The alley was cool and dark; a few old bulbs cast yellow stains on the shadows. Ned paused at one narrow door and pulled at its latch gently, but it would not stir. After a moment he heard grunting and giggling. He shrugged and moved on. Behind other doors he listened to rattling dishes, fistfights, and an Orpha chorus singing to kettledrums before he found an entrance he dared try.
He winkled a fingernail into the latch and the door slid open with a scream of runners that made him glance about quickly, but no fleck of dust stirred in the long corridor to either side of him. “What is it?” Zella whispered.
“I think it used to be a lav,” Ned said. “Looks like it’s been here about three hundred years and long before Zamos.” He was exaggerating, but not by much. A dusty bulb, switched on and off by a pull-string, showed an irregular-shaped room with odd angles butting into it. It had not been cleaned recently, but did not have the filth of centuries. The cracked terrazzo floor was grimy but dry, and a large oval basin of imitation marble was sunk into it; there were two sinks of different heights, a wash-tub and a doorless cubicle with two urinals, also of different heights.
Ned warned Zella back, stepped over the lintel and peered about; nothing jumped out at him. He crossed his fingers and pushed the tap button; with a fearful squeal it gave out a stream of rusty liquid that began to clear after a moment. He turned to beckon to her: “Your chamber waits, m’lady, your bath is drawn—not quite, I don’t think you’d want to wash your face in that stuff just yet, but if it keeps running it might be useful. Look, here’s a tarp folded up in the washtub, it might be clean enough inside to keep us from the dirt. Where do you want it?”
She pointed to the sunken basin and before he had finished smoothing out the tarp had slipped down and arranged herself in its cradling shape. The moment she stopped moving she was asleep. He looked down at her, neatly angled in the rumpled slate-blue pants and jacket, one hand beneath her face and the other curled alongside. The wounds on her cheek had dried and under the covering makeup were dull pink spots. Now that he knew her she seemed so utterly different from Jacaranda that he could not at all find the similarities that had struck him so deeply when he first met her. The look of her dissolved, if only for the moment, the fears and worries crowding his mind; he pulled the lamp string, folded himself down beside her in the darkness, circled her with his arm, and slept.
Zella woke with a start from a dream of a clawed bird dropping shrieking from the sky, not only an image of Kati’ik attacking but an omen of every danger she had ever feared. Her hands and face throbbed, but not fiercely; the dermatex she had painted them with dulled the soreness.
She became aware of Ned’s arm resting on her and the whisper of his breath stirring her hair. There was nothing familiar about waking here; thumps and stirring from the walls around her, the still and dusty air, and the hard basin beneath the rough tarp she was lying on. All of them emblems of the danger she still did not know the nature of, the unnamed peril she had been drawn into because she looked something like—only something like!—the friend of Ned Gattes named Jacaranda, who had died so horribly.
The door squeaked, and Ned startled but did not waken. Zella began to tremble and tried to shrink down farther into the basin. Her heart was churning like a milk separator.
Something bearing a light—an arm?—reached in through the open doorway, and paused suspended. She shaded her eyes with her hand but could not see what was beyond it.
A very heavy moment passed. The light dimmed and withdrew. From the backlighting in the alleyway she saw that the intruder was a servicing robot, who had sensed life and left it undisturbed. The door drew closed on its shrieking casters. Her heart was still jumping and she felt the sweat on her face like a sheen of ice. She could not move for a moment.
The danger of wanting excitement, like a narcotic, she knew it now, everything her family on New Southsea had warned her about. She grinned into the darkness and raised her hand to pull down Ned’s zippers.
EIGHT Exits
Khagodis: Skerow and Evarny
On Khagodis, in the hot heart of the Diluvian Continent, International Trade Consortium and Goldyne fought each other slowly through the long demanding trial. The crucial witness Nohl—who had lost his knife to Kobai’s people the gold-gathers, his eye to the gold-buyers, and most of his life to the sellers—poisoned and wounded though he was, did not die, but stubbornly clung to his terrible existence. Since he had sworn three times to his testimony, and each time more cantankerously, he was left alone; there was nothing more to be gained either by prosecuting or by murdering him.
