Flesh and Gold

by Phyllis Gotlieb

  “That is nothing, a beard rash. You will find him a good fighter, and I want you to be very good to him.”

  Zella stared at the woman, who was buffing a claw with a small piece of chamois. “That’s not in my contract. There’s a clause that says, no whoring.”

  “That is true, and whoring was not what we had in mind. We believe this man is a spy working for a huge gambling ring, and we want to catch him communicating with them. You will be with him all the time, and tell us if he does. It is very important to us. If you can do that without taking him to bed, so much the better for you, I suppose.”

  Zella’s cheeks were flushed deep red. “I don’t know how to do that kind of thing. Aren’t there other women who’d be better at it?”

  “Perhaps there are. But you are the one we particularly want for this task right now.”

  “I don’t have to do this. I’m not legally bound—”

  “You are a very naive young woman, dems’l! You can ship home if you wish, but Zarandu’s shuttle lifted off yesterday and will not return for one year. The fare is expensive, we paid a deal to bring you here. And right now you are very, very far from home.”

  Zella was sweating hard and terrified; she had reached a point where all she wanted to do was give in and agree. “I’ve worked seven of every ten days, I’ve earned my keep and over.” She felt the roots of her hair prickling, but she steadied her voice and said, “I’m a free citizen in every place that recognizes Sol Three’s worlds and colonies. Just because the Zarandu’s gone doesn’t mean I’ve had to give up the protection of interworld law.” Her jaw was set like stone.

  The Kylklad stood looking at Zella, tapping her flat hooked beak with the restless gold talon. After a long moment, she said, “Let us begin again, Sztoyko. You need a partner, and this man is a good one. We need information about him and feel you are the person who can get it. It’s a case of spying. Does that offend you so greatly?”

  “No, I suppose not,” Zella said. “As long as he’s not violent.”

  “No more than the usual gladiator. You might even like the fellow.”

  “If I did I might be happy to sleep with him.” Zella was grateful to be let off the hook.

  “I am glad we are finally in agreement,” Kati’ik said dryly. “You will meet him this evening.”

  Zella went back the way she had come, furious with herself for having been so manipulated, and helpless against the attack strategy the Kylkladi used so well. She was conscious, to the point of self-consciousness, of being unsophisticated. She had been born on one of the many farming communities of New Southsea World, a planet belonging to Sol III that had already shaken off names like New World, Second Chance, Last Chance, and Heaven On Earth. Its colonists were determined non-polluters, and Zella’s people were secular fundamentalists who lived on solar energy, avoided electronics more complicated than radio, raised all their own food, and went to bed with the chickens. The energetic young left early and sometimes came back when they were tired. Zella did not repudiate her community’s ideals, but wanted excitement. She was getting it.

  It seemed to her that the atmosphere, which had seemed no more than coarse, had now become sinister. The ivy-latticed crèche with its garland of gladiators’ children playing ring-a-rosy now struck her as perverse; one of the dueling Kylkladi had blood on his breast feathers, and the Brazilian machete fighters conferred darkly with their priestess—a thick woman with bursting black hair and sharp protruding teeth; draped with the bones of small animals, she was stamping to an unheard beat that rattled the tiny skulls.

  Ned Gattes had taken all of his worries into deepsleep and woke to them in the long pull out of it descending to Shen IV. For years he had longed to train and fight with the Spartakoi. Now the condition of fulfilling the dream would mean going into more danger than he had ever known in the ring. The spytick he had been given at Zamos’s brothel might not have been meant for him particularly, but given that he had just delivered Jacaranda through its doors as a spy, what else dared he think? Manador had not reassured him. Even in deepsleep he could see Jacaranda going through those heavy doors wrapped in the arm of the tattooed Varvani woman.

  During the gradual awakening on the shuttle in its long descent, and the regimen of exercise and diet that brought him and seven hundred and eighty other Shen IV-bound passengers back to life, he found himself distracted from his fears; for a long while he felt still wrapped about with hazy sleep, his bones icy from the cold that stretched between the stars. His one satisfaction was that the shuttle’s clinic had built him drugs that depilated his rough beard and altered the genetic structure of the follicles so that the hairs grew in straight. The skin still tended to turn red or sallow at strange times, but he had a smooth chin. And he was not thinking of Jacaranda.

