Spartakos paused to stare at her. “That is not an auton,” he said.
No friend for Spartakos there. “No.”
“That’s not seemly, Ned.”
“The beer isn’t very good either,” Ned muttered, wishing he’d chosen some other place. His nose prickled with smokes and perfumes. A lot more of the jhat here. He searched for a table, sidling through the usual crowd of rawboned sweatband-headed men with skin half sunburn half tattoo, wrapped around hefty women wearing real jewels. Mostly they were workers around the port or on permanent time-and-a-half in mines, factories, construction and on derricks, and most of them knew Ned, mainly because of Spartakos.
:Look who’s here: the way the Lyhhrt transmitted it, seemed to flash through all the minds at once.
“Here’s the one lives off his robot like a fucking pimp,” a voice said.
Ned had sometimes run a couple of whores in an earlier life to cover his work for GalFed. He looked hard at the voice’s blue-jawed owner. “I want work. Who’s hiring?”
“Nobody wants pugs no more. This is a port here with rousters and tuggers, and around it’s factories, mines, construction. If you’re good at that you’ll find it.”
A woman came from behind the beer goddess to take orders: she was an O’e, and the look that passed between her and Spartakos, and then at the Lyhhrt-as-O’e, was a laser beam.
Ned touched Spartakos’s shoulder.
The woman said nothing except with her eyes. With difficulty, Spartakos turned his eyes away. Ned almost felt the circuits flashing.
Drinkers jeered at the O’e and put out legs to trip her, but she was nimble and stepped over them neatly. Ned turned his glance away carefully and Bluejaw dug his snout into his beer.
The wrestlers unraveled themselves into a Varvani woman, a bulked-up male Dabiri and a genuine Asiatic sumo wrestler. Ned found his voice to say, “I been to all your hirehalls.”
A quiet thin voice said from a dark corner, “Been a lot of hiring for offworld.”
“Depends where.”
A loaded silence. Then, “Aren’t we choosy,” Bluejaw said with an elaborate titter—
—then something like a shifting of viewpoints, or—
The O’e woman was whispering to the Lyhhrt, “You are so lucky to have Spartakos protect you!”
—a sense of infinitely reflecting mirrors, of minds rebounding from each other, of a heavy body with silent feet, powerful swinging shoulderblades, a whacking tail, thirst and hunger …
… resolved through the doorway into a big red cat with red eyes flashing green eyeshine, a black V stripe running from her forehead down along her flanks. Her telepathy marked her as female, an Ungrukh woman.
The Ungrukh, a mutant version of Earth’s own leopards, were, along with Lyhhrt and Khagodi, one of the three species Galactic Federation depended on when they needed telepaths. But Ungrukh did not like following orders and were not very sociable, even with each other. They worked only to feed themselves on their fierce and rocky world.
Ned, about to sit down with his squeezer of beer—he had never drunk from the beer goddess—stood watching the Ungrukh. The bar had fallen silent; the drinkers knew this cat and their eyes were on Ned now.
The Ungrukh woman came straight to Ned, stood on hind feet and clapped her paws on his shoulders.
She opened her jaws and said in raspingly guttural English: “Harroo Ned Gattsss! You mooff here naow?”
Some of the drinkers spluttered in their beer, others laughed, and the rest twisted their mouths in disappointment.
Ned grinned. “Just visiting, Rrengha—what about you, sweetheart?” Her saber-teeth were so close to his face that his breath made her whiskers quiver. He was panting, but he stood quietly and let her finish her little joke. “I wondered what happened when I didn’t see you around the plaza in Miramar.”
“That’s a long story.” Rrengha relaxed into competent lingua and dropped to the floor. “All because I am trying to get to Khagodis.” She looked up at Spartakos, and then at the Lyhhrt-as-O’e, and did not mention that she knew what he was.
But the whole room seemed to be listening now, or perhaps Ned’s uneasiness had become paranoia. He stepped off the razor edge he had been walking on and sat down a little calmer. “Let’s hear it.”
