“Yeh. He is. You get a lot of money for recruiting, Lek? Maybe I'll try that line myself.”
“Whatever I get, I can't do much with it until I get back.”
Lek wandered off and Azzah snapped, “You let me take care of myself, Spartakos!”
Spartakos said kindly, “You can't have âtake me with you' and âleave me alone' at the same time.”
Rrengha said, :
I don't like that one, he is a thief, and gets a brand for it on the world Ahrgonsit
.:
Ned felt kinder toward the man now. “If he went about it the way he makes friends with women, I'm not surprised. But if he's going along with us he's just an ordinary pisser in the same boat, and if he'd meant to harm her you'd know for sure.” Ned picked up his ration and headed for a squat in the mess tent and a cup of weak tea.
Rrengha followed. “And where is that other one who is something else?”
“He's justâehâ”
Ned realized that the Lyhhrt was gone. He found a place to sit and ate in a daze. “He said nothing to you?”
“He does not invite me into his mind.”
“You think he deserted?”
“I don't know what.” Rrengha had not much enjoyed being upstaged by the Lyhhrt.
Trying to pull his ragged thoughts together, Ned found himself chewing his paper fork and threw it in the trash along with the empty container. Rrengha added grudgingly, “I cannot believe that one is a deserter.”
From the watchtower, Gretorix called, “All you sinners, Work Area Number One!”
This was the largest of the fields Ned and the others had been working to keep clear, and carriers crowded with recruits from other camps were rapidly filling it.
“Awright now,” Gretorix yelled, “you know you've been hired by the Lyhhrt to take a bite out of Khagodis, in sharp and out soon. You need training for that, an here's where we startâyou, Esser and Yokoah, bring that over here!”
Two burly NCOs unloaded and wheeled what looked like a big metal cage into the center of the field. “There now! We need a volunteerâyou, Ned Gattes, I remember you from old days, you get to try this first! In you go!”
“Whaâ?” Esser and Yokoah grabbed Ned by the arms and stuffed him into the cage. “I neverâ”
“Don't mind the electrodes and that bit of a needle won't hurtâ”
Before Ned could say his prayers, he felt a great jolt and at the same time Rrengha's reassurance,
:No fear, they are not killing you yet
,: and then as if the whole contents of his skull had been sucked out, dumped into a giant mixer with the power on high, and poured back in.
In one standard minute he opened his eyes with the ability to load, aim, fire, field-strip, clean, and assemble a GuentherMMV. A very old mercenaries' standby.
Gretorix thrust the Guenther with its cleaning pack into Ned's hands and Ned went through all of the maneuvers zipzap.
“Neat,” he said. It was all he had breath for. He handed back the Guenther. “I hope I don't have to do that every day.”
“You'll find out,” Gretorix slapped him on the back. “Now who goes next?”
Ned did not want to watch the next victim's fear. He threaded his way through the crowd and headed for the mess tent, where he found Rrengha drinking from a bowl, the i.d. tag around her neck rattling against it. No one else was there except a Varvani named Orbo who was sweeping the rough floorboards.
“That tea you got?”
:Maybe
.:
Ned filled himself a cup from the tank and muttered, “Christ, you're as cranky as he was.”
:He sends a message.:
It fell into Ned's mind that moment, the way the ability to handle a rifle had done:
My fission-sibling saved your life on Shen IV and gave his life for you when you tried to save his in return. I found him in your memory and saw through your eyes what happened to him. I hope you will forgive me if I seemed angry. I am angry at myself for taking you from your life to do my/ our work for me/us. I must do it for myself to give you back your lives.
Ned sighed.
I dunno what he thinks he can do
. He had never felt nearer to Nowhere than he was now.
Â
Â
The Lyhhrt might have caught a ride by boarding any air or ground vehicle in the camp, but he was weary from being with the minds there and had no trouble passing the armed guardians at the edges, they blinked and he had passed. And just as easily he went through the barbed wire fence that Ned had not reached by cutting it with his laser and rewelding it when he was on the other side. The thornbushes caught at his clothing and false skin, so he slipped them off and used the laser to vaporize them. The glass eyes popped when they exploded, and someone far back called, “What was that? You hear that?” By then he was gone into darkness.
His brushed silver carapace was unencumbered, but he did not feel more free. He was a being confined to a cramped cell with small windows, burdened with a task beyond his stability that he could not give up, and weighted further with the sense that he had taken a dreadful wrong turn that led him to conscript Ned Gattes, and draw him into the camp in Bonzador.