  Eventually he found himself threading his way with forty-six other new-dogs through the endless halls of the Palace of Knossos, shepherded in a ragged line by a Varvani woman with a clipboard. He had slept both too much and nowhere near enough, and could not fully open or close his eyes in their gritty sockets. Like everyone with him he was wearing thirty-four patches of drugs and stank of disinfectant; he could sense the shielding of noses as the file went by.

  He passed the Kylkladi fighters wiping blood off their swords, the crèche whose ivied lattice fenced in the brawling children, the Khagodi fighters pulling the steel spikes off their tails and wrapping them in soft leather thongs, the divided bubble where two devil’s wives swirled in trails of their turquoise blood from flinging themselves at the partition to get at each other. In another cubicle three Brazilian machete fighters idly clashed blades together while four others honed theirs with whetstones, and their priestess crouched in a corner and muttered to herself.

  The moment Ned stepped off the walkway into the momentary shadow of a less brilliantly lit hallway two figures with daggers leaped at him screaming “Ya-hee-ya!” and the world changed. They had khaki-colored skin, headdresses that looked like heaps of blue blocks and earrings to match, and brass breastplates with symbols in bas-relief. Neither had a left arm.

  Ned marked all this without thinking as he came awake: he had no maneuvering room and twisted sideways to avoid the downward swing of the weapons. As he drew back the momentum of the pugs marching behind him pressed him toward the dagger points, and he began to fall forward. Just as he crumpled two golden hands reached out and grasped his attackers by their two right arms and pulled them away.

  By then he was on the floor and the woman behind him had tripped over his ankles and fallen to her knees. Her scream of “Shit!” brought the Varvani lumbering to help her up, and the golden hands with mother-of-pearl fingernails caught Ned under the armpits and hoisted him to his feet. “Are you wounded, friend?” the equally golden voice asked.

  “I don’t know.” He could not think to look for wounds. His eyes were compelled by the figure before him.

  “I am Spartakos. What is your name?”

  Ned stammered something. Perhaps it was his name.

  Spartakos was a robot in the shape of a male Solthree. His head, hands, and feet were plated with gold, and his athlete’s body chromed. He moved seamlessly and without a sound. Ned’s eyes could not take him all in at once, he shone so. “You will report this to the front office.”

  The line back of him was untangling its knot of traffic and snarling at him to get going; the one ahead was turning to see what had caused the commotion. Nervously, Ned tried to draw away from this awesome figure, but Spartakos drew him aside into the shadow, seeming to realize that he was trying to avoid attention. “You will,” said the robot.

  “What?”

  “Report this.”

  “No, no! I don’t want to stick out as a complainer before I even half got here!”

  “But they tried to kill you!”

  “Yes they did, and I thank you, Spartakos, for saving my life—but please don’t report this to anyone!”

  “And you are still my friend?”


  Ned could not believe that this voice sounded anxious. “Oh yes, forever!” He pulled away at last and ran to rejoin his gang.

  “You will see me in a moment,” Spartakos called after him, but he did not turn to answer.

  “Ee, chummie, what was that about?” said his companion, a woman with a cybernetic arm.

  “I’m damned if I know,” Ned said fervently.

  “Yer been singled out for special attention,” the cyborg said.

  Ned shuddered and did not answer.

  Presently, armed with a bag full of contraceptives as well as the keys to the lockers and storerooms where he would keep his possessions and fighting tack, he was standing with the others in Common Room #27 while a burly fellow named Gretorix, who looked as if he had fought with every army that ever marched, harangued his captive audience about payday, policing, and prophylaxis. He finished off by saying, “Now, here’s Spartakos, who has a few words to say to you,” and the robot came into the room and stood among them.

