The sun beat down demoniacally; the air refrigerators thudded like monsters’ hearts under the shields of thick polarized glastex and could never make the atmosphere quite comfortable in this upper level where the fighters practiced in public for small bettors. Even so, Ned would have been content here under the high ceilings and their hanging fans, in all the noise of machetes clashing, children screaming, and fighters yelping in pain or triumph if he had been allowed to enjoy it in peace.
He paused to stare at the masks while he wiped bits of plastrine from his hairline. Whores, pugs, and bouncers, many long dead, stared back at him eyelessly. The newest masks taken from the young and living were pale ivory, and as they aged rising in their rows toward the ceiling they yellowed like old bones; it seemed to Ned that their features hardened and twisted with time. Most of the actual faces had been reconstructed before their impressions were taken, some not for the better, and others had gone to their deaths much worse. Jacaranda, who cared little for her looks except to please Manador, had never been so much as blemished.
In one of the lowest rows he recognized Zella’s young rounded face, a softer one than Jacky’s, and thought his own scarred mug would look odd beside it. Zella was sitting on a bench in the corridor outside waiting to lead him to setups. She had been waiting at his door when he woke, and sitting near him at breakfast and noon dinner.
Now she was beside him, putting a hand through his arm.
Four cold fingers in the crook of his elbow.
She had been watching him, how he moved. He was really nervous, really working to stay calm. But he’d been hardly half awake when he was attacked, then knocked down in the melee, and after that discovered the fearful death of a friend on that pornopic. It was because of the flurry of new-dog arrivals that all those events hadn’t been given much attention; not many people had seen them, and he wasn’t in a hurry to report them, either. That woman who had been killed, Jacaranda, was she another spy? She didn’t look like somebody caught up in a gambling ring . . . if she was, the Kylkladi had certainly taken care of her.
No more did Ned look like a spy for gamblers, with his grafted jaw and the scar running from his left ear around to the first vertebra below the nape of his neck. And he was too wide awake now, and shy of her. Wary. Not one to jump into her bed and make himself familiar. It looked to her as if he was trying to get away rather than worm himself in. She wondered what he did know. She wondered if that death scene, with its Kylkladi, had not taken place in a Zamos brothel . . . the thought gave her a shiver.
Ned was giving her a curious glance that was chilling in its own way.
With an effort Ned twisted his mind away from danger and set at Zella with the sham chebok. He did not really like the chebok; it was too easy to imagine the spikes slashing him. No other weapon, except for the outlawed morning-star, affected him this way, and he had worked to use it with skill only because it was Jacaranda’s specialty.
Zella’s style was different from Jacaranda’s, her attitude something of an enthusiast’s, fresh and a little unwary. He had known pugs like that, both men and women, and a few whores too, young ones; some had even been wise enough to get out of the business before they got old and twisted.
Perhaps she found it just possible to read his mind as he was thinking this. One pass when he did not follow through as hard as he should her eyes sparked, and she fetched him a clout with the buckler that rang changes in his head. On the rebound he caught her with her chebok injudiciously positioned like a burr between her body and her own buckler; he gave her a light tap that did not hurt her, but her fury at herself drew blood to her face. God damn you Ned Gattes, I was living my life here working at what I do best and you come and everything is turned over in one day!
They exchanged speculative looks.
“Yer too damn polite, Ned.” The coach reached up to whack his shoulder hard with a broad palm. Gobo was very short, long-armed, and hairy; he looked like the result of an only too-successful mating of ape and human.
“Not up to full strength,” Ned said, doing a little shadow-box-dance to show he was trying.
“Not good ’nough,” Gobo was saying, when the clogs came rattling across the floor, and Ned saw Zella freeze. He thought he could feel the prickling at the nape of her neck.
The clogs paused, and she and Kati’ik, the personnel manager, caught eyes for a sharp moment. Those claws scratching, scratching down my body like that murderer was doing with her!