Nohl had insisted on speaking unprotected by counsel or helmet, and an ESP notary had confirmed that his statement was the truth as he saw it; the confirmation bore no more weight than any other lie-detector test but was there if only to say that he was telling the truth when he claimed to be guilty. His evidence was haggled over by the opposing forces with as much emotional as climatic heat, for its implications, and its hints of accusation.
Skerow was sharply on the alert for any suggestion that she had been remiss, or that Nohl’s accusation against her had become a rumor or implication of corruption. There was none; the testimony was being treated like any other.
But Skerow was forced to declare Nohl’s account of Kobai and her people inadmissible. There was no evidence whatever to show that the Consortium was actually kidnapping intelligent persons or that Nohl was enslaving them. It was not part of the charges against Goldyne’s theft and selling of gold. Her consolation was that there were world and interworld authorities who would be deeply interested in it, particularly on Fthel V in Starry Nova, where the story as she knew it had begun.
Nohl was only one of a sleazy group of would-be crooks engaged in stealing gold and making its owners pay to borrow it. In that limited perspective the matter was clear enough to the court. If Skerow had been younger and less experienced, they would have seemed to her a crew of rogue Khagodi disgracing themselves and their world for the Federation to jeer at. Now she accepted that there would always be such rogues on the fringes. It was the knavery of a powerful judge like Thordh that she found so painful still.
As this excitement was ebbing, one of the three chief lawyers for the Consortium, an ancient Khagodi woman, did not return from the midday break, and was found dead in her quarters. An eddy of fear rippled through the court, but Skerow had known the old woman in a formal way for many years, and for just as long had heard the rumors of her struggle with a rare form of leukemia.
To give the lawyers time to regroup, she declared the afternoon session adjourned, and called out over the whispers of the congregation: “We shall recess for next after tomorrow,” grave and sober as ever, though she shared the irritation of the whole Court over a day and a half of doing not much in the tropic city of Burning Mountain at the nadir of its summer.
If Nohl had not been poisoned, the trial would not have been brought forward into the hot season, she was thinking—and he would not have confessed either.
But all that she had learned from Nohl told her nothing of Kobai, who in her mind was still suspended, helpless, in the window of Zamos’s brothel, burning in her imagination out of a night of rainfall in Starry Nova.
While she was hanging up her robe in her office and delivering her daybook to a clerk for downloading into Files, Ossta the Court Officer popped her head through the doorway and said, “Skerow my friend, would you like a good hot supper at my rooms in town? They’re not far away from here and I have a fresh crock-bull shank and a good jug of white-thorn essence.”
“Thank you so much, Ossta, that sounds delightful.”
“Meet me about sundown, then, in the front courtyard here, and we can walk over together. There is a roasting spit on the roof of my building and the sunset is so pretty from there.”
Skerow had an unpleasant flashback of Hathe saying: Share the evening meal with me, Hathe who had nearly killed her, whom she had so nearly killed, and pushed it from her mind. She
had known Ossta as a girl, back a number of years it was better not to count, when they had both studied Law. “I’m sure I will enjoy it, Ossta! Now I am going to Central Telegraphy and try to make contact with my sisters. I have not even had an opportunity to tell them I am staying on. Will you leave an answering message for me?” She knew that she would be truly grateful to avoid the Court Refectory, which served food far too much like the sea-smik, myth-ox, and preserved kappyx bulbs her digestion had been burdened with in Starry Nova.
The communications center of Burning Mountain was inside the station where Skerow had disembarked from the ferry. It was not within walking distance of the courthouse, and Skerow was obliged to take the flatbed omnibus, pulled by a pair of massive and foaming thumbokh, that bounced roughly on the cobbled road; there was a Standard hour of heavy riding on this in deeply oppressive heat, but she was relieved to be free of the close atmosphere of the Court, to watch persons leading ordinary lives in workshops and at market stalls.
