Flesh and Gold (5 page)

“You don't know your own strength, my love. I'd hate to be around when you became really angry.”

:Did I kill her?:
She shifted and began to lever herself up
on a hip and one elbow. Her siphon-bubble deflated, and the tube folded concertina-wise into its gill-slit. The water streamed from her shoulders and neck.

“Watch out for the IV! The doctors may be able to put her head together again.”

“Who brought me here?”

“Five medics and four trolley-servers lashed together.”

“My folly in being so headstrong . . . this flask is nearly empty, and I suppose I no longer feel hungry.” She pulled the needle from her neck, filled a spitbowl with fresh water to rinse her mouth. “It . . . was Hathe then?” She spoke a bit raggedly: because of the sore. Through Tony she could see that her dark red tongue had a flaming lump on one edge.

“Didn't you know?”

“I tried to keep from knowing.” Her head seemed dull, and she felt as if her body had shrunk. “I had left Eskat out of his cage, I didn't expect Thordh would come back first. Thordh loathed him, but he took care not to let him escape. Hathe didn't even think of Eskat while she was poisoning Thordh, and he thought she'd come to play . . . he followed her afterward . . .”

“Do you think she poisoned him only because he refused to let Boudreau off?”

“Not only . . . I believe someone must have bought her for that reason. To spy on Thordh. According to Sama, Thordh had let Boudreau off twice earlier, and there must have been other cases she didn't know about. Thordh was a double-tongued man; it seems that he was in the hire of smugglers. Perhaps they had doubts about him already, and when he betrayed them—by having me take the case this time—they had him killed. I wonder about him . . . whether that one last time was one too many, and he was trying to redeem himself. Or just that he felt footsteps on his tail.”

“Then why would Hathe sell herself—really?”

“Must I know that? To gain some kind of power, meaning an apartment with more space and bigger basins? To get away from this ugly world? Tell me, did I truly harm her so badly?”

“Not on purpose.”

“She was very powerful. It's a pity, she could have been . . . I will apologize to the Saints. I've lost a person I thought was a friend.”

“So have I, and I thought I knew her even better than you did.”

“When she showed herself to me on the walkway . . . after Thordh disgracing us . . . I thought—perhaps hoped—some other intelligence was putting on a Khagodi image. I was deceived—I deceived myself. Not altogether. There was a possibility that the attacker was Nohl.”

“Nohl? Who's that, Skerow?”

She told him about Kobai. “When Hathe attacked me I was on my way to tell you . . .” And gave him the picture.

“My God. From Khagodis? I've never heard of that kind of person. Who could she be?”

“There is no other indigenous sentient life on our world, and nothing at all that looks in the least like a Solthree, not under the waters or in the trees or in the air.”

“Poor woman! Why didn't you tell the police?”

“I'm not sure I know . . . first I was too astonished at Thordh's death even to think of her, and then I only wanted to get away from them, get them away from me, and yes, I do know—because some of my own people were behind this on a world where there are so few of them, and the citizens here don't much care for Khagodi authority figures. And, you know, the police don't either.”

“There may not be anything they can do about this woman but the police ought to know just the same.”

“Perhaps they know already. Brothels bring in a great deal of money.”

“I never expected to meet that degree of cynicism in you, love—and so suddenly.”

“Because my manner is rather awkward you believe I'm ignorant and naive. You have many preconceptions about me, Tony.”

“I did. But I don't think I'll have too many more!”

The Slave

Ramaswamy looked at her with soulful eyes. “It is not a human being, Madame.”

“What!”

“It is registered as an experimental animal, legally imported under the terms of the Recreations & Amusements Act, Brothels & Zoos Division. I was shown the bills-of-sale and receipts.”

She looked hard at him. “Experimental animal? I spoke with her! And that is a trash law, Ramaswamy, designed to let Zamos's establishments operate. They are not running a zoo.”

He shrugged. “Whatever they run, Madame, is under the authority of the local police. Traditionally they are jealous of that authority.”