For that moment he thought he could read her mind in her eyes. Whatever you want, no! I haven’t screwed it out of him! He was upset, just left me and went to his room! Did you want me to rape him the first night? Leave me alone, alone!
The klok-klok receded and Gobo sniggered. “Guess y’ wouldn’ wanner be in a ring with that’n.”
Zella said in a strangled voice, “Let’s keep going.”
“Yar,” said Gobo, taking the buckler from Zella. “Get some English on that ’bok, Ned.” Without warning he knocked Ned’s buckler aside and swung his armored fist outward at the side of Ned’s head.
Zella without thinking sent her chebok up his armpit to deflect his aim. He said, “Uh,” almost inaudibly and stepped back.
“Not on the first day, Gobo,” Zella said, and gave him a grin that did not reach her ice-blue eyes.
After the noon meal the siesta broke the long hot day, and its deserted quietness was profound. Ned was lying on his cot with his hands folded in back of his head, watching the shadows as the sunbeam swung in his round window like a searchlight. Every once in a while he heard a snore from Smugger next door, or a ringing from far off: the robot Spartakos, untiring, a gold-edged guardian with a surface rippling like satin as he moved, stalked the corridors; his feet were padded, but not thickly enough to keep his steps from resonating.
Ned wondered if Zella would come. He was expecting her—whether to seduce him or give him another crack on the head he was not sure. She’d been quick enough with Gobo. The memory made him snigger.
He did not hear any steps at all before the tap on his door. When he called out, “Yeh?” it opened and she came in and sat down on the bed, calmly and looking rather determined. Her eyes were on him, and she rested her hand lightly just above his navel as if it were the center of the universe and very, very far away. “I’m here,” she said. “You want me?”
Ned thought her eyes were a bit smoky. He seemed to hear his father’s voice saying, Better not go blindside to that one, Ned. When her kind rankle up it’s devil take the hindermost. His father would have known, had married one, among others. He had still a way to go in the arena with this one.
He breathed deeply, put his hand over hers, and said, “Any time you want to do it. Right now somebody else wants you to do it.”
She took her hand away and looked at him, fathoming him from a new point of view. “Who are you, Ned Gattes?” Her whisper seemed very loud in the silence punctuated by Smugger’s snores.
“What’d they tell you? Your people think I know too much about something I never even got to find out until last night!”
“My people?”
“Whoever paired you with me because you look so much like Jacaranda.”
Zella recoiled. “Me? Jacaranda?”
“You have the same body shape and movement. Determination.”
She shivered. “I’m nothing like, nowhere near like her!”
“I thought you were, the moment I saw you, and they must think so, whoever they are.”
“That’s terrible. I don’t even want to think of it.”
“But they wanted you to stick to me?”
“Stay close to you. Sleep with you . . . anything so you’d talk. I was told you were a spy for a gambling ring.”
“I thought it was something like that.”
“That’s why I banged you on the head. I was peeved at being maneuvered into agreeing . . . did you love her very much? Jacaranda?”
“As a friend. She wasn’t ever my lover . . . th
ey didn’t realize, they never thought . . . she went with men for money, sometimes, but she never cared for any man—the closest we got was that we shared a lover, and Jacky was the one that was loved, not me. They made a mistake, whoever ‘they’ are.”
“My ‘they’ is Kati’ik. She’s the Personnel Supervisor on this level.”
“I noticed, when she came by, the way you were looking at each other.”
“One thing she’s not is ‘my people.’” She looked at him directly, daring him. “Why did you come? She’ll keep pushing at me, I need something to tell her.”
“I applied to join the Spartakoi for seven Standard years before they gave me the call. It doesn’t look as if I’m going to enjoy my membership now I’ve got it. But I had really wanted to come here.”
Her eyes were doubtful and searching. “That isn’t all, though?”
“It’s all I can say.”
She stood up. “I hope . . . she’ll believe me.”