The Hall of Telegraphy was a smaller sister of the one in Port Manganese, a round stone building centered with a tower of antennas; most of the outworlders using it here were attached to the Interworld Court, and half the rest were journalists who observed them. Arches in the thick walls led to small dingy shops where travelers could drink tea or wine, finger tired-looking souvenirs or order take-away food for the journey.
Skerow found her place in line at the railing, composing in her mind the message she would send, watching while the whickering fans stirred the hot dusty air under the dome, and two non-ESP outworlders at her elbow quarreled over who had come first. She pulled off her helmet because her skin felt as if it were writhing with sweat beneath it, and after a moment felt a mental touch, then became aware of someone approaching her.
“Yes?”
A tall young Khagodi man she did not know, wearing a helmet and a messenger’s badge on a swag of leather, was standing beside her. “Madame, there is a gentleman who would like to speak to you on an urgent matter. He is waiting in that tearoom.”
Skerow glanced along the fellow’s pointing arm, noted the darkness of the archway leading to the tea shop, and was instantly suspicious. She said firmly, “I am not going to lose my place in this line, carrier. If your gentleman’s concern is so urgent, he may come to me and speak.”
“Madame, he cannot.”
“Then, fellow, he must do without my advice.” Skerow stepped forward in line, and the messenger took a step to keep abreast of her. “It is no use staying with me. I am not coming.” One of the non-ESPs was looking at her oddly, but she turned away to glare at the carrier.
What happened went quickly then. She realized that she was going to be touched physically, but her reflexes did not move her soon enough to dodge the pressure that came on the inside of her wrist, of something cool and moist. After one twitch of repulsion she turned her hand out wonderingly and saw the dermcap melting on the thin skin, diffusing into the throbbing veins beneath. I have been drugged, she told herself, as if the I were somebody else.
She watched the half-crushed globe for a blurred moment, and looked into his eyes; he was her height. “You must come, Madame,” he said.
She nodded, and went along with him toward the arch. Now it was full of light. My pupils have expanded. Inside there were three small eating tables suitable for her height and five or six others at lower heights, with chairs to match, for squatters. Shadowy figures were crouching at them. The hard center of her being fought to see clearly, but the languor swept her, not unpleasantly, not unpleasantly enough.
There was a bowl of liquid on the table in front of her; its surface seemed to ripple like moving lips. No, Skerow, no! The mindvoice was not quite her own. She shuddered inwardly and drank.
“You must come now,” said the young man once more. He had changed his shape imperceptibly, and now he seemed to be writhing like the priest representing the Endless River Serpent at the spring dances of Southern Vineland. With an arm around her shoulder he led her willingly, lovingly, to a portal where she took one step into another dimension, a universe that was the inside of a bubble, colors and music flowing over its glassy surface, whose lights above her came from a thousand stars, whose floor was a pool of pretty blue water. She stood on the ceramic edge, waiting for the one she knew would rise from the water, her dead daughter Bathetto. They would look into each other’s eyes and talk together forever.
The love rose swelling in her spirit, it drummed against her forehead and pressed out the tears. So many years of sorrow in alien places far away from even her desert and its moons . . .
Skerow!
The hard daily self that called to her was encapsulated in a bubble of its own, sealed away from her dream.
The being rose from the blue center of the water with massive head turned toward her and heavy jaws grinning. His eyes gleamed bright topaz, and the prismatic colors played over him so that he seemed almost to be part of the bubble’s diaphanous wall. The air was full of perfumes.
“It is good to see you, Skerow!” Thordh cried.
Skerow’s love collapsed in folds like a struck tent. Even so, she was not surprised. The quarter-century acquaintanceship with Thordh was an unshapely, unfinished part of her life’s experience, something she always knew that she must face—but never so pleasantly! “I am glad to find you in good health, Thordh. Even though you are dead.” She was laughing and crying. A needle of half-conscious and never-acknowledged feeling pierced her between the hearts: a terrible relief that what she was facing was not Bathetto. She was free.
