After the examination the Lyhhrt extruded sensors, dipped them into the samples, and read the values into a computer. “You are free from communicable diseases.” He took her hand, turned it palm up, and touched her wrist with a burst of cold spray from a plastic bulb. “These are the boosters you need for forty-six viruses endemic in this district. Your breath is a trifle short and you should change oxygen cartridges more frequently.” :It is dangerous to interfere.:
Jacaranda’s reaction time was a little slow after three stads of sleep out of the local twenty-eight; it took her a half second to realize that the Lyhhrt was communicating by esp.
Lyhhrt were very powerful ESPs but held fastidiously to the rules of law and courtesy they had helped to frame. Jacaranda was not an ESP, but kept her mind rigorously to herself and was quick to defend herself against intruders. She glanced at the expressionless gold mask. The Lyhhrt, though they loved ornament, were masters of good taste and did not try to create false expressions: the metal head might be hollow, or filled with computer chips or nutrients; the Lyhhrt itself would be ensconced somewhere in the torso, operating its gleaming shell in the silence and darkness it loved.
Within the space of the half second, she understood that the Lyhhrt was—reservation: claimed to be—the agent of another GalFed department; the object of investigation was unclear, but she was being told: Do not try to rescue Kobai. She asked no question, did not give herself away except to show by the stance of her body and mind that she was far from planning to interfere. She was here only to find out if Kobai was inside the establishment, and make sure she was being well treated. She had brought no weapon and never had a thought of rescuing Kobai: it would have taken a traveling circus to do that. “Thanks. I’ll take your advice.”
The Lyhhrt asked with grave courtesy, “Are there any other problems you wish to discuss, madam?”
“None whatever.”
“Remember to renew your oxygen cartridges more often. The lift is down the hall to your right. You will find the Keymaster’s office one floor down just opposite.”
“I have an escort.”
“Yes. So I see.”
The Keymaster was another Kylklad, a flutterer in dyed green feathers who had sore eyes, and wore thick lenses set in a clamp around his head. “Jacaranda. Is that all of your name?”
“Drummond. Jacaranda Drummond.” She had already given that name to the Varvani madam—even though it was not her own—along with references to two other Zamos houses. A self-important man, this.
The Keymaster’s office was very small; Barr was forced to wait outside again. The upper half of the wall facing the door was slotted to hold code-card files of employee information, as in other houses where Jacaranda had worked, and the lower was a panel with hundreds of hooks holding little gold locks and keys. A second wall was composed of tiny doors with ostentatious complicated hasp locks, and probably contained client information. Or perhaps not. Perhaps all this was for show and deception. Another wall was lined with screens that looked into hallways, offices, and whatever retiring rooms were in use. There was no day or night in Zamos’s brothel.
“Not much flesh to you, is there, dear?”
She said with rouged lips: “I do what I can to make it effective.”
“Tik-tik! And I am sure you shall!” He ran a black-enameled claw down her arm very lightly. “Here is something to wear around your neck.” A little gold lock in the shape of a heart or vulva. “Let me put it on you.” The claws circling her neck with a narrow cold line. “Piri’iryk says that you can swim.”
Purple feathers given a name. “A little.”
“Good. You will go into the tank with the delphine.”
“Delphine?”
“We call her that, not having other names for her kind, whatever they are.” No questions please. “In structure she is basically Miry”—an approximate word for Sol III popularized by the Russians—“and the dolphin of your world is an intelligent animal—so there you are.”
“Yes, Keymaster.”
“Run along now, dear, Piri’iryk will tell you all about it and outfit you. Up two floors and second door on your right.”
It is not very easy to see expressions on Kylkladi faces, though there are a thousand fluttering gestures that express what a Kylklad feels. Jacaranda did not know very many of them.
