“I bet you’ll know that one. Just how far can he esp anyway?”
“It’s not how far he can esp, it’s how well he can find.” Then with an obvious effort to pull herself together, “Listen, you don’t have to stay with me. If you give me half of that cashbook I can find a place to dig in.”
“You think he planted anything on us?” Tyloe pulled the cashbook from his pocket and flicked its gold foil leaves. “Think that’s giving him a buzz right now?”
“It’s possible, every one of those could have a tracer on it.” She said reluctantly, “Maybe you’d better throw it away.”
Tyloe thought for a minute: “No. Let’s stick together for a while, your esp must be good for something, and we’re less conspicuous as a couple, we’ll just spend it around town for a day, get a hotel room, go through the motions laying a trail and then leave it in the street for somebody else to find and get the hell out.”
Lorrice couldn’t think of any better plan.
From the mono they took the aircab and looked down on the city and its tall towers, many of which had been built in the foundations of ancient stone ruins and rose like stemmed flowers from their beds of leaves. “I don’t want to go back to that damned Lyhhr place we went to that night,” she said.
“There’s plenty others.” Tyloe plucked the first gold leaf for cabfare, the slot spat a cashcard for change.
They walked along the avenue among the crowds for a while, shaking off the air kisses of the hologram sirens and spending the cashcard on iced drinks. Tyloe found the brightness of the sun and sky, the reflections of glass and steel, almost painful after the long days in the forest. “That one there looks good.” He was pointing to an establishment that was a branch of an Earther chain known for expensive elegance.
“It looks awfully snobbish.” Lorrice was wearing the gray silk suit that had made her look powerful, and she was pushing at herself to keep from shrinking.
Tyloe’s clothes were barely good enough. “We’re not on anybody else’s wanted list yet.”
“How much time d’you think we’ve got?”
Tyloe put on an air of recklessness to match her efforts. “Let’s pretend we have a day.”
“Only a day?”
“A day, to start with. I don’t think he’s wasting time playing with us right now.”
Neither of them dared ask, What does he want with us?
In the crowd of minds the Lyhhrt scanned, searching for GalFed agents and workers he had known, traces of feelingtones he could not describe, did not quite know what he was looking for, wondering if he had gone really mad now … and sensed a something, he thought first only the whispery pulses of his heart, no, a signal, yes, by its frequency and resonance a Lyhhrt tracking device, he had used them himself working for GalFed, and he said to the empty air: I have you now. A pleasure to form those soundless words with his metal lips.
Wait. I am deceiving myself. Any Lyhhrt in the city could be using one of those. No matter, there was nothing else for him, nowhere to go and no more time. He followed.
Tyloe and Lorrice took a hotel suite and slept for two hours, woke up, ate lunch and went shopping for three hours, spending a lot of money on clothes that did not look expensive, consulted an InfoDesk to find the most pretentious restaurant and spent precious time on drinks and dinner for nearly three hours.
“We’re killing time,” Lorrice said suddenly. “I don’t like that expression.”
“You don’t have to use it.”
“My mother always used it. When my father left us it would have been all right because she had her own money, but she’d never been educated for much, and she was always saying, let’s do this or that, go here or there, to kill time, and when she died, it turned out she’d spent so much money doing it there wasn’t any left.”
“My father spent his like it was his life’s blood … we’re taking up space here—let’s get out before the staff kills us with dirty looks.”
One more gold leaf.
Back at the hotel they began to change into the mufti they had bought for anonymity.
And in mid-change a spark of sexual feeling flamed between them and—
Lorrice cried, “No no, God, what am I thinking, it’s just one day! Damn you!”
“I’m not coming at you! I can’t help what I feel!” It’s the danger, a maybe-never-again feeling. He zipped his pants and top and flung open the doors to the balcony; the city lights flared below, the stars above. A last false taste of wealth. Just as the leaves of money were not really gold. “We’ve got too many of these left. I don’t want to use them for the underground.” The tram would take them to the hotel at the edge of the city, a place for one-night stands, where they would pretend to be moneyless lovers.
She said in an exhausted voice, “Let’s order up some drinks, then, and toss the rest of them over the balcony one by one.”
“Why not? Let’s.”
The Lyhhrt followed the signal into the store where clothing was being sold. It stopped there. Whatever was carrying it had been locked in metal. His fear deepened. He left quickly before people could begin to stare at a Lyhhrt in a clothing store. Out in the street he picked it up again, thin and thready, surely not the original one, which had stopped so abruptly. He followed it as if he were lost in the deepest of caverns searching out one footprint, across the street into a small arcade that sold iced drinks, where it stopped again; he scanned the minds of the servers there and they gave him a glimpse of a man and that ESP woman he knew from seeing them through the eyes of those Earthers, in that eating-place that claimed to show his world Lyhhr.
He was far from sure of the time when these passages had taken place, but he knew that he had landed his buzzer in the western outskirts of the city and from there to the center he had found nothing; so he kept walking, eastward, slowly, down side streets and back to the avenue, crossing to explore streets off the other side, back again, as the sun arched over him and fell behind him, searching the minds of the passersby and straining to catch a signal once more. There was no reason that another tracer should exist, but since there had been more than one, why not? He followed on, led by thready hope.
