Flesh and Gold

by Phyllis Gotlieb

  “—and so you see—”

  “Shut up!” Ned yelled. Zamos’s image stopped speaking. “You promised to lead me to safety, Zamos. Which way is it?”

  “I will take you there this very moment,” said Zamos. Ned followed him past the cage of some whimpering female creature all breasts and buttocks, with a minuscule head and limbs, and then something completely different with too many heads. After that he went down a narrow hallway lined with dials and control panels, and faced one more door.

  “You may open that door for yourself,” said the image of Zamos. “I am leaving you here, Ned Gattes. I am pleased to have met you. You need not reply. I don’t exist here except as a hologram.” Zamos bowed with a flourish and blinked out.

  Ned pushed the door aside. Beyond it was a small round office lined with one huge cylindrical monitor screen in five panels. It was dead and cracked in places. The one light came from the ceiling and reflected off the lenses and antennas of a cleaning robot.

  Ned stared. “What is this?”

  “Did you enjoy the tour, Ned Gattes?” the robot asked in a crackling voice.

  “Is this some kind of joke?” Ned saw his reflection on the slick surface around him, warped by the cylindrical shape. He was sweating from the heat in the room of cages. “What are you?”

  “I am the last Lyhhrt on the world Shen Four. Perhaps the last on any alien world.”

  “I don’t believe you.”

  “Do you not? I know that you are a Galactic Federation agent.”

  “Why do you think that? Who told you?”

  “I sent for you, fellow! Or let us say that I/we did so. This entity received special permission to split, and my other half is on his way to the home I will never know again.”

  “I don’t understand. Anything.” The robot/Lyhhrt extended a folding limb and pushed forward a round stool for Ned to sit on. It was big and low to fit Varvani, but he sat down on it.

  “Listen. Zamos made us sign an oath to serve them, and then made us their slaves. It is because we are so timid and fearful, and we would have been hideously destroyed.”

  “A lot of people think you’re frightening!”

  “We do our best. We served Zamos for a hundred and twenty-nine years. At the beginning they taught us everything, and we learned so fast they say now that we know too much.”

  “You made all those monsters—and the O’e.”

  “We helped develop the technology that made them. At first we were subtly tricked by Zamos, because the Research Foundation was set up for us, and Zamos wanted to sweeten its name. Those of us who worked here became separated from our fellows and lost touch with the Cosmic Spirit. We were so fearfully lonely. Our minds became as warped as those of Zamos’s people. Zamos wanted to know how far they could go in making undifferentiated protoplasm become animals and persons, anything they could control. And we were so out of control that at one time we even thought that we might make independent organic bodies for ourselves instead of these metal ones. Disgusting thought!

  “We told ourselves that we were serving humanity, and perhaps we did, a little, but we have committed terrible wrongs, and I know it is not enough that we tried to minimize the harm.”

  Ned said bitterly, “Nobody could minimize any harm to Jacaranda, and that swimming thing was—was more—”

  “Yes, was more important. Jacaranda was aware of the risks, and we did our best to warn her.”

  “Did you,” Ned said dully.

  “The swimmer was the only definite evidence of a coerced being.” The Lyhhrt said. “The O’e could be called indigenous, or a world of origin could be faked up for them. But the swimmer’s species is known. It was created from your genotype of human stock on your own Old Earth, by the founders of Zamos, some hundreds of years back, not us, and bred for a few generations, then became sterile. The genetic data were saved, the type modified and cloned again and again because it had once been fertile. Slaves created on demand are immensely more valuable when they are self-breeding. This one is. She is pregnant.

  “Once we realized her significance we had her put in the brothel window to attract Skerow. We were desperate to find ways of attracting attention to Zamos’s crimes before they destroyed us in a manner just as terrible as the one we feared so much. We showed you on that machine, the ‘pornograph,’ what happened to Jacaranda in order to warn you that you were known and must take care. We were afraid to speak out against Zamos though they broke the oath they forced us to make. We hinted! Waiting and waiting for anyone to notice! Is no one outraged? Do all of you people of flesh want flesh in your power?”

