The Quest of the DNA Cowboys (17 page)

‘This is some friendly town.’

Reave glanced round.

‘It don’t seem too bad in here.’

The outlanders’ quarter seemed a good deal more human. Its streets bustled rather than proceeded with stern piety like they did outside. Sailors in striped shirts and rough cotton trousers rubbed shoulders with merchants in black robes. Street vendors cried their wares and hard-eyed men in frock coats, fancy waistcoats and wide-brimmed hats moved determinedly through the crowds. There was even a subtle difference in the women. They still wore the same grey dresses and white aprons as the strait-laced ladies on the outside, but many had discarded the starched white caps, and they contrived to show more cleavage and the occasional flash of leg. Reave grinned at Billy.

‘This looks more like it.’

Billy laughed.

‘I could feel more at home here. What we need is food, drink, a bed and some female company. Right?’

‘Too right.’

Billy pointed to a place ahead on the left.

‘How about that?’

It was a two-storey building. Grey stone again, but its woodwork was painted a cheerful yellow. Over the door hung a sign - The Hot Puddings. They pulled up in front of it.

‘Is that an inn, or is that an inn?’

They parked the buggy and walked inside. The front parlour smelled of ale and tobacco. The timbers of the ceiling were mellowed and darkened by generations of smoke. The place was lit by an iron fixture in the ceiling that held dozens of flickering candles. Their light reflected on the different coloured bottles behind the bar.

Billy and Reave stood in the middle of the parlour and looked around. There were maybe a dozen men in the place. Most were sailors, except one group of three who looked disturbingly like mercenaries either coming to or from Dur Shanzag. A small man in a white shirt, black trousers and a leather apron came out from behind the bar. He had a round moonface and slanted oriental eyes.

‘I help you gentlemen?’

‘We’re looking for a place to stay.’

‘You gentlemen find no finer rooms than here at the sign of The Hot Puddings.’

Reave looked sideways at the little man.

‘You the landlord?’

The little man nodded.

‘Sure. Me Lo Yuen. I run this place.’

‘Well tell me, Lo Yuen. What passes for money in this town?’

Lo Yuen looked suspiciously at Reave.

‘Port Judas crowns, of course. You got some?’

‘No stuff beam?’

‘Port Judas don’t allow. You got to have money. You got money?’

Lo Yuen was looking less and less friendly. Billy intervened.

‘We don’t actually have any money …’

Lo Yuen looked decidedly hostile.

‘… However, we do have this very fine desert buggy outside which we would very much like to find a buyer for.’

He leaned close to Lo Yuen and dropped his voice.

‘Seeing how we don’t know too much about the currency we were wondering if you might help us sell it. I mean, we’d be happy to give you a percentage on the sale.’

The little man looked a good deal happier.

‘It sounds like very admirable proposition. Where is fine vehicle?’

Billy gestured towards the door.

‘Right outside, honoured friend.’

He led Lo Yuen out of the inn and into the street.

‘There it is. What do you think?’

‘It very … colourful.’

‘Yeah, well, apart from that.’

‘I think maybe some men in parlour might want. Hold on, I talk with them.’

He went back inside the inn, and a few moments later he came back with one of the men in combat gear.

‘This Zorbo. He want to talk about buying vehicle.’

‘Yeah?’

Billy faced the mercenary.

‘You headed for the war zone?’

‘That’s right.’

‘Rather you than me, friend.’

‘You been there?’

‘Sure, we just got out of it.’

‘Bad, huh?’

‘Bad.’

Zorbo shrugged.

‘We’re fighting men. What else can we do?’

‘Don’t ask me, friend. It took us all our time to get away from it. You want to buy this machine?’

The mercenary stroked his chin.

‘Looks like the kind of thing that we need to get us across the desert. How much you want for it?’

Billy glanced at Lo Yuen.

‘What would be a fair price, mister innkeeper?’

Lo Yuen went through a pantomime of patting and inspecting the buggy.

‘Look like two thousand crowns’ worth to me.’

Zorbo poked the buggy with his finger.

‘I’ll give you a thousand.’

Billy looked down at his boots.

‘It ain’t more than two days old. Eighteen hundred.’