“Death is not so bad when you get used to it,” said Thordh.
She found herself chuckling. She would never before have accused Thordh of being a witty fellow. She warmed to him. “How pleased I am to be with you!” Free.
Skerow!
He stood up in the water so that his serpentine tail rode the ripples of its surface. His upper lip folded over his beautiful teeth in a rictus of desire. “I have always loved you, Skerow, even though I have never spoken my love.” The colors flowed over him as if they had a life of their own, and she could feel her passion uncoiling in long swaths that followed the lines of his body. Free.
His body swam the air so that it twined about hers without touching. “You are the woman with whom I truly longed to share my Lineage.”
“Yes, Thordh . . .”
“How I wish you were the mother of my children!”
Antidote!
She was swimming off the edge and into the depth: the depth not of freedom but of nothingness. My children. The words tasted like iron, and her passion, so deeply sexual, subsumed itself into those other and even deeper passions of mother-love, wife-love, that had burned in her unrelieved for thirty-five years. The sore of her being burst and flared its poison into her longing; it set her afire with fury from bone to skin. With infinite slowness and all her strength, before she sank forever, she shook herself free, pulled away the hand with which she had been about to caress Thordh, drew air into her constricted chest and hissed, “That is damned nonsense!”
—damn you, the antidote!
The fading light of her mind sharpened for a moment: before shame at even the thought of delivering her private self to Thordh had time to flood her, she realized that she had been not only drugged, but poisoned. Then her field of vision darkened with a blue-grey stain, the iron burned in her throat, the cramp hit her, she twisted and involuntarily swept Thordh with her tail. She felt a sting and thought it was death. The stain blackened all of the light.
“Skerow, wake up! You must wake, Skerow!”
I am awake. She was just dimly aware of lying in the basin in that strange place where she had found Thordh. Thordh was—not speaking to her but lying beside her on the ledge . . . no, it was not Thordh but someone vaguely reptilian and green-grey, wearing a suit of cloth or leather colored like a Khagodi man’s skin. Not a Khagodi even . . .
“You must rouse and stir yourself, move about and circulate the antido
te! Do wake up, Skerow!”
I have never been free.
“No one is,” said Evarny. “Now—”
Evarny?
“Yes, yes! Try to rise up, get a good breath of air. The Security people are here now, and there will be an ambulance in just a moment.”
“Security? Ambulance? Whatever for?” She noticed several more shadowy figures, these quite recognizable as Burning Mountain Security forces. “What has happened, Evarny?”
“You were so near, so near death! I was calling and calling you!” “I thought it was my own self calling me. What are you here for?” She asked this of the ambulance crew, who were pushing in a proper wheeled stretcher, well padded and broad as a barn door, not like the makeshift cobbled together when she had collapsed in Starry Nova. She felt quite cheerful and lively.
“You are going to the hospital right away to make sure the antidote has worked properly, and they will probably want to keep you a day or two for observation.”
“I’m damned if they will! I am going to Ossta’s to eat crock-bull shank and drink white-thorn!”
“No, Skerow. Ossta will put her crock-bull shank into the cool-safe and save her white-thorn for one or two days more. You have been poisoned with karynon and must be watched.”
“Karynon—the aphrodisiac—ugh! I had to try poor Lebedev for smuggling that.”
“Poor! I hope you gave him life in prison!”
“No no! He was quite innocent.” The attendants were lifting her up in slings; water poured off her. To herself she seemed heavy as lead now. She had one more side glance at the creature who had pretended to be Thordh. “I had to send him to prison for a year, a heavy punishment for smuggling a few trogga of contraband barley and.” She had meant to add, “chickpeas,” but fell asleep on the word, and knew nothing for a day.
She woke lying on a waterbed like the one Nohl had been on when she heard his deposition; her ears were ringing, she felt dim and nauseated, grateful to see the iv connected to her arm so that she did not need to eat. When she remembered karynon and Thordh she was doubly nauseated, and by the time Evarny appeared in her doorway her first impulse was to cry out, “Don’t say anything!”
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