  The O’e woman’s lip rouge burned on Ned’s mouth. He had thought too often of Jacaranda and Poll Tenchard. But he did not think Zella would be flesh in anyone’s power. He felt confused and gritty-eyed, not in shape to debate with Lyhhrt.

  “But no—”

  A hoarse voice outside the door yelled, “Gattes! Gattes, say something, Gattes! Tell us you aren’t in there!” The door rang with kicks and another voice snarled, “Move away!”

  “O God, they’ve found us!”

  “I am unjust,” the Lyhhrt went on, as if nothing had happened. “You are not all that bad—”

  “Listen to that!” Ned said through his teeth. “You said I’d be safe here, and now we’re both trapped!”

  “No, no! You will escape quite easily! You must hear me out, it is my last chance to repent! We did not sink entirely into sin, because—”

  There was a sound Ned could not quite identify. “They’re going to come—”

  “—because at the time we discovered the swimmer Kobai in Starry Nova we were able to find Skerow and Lebedev as well as you and your friend Jacaranda, who were not only willing but insisted on taking risks for us. Perhaps in places I do not know of there are others!”

  The edge of the door began to spark, to shrink and soften, and in a moment the plastial was running in drops like rain down along the edge, and a voice cried, “Idiot! Don’t touch it yet!”

  “There must be others!” the Lyhhrt’s voice went into a high whine, his limbs extended clattering and his antennas trembled. “Others!”

  “You’ve gone crazy,” Ned whispered.

  “Keep in back of me,” said the Lyhhrt. “I will save you.” Ned maneuvered to get the bulky robot body between himself and the door.

  An opening appeared and the snout of a Karnoshky flamer passed through. The Lyhhrt in a swift reach grabbed it and pulled, dragging a hand with it, and there was a scream.

  The Lyhhrt howled in a huge earsplitting voice that woke chords of resonance in every surface around him, “One hundred and twenty-nine years of slavery! Imprisoned in impervious barriers! Going mad in loneliness! Endlessly falling in sin!”

  He tossed the gun aside with one metal hand, hooked another in the soft edge of the door and folded it over like a sheet of paper. With the first he pulled in the Bimanda woman, knocked her down, then pulled her up by one arm and flung her against the screen; the impact widened its cracks, and she fell slumped. “A Cosmic Cycle of terror!” the Lyhhrt howled and reached out again.

  “Watch it!” Ned yelled. There were two others with guns, the Varvani with a machine pistol that looked like a tiny thing in his massive hand. Ned reached for the Karnoshky, though he had no idea how to use one, had never before seen one up close.

  “No, no!” The Lyhhrt pushed him roughly under the bank of controls that rimmed the screen, and Ned heard the whack-whack-whack of one gun and then another. Pieces of antennas and smashed sensor lenses flew against the walls but the Lyhhrt ran forward on his treads through the open doorway over these fragments, with his voice rising into a whine beyond hearing: “Say that you will testify, Ned Gattes! Say it!”

  “I will!” Ned gasped. He heard a soft crunch and another scream, and more shots.

  “Push that part of the console just behind you,” said the Lyhhrt in quite a sane voice that quavered only a little from the blows it was absorbing. “You are
not to be harmed.”

  “But you’ll be—”

  “Push it!”

  Ned rose in a crouch and shoved at it; it swung back squealing from a hundred years of forgetfulness, and opened into a narrow dark passageway.

  The Lyhhrt’s limbs rattled once more and died. He had lost his voice control and bellowed: “NOW GET OUT! IT IS OVER!”

  “But you—”

  “GET OUT!”

  The Lyhhrt was through the doorway, running toward the attackers with all the energy left to him. A stunner bolt hissed by Ned’s ear and he waited no longer but backed out on all fours through the dark opening, then stood to push back the console where it formed part of a wall. He leaned on it in the darkness, catching his breath while his eyes accommodated to the light. He heard nothing from the other side.

  After a few moments he saw that he was standing in another circular chamber at the top of a winding ramp. A light was slowly mounting from below, casting strange shadows as it came. He shrank against the wall.

  A voice said, “It is I, Spartakos.”