“If I might see her—”

“Zamos's admits her presence, but we are not zoo inspectors, Judge Skerow. As long as this being has no status as a person, is legally accounted for, with documentation, and is seen to be in good health, those people are within their rights, no matter how ghastly a pleasure is taken from her.”

Skerow hissed, “There is nothing at all to be done then?”

“Judge Skerow, you may be correct in your belief that
there is a suffering person illicitly held by Zamos's establishment, but you know,” he looked hard at her, “that you cannot go near it, and I cannot do anything except by catching them bloodhanded.” He took out his daybook and switched it on. “If you can tell me whatever you know, or even think you know, I will consult with Lieutenant Strang and we will try to keep an eye on that place.”

“I am sure she came from Khagodis. The Nohl she told me about was certainly a Khagodi—she thought I knew him. No. She was sure I must be associated with him. Experimental animal! We import most of our technology. How could we produce those kinds of experiments—animals that look like Solthrees!” Almost absently she held her hand out: Eskat landed on it in one leap from Tony's shoulder, and ran up her arm to his usual perch on her head. “Even creatures like Eskat are rarely bred nowadays because it is considered cruel, and I would never own a tethumekh if my brother had not given him to me more than fifty years ago . . .”

Ramaswamy waited. Skerow was feeling quite dim, but tried to focus her thoughts. “She called me an ‘out-there-do-nothing,' had no idea where she was or who I could be—except a Khagodi—said I was to tell Nohl, Lord Big One Upthere, that if, no,
when
she caught him, there would be nothing left of him, nothing for the dung-fish to chew on. I've never seen one of those, but I know they exist, under a slightly different name . . . There were others like herself in her mind, I think, perhaps one Solthree . . . and, the fish we call scrapfish. I think they come from the Volcanic Isthmuses, an equatorial country. Some people there actually eat them, but Isthmus-men like to eat all kinds of poison. Since she called me a do-nothing, she must be some kind of worker, or even slave . . . she is hand-oriented, and would have been working in the waters of that country . . . what I think is that she's a gold-picker. Yes . . . a gold-picker. I
wouldn't swear to it in a court of law, but that's what she is.”

“I don't understand, Judge Skerow.”

“You know gold, Sergeant. In the Isthmuses, where you'd find the scrapfish, the veins of gold that swell up from earthquakes break off in lumps of almost pure gold and roll into the seas, where the currents wash them down smooth as pebbles. People pick them, as they do on any world where gold is, and we get quite a bit of it that way—just picked up. Ourselves, we are not big gold users; we manufacture a few instruments and some bits of jewelry and export the rest. But in the same way that non-ESPs believe they can become telepathic if they take mind-altering drugs, there are Khagodi and some other peoples who believe gold enhances their esp if they eat it in compounds. That is only because it makes them toxic—just as with the others.”

“Then there is likely an illegal trade in gold compounds, same as any other head drug,” said Ramaswamy.

“Maybe so, Ramaswamy, and I am also sure that Kobai is a victim of illegal trade—in people. And if so, then I am forced against my will to believe that a respected man like Thordh must have been involved in all kinds of that trade, along with any other Khagodi smugglers to or from this world. And by all my Saints and Ancestors I want it stopped.”

“We will do what we can,” said Ramaswamy.

An Aborigine

It was noon. Skerow felt that she had not eaten and not slept: rightly, because she had taken IV fluids and lain for hours in the drowse of shock. She thought vaguely that she ought to bestir herself, if only to show Tony that he need not worry
about her. Although the Assizes were over, he had plenty of other work: he dealt with international cases as well as Galactic ones, though in this cold laboring world the nations were huge mining and industrial companies.

There were no aboriginal peoples on Fthel V: Khagodi called it
tikka
, meaning Five, and all of the names given it by other worlds were analogous. The world Khagodis had a name, but in one basic way it was similar to Five. It too was a colony world, and it had no paleoanthropology.