“I was stupid to jump straight into a trap, but what I’ve told you is true.” He took her hand. “You do believe me . . . you wouldn’t let Gobo flatten me.”
But her mind was on Kati’ik and she forced a smile to cover her fearful thoughts. “Maybe I need a friend here as much as you do.”
“Can’t I be more than than only a friend?”
Zella slipped out without answering yes or no, and he did not hear her light step beyond the door. There was nothing else then but to sit on the edge of the bed and think of her.
I don’t know why I even said that, there’s no time for it now. I’ve got to keep telling lies and trying to stay alive long enough to get out of here . . . yes, I guess I know why I said that. It’s dangerous to trust her, but I want more than a friendly machine, or a good fighting partner, or a whore who lets herself get beaten up for me and makes me feel like a shit.
Ned’s first match was one of the many free round-the-clock fights that took place in the lobbies of casinos, brothels, and amusement parks: a game of blitz, a simple contest in which two fighters squatted like sumo wrestlers in a circle and tried to shove each other out of it. The arena was a little theater of marble, a miniature Greek odeon with velvet cushions.
Blitz was an old time-waster for spacers and the children who imitated them—and for Ned who had been an alley-boyo; his opponent was Sweet, Zella’s sparring partner. It occurred to Ned that he was just being put through the motions until he could be easily disposed of—unless Front Office expected Sweet to do it.
Crouching in this circle that reminded him very much of a target, he was wary; he watched, hands up and out with fingers rigid, like knives; no fists were allowed. Sweet’s diamond tooth glinted in the arc lamp.
After dodging a couple of feints Ned realized that all Sweet wanted was the thrill of being in competition rather than sparring. After that he found his rhythm, knocked aside a jab with his shoulder and got under Sweet’s arm to whack him on the side of his head with the edge of a hand and push him out of the ring. The members of the audience, mush-mouthed with free drinks and cheap drugs, gave him a few halfhearted yelps of approval and tossed some scant handfuls of brass tokens and sweetdrift petals.
The next day passed without combat or any other incident. Ned worked out in the gyms among the pugs who had landed with him.
Zella kept him within sight most of the time, but she had become untouchable—he had freed her to refuse him and thought she would as long she felt that making love to him was following orders; he was certain she was not his enemy. But he had no lover either.
One more night, and the next afternoon he and Zella fought a double with buckler and chebok for charged admission with a pair named Hammer Head and Knuckle Duster, sisters who usually fought each other or did an act. The arena was bigger and so was the audience. The women were better fighters than Sweet, and the fighting rhythm needed to be more intense and dramatic to give the watchers their money’s worth. Zella was used to the techniques of their opponents, but Ned took some scratches and earned his money hard: each of the sisters weighed half again as much as he. All four came back together down endless corridors on the service rideways, Zella weary enough to lean on Ned’s shoulder. She murmured, “I told Kati’ik what you told me, that you’d trying to come here for years. All she said was, to stay with you . . . do you think she believed me?”
Ned, much as he wanted to reassure her, could say only, “I don’t know. I hope so.”
Zella shivered. “She just wants me to be a whore.”
“You aren’t, you’ll never be a whore.”
She said nothing.
When he opened the door of his room he found a woman—he thought it was a woman—waiting for him. A beige-skinned, hairless person of a species he had seen many times without noticing or recognizing as a people he knew. He thought she was a servant who brought his towels and laundry. She stirred the memory of the pair who had jumped him on his first evening here; they had had the same color of skin.
She had been sitting on the bed in the dark and as he came in and flicked light on she stood up. Her impervious helmet glittered with fake jewels. He stared at her without thinking very much of anything; she was slender and narrow-shouldered, and her mouth was lightly rouged. “Yes?” A question he forced past his lips. Of course he knew the answer.