  Everyone was taken aback. Most of the pugs had never seen such a robot before, and they could not help drawing away a step. Their desultory muttering stopped. Then curiosity conquered uneasiness and the men, women, and non-sexed of eight species surrounded him at a distance of three meters in a rigid and almost perfect circle that had grown as naturally as an organic cell from the balance of attraction and repulsion he had stimulated in them.

  Spartakos said: “Gladiators, I am Spartakos, your guide to the Palace of Knossos, its labyrinths with their pleasures, treasures, and dangers. You will find perhaps love, perhaps death, and some of you will have both, and die beloved.”

  The Common Room was just easing into the shadow of evening; its furniture, chosen to fit itself to several kinds of bodies, was comfortable but neutral in color, and the radiant surface of Spartakos was almost an assault on the eye, as if it carried its own light.

  “The most experienced among you will be assigned partners here today, and perhaps you will find in them . . .” He raised one gleaming hand toward them in an almost tentative gesture at which the stance of his body shifted at the hip in what seemed thoughtless grace. “Is destiny too heavy a word for the love, or friendship, or even hate it will be so interesting to find? Whatever it is, I invite you to it, gladiators. Now come with me.”

  Ned Gattes knew of such robots, but the few he had seen were not completely robotic, and had been directed in part by human brain matter. He did not think this was the case with Spartakos. The pug standing beside him, a hairy Solthree with a regrown nose and unmatched ears, sniggered and said, “Wonder if he gets any fucking use out of his equipment.”

  “He’d smell a lot better than some,” said a woman who did not care to be standing next to him. Ned Gattes was to find it characteristic of the pugs that when Spartakos was among them they became uncomfortable and spoke coarsely of the flesh, as if to reaffirm it in themselves and each other. Even cyborgs did this. Especially cyborgs. But they obediently picked up their baggage and let him lead them down the halls, hypnotized by the light that glittered on him from one ceiling lamp to the next, until the hall broadened and became lined with doors. Then he withdrew into a corner and stood as still as if he had been turned off, and Gretorix, who had been worrying the file of pugs like a sheepdog, directed them to their quarters.

  Ned sat on his bed with his gear around him, and noticed for the first time that there was a fifteen-centimeter crust of dried blood running from right shoulder to nipple on his taklon knit jersey; one of the knifers had got him, and neither he nor anyone else had noticed the shallow cut because the shirt was dark red. The thin material had been designed to deflect such attacks, but the blade had caught it along the grain when he was twisting away and driven a tiny fold of the fabric into its slash; the shirt was not torn even though the skin was cut. In all the excitement he had not noticed the wound; the moment he noticed it it began to hurt. He softened the crust with cold water, pulled off the fabric, washed and sprayed the cut with picrocin and dermatex. Then stuffed his shelves with underwear and sleepsuits, and arranged toothcleaners and depilatories on the washstand. He did not even try to sort out what had happened, but merely pushed it away; when Gretorix directed him to one of the trestle tables in the huge dining hall and the young woman stood up to greet him, he did not want to look at her face.

  Zella had dressed carefully, in a light blue leather doublet, slit at the sides, that showed some thigh but not much, dark blue stirrup-hose and cordovan laced sandals. Everything was mixing itself up in her mind, Ned Gattes and his terminal acne, being demeaned by Kati’ik, Sweet and his diamond and his dead end life as a sparring partner for the Spartakoi, whether she might become one like that or be fired, how lonely and out of things she felt in vast surroundings where the other women seemed so experienced and self-assured—hard, anyway—and she was not quite sure whom to trust among the men, whether she could survive a Bloodfight, how soon the Lottery would come up for it . . . whether Kati’ik had it in for her, everything whirling together—she caught a side glance at herself in the mirror that formed one wall of her small room, braid half-fallen over her shoulder and looking young and naive. But she had fought in thirty arenas, and drawn blood. She stared the image down. And now, hurrying on her way to the dining hall, she knew she was still young and healthy enough to feel a stir of unreasoning hope.

  The hope was seriously threatened when she stood up to welcome Ned Gattes. He grimaced when he shook her hand and looked as if he would rather be somewhere else. That look was not the only one that put her off. “You don’t look like your holo—oh, maybe I shouldn’t have said that.”