The Khagodi did not know their home world or people; they knew only that thousands of years of exploration and digging had yielded no buried family lines of descent, not even for tethumekhs and other wild reptiles. The ancient skeletons of thumbless animals had unrelated structures and inimical chemistries. There were branches of Khagodi religions that considered these conclusions heretical: the Diggers and some of the Inheritors contended that no one had yet dug in the right place; but the Watchers and Hatchlings, who believed that their ancestors had been delivered by burning gods in enormous eggs, were probably a half step nearer the truth. Whatever their religion, Khagodi did not believe in lost gardens of innocence, or any other kind of ignorance.

Skerow's home had few gardens and many mountains that rose fiercely out of the desert. She missed its thin cool air and vast blue skies by day and the white salt light of its two moons by night. No matter how powerful a yearning for warmth and tropic greens might sweep her at times, her visits to equatorial lands left her suffocated by the heat and moisture that winds and storms would not blow away. Dismal worlds like Fthel-tikka gave her part of her livelihood, and beyond that only piqued her curiosity with their degraded cities.

Dutifully she set her mind toward work. Eskat scratched her head. There were documents to be collated with those
prepared by Tony and Sama, and reports to write . . . now Hathe would no longer help with ledgers and trial records.

Would you like to spend the night here and use the extra basin?

Would I still be alive if I had? You must suppose so, Skerow, since she would not likely have wanted your dead body in one of her tubs! Hathe! How could you have given yourself in that way? And Thordh
—
what price did you sell yourself for? Dear Saints and Ancestors, let me not become a complete cynic in less than one day!

—
But Kobai! How could she have come there? Can there be people on Khagodis breeding and importing slaves?

Work was out of the question. She opened her personal copybook and called up what she had last set down:

o
this desert
I drown in moonlight

This is as near as can be described in general terms the form of the
seh
written by Khagodi in the Northern Spine Confederacy: three lines of one, three and five syllables in any order. It is not the only form of poetry produced in the Spines, but certainly the one considered by critics in equatorial lands to be the most dry and frigid.

What Skerow was thinking was:
alone in moonlight
. She erased and rewrote the last line with these words.

Now I can never show this to anyone
, she said to herself. Far too revealing. Nevertheless she considered it in a steadfast way, and added:

at noon
I
see the burning star

When the sky is very clear more than one can be seen. She thought for a moment, went back to the first
seh
and wrote:

o
this desert
I burn in moonlight

She was content with this but now, having used up the idea of burning, did not know what to do with the second
seh
. The comm buzzed, scrambler-tone. There were very few now who knew her scramble code.

“Skerow!” said the voice.

“Yes. Who is speaking?”

“A friend.” This was a male Solthree's sharp but seductive voice.

“Do you have a name, friend?”

“Not yet.”

Her fingertip hovered over the recording button, but once activated it would trip a signal on the caller's panel. Unless he was calling from a cheap public comm. She pressed the button very gently.

No reaction. “What do you want, then, aside from befriending me?”

“Skerow dear, would you like to become a senior magistrate?”

“I believe I already am one.”

“Are you earning as much as Thordh?”

“No. But he is dead, and not earning it either.” He would have gotten the code from Thordh, who used the same one.

“Thordh dead, Judge?” the sharp voice sniggered. She was being mocked.

Where is Thordh, Judge? Where?
In the courthouse hall after the trial: a thin dark Solthree with a microphone and an
insolent face, plucking at her robe and pushing a microphone at her. Mocking her.

He is indisposed
, she had said. Now she refused the temptation of a flippant answer. The man was dead, murdered, perhaps at the order of this person or someone like him. “I don't care to pay Thordh's price for advancement.”

“For showing a little mercy?”

This was not one with whom she would discuss justice. “I was thinking more of the dying.”

“Really? You believe he was killed?”

—
I'll kill you for this!

She was already hanging up when she realized that the particular pronunciation of
killed
was very near what had rung in her mind, from one raveled tag-end of thought, out on a busy street. But there was nothing to be gained now by speaking longer.