Flesh and Gold (35 page)

Tui'ireet went on, “So clever of you to realize what was going on alongside you while drawing fire from the Inter-world Police agent!”

“Hm?”

She tittered. “You may feel quite free to discuss that here! This room is completely sealed and has its own power sources.”

“Ah . . .”

“Realizing that you had been mistaken for that Police Agency fellow—what's his name? Yes, Smugger is it? a chap who had something wrong with his face?—and all because, this I think you did not know in every detail, Zamos's people misread the warning they had been given by one of their spies to
look out for that man with the poor facial reconstruction!
But you caught on and completed your mission without giving him away! First class work, Gattes! That fellow what's-his-name's superior has asked me to put you in line for a Special Commendation, and I'm very pleased to do it! What do you think of that?”

“Very grateful,” Ned muttered, rubbing his jaw and hoping he did not sound as stunned as he felt, or as pissed off at Smugger.

“Tell me, Gattes, what do you have in mind for the long term?”

“More of the same, I suppose.” He had never more than glancingly thought of running a string of whores, or of coaching a stable of pugs who would learn everything from experience anyway. If he married Zella, perhaps . . . something more settled. “I'll fight for a while and then I'll find something steadier.”

“If you want to go further I can tell you that Galactic Federation has a fine career ahead for you in the future if you want it.” She offered a handclasp.

“Thank you, Madame,” he said, and took it. He felt breathless, and relieved that the interview was over.

While he waited until his transport landed he had rented quarters at a cheap Travelers Rest (7—Complete Pollution-free Environments—7) in the Shen IV spaceport; some day he would be called on to testify, someday he might find Zella, maybe. She seemed transparent now, an ache beneath his breastbone. Right now he wanted only to fly off the world, and until then lose himself somewhere, perhaps in
the city, anywhere not to be jumped by a Zamos thug. But he had not had enough sleep and his mind was lumbering along heavy and sparkless.

Down the corridor near the Travelers Rest was a boozer called the Humanoid Bar. Anyone who breathed oxygen and could stand nine Newtons of gravity went there. It was run by a Praximfi shapeshifter called Loui, who today had put on the shape of a velvety blond chanteuse, and was singing, with a display of finger-snapping:

I never loved you
baby*
just said I did **
you never knew the many
many masks that hid
me, baby*
you never did
. . .

It was a song that made Ned melancholy and wrapped him in a shroud of doubt; the way she had run toward those men . . . the bright future in the Service offered by that fatuous Tui'ireet looked only grey and empty.

The bar was sleazy, its tropical air was hot, the drinkers looked—like himself—as if they had been collected from
Wanted
triwy clips. He looked out the big port windows at the rain and thought of another song.

He was sitting with the songs winding themselves about in his mind and nesting his chin in sweaty hands when they were clasped in turn by two cool ones. Cool firm hands that had touched him where he lived.

A voice said in his ear, “I never just said I loved you, never.”

“Zella!”

Her face seemed thinner, and, scarred as it was, dimly
shadowed. Like his own. “Ned! I've been waiting and looking for you everywhere, everywhere. We're both free!”

He clasped her, she was herself, no shadow but whole and fleshly, and he grew a hope like a green plant. “I love you, Zella.”

She rained kisses on him, and he was happy to be rained on in this way.

You be sure Iron Man is having hot chills and rust attacks on the way to sending me down into that long cold sleep that give me those winding around and sickmaking dreams of the Monster and the Demon and every other one that want to slice me and my Baby up down and sideways to find out what make us the Live Ones. But they don't.

I wake up with the kind ones who want to drop me into my Bay where I pick the gold, where they have taken away the net to let us be free, and I learn I am not just some stupid nothing, that drop down like a lump of shit from some big Lord Upthere, but a person, a kin that has been made long ago of those that come here from that world called Earth, Terra, Mir, a place that have a lot of names instead of just one like what was given to us Folk. It's not bad to pick the gold when you are paid with good food and medicine and have somebody to love. It is not so good to learn that you are not a fish that has the whole freedom of the deep sea, and that most of the world you really belong with is Upthere where you cannot live, but no one of us is free in every way . . .

As years ago in Mean Galactic Standard Time, several of them had passed before Skerow again found herself in the Interworld Court on Khagodis—not as judge, but as a witness, watching the center of the huge bowl-shaped courtroom where Kobai was giving testimony. Skerow was a World Supreme Court judge by then, still in exile from her
own desert land where scientists and technicians had not yet finished digging the immense deep-space ship out of the rocky bed where it had slept for an eon. Fearfully they listened for sounds from within, wondering whether it was that longed-for beacon, The Great Egg, or only some nest of demons.

But beyond this world there had been other developments: Skerow had during this trial watched Zamos's empire splitting to show its spilling corruption. She had looked at the faces of evil, who had been brought to plead here not as snarling pirates like the Boudreau she had condemned so long ago in Starry Nova for smuggling, but as mild corrupt men and women disguised in business suits who dealt not in drugs and flesh but in transmuting them to gold; who, through the Goldyne Corporation, only one of its monstrous arms, had in the end infected the heart of the Interworld Trade Consortium with gangrene that could now never be cleanly cut away.

The brothel in Starry Nova had vanished as though it had never existed, racks of embryos seized in evidence, the shadowy unlit one in Burning Mountain Station seemed to have folded itself away and disappeared. She had regarded all this with a certain irony. Of course Zamos would always exist under one name or other.

Skerow still occupied the wife-house given her by Evarny, whose wife had died and whose son lived far away; she shared his dinners and part of her life with him, not quite in the old way, but still. She could see him down along the line of lecterns, several tiers below, in the section reserved for Galactic Federation officials. She wondered if this vast complicated case, this nested box of cases, would ever be completed. For her the prize was simply to watch the swimming woman in her cylindrical tank, speaking in her own way, sometimes by signing, sometimes raising her head above the
surface of the water to gulp air and speak, stretching her limbs, making ripples with her shimmering tail, telling the last chapter of her own epic.

This baby that come out of me, he was one just like me but very small, not like those ones the Lords used to drop down from Upthere. Then he got bigger and bigger and everyone says, He will be a man one time and must have a name, a new Name, not just Baby. I got to think of all the names I could call him, everything new, but you know, maybe you will laugh at me but I call him Om. Yes, after that stupid one! I want to call him ten and ten and ten again other names but it has got to be Om.

Because when I come back I find that everybody got older than me in some way that I don't know why about, but two other women have these babies that are already a boy and a girl, not just little ones. So I think: that Om that was so handy with his this-here and going after all the woman all the time, maybe he is their father!

He is the one that want the knife, the one that picks up the gold and throws it, the one that want something so much even if it leave him dead! Because the whole world is changed forever when Om throws that one piece of gold.