  He grinned. “Yah! The jaw! That got fixed up, at least for now.”

  “I heard someone saying you’d been attacked.”

  Ned sobered, and said, deadpan, “Only a flesh wound.”

  “Couple one-arm bongos,” said the woman sitting next to Ned, and he recognized her as the one who had tripped over his ankles. “But you got hoicked up by Spartakos. Never figured a mekko would have them kind of brains.”

  “Oh, he does,” said Zella. “But I don’t know of any one-arms among the pugs. Maybe novelty-fighters like Spartakos.”

  The cries and cheers ringing in the dining hall heralded the first good meal in months to the long-starved travelers, and Ned fell to ravenously and would not take up the conversation.

  Zella was becoming worried that she would never be able to find her way into his confidence when, toward the end of the meal, she looked up and found him staring at her. She said, “Something you were meaning to ask me?”

  The grimace returned to his face. “You remind me of somebody—a bit.”

  Zella thought, Wouldn’t want to be that one, whoever. But she said, “Is that a line?”

  He showed teeth. “Only if you bite.” He had Jacaranda on the brain, he knew that. He was being paranoid, but then he often was, lately, and with good reason. But the moment he had first looked at Jaca—no, Zella, the sense of determination in her face and how her features were set by it, the white skin, the way she moved her shoulders and arms, recalled—

  Cut that, Ned, or yer a dead ’un! His father was always saying that, with a whack, when his mind wandered.

  —reminded him of a younger Jacaranda at the time when they were both being seasoned under the hand of Manador.

  The antique pornograph had a room to itself adjacent to Level 3 Common Room #15. Most of the habitants had exhausted its treasures after a year in the Palace of Knossos, but many of the new pugs had never seen such a thing, and thirty-odd were crowded around it, faces flickering in its light.

  The machine measured about four meters by three and glittered with the sexual symbols of fourteen human species from twenty-five worlds in a thousand shades of color and intensities of flashing light. It housed six peepshows with touchy-feely and Orpha dugak music on the Varvanian wabu, eight erotic computer games with sound effects, a two-meter-square screen that played holo cartridges, and a three-dimens
ional Tri-V that programmed itself with innumerable variations on the same theme.

  Ned was standing near the crowd, for safety, but a little apart, to avoid being jostled. He wanted to put an arm around Zella, not just only to make her an unwitting ally, but the part of his mind that equated her with Jacaranda balked: every man who touched Jacaranda paid, one way or another. When he finally did bring himself to circle her waist, she relaxed against him with what seemed to him—relief?

  Something had gone wrong with the Tri-V and perhaps because it was so old no one had bothered to have it repaired. Its colors did not coalesce: each person in its dramas had become a close cluster of three images in red, blue, and green, and each gesture was tripled as three, six, nine hands groped for their shadowy pleasures.

  The cyborg woman said, “Shit, even I’ve seen all this junk and the thing’s buggin my eyes out. Where’s all the cartridges with the good stuff?”

  The man with the bad nose job was digging into a rack of cartridges below the big screen. “These things are so old I can’t even read what they say.” The fluorescence of the titles had rubbed away.

  A Khagodi with a tri-split tail picked a cartridge off the floor. “This one looks new.”

  “Yeah! Sisters, it says. Yeah. Every man should have one. What I—”

  “Just cut it out, Smugger, and get going,” the cyborg said. Smugger gave her a leer and slotted it in.

  Sisters opened with the camera eye looking from above at a woman lying on a bed, lit in dark red, infrared. She woke up, turned on the light. It was . . . not sure yet, but . . . she looked into a mirror, yes, it was Jacaranda. Red curly hair, white skin, small tight build. Ned’s heart bumped and he began to sweat very cold.

  The woman opened the door; a big man was waiting for her. She went down a hall with him: he stood by while she went into a room where a Lyhhrt in a workshell gave her an injection. There was no sound but the pornograph’s crazy music, and the action was tightly edited.