Piri’iryk’s office was even smaller than the Keymaster’s; it was also lined with slots, but by their symbols these held key-cards to a thousand other closets and cupboards. The Kylklad was waiting for her. “There you are.” She plucked a card from its slot: “Come,” and with a feather-draped arm led Jacaranda along and through the narrow hallways she had traversed the night before. Lit by artificial light, they looked no different, but Jacaranda felt the brush of a feather across her ribs, the touch of a long silvered claw on the prominent vertebra between her shoulder blades. Barr followed along, silently plodding. “Here.” The Kylklad woman seemed less stupid today. Evidently she did not need much sleep. She stopped before a door and slotted the card.
The entrance opened into a vast storeroom of costumes and parts of costumes. Piri’iryk looked at Jacaranda with a beady eye. “Underwater . . .”
Jacaranda waited.
“This one, I think . . . try it.”
A tube of blue, green, and silver spangles like fish scales. Jacaranda stepped out of her torn finery and pulled it on. It fitted her quick, not covering anything. “I’ll need waterproof Pinxid makeup.”
“That will not be necessary.”
A diamond light in the bright fixed eye made Jacaranda think of escape routes. “Is the delphine woman a professional?”
“You will teach her whatever she needs to know.”
That was it, then. They were not seriously hiring her on for her experience. She had been ticked, and they knew her. And they seemed to be willing to sacrifice Kobai.
All in my mind?
No. She had the dread conviction. She had had friends and lovers who were snuffed . . . The Lyhhrt doctor, maybe, had twigged her, the only one she could think of. But he had tried to warn her: more than tried. He had warned her fair and square. If it was true, Kobai would not need any experience.
The appearance of Barr should have warned her; if she had killed him—there would have been an excuse to snuff her more conventionally and right away.
She sniffed. “I don’t work in aquatics or with nonprofessionals,” she said firmly. “Even my rotten gentle-Johnny can do better than that for me.”
“You do not want work, then.”
“Yes I do, but not this kind.”
“This is all we have, dems’l. We took you in and sheltered you when you did not want to have much to do with your pimp. And now you want to go back to him! Do you specialize in hurt-sex?”
“You want me to pay you back.”
“It seems reasonable. One short act for a well-paying audience . . . don’t you agree?”
She doubted she could handle two of them. Piri’iryk’s neck was very scrawny, but she bristled with home-grown weaponry: the talons, the horny mouth and ankle-spurs; she had the advantage of home ground.
And it did seem reasonable. “I suppose so,” said Jacaranda. She had nowhere to run in this ant-heap of winding tunnels and twisted cul-de-sacs. Alarms would harry her down.
Piri’iryk pulled open a drawer, one of the many set into the wall, and found a wire cage studded with cheap jewels and plated with imitation gold. “Here is your imper helm.” Jacaranda put it on and fastened it. “And your oxygen mask.” This was in the shape of a white scallop shell worn with the flutes raying upward; it had slanting eyepieces set into it, and inside, nose tubes that curved up inward. The three mini-cartridges together would last half a stad. Crossing her fingers mentally, she fitted the tubes into her nostrils and sniffed. The usual stale smell, nothing to make her dizzy or drop dead; she had a moment’s flicker of hope.
“This capsule is a little off.” She pointed to a crystal that was slight
ly discolored. Without a word Piri’iryk opened a tiny drawer and gave her one in an unbroken package.
Barr and the Kylklad followed her down the corridors where she had come last night feeling the momentary false safety. Jacaranda did not claim a vivid imagination, but it seemed to her as if all the office workers and all the professionals not in the retiring rooms were turning in chairs or slings or harnesses to look at her. Kylklad, Solthree, Dabiri, a Tignit in bubble-helmet, a Lyhhrt in brushed silver, the faunish stripling who had played with the satyr, looking as if he had not quite wakened from leafy sleep. In fur, feather, or spangle, they stared at her affectlessly, with flat eyes. Piri’iryk’s clogs hammered the floor, her talons and feathers grazed now Jacaranda’s shoulder and neck, now her thigh. At no time were the two alone.
The tank had been moved into one of the niches beneath a screen; it was the same fishbowl Skerow had seen in the window. Kobai was floating curled up, clinging to the back wall with her face turned away; the little heart was chained around her neck.