The nearest village was ten kilometers distant; he lengthened his legs and began walking toward it, using his radio to search for unoccupied land or aircars. He was not quite as good at this as Spartakos, but eventually he was able to summon a buzzer and direct it to take him to Montador.
Montador was more sophisticated than Port City, much less of a company town, and the capital of the Cinnabar Keys. For the Lyhhrt everything had begun here.
Here is the center
.
There were Lyhhrt here who worked at the embassies, or for businesses, and he would be one more. He would be allowed to obtain drugs that were illegal for fleshers in order to mix his food, and buy the expensive power cells that were vital to his workshell's operation; he did not dare go back to that cavern in Miramar.
Here was where he would findâno, be found by, the Other who wanted him dead.
He landed in a car park as the sun cleared the horizon, sent the buzzer home and walked the streets of the city. There were open-air markets, leafy trees, glassy towers that even the Lyhhrt might have enjoyed observing when he first came. He paid no attention to them now, but walked through the markets and down the main avenue scanning the crowded minds to sharpen his sight and hearing.
He saw through alien eyes that there were brilliant holographic advertisements swarming among the people, urging, pleading, admonishing, but they appeared to his vision as flickering mists, and he was concentrating intensely on what was in the minds, what the eyes had seen, the ears heard, that would point him where he was going.
Projected on the walls of tall buildings there were other kinds of messages, printed newsstrips telling of games won and lost, wars in distant places. The Lyhhrt did not read, but the minds of readers who stopped to look told him what was being said, a great deal that was of no importance to him,
and suddenly, a report that the Ambassadors from Lyhhr had been called home for gross misuse of their authority, and the Embassy closed. There were no other details.
He caught this message just before it scrolled out of sight, and stood stunned, feeling faint while streams of people heading to work swarmed around him muttering. Finally he withdrew the feelers of his mind into himself.
What does this mean
? Of course that pair well deserved to be sent home, and good riddance.
But he was not sure now that the murderer in wrought-iron was a cohort of those ambassadors, Brass and Bronze, and he was struggling to put the two parties in relation to each other.
The matter had begun with those ambassadors and Brezant planning a neat coup against Khagodis. Now Brezant was dead, the two ambassadors displaced; that murderer, who had come out of nowhere, was now running the Company. He wondered if that one had been in control all along, had used Brezant as a puppet. Brezant had been a man with no control and little talent in an organization of any size, the controlling Lyhhrt had seen that, had seen that his underlings were contemptuous of him and let themâperhaps even encouraged themâto kill him. That death made no difference.
The difference is that my Other is dead, and Willson.
If I do not destroy that dark sibling, all of those in that camp will die, Ned Gattes, Spartakos and Rrengha, and all of the poor fools that the world could not find a use for, they will die horribly and I will die for shame ⦠.
But for all of his casting about, the Lyhhrt found nothing in the minds of the news-gathering passersby to suggest that any threat had been made against Khagodis.
Then what is going on?
The woman Greisbach had run for her life, he did not even have any one of the Embassy staff to reach out for and the ground was rapidly shearing away beneath him.
Jesus God how did I ever get into this / being too pissed off with the old man / falling into a whorehouse and letting myself be / not having enough guts to sit out him and his lectures till I could earn a real / picked up because anything was better than that knockshop and ended just as much of a whore ⦠.
Tyloe pulled himself away from his thoughts and hers, they glanced at each other, one blink, and turned their heads to look out the windows. They had left their aircar at the monorail junction and boarded for Montador. The windows showed an autumn landscape, what passed for autumn in Cinnabar Keys, a slight yellowing of thin leaves in the rich growth, a dark thickening in the succulents that rose like city towers.
“There's no reason we have to go there just because he said so,” Tyloe said.
“I'm so afraid of him,” Lorrice whispered. “My esp is almost zero on Lyhhrt, they can shield so you don't see them coming.”
“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.
Â
Â
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?
Â
Â
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.
Â
Â
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 hereâlet'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 andâ
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.”
Â
Â
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.
Â
Â
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.”
Â
Â
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.
Â
Â
“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.”
Â
Â
Â
Khagodis, New Interworld Court:
One Man's Meat
Â
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 flaskâI see it is some kind of containerâyou 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 firstâif 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.
Â
Â
“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.”