Tyloe drank the last drop of whiskey and crunched the ice. Took up the cashbook from the table, it was three-quarters empty by now, went to the balcony railing and breathed in the soft heavy air. Lorrice joined him, he tore the leaves out one at a time and let the evening wind pull them from his hand.
They leaned over the balcony and watched them floating down in ripples of light.
“That’s that.”
The Lyhhrt found it: a signal that was multiplied like a sung chord came from the restaurant across the way. He crossed the street. The windows were curtained now but he knew what was inside.
The server was saying, “That three hours was worth it, they never stopped ordering and gave me a tip big enough to start a small business … just wish I could keep it all …”
The Lyhhrt could see him, could feel him waving the sheaf of gold leaves, shutting them into the strongbox, stopping the signal.
:Which way did they go? Tell me that!: the Lyhhrt cried in desperate silence.
“They went back up the street the way they came,” the server said. “Now why the hell did I say that!”
The Lyhhrt was moving up the street with lengthened strides, where would they go? Expensive clothes, expensive dinner, expensive what now? He did not know why they were spending money in this way, he wondered whether he really knew anything about aliens at all and wished he had never been forced to learn.
Then the signal sang and sang and the gold leaves came blowing across the pavement at his feet.
“Let’s go,” Tyloe said. “What’s the matter?”
Lorrice was standing still. She had dropped her bag and was clasping her hands. “I feel so …”
“Lorrice, what is it!”
“I …” She raised one hand and bit the knuckle of her forefinger. She had the same look on her face that
she had when the Lyhhrt arrived to meet Brezant.
Tyloe sweated ice.
The Lyhhrt opened the door and came in holding up the five gold leaves in his hand as if they were four aces and a wild deuce.
“No,” he said quietly. “I am not the one you are so afraid of.”
Lorrice and Tyloe looked only too ready to be afraid of him. Lorrice wet her lips and said tremblingly, “Who are you, then?”
The Lyhhrt placed himself into a chair and quietly, quickly opened his mind to them as he had done with Ned, but rather more slowly, because he had learned so much more, and told them everything, beginning with the meal in that restaurant that looked something like Lyhhr, and watched the expressions flickering over their faces under the assault of information. The weight of it made them sit down.
“I see all that,” Tyloe said slowly. And as Ned had done, added, “All this sounds like highly official business. And we’re not quite on the right side of the law, are we?”
The Lyhhrt said, as he had done to Ned, “If necessary, I will see that you forget.”
“But you want something.”
The Lyhhrt folded the leaves in two and held them out.
“You lead me to that one.”
Khagodis, New Interworld Court: One Man’s Meat
Tharma’s dreams were thorny and terrible; Ekket wept in them, Gorodek’s flunky Osset leered and threatened, Hasso was wrapped in a cloud of something altogether sinister. A restless twisting sleep that sent her arms knocking on the edge of the basin, pinched her breathing siphon, squirted water into her ear.
A low but powerful zzukk! made her jump up with a tremendous splash that shot half the water over the floor.
:I have him, Supervisor, but get out of there quickly!:
Tharma jumped from her basin doubly fast. “What is it, Dritta? What do you have?”
The young woman, who had been waiting with the stunner for three hours, flashed her belt light and was bending over the dark figure sprawled by the basin. “I am trying to see whether it’s a weapon he has or a poison flask—I see it is some kind of container—you had better shower down, Supervisor.”
“Just make sure that flask is stoppered … here is a washing rag to wrap it in.” She added, “And thank you for volunteering yourself, Dritta.”
“I serve willingly, Supervisor.”
Tharma stared down at the intruder. He was a stringy old man with faded scales, wearing a heavy helmet that surely must have burdened him. “A servant,” Tharma said. “Too worn down to match any of our diplomats.” Also there were no documented felons, as yet, in the New Interworld institution, and whoever killed Sketh would be the first—if found. This beaten-down specimen had not killed Sketh.
“I have called for a platform to pick him up,” Dritta said.
“When he comes to we’ll get that helmet off and see what …” Especially what kind of poison.
“You might call this poison,” the chemist said. “It’s metho-trimeprazine, a hypnotic that causes staggering and hiccups in Bengtvadi and Varvani. It must be a cheap intoxicant if they’re willing to take those effects.” He knew of it only by hearsay and had no idea what it would have done to Tharma. “It was a rather stupid kind of attack, you know. No one would believe you of all people took this kind of drug on purpose.”
“I hope not,” Tharma said.
“Calm of you to go to sleep with that on your mind.”
“I trust Dritta. See what DNA you can get off that bottle.”
“Everyone will be gone by the time we find out, but we’ll do it.”
The attacker had willingly removed his helmet. His mind was a blank. Not a great surprise for Tharma, considering what Hasso had been telling her about his suspicions of a Lyhhrt in hiding.