“First,”—the bartender himself was approaching with a big bowl brimful of chunked raw meat to set down in front of her—“my dinner.” After she had gulped this down and slurped the last drop of blood she said, “For now I am earning my living as the guardian of peace in this place.” She looked about and found everything peaceful, while Ned took a suck of his beer and left the Lyhhrt to brush away the O’e woman.
Then Rrengha panned the room with a look and the customers kept their eyes to themselves. “It is some years ago that Galactic Federation tells Ungruwarkh there is a request from Khagodis for consultation with us because both of our species are so strange. Neither one grows out of the life on its world. We originally believe the god Firemaster comes from our volcanoes to make us in the colors of our land and his fire, but now even the most ignorant of us knows that a powerful alien being from the depths of space picks animals off your old world and makes us Ungrukh out of them for his amusement. That is hard to swallow, but we manage.
“The Khagodi are also not related to any other of their life forms, and they have ten times ten kinds of religions to explain their beginnings. But when they dig up an ancient ship that comes from some other world their scientists and priests want to know the truth and ask us for advice.
“Not so simple. Nobody is offering any money.” She gave a meaty belch as politely as possible for an Ungrukh. “We never have much and there is little to find when all you want to buy is knowledge. And you know we don’t care much about writing our history when it is mostly about old battles. Khagodis is having trouble with politics and the Ix and the Lyhhrt, and they don’t care what their learned people want.
“Galactic Federation says, what Khagodi want is not our business, but after a lot of arguing they agree to pay one person’s way to Khagodis by whatever route is cheapest. My people say, Rrengha, you are here on Ungruwarkh four times ten, and ten again years, your mate is dead of old age and your cubs have grandchildren, you are not much use around here, so it is your turn to tell those fools on Khagodis what they want to know, and let them pay your way home.
“All very well, next delivery of cattle embryos on Ungruwarkh that ship picks me up and by one or two jumps here I am in this ugly city—which is somewhat nearer to ships and cheaper than your beautiful one—still waiting for the lift that takes me to Khagodis.”
The Lyrhht said suddenly, :And you found this place. You would not be working here if there was no information coming.:
:There is a matter of being given admission, Lyhhrt … they must trust me first.:
:And they had better do it soon,: the Lyhhrt said. :We also would like to do a favor to Khagodis. Not to wait.:
“Yeh, that is a long story, Rrengha,” Ned said, playing up, and also wondering how Rrengha and the Lyhhrt had become so close so quickly.
Rrengha said in a mindvoice that was like letters of fire, :We two peoples know each other many long years, Ned Gattes.: And then, loudly, “Aar! Pretty soon I get tired of moping about here. I want lots of space and fresher smells!” A thump of her tail signified that the conversation had ended.
Ned, because he was an old hand at the business, felt one of those synapses, at once insight, resentment, relief: first the realization that Rrengha was a Galactic Federation agent, at least a temporary one, because GalFed never deals out any money without exacting service, if only on a while-you’re-at-it basis; resentment at adding another member to the team at the risk of making it unwieldy; relief that the new addition was as powerful a force as Rrengha.
Even though Ungrukh and Lyhhrt had had their disagreements during their long years of history. Spartakos, at least, was peaceful, having pulled away from his concentration on th
e O’e woman and shadowed himself in a corner.
Ned muttered, “We can’t hang around here forever. In the meantime there’s no bloody lift.” He rose and sauntered to the dark corner where the man with the quiet thin voice had said, Been a lot of hiring offworld.
:Be careful with that one!: the Lyhhrt said sharply. :He is well armed.:
Ned said, :So am I.: If Lyhhrt/Spartakos/Rrengha with their minds/lasers/fangs were not weaponry, what was? He sat down at the small corner table and regarded the man, who looked back at him mildly enough. “My name’s Ned Gattes.”
“Lek here.” He was a scrawny man with rough-cut hair, a scrag moustache and a point of beard under it. He was wearing clothes as worn as himself and a conical felt hat with a curled brim, and had no woman or jewelry to show off. He drew on a dopestick and let the smoke curl away from his mouth. “I know of you, and everybody’s heard of Metallo Man but that other one doesn’t look useful.”