“I am at your service, Mister,” she said in a soft voice, and began to pull down the tag of her zip. Underneath she was wearing something red with the glint of gold spangles, and a gold chain with a pendant that hung down between her tiny breasts. He reached to touch and examine it and she flinched, just observably. The little heart with the keyhole that Jacaranda had worn.
He felt as if he had been kicked. She stood before him in her flesh almost the color of dust and darker around her eyes and creases, almost asking to be abused, with little lightning forks of fear flickering in her eyes.
“Thank you, Miss,” he said. “Not this evening. Maybe another time,” and stepped aside to let her go.
But she shrank back into a corner of the room. “Mister, please don’t push me out. You don’t have to pay me anything.”
“I’m tired and hungry, lady!”
She whispered, “They’ll beat me.”
He sat down on the bed and said wearily, “Sit down. Who are ‘they’?”
“The ones that pay me. That run this place.”
“What do they want of me?” He put his hand on her shoulder.
“Don’t ask me, mister! Please don’t ask me.”
He lifted his hand. “Don’t be frightened! I won’t touch you and they won’t beat you either.” He opened the door, stood up and pulled her toward him; standing at the doorway in full view, he kissed her on the mouth; she flinched a little as if it had been the first time ever. “Tell ’em I like you very much and want to see you again.” He kissed her again. “You go tell ’em, darling-o.”
He stood staring after her, licking her rouge off his mouth, as she disappeared in the shadows of doorways or among clumps of people gathering families or lovers for a pub drink before dinner. He wondered who she was, surely not a citizen of any nations he had learned of at school in the history book about his ancestral Earth. She seemed to be a Solthree woman . . . Anyway, it looks as if they’ve given up trying to make a spy out of Zella . . . The unease settled into him more deeply.
While he was bathing and changing he noticed that one of his cuts was uglier than he had thought and was seeping so badly that he could not stop it. He dressed quickly and hurried down to the clinic. Though he was not afraid of the Lyhhrt doctors, the one available to him was a medmech and in a few moments he was absorbing an antiseptic dermcap and being patched.
In the Clinic waiting room there was a cylindrical tank of fish, and Ned paused to watched them for a moment. He wondered if they had developed in the brackish seas beyond the docks; they looked truly alien and not restful. A few were twisted monsters in splattered colors that made him think of the swimming creature who had set the whole train
of events in motion by calling out to Skerow, the Lizard Lady.
He asked the robot doctor, “Do those come from here?”
“A few. We breed them. The others are clones that we make here.”
“Really?”
“We clone zoo animals too, some for research. We are known throughout Galactic Federation for our Research Foundation. Have you not heard of it? Tours every tenday.”
“Thanks for telling me,” Ned said. He did not think he wanted a tour.
The medmech did not quite nod, and its metal face of course did not change expression.
Ned went away bemused. Tanks, swimmer, slaves. We breed them. He had wondered first why he and Jacaranda had been assigned to that swimmer and afterward whether that had anything to do with slaves. He realized that the two assignments were bound together in a way he did not understand.
Manador knew nothing about the swimmer and Lebedev had not told Ned much when he was sent out, but Jacky had died for her, he himself had been hunted, nearly killed without knowing what her importance was; innocent Zella was a counter tossed and spinning in a game she knew nothing about.
As he threaded his way back through the level of practice arenas, he heard Spartakos’s resonant voice declaiming; the words were blurred by baffles and echoing. He followed the sound to a tiny amphitheater where twenty-odd people had gathered to listen. These were not pugs but the patrons who usually hung about the small arena to gamble.
Ned thought the robot might have been repeating the same spiel he had given to the incoming gladiators earlier, but it seemed he had more than one. “Members of the audience,” he was saying, “I have been given the name of a slave.” While he spoke he was polishing himself with a chamois, wiping his limbs unaffectedly like a bather, but quite unlike any known bather of his shape, turning his head by a hundred and eighty degrees and bending his arms backward to make sure he had not missed a spot. Sometimes he paused to emphasize a point with a gesture.
Flesh and Gold Page 16