  Ned swallowed on a dry mouth. “He—the Lyhhrt—”

  Spartakos was standing half a head below him. The light was coming from his forehead. “Follow me,” he said.

  “But he—”

  “He does not wish or intend to be saved. Did not. I have alerted Security and I doubt that you want to meet them. Come along.” He put a hand on Ned’s wrist. It felt like warm satin.

  “Where are we going?” Ned pulled back.

  “There is a local freighter here that has been delivering supplies and will be taking patients with serious ailments to Portside City Hospital. You will be among them: I have an understanding with the autopilot, and it is delaying its flight for you. Then you will be sent to the Galactic Federation representative.”

  “No, I can’t go! I’ve got to find Zella!”

  “You must finish your assignment! We have just barely enough time for you to reach the landing. After that I will find Zella and bring her to you even if I must steal a ship and pilot it. I promise. Come!”

  Ned snarled, “Damn you, why didn’t you do all this earlier?” Sweat was running off his scalp, and when he wiped it from his forehead he saw that his fingers were flecked with gold. He thought for a moment that it had come from Spartakos’s touch, but the gold was only the dust in his hair. He followed Spartakos down the ramp, limping on his twisted ankle.

  “It was difficult to place you where you would find evidence and swear to testify to it without giving everything away to Zamos. The Lyhhrt would not show himself in the open when he is the last one in the Zamos’s power, and I am only a machine.”

  Ned looked into the lens eyes and said bitterly, “You have a terrible lot of arrogance for only a machine!”

  “I did my best to be a friend to you, Ned Gattes, and I think of you as my friend. I was built by the Lyhhrt people to be a guardian and a lighthouse, and when the Lyhhrt are safe and the O’e are free then I will perhaps have been more than just a machine.”

  Zella’s Walk

  Zella woke up on a hard bunk with a bruised arm and a hand she thought at first was broken. But she had been lying on it, in sleep or unconsciousness. Her mind was blank, and slow to put the world together. The grey-walled room, cell, had few features: a dim lamp in a wall bracket, a camera high under the ceiling in one corner and a small round window in another, showing a thin line of deep blue eastern sky at the bottom and a star in the deep blackness above; a small sink, a w.c. without a lid, a wall hook for hanging clothes. A set of denims was hung on it. She was lying on the narrow bed in her underwear—a brassiere and briefs. The air was hot and poorly filtered. She sat up dizzily, not remembering much, knowing she would not want to remember when she did.

  The room was a holding area for miscreants, usually drunks or swacked-out dopers, sometimes a too-violent fighter. She stared at the stark grey walls and they bounced back terror and dread. Stood up. More dizziness, a memory flash, she had been running, running . . . she ran some water over her face and hands, put on the blue pants and jacket, an old set of her own, and found her thick-soled shoes under the basin.

  Yes. She had bought the clothes, foolish, whorish clothes. Coming to meet Ned had caught sight of him, then the Security men—“That face—” one of them had said, flipping open a wallet with Ned’s hologram and pointing down, Ned standing looking up, catching sight of them with his face going white but for that odd dark part of his jaw, and she running with her arms open to embrace them, touching that one on the back of the neck with a red-gloved hand and laughing as if they were her dearest Johns.

  They’d humored her just for an instant, one of them had given her a feel before he blinked and said, “Hey, this is Sztoyko!” and the other snapped, “That was Gattes down there, you shithead, and he’s gone!” Then they’d really grabbed her, and she had fought like a demon. Things after that were confused, she thought they’d used a stunner, and now there was a bit of a bruise on her arm where she’d been given a dermcap or a needle.

  She drank some water to work the fog out of her head and sat on the bunk with her hands on her lap working to push the fear away . . . away from Ned. She could not think what more there was to do for him.

  Time passed and when she opened her eyes again someone was saying, “Here’s your breakfast, Sztoyko,” and a tray was being pushed in through a flap at the bottom of the door. She picked it up and lifted the cover; breakfast was the same sausages, eggs, and grilled tomatoes as usual from Zamos’s hydroponic farms. Not prisoners’ fare, but she had not expected rusks and water. She sat down again and ate, beginning slowly, and then with a sharpened appetite. When she had finished she replaced the tray near the flap and waited.