In the arena Jacaranda always fought with dagger, whip, or chebok, a kind of mailed fist, and here had nothing like them. She was not enhanced except by a short course of steroids she had discontinued early to avoid being blown up into a parody; the only steel in her was her determination. She could not even see how they might try to kill her, except by poison in the water. Whatever happened, maybe she could find some way to save Kobai, or protect her, or . . .
There was an audience before the showcase, a Miry group accommodated on hammocks and couches, waiting in dreamy attitudes and watching an erotic display of pre-Raphaelite-styled couplings on the Tri-V screen. There were five of them, three men and two women; the men were perfect and empty, the women, the white-blond and the brunette with red highlights, seemed rather too eager. The image of Zamos danced among them, speaking for one moment to them, then turning to address the world.
Piri’iryk guided her, always with the silver talon at neck, shoulder, or armpit, along the walkway behind the scenes, among stages and huge robots that manipulated scaffolding to the hatch that led into the bowl of the tank like the neck of a Florence flask.
“Are you ready?” Piri’iryk asked with no particular tone of voice.
“Yes.”
Piri’iryk summoned Barr to pull open the hatch door; a waft of air smelling of salt seas rose from the opening.
Jacaranda did not think then about anything more than the next moment, but fitted on the mask and slipped down the opening. The water flowed around her into the hot creases of her skin; above her head she heard the thud of the hatch closing.
I never feel truly stupid in my life until this monster come into my water and scare me up the wall, and I am just about to give her a two-finger in the eye when I see the eyes are not real but some kind of mask she is wearing that gives bubbles. When I reach for it she hold her both hand together like so: friend, and touch my hand.
Then she grab me by the two teats! I don’t think she will be my friend. I guess this is the one that ask for me after all the time, but she will not get me. I am going to take her two hands and crack her head open with them like an oyster, and she knows it.
And what happen but I get this smell coming off her skin. It is the smell of one really scared, even if she is not running, and looks like a tough one. Afraid of me? It look to me like there is something about her I know . . . I don’t think she is afraid of me . . . I take her hands off me, but not in a bad way, and keep hold of one, to say: Friend, yes? And she nod the head, what I guess is yes, so I say to my own self, if this pretend-fuck is what I got to do so nobody get hurt, that’s it—
—and next thing, the whole world boil up and go bee-BLOOP!
The fury blazed through the water like an undersea earthquake, and flung the women against the wall of the tank. There were claws and teeth attached to it, and black flaming hunger. In the half second it paused, disoriented, Jacaranda recognized it: a serpent from the Copper or Cyprian Sea of Thanamar II. It was powerfully telepathic and brutally half-sentient. She pushed Kobai aside and clamped her teeth on the tooth-stay of the mask to withstand the crackling of the savage mind. The helmet, a cheap barrier to low-grade esp, was useless against it. Solthrees called it “devil’s wife”: it was a hermaphrodite that bred parthenogenetically and used its male function for gene renewal when its numbers diminished. She had watched bouts where the devil’s wife was fought by dagger fighters who were willing to risk everything.
At her first dodge a claw caught her down the outside of her thigh and the blood slinked away in a curling trail. She shuddered in the pain, the bubbling fury, with Kobai’s jolting terror driving through the beast’s esp; dived through marbled water under the hook-toothed jaw, clasped the long neck between her knees and slammed with the heels of her hands hoping to reach a nerve complex. She had fought underwater but never without weapons and could not get enough purchase to do this.
She wanted to push Kobai up into the neck of the bowl where she might have protected her but that was impossible. The devil’s wife writhed, the bestial form of hell-broken-loose, and she rode it as the hag rides the nightmare, feet tangled in the laces of its gills. Her own determination hardened to a knife-shape in her spirit, and when the claws raked her back she did not feel anything. She did not let go even when the flimsy helmet broke off and the full force of the black mind hit her inside the arch of her skull. She tasted the iron of her own blood in the water.