‘I’ll make it twelve and not a crown more.’

‘Sixteen?’

‘Fourteen.’

‘Fifteen hundred.’

‘Done.’

The mercenary gave Billy a heavy canvas bag of coins, and went inside to fetch his friends to look at their purchase. Billy dipped in the bag, and gave Lo Yuen a hundred and fifty crowns. The little man smiled and ushered them back into the parlour of the inn.

‘We do good business, hey gentlemen?’

Billy clapped the little man on the shoulder.

‘Good business, Lo Yuen.’

The two of them ate, and then spent the rest of the afternoon lounging at a corner table working their way through a bottle of tequila. Sailors and drifters passed in and out of the place, and as the day wore on, Billy and Reave picked up various snippets of information. It appeared there was a river boat going down to Arthurburg in a couple of days, and also that Port Judas could be quite an easy place to live in if you stuck to the outlanders’ quarter. They also discovered that the thirteen fifty they had from selling the buggy was more than enough for them to buy a passage all the way down the river. For the first time in a long time, life looked pretty good.

The afternoon drew into evening, and the sky outside the inn parlour’s narrow windows became dark. Lo Yuen built up the log fire in the huge stone fireplace, and the room became a cosy recess of warm light and deep shadows. Bright highlights glinted on the polished wood, the brasswork and the ranks of bottles.

The parlour began to fill up and Lo Yuen put three waitresses to work, who moved between the tables serving drinks, collecting glasses and bandying ribald chat with the customers. A fiddler and an accordion player struck up beside the fireplace, and the laid-back atmosphere of the afternoon dissolved into a jumping jollity. Reave, already half drunk from the afternoon’s tequila, laughed and nudged Billy.

‘Only one thing we need now, old buddy.’

‘What’s that, man?’

‘We need us some broads, old buddy. That’s what we need.’

‘Amen to that, buddy.’

Word began to spread round the parlour that Billy and Reave were big-spending travelling men. A couple of card hustlers cruised by to check them out, but they made it clear that they didn’t want to know. Girls also began to hover round their table. Not only the waitresses, but two or three other girls who seemed to be employed by Lo Yuen to keep the customers happy and drinking.

Reave stretched out his arm and grabbed one of the girls by the wrist. She was a pleasant plump brunette whose ample figure couldn’t be disguised by the sober grey dress, particularly as she wore it considerably less buttoned than the good women of Port Judas.

‘You want to dance, honey?’

‘I don’t know about that, sir. Dancing ain’t really allowed in public inns.’

‘Fuck that shit. I want to dance.’

He climbed to his feet and started jigging about with the girl.

‘Thou art a one, young sir.’

A circle was formed in the middle of the room. Reave swung the screaming and giggling girl round and round, while the accordion player and the fiddler stamped their feet.

The dance whirled faster and faster, then, abruptly, the music stopped. The door had opened, and in the doorway stood two blue-coated officers. Reave collided with the girl and they both fell in a heap on the floor. The officers stood looking down at them.

‘What do ye, herein?’

Reave scrambled to his feet. Billy stayed seated at the table, but his hand slid down beside his gun. Reave grinned sheepishly at the officers.

‘We, uh, fell over.’

‘Ye fell. Art thou sure it wasn’t public dancing?’

‘Public dancing?’

‘Aye, fellow. Public dancing.’

Lo Yuen hurried from behind the bar.

‘There no public dancing in this inn, gentlemen officers. That would be against law.’

He took each officer by the arm, and after a muttered conversation they all went outside together. A couple of minutes later Lo Yuen returned on his own. He went straight up to Reave and the girl.

‘If gentleman want to sport with girl, then he must take her to own room.’

Reave grinned, and slapped the girl’s bottom.

‘That suits me, brother.’

He grinned at her.

‘You coming then, gorgeous?’

She pouted.

‘If that’s what would please thee, good sir.’

‘Let’s go then.’

He took her by the hand and led her towards the stairs. Lo Yuen caught him by the arm.

‘One moment, my friend. Officers took twenty crowns of persuasion before they leave.’

