gold keys to clients, exchanged money, took bets, dispatched orders for food, unguents, makeup, served kava, whiskey, froths of formic acid, and loaded sterilized needles; where clients lounged on couches or hung in slings waiting to meet those they had chosen.
Every few moments the freestanding hologram image that had frightened Kobai appeared on the floor, quite whole and clear, completely lifelike except for its suddenness: a toga-robed hairless male Solthree speaking words of praise or criticism, keeping an eye to the pleasure of the clients. Jacaranda was familiar with this: it was supposed to be the image of Zamos, though it had no distinguishing marks, and appeared as a trademark in many of his establishments. By an unspoken agreement it was treated as a person and with the same deference as if it had been Zamos himself.
The ceiling of the waiting room rose up into a huge vault divided into three sections, hologram screens that played out the actions of three exhibitions that were taking place on platforms below them: one showed a fat and darkly hairy Solthree man sitting in a tableau rather like a painting on an ancient Greek vase. With a grin on his face he was using one hand to eat zimb fruit and with the other playing with the body of the slender pubescent girl who was pouring a jar of perfumed unguent over him and manipulating his penis; a boy was placing a flowering wreath on his head and in turn a second girl played with the boy. The children had sweet slender bodies and wore green wreaths on their fair curls. The grinning man appeared to have narrow hairy legs that ended in hooves, or perhaps his shins were so hairy a trick of the light made them seem so. Once he was anointed the children s
tepped back; one of the girls produced a lighted taper and touched it to the flowered wreath: immediately a fountain of cool fire cascaded down his glistening body until every hair stood in a tiny blue flame and the aroma of the heated unguent exploded through the room. The other girl leaned over and dipped her head into the fire and the hair to suck him; he laughed and lay back on the green velvet, reaching out his hands for a girl’s genitals as the boy straddled his head.
The screens magnified and intensified these acts and showed the pores of the man’s skin and the papillae of his tongue, the petaled softnesses of the children as well as the knowing expressions beginning to harden in their faces.
Two screens away, in a double tableau a Varvani couple were arousing each other while they watched two froglike Orpha puffing up toward orgasm. The male Orph was fingering a melody on a nose-flute to coax the female into releasing the egg mass from her womb opening into a bowl between her legs: Orpha sex was a powerful aphrodisiac for Varvani. When the song had reached its climax and the eggs poured into the cup the Orpha clasped hands and licked each other’s eyeballs. The seed drenched the eggs and they quivered and twisted with life. Now the Varvani, the slabs of their thick bodies rippling furiously, coupled in a springtime of ecstatic lust, ripping off each other’s molting skins with their teeth.
In the last of the tableaux two Solthree women lying on a huge circular bed with a crimson cushion were licking and caressing each other. They were wearing wigs of an antique style, white and powdered, heaped with curls upon curls and decorated with flowers, gold pins, stuffed birds, miniature sailing ships, and jeweled sunbursts. Their faces were powdered and black-patched and their pouting lips very red with rouge. On arms and legs they had sleeves of frilly lace bound with red velvet ribbons, and on their feet little pointed shoes with square buckles and French heels; their waists were looped in gold chains. After they had advanced for a few moments in the course of their erotic dance, gracefully balancing their gigantic headdresses, one of them turned her back and her rosy buttocks to the audience for a moment, and when she faced them again, half-rising, was wearing an artificial penis; smiling, she held her arms out and her frilled legs splayed to draw attention to it and the screen picked it up, in its ivory shape of a jewel-eyed snake’s head with gold-edged scales. The other woman opened her legs to receive it, and the first began to bend toward her; then the snake stirred, arched its head, blinked its emerald eyes. Its tri-branched tongue flickered two or three times, then advanced, like a little claw, toward the vulva.
As Jacaranda rode up the helix between the floors Kobai floated up along with her, grasping the tank walls with thickly ridged fingers and peering at her curiously with those deep eyes. The Varvani shepherding the newcomer reached an arm through the lift cage as they went by and flicked at the wall to chase her away, but Kobai made what must have been an obscene gesture among her people and flattened her face grotesquely against the glass.
“One will learn,” said the Varvani.
Jacaranda made no sign to her—there was nothing she could say—but let herself be delivered to a Kylkladi woman with purple-dyed feathers and led to a washing room where she removed the wig and paint and used the autobath. Without the thick false lashes and the smile lines she drew under her eyes she was a lean tight woman with cropped red curly hair, white brows and lashes, and eyes the color of slate and just as hard. Only her lips were full, and only when reddened were they sexually expressive rather than contemptuous, promising nothing but war.
The Kylkladi, stupefied on narcaine, did not recognize her from the arena—no one ever did—or interpret her expression, but was lazily amused at her transformation from Pinxid to Solthree. “Do you really think you will have clients?”
Jacaranda kept in mind that she was only a whore beaten by a pimp; she touched her tongue to the sore where he had bruised her lip, and said meekly, “I hope so. Where am I to stay?”
“A little room in oxygen country three floors up. They are only allowing you in because there are not many of your type here.”
“What kind is that one in the tank with the tail?”
“Some Solthree undersea colony, I suppose; I don’t know where. Why?”
“I was wondering how they would do it with her.”