Kobai had pulled herself up into the chute as soon as Jacaranda thought of it, but when she saw the helmet falling dived down with a flick of her muscular tail, picked up the helmet, and smashed the devil’s wife in the eye.
The fake jewels tearing through the eye’s precious layers loosed a cloud of blue-green copper-based blood, a bulge of grey-pink tissue and a psychic shriek that brainburned its way out to the white-noise limits of the brothel. The blue-green and the red blood mixed and blackened into a cloud in which all were blind for one stunned moment.
Jacaranda could not break the serpent’s neck. Still gripping the snaking torso with her legs she took one deep breath and tore off the mask, grabbed gill tendrils with both hands, shoved them into her mouth and bit. The devil’s wife bent its head against its side and crunched the back of her neck between its jaws. Jacaranda died without a thought.
Kobai smashed out blindly; the twisting serpent’s tail slammed the side of her head and the thrust drove her to the tank wall where she flattened gripping the plasmix with palms and soles in the opaque water, stunned, waiting to die. The water darkened further as the devil’s wife lost blood, and the mind of the beast began to darken.
She sensed now the blood-thirst of the watchers, the terror of the beast that could act only as nature allowed, the dizziness as she sank into unconsciousness. A voice filtered into what awareness she had left, through the serpent’s dying mind:
Who has done this? Get her out of there NOW!
Words she did not understand.
You fool. You absolute bloody fool. You will be smashed. THATDELPHINE’S A BREEDER AND SHE’S PREGNANT!
Jacaranda was found in much the way Ned Gattes had envisioned, half in the gutter before the brothel door. Her white drowned body was scarred with wounds that had drained pink, her spangles dulled like the scales of any hooked fish. By then Ned was wrapped in sleep aboard the Zarandu’s shuttle along with Skerow and twenty-five thousand other souls bound outward across the Galaxy from Galactic Central.
It was a Lyhhrt who told Manador what had happened to Jacaranda; she did not know which one it was among the physicians, surgeons, and lawyers. “How do you come to know this? Who are you, anyway?” Her skin was blue and dewed with sweat.
“I cannot tell you that.” The Lyhhrt had taken a Kylklad form and looked like Death’s angel in feathers of silver filigree.
“Damn you, was it one of yours who did it?”
The Lyhhrt stood still for a moment in this shape, which it made more graceful than the true one. “I al
low for your grief and anger, Madame. You are well aware that such a question is inexcusable.”
She was. “There is one of you who works for Zamos. That one knows, and so do you.”
“I cannot—
“You cannot tell. Oh yes,” said Manador. “But I will find out.”
THREE
Khagodis: Skerow on Raintree Island
On Khagodis the Diluvian Continent forces its way up through the belly of the equator between the Greater and the Lesser Archipelagoes and pushes into the Great Spine mountain chain that twists to the north and south. With the mountains running up just east of its center, it looks from space like the body of a sleeping animal covered by a green pelt that stretches whitely over its backbone. From this heaped backbone the Great Equatorial River flows west toward the Greater Archipelagoes and the Isthmuses; in its tangled chains the river islands seem to be sailing upstream.
Every year in the winter season the Organization of Poems and Their Authors holds its conference in the Orchard Gardens of Raintree Island. Poets and other artists come from all over the world to attend it.
One of these was the first public function Skerow attended after returning to her home world; her duties on the Assizes Circuit would not begin for another thirtyday, and though she was fearsomely weary and felt as if her brain was boiling, the government-supported Raintree Conference was one of the few opportunities for her to see authors from her own country, local travel being both slow and expensive.
On this evening there had been a barbecue of fingerclams and water-bracket given by the Island hosts; a group of seventy-five was gathered under the lobe trees licking its collective fingers and watching the sunset. The sky was suffused with rose and mauve, with the fragrance of sessu vines, and the moons were huge and creamy over the flickering river and the deep green humps of its islands. One of the host poets was reciting, by esp, for though Khagodi poetry need not be an esp form, people do not vocalize much among themselves. . . .
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