Yet, there were many home-grown telepaths who could have done this mind-work. You smile now but you will not smile later. It just was possible that Osset was not carrying out his threat. Though the Saints know that if it had succeeded, I may well have been lunging about with hiccups and giggling fits … far from not smiling. And Gorodek may even had nothing to do with this.
Maybe so. But Tharma did not try to sleep again.
She broke the fast with her usual bowl of yagha-root tea and some soured curd, and went down to the holding cells where she found her attacker taking his. There was no basin for him to sleep in and he was propped in a corner with his tail curled around him. He was looking very ragged, and did not want to meet her eyes.
She opened his door with the pressure of a fingerprint and squatted before him as it rolled shut behind her. “Old man,” she took off her helmet and set it on the floor, “do you know who I am?”
He did not look up. “I know now.” He took his last lick of the yagha bowl as if he would never eat again.
“You have a name?”
“I am Aggar.”
“Where do you work?”
“I unload freight from the railroad cars.”
“I am the Supervisor of Security in this Court Center, where I try to keep people safe. You didn’t know that, did you? I have never harmed you, so you have no reason for coming to my room to put drugs in my water. Is that true?”
“Yes.” Eyes down to his yagha bowl wishing for more.
“Now, Aggar, you tell me who sent you to my room.”
“Nobody.”
“What! Then why—”
“I dreamed,” Aggar said almost eagerly, gulping air as he gulped yagha. “My dream told me, if I did this trick, everyone would say how clever I was.”
“Eki! I understand.” Tharma sat back. “Then where did you get the drug bottle?”
“It was in my hand when I woke.”
“Yes,” Tharma said, picked up her helmet and got up to close the cell door behind her. Freight-handlers were a rowdy lot, but not subtle enough for a trick like that. No legal way to esp out the trickster, and every other way too risky for that dim mind.
“Give this fellow some more of that yagha and a slice of glauber, Constable—eh, go ahead. I’ve never seen a scrawnier freight-handler!”
Outside the Security offices was a cluster of chapels for six or seven of the world’s religions. Tharma had just faith enough to swear by the Saints, and she chose their chapel to rest in and think.
She found an empty space and accepted a communication wafer. She set it into her gill-slit where it emitted words of wisdom from the Saints. Khagodi languages in spoken form are a late development and do not take well to recording. The Saints who addressed her in bland croakings did not go near enlightening the great puzzle, of which this attack was not the biggest piece, or have the vigor of her own favorite, Saint Gresskow of the Seven Bastards, who had earned sainthood by refusing to have her fetuses aborted after a violent rape; Ekket’s case made the legend particularly pertinent. Gresskow had refused the abortion allowed by law because of the eternal problem of infertility on Khagodis: there never have been more than seventy-five million people on the world.
Gresskow’s bastards had begotten fifty children and become the only male saints of Tharma’s religion.
But: the total number of the bastards had been nine. Two had been violent rebels who were punished by being dropped into Screaming Demons Chasm, where their anguished cries resounded forever.
Tharma was well aware that in Screaming Demons Chasm, which the locals pretended was haunted to lure outworld tourists, the demons were only echoes. But except for those two there were no other demons in Khagodi culture. No tricksters, no Underworld gods. Only giant eggs in plenty, bearing multitudes.
She wondered if the Lyhhrt had become these demons, out of their anguish had truly made a rebellion that was not merely an empty threat, on the worlds where they had become known, in the midst of hot lives far from their own cold sightless world. Whether the attack on her had been part of it. Or if there really were Qumedni here, ready to find mischief among the stodgy Khagodi, or make it.
Qumedni had been very fond of tweaking the Ungrukh at one time
, but the Cats had discovered that joining three or four tens of their telepaths could send a Qumedon somewhere else fast, and none had been heard from since. Hasso was sure that the presence he had felt was not one.
But I believe that there is at least one other Lyhhrt here, and I am only an ordinary woman. Not someone with a real talent or great importance in this world … a district supervisor who has risen as far as she can go. I might become Prime if Ravat retires or transfers, but I doubt I will wait that long … .
“Eh, Supervisor, you’ve found a good quiet place for yourself.” Ravat had come in soundlessly and settled in beside her. He civilly refused the wafer and said, “I heard what happened last night. That was sharp work.”
“Thank you, Director, but it would have been sharper to have found the source.”
“Yes, but you are unharmed, and that is most important. I’m sorry I cannot give you any time off, with so much happening.”
“I will be glad to have some when this affair is over,” Tharma said. “In the meantime I would like a favor.”
“Ask.”
“I worry about the young woman Ekket, and I would like to assign an officer to guard her and perhaps even escort her when she leaves here.”
Ravat looked at her wisely, “That young one who stood guard for you, a new one, isn’t it?”
“Head of her class, yes. And I can spare her now that some of the guests have gone.”
“If you find her so trustworthy, certainly,” Ravat said, and left her to her Saints.
But Tharma gave the demons one more thought.
Suppose that foreign drug was deadly to Khagodi? She had heard of no cases of such poisoning—and no one was likely to test it. And unwillingly she had come to know that Gorodek was probably sterile.
Would that be worth poisoning me?
Mindworlds Page 14