“They come with me, that’s all.”
“Are they worth anything?”
“Depends what you want them to do.”
“That half-rotten O’e?”
“He’ll fight for my sake.”
“I can find a fight for you—not in any arena, not in this bar either … not on this world. You’d have to pick a side.”
“That’s what you expect in a fight. What kind of sides?”
“What kind do you want?”
Ned sucked the last drop from his squeezer. “The one with the money.”
“Good choice.” The O’e woman came forward to clear the table and Lek set down his mug, and smiled. She turned her head and shoulders away as if she were warding off a blow, and hurried away quickly. He watched her beaded helmet glittering and the swirl of her flowered gown and said, “Some of them aren’t bad looking if you don’t look too close … .”
“Yeh,” Ned said, and waited. He could feel a hot trickle of sweat running down from his left armpit and wished he had taken his jacket off.
“Your robot friend collects them, doesn’e?”
“Lyhhrt made both of them. Birds of a feather.”
Lek snorted. “They fight for Lyhhrt?”
“The O’e I know will do anything Spartakos wants. I guarantee it. And he’ll fight.” For the ones I know he will, anyway. “Who’s hiring, and where offworld?”
“There’s a hot spot on Praximf’s moon, Calidor, always some bunch wanting to build a base there—”
“And none of them ever comes back from anywhere near Praximf, do they?”
“If you say so … you’ve been to Khagodis, no? Some work for the Lyhhrt there?”
“Lot of good it did,” Ned said bitterly. “They never came back either.”
“But you know the place.”
“I would if I was paid to know it. Is recruiting your business, Lek?”
Lek gave a closed-teeth grin. “No—but it’s my business to find out if the recruits know the place they’re going to … eh, what about that cat you’re up close with?”
“Rrengha knows the world.”
“She bite?”
“Never bit me.”
“Heh, I dunno if that’s saying much. That’s it, then.” Lek pinched the coal off his dopestick and dropped the butt in his vest pocket. “I can’t guarantee I’ve got work for you, but I can tell you if you want a cheap doss drop my name at the Sol3City on Main at Fourth, and you’ll hear from me. They may not want the Big Red that place, but I guess she has her own quarters.” He got up, thin and loose-limbed, tipped his hat and left.
:That was very dangerous. Especially if I had been forced to strike him down.:
Rrengha would have taken care of that a lot faster. “You want me to be the mug that deals with the other mugs and that’s what I’m doing.” Ned had half-expected those lazy eyes to look up, the thin lips sneering: Don’t I remember you from somewhere, somebody saying you did odd jobs for GalFed? He found himself longing for the backup of somebody he knew and cared about. Zella had been that in arena days past, she had always been a fiercer, sharper fighter than he; while he liked a taste of violence, she was often afraid of her own anger. He felt lucky it was not usually directed at him. He said to Rrengha, “Lady, you want to come with us or make your own arrangements?”
Rrengha grinned, “Not to sleep with you, Ned Gattes—and I owe a night’s work here, but when you want to leave this city I am with you.”
They left her curled up neatly beside the doorway, heavy head resting on her crossed forefeet.
Outside Ned found a cool night where few trees whispered when the wind blew; down the lane toward the street coldlights were fading and neons blinking out. “Good to be out of that smoke,” he muttered. It hadn’t mixed well with the beer. “At least we got out of there without a fight, and that’s more than I can say for some places.”
The Lyhhrt said in a very low voice: “We have a follower.”
Ned turned to look, saw a dim figure, saw it stumble and then heard a crack, very much like a head hitting the pavement. It lay very still; Ned crept up to it and the Lyhhrt did not prevent him. “Dead?” It was one of the bar’s customers, a thick dark-bearded man trussed with the usual weapons. Ned only vaguely recalled him, and was momentarily disappointed. He’d been wishing it was Bluejaw because that chukker had a whack coming.
:A concussion.:
He looked up at the Lyhhrt, who had nothing else to say. “Did you do this?”