“Tik-tik!” The purple-feathered woman clicked her beaky mouth in a Kylkladi’s laughter. “That is not a professional yet—I imagine someone will teach her! They are likely saving her for an underwater show. Can you swim?”
“A little.”
“I’ll tell the Keymaster. You will meet him tomorrow after the doctor has seen you.”
Jacaranda, a careful observer, was hard put to keep track of where she was taken, and almost lost the way among the narrow corridors, staircases, slides, and elevators that twisted into heights and depths she would never have guessed at from seeing the brothel’s exterior. The atmosphere of the windowless place was close and full of perfumes that went deeply into musk and sometimes lingered on scorch or sweat, and she did not know whether she was in the upper-class section or the lower—or if there was any difference. Soft light bloomed from the walls; the hallways were lined by doors with handles and latches of crystal knobs or golden loops. Some entrances rose to the ceiling, or were oddly broad or round: many of these were closed by half a score of locks and labeled with warnings of alien pressures and atmospheres; some that were ajar seemed to lead now into more passages, stairways and bolt-holes; now into storerooms heaped full with garments of bright scales and drifting luminescent tissues, leather and cloth-of-gold, wigs and whips and armor, jars of oils, creams and skin colorings, tanks and cartridges of liquids and atmospheres; and now again they led into unoccupied silk-draped retiring-rooms furnished with chairs and divans contoured to support the passions of seven or eight human species, and machines fitted out in soft leather and polymer appendages to help stir them.
Sound was muffled here, whether of feigned ecstasy or real pain, but Jacaranda thought she saw down one of the shadowy halls a dark creature scuttling on fours, and heard the iron clank of a chain—even that noise might have been part of the music that wafted on the air: wind chimes, harps, a snarling song wailed along with stones rhythmically cracked against each other. A screaming of machine joints.
No image of Zamos appeared to disturb the privacy of clients, but wherever the doors of retiring rooms were open Jacaranda could glimpse the holograms: the old satyr grunting and panting as he writhed with his three sylphs in a Laocoön’s knot of passion, the Varvani crooning in their new skins, the two snake-joined women shuddering in orgasm, or seeming to. Through some unguarded doorway she heard along with the performers the Bacchic cries of another many-mouthed group.
None of these displays affected Jacaranda any more than they moved the performers and servitors. She knew brothels, and had seen all the acts, if not the players. She wondered about the children for a brief moment, what made it worth-while for the brothel-masters to bring fragile young children far from home to dirty their hands and souls on old lechers. For herself, she turned tricks when stranded in ports without arenas, and spied when Galactic Federation’s gears meshed with hers. Now, having come to Starry Nova as a pug, she was spying on her own dangerous employer Zamos, and had let Ned Gattes beat her for a cheap whore. She was tired, not from physical exertion but tired of herself; she kept her mind on the turnings and landmarks of her trail, and when she reached the small room that was spare as a nun’s cell, did not even hear the final sarcasm of the Kylklad, but lay down on the bed and closed her eyes.
After a moment the image of Zamos sputtered briefly into life and roused her awake: clearly, in the world’s most luxurious bordello, there were electronics even in so spare a room, but the image was not quite clear or whole: it mouthed into space and did not look at her, and perhaps had been beamed in by accident. There was not much she would do in this scrubbed white room either to please or disturb Zamos. The bed was narrow, but at this moment it meant safety to her. Jacaranda did not allow h
er mind to dwell on more than the next move: she fell asleep wondering what she must do to please the Keymaster, and how to communicate with the innocent sea creature. It came into her dreams wearing Manador’s face.
The Devil’s Wife
Jacaranda had three stads of sleep, and when she opened the door a thick-armed bruiser, cousin to the bouncer who maintained the peace at the common-gate, was waiting for her in the doorway with arms folded and feet crossed. She gaped at him. “How long you been here?”
“As long as I had to. You’re going to the doctor.” He was chewing something. Betel: his lips were red.
Jacaranda shrugged and ran her fingers through her hair. “What’s your name?”
“Barr.” He followed after, touching her arm, muttering, almost subvocalizing: This way. Down here.
The house doctor worked out of a small lab crammed with computer consoles and diagnostic machines. Barr waited in the hall, crossing his arms and feet.
Jacaranda was relieved to find this doctor no coarse-fingered groper but as in all Zamos brothels, a Lyhhrt in a gold-plated hominid workshell with a sunburst face, a person capable of jacking into any of the instruments that surrounded him. He—or it—was so subtle and neat-handed that Jacaranda did not feel grossly violated delivering blood and urine.
Whatever a Lyhhrt might look like externally, it was really a brain-sized and timid lump of protoplasm working its shell with pseudopods, trembling with desire to be at home on its own world, lying entwined in many layers of its fellows and engaged in Cosmic Thought. If Galactic Federation had not discovered and encouraged the Lyhhrt passion for metal-working they would have deprived themselves, if not the Lyhhrt, of half their surgeons, anatomists, goldsmiths, and professors of these arts. It was a feature of Lyhhrt philosophy to work for the welfare of others, but they hated being separated and were almost fanatical anti-individualists. This avoidance often made them feared and hated. Not by Jacaranda. They treated her with care and respect.
Flesh and Gold Page 6