  Someone came and pulled it away eventually, and after that the lock whirred in the door. It slid back, and an ordinary-looking hefty fellow came in. His hair was red and his mouth a deeper color from chewing something, betel, perhaps, and one wrist was tattooed with some emblem of the Brotherhood of Goons. He had a small low-grade stunner tucked in a sling and hardly seemed to need it. “Come on,” he said.

  “Am I a prisoner?”

  “Your sheet says violence”—he spat red juice into the sink—“but I know you aren’t gonna be violent with me, sweetheart.”

  “No, I won’t be violent.”

  “Somebody wants to talk to you,” he said, and raised his arm toward the open door. He came out after her and walked beside her, his hand not quite at his side, ready to grab if she strayed.

  The corridor was a place she had not even seen before; there were only two other cells she did not have time to look into. Her mind was running like a—not a computer but the adding machines they used on New Southsea World in her home colony, Eden II, with their glimmering brass-toothed wheels and steel-rimmed keys. She had a deep stab of longing for all the old hicks and yokels there.

  When she came out of this section with her warder behind her the more familiar halls were quiet, in a depth-of-dawn near stillness where few were moving about, and the sky through the huge arch of window the color of a peacock’s neck. Maybe my last morning.

  Only the Khagodi were up early doing exercises, or pretending to, in slow and sluggish movements, stopping every once in a while to scratch their unhelmeted heads. They were a surly lot, and the dim thoughts they emitted were cloudy with resentments and old grudges. No help for her there, not anywhere, she thought. Most of the hardiest revelers had staggered away, and the only one she saw was a very old man being supported by a woman bodyguard; his ancient face had been recreated so many times that it seemed to have been seared by hot irons, and its touches of makeup might have been done by an embalmer. The flat-eyed woman with him was from the same stable as her own escort.

  Sweet was doing pushups on one of the workout floors; he had not shaved yet, and there was a sleepy grin on his face; probably he had spent the night with a woman from one of the lower floors and stopped on the way home; he looked happy with
himself, still enough of a pretty-boy to give some woman a thrill. She wondered that no one had stolen his diamond tooth. It flashed when he turned his head as she went by. “How you doing, Zella? Hey, where you been?”

  The muscle said, “Don’t. Say. Anything.”

  “Wherever I’ve been, I’m back now, all right.”

  Red Teeth grasped her arm, she tensed and twisted. They stared at each other for a moment. “He’s my friend,” she said. He let go, and they went on as before. A grey matte-finished cleaning robot that was coming toward them wheeled as they passed and followed them with a crackle of static.

  He looked around. “What the hell’s that thing doing?”

  “Are you addressing me?” The machine asked. “I have been assigned a task in this direction.”

  Everything at once became surreal to Zella. The world Shen, the Palace of Knossos, the fighting, gambling, and whoring, Ned far and gone, her life. Her whole life. She went along as if she were something flat on a screen, seeing tableau on tableau, Sweet with his diamond tooth, one old whore or another, one muscle-bound bully or the next. Her mind seemed separated from her eyes, running on a flat screen behind them with flickering gears and spindles. In a moment the corridor would turn and broaden past the coaches’ offices into the concourse that led to the escalators down the hall on the way to the Front Offices . . . She was walking along, Jacaranda, just like this, first with him, and then that woman, letting that woman touch her with those claws, letting her . . .

  “That way,” Muscles said, pointing to the last office in the corridor, where Kati’ik was standing in the open doorway, with Gobo just behind her.

  “So, dems’l, you are back,” Kati’ik said.

  Zella stared. Expecting this encounter farther along on a different level, she was disoriented once again. All of the sores flamed on her face and jaws. Letting her at my face with those filthy ripping claws.

  She climbed over the fear in an intense effort, and said in a low voice, “What do you want from me?”

  “I thought once that I wanted you to fight in the arena, what you were hired to do.” Tiny white lights shone off Kati’ik’s eyes. “I had even planned to invite you into the Lottery we are pulling today, the fight in blood. Believe me, you would have preferred that to what you will do now: answer my very pressing questions.”