A shrill voice cried out, “I did that, I! I!” The O’e woman came out from the doorway she’d been hiding in, shivering, hugging herself in the sharp wind while her robe blew about her in mad patterns. “He was running for me, me,” her angry eyes picked out the blue and red glints of coldlight and neon. “And he thinks he has the right, always him and those others, he splits us like axe on wood and lets us burn for his heat!” She grabbed at a fold of her robe to wipe her eyes, a slit opened in it and Ned saw the knife harness strapped to her thigh. She pulled the cloth together, crying out through her tears, “I put out my foot to him,” repeating the gesture, “and if he has split something so much the good for him, that piece of shit!”
She stopped to catch her breath and Ned felt he needed some too. “We won’t say anything to anybody, but you better get back there before they miss you—and let us get away from here too.” The unconscious man began to snort and twitch. “Let’s go—”
“No! I want to come with you, with Spartakos and this other one you have along and give shelter to—”
“No, dems’l,” the Lyhhrt said, civilly enough but with a shade of panic, “we must get away from here before—”
“Please, no!” she cried desperately, “Spartakos! Let me come with you wherever you are going! Please, please take me with you and share your freedom with me!”
Ned and the Lyhhrt were already on their way, but Spartakos was standing still. His head turned, from the O’e woman to Ned and back again. He moved deliberately to pick up the groaning man and set him on his feet, where he fell immediately to all fours and stayed there for a moment, moaning and snarling, and gradually began to crawl away—probably, Ned thought, with a boost from the Lyhhrt. Spartakos came to the O’e woman, laid a hand on her shoulder and said, “Dems’l, the ones we are going with will not treat you any better.”
Ned thought of the way Lek had been watching her.
“Please! If I can stay alive in that place I can do it anywhere!”
Ned said desperately, “Miss, it’s worse than you could think!” His own words gave him a shiver.
She bowed her head into her hands and wept.
Spartakos looked at the Lyhhrt, and at Ned. “This one will not lie rotting on the steps down to the sea.” And to his charge, “Come along then, we will find a safe place for you.”
Nothing for Ned but to follow, and the Lyhhrt, like the O’e he was pretending to be.
Ned, frightened, exhausted, stewing in his own sweat, wondered about the crawling man, of whom the Lyhhrt had said nothing, but
was not so curious that he wanted to find out.
FOUR
Khagodis, New Interworld Court in the Southern Diluvian Continent: Hospitality
Hasso thrashed in fearful nightmares, drowning in heaping seas, twisting in swaddling bands on flaming pyres, battling the squirming monsters that leaped out of his mind, and—
“No need to throw yourself about, Hasso my friend. You are quite safe now!”
Who …
Hasso forced his sticking eyelids open.
“Yes, it is Tharma, your old friend from Burning Mountain!” The lively crinkled face and the voice with its sharp West Ocean accent certainly belonged to Tharma. “You never expected to see me by your bedside.” That was true enough, though Hasso had known that Tharma had left her Police position in Burning Mountain to become Head of Security in the Court. Beyond her there was a white wall and arched ceiling, even a round window with morning sunlight coming through its quarter panes.
When he tried to move he found himself bound on a linen-covered mattress by wide bands of elastic cloth that limited his movement without stopping it; his head was encased by an impervious helmet in the form of a padded bonnet to keep him from harming himself as he flung it to and fro. His mouth was so fearsomely dry he could not speak, and a medic in a red sash came forward with a bowl of water while Tharma loosened his bonds.
After taking a few sips he gasped and croaked, “What are you doing here, Tharma?”
Tharma took his trembling hand. “Your friend Lyhhrt saw what was happening and sent me a message right away. If I had not been forced to leave the Court for only two days this would never have happened and—”
“But what—”
“You were found unconscious in a faint because of a disturbance of your heart rhythm and of course you are being given drugs to counteract it—”
Hasso swallowed air mightily. “My heart! Dear Saints, I am not enough of a wreck but that I must be tormented further!”
“I spoke one or two words to the Director General about that—”
Mindworlds Page 8