Reave dropped the coins into his hand, and then hurried up the stairs with the laughing girl. Billy relaxed in his seat and poured himself another drink. He was beginning to like Port Judas despite its absurd laws. A girl dropped into Reave’s empty chair. She had red hair and large green eyes. There were freckles on the section of her ample breasts that were presented to Billy. She smiled at him slyly.

‘My friend’s gone upstairs with thy mate.’

Billy laughed.

‘You want to do the same?’

‘I might. If thou wast specially nice to me.’

‘It would be productive to gather data from the static module.’

‘It is unfortunate that we lack the time.’

‘We are injured and unable to delay our search for a naturally occurring stasis point where we may heal our wounds’

‘We must continue.’

‘We must continue.’

The spherical form of Her/Them detached Her/Their self from the dead hulk of Wilbur and floated free. She/They maintained the form until She/They was some distance from the silent disrupter, and then resumed the triple form. The two identical women carrying the injured third in their arms. She/They turned so that She/They faced away from the broken disruption module, and once again began Her/Their steady progress.

The mist was unnaturally still. It lay in even horizontal layers. All twisting and undulation had ceased. She/They moved forward, breasting the layers of mist with little effort. Then abruptly it ceased. The mist, the blue light, there was nothing at all. A total empty blackness.

‘Absence.’

For a fraction of a second, She/They did not exist either. Then, moved by Her/Their emergency programming, She/They exerted Her/Their will. She/They began to glow with a soft violet light, and became the only thing in that totally empty universe.

‘The state of our existence is related to nothing. There is no external by which we may judge our being.’

The words glowed bright red, growing bigger and bigger to fill the empty space. Abruptly they blinked out.

‘If motion can be equated with the expenditure of energy, then we move.’

‘We expend the energy in order to move, therefore we move.

‘Subsequently we move’

More words flashed away into the void.

‘The absence of external produces a hole of total subjectivity.’

‘Observation. An external has been produced.’

A point of light appeared.

‘Cease all energy use.’

She/They became totally inert. The point of light remained.

‘External proved to be objective.’

The point of light grew larger and slowly took shape. It moved towards Her/Them like some winged object. It grew larger and larger. It was a huge penguin that glowed with a hard yellow light. She/They remained totally inert as it flapped majestically past without a sideways glance. It flew on, becoming smaller and smaller. Finally it was just a point of light again.

‘We possess no data on such a phenomenon.’

‘It fails to compute.’

‘Thou wert lusty, young sir.’

‘I could say the same for you, babe.’

The girl had been willing and eager. She had lacked a lot in technique, but more than made up for it in enthusiasm. She had reacted with shock and amazement when Billy had put his mouth between her legs. It was obvious that no one in Port Judas behaved that way. She had also been somewhat disturbed when he had suggested that she treated him to a blow job. After some persuasion and instruction she had acquired a taste for both.

‘Thou hast taught me much.’

‘Glad to oblige.’

When he had entered her she had seemed much more at home, bucking and writhing, moaning and lifting her hips to meet him in what seemed to Billy to be genuine earthy pleasure. She had raked his back with her nails, and finally, after a long time, they had both come together and collapsed exhausted. They had lain together in silence for a while, and then she had spoken. Billy propped himself up on one elbow and looked at her.

‘Don’t girls like you have a hard time in Port Judas?’

‘It’s not too bad if we don’t stray outside the quarter.’

‘What about the good people of the town? Don’t they give you a hard time?’

‘They call us whores and sinners, but they can’t do without us. They need us so the good women can keep their sacred virtue. Much good it may do them too. I wouldn’t swap with the wife of an elder right now.’

‘Don’t they have laws against doing this kind of thing?’

The girl scowled.

‘ ‘Course they have laws. Every so often the blue coats round up a few of us and we get dragged in front of the procurator for fornication and lewdness.’

‘And what happens then?’

‘Either ten strokes of the rod or five days in the workhouse.’

‘Have you ever been pulled in?’

‘Once or twice. I always take the rod. It’s quicker.’

‘You mean you’ve been beaten?’

‘ ‘Course. I said I had, didn’t I? It don’t happen often because like I said, they got to have us. We only get rounded up for appearances.’