Alone, Roan sat and waited in the small, dank tavern. The room smelled of a hundred liquors, poison to each other, and of alien sweats. Outside the flaps of the cellophase windows the men were bored, talking too loudly and throwing knives carelessly at each other’s feet. Rain started up and drummed on the tin roof. It reminded Roan suddenly, overwhelmingly, of home. But he thrust the emotions back under a gulp of strong wine. Home was gone, had never been. Tambool was a place like any other, and in a few hours he’d be on his way. He had another drink and waited.
Bella was no longer alive. L’pu had said. What did that mean?
He heard the men jibing at someone outside and the tavern lighted with an opening door and feet shuffled. It was Uncle T’hoy hoy. He had gotten old, so old, and his gray face was like shrivelled clay, but it rose into smiles for Roan.
“My boy,” he said. “Oh, my boy.” And Roan saw that if a Yill could cry, Uncle T’hoy hoy would have cried.
Roan embraced the old slave and ordered two more Fauves.
“I guess I’ve changed,” he said. “Would you have known me?”
“You have changed, but I would have known you, Roan. But tell me the story of your years. Have you killed and have you loved and have you hated?”
“All that and more,” Roan said. “I’ll give you my story for your collection. But my mother. What happened to Bella?”
Uncle T’hoy hoy reached under his belt, inside his tunic, brought out a thick gold coin and offered it to Roan. “Your inheritance,” he said. “All that remains of a once fair flower of the Yill.” Uncle T’hoy hoy was a story-teller and he couldn’t help being poetic, Roan told himself, suppressing his impatience.
“Where did Bella get gold?” Roan fingered the coin. It was an ancient Imperial stater and represented a lot of money in the ghettos of Tambool.
“She had nothing for which to live, with Raff dead and you stolen. She sold herself to the Experimental College for vivisection. This was her pay, and she left it for you in case you should ever return.”
“And—she left no message?”
“The deed speaks all that need be said, Roan.”
“Yes.” Roan shook his head. “But I don’t want to think about that now. I have to hurry, Uncle T’hoy hoy. My men are itchy for action and loot, and if anybody even looks at them sideways they’re going to cut loose. I came here to find out who I am. I know Dad and Ma bought me at a Thieves’ Market here on Tambool, but I don’t know which one. Did they ever give you a clue?”
“No clue was needed, Roan. I was there.”
“You?”
“I came here, all the way from a far world, to kidnap you,” T’hoy hoy said, remembering an old irony and smiling his strange Yill smile at it.
“You!” Roan was grinning too at the unlikely image of the old Yill as a hired adventurer.
“Ah!” T’hoy hoy said. He shook his head. “Better it were perhaps if all this were left untroubled under the mantle of time—”
“I want to know who I am, Uncle. I have to know. I’m supposed to be of Terran blood—Pure Strain. But who were my parents? How did the ITN get me?”
Uncle T’hoy hoy nodded, his old eyes remembering the events of long ago.
“I can tell you my story, Roan. Your story you must find out for yourself.”
“I’ve shot my way in and out of a lot of places,” Roan said. “But you can’t shoot your way into the past. You’re my only lead.”
“We came here,” T’hoy hoy said, “following orders. We were minutes late at the bazaar—but the dealer talked a little. We trailed the purchasers, and they went to earth in a closed place where tourists never venture. When we saw them, we laughed at how easy it would be; a frail Yill woman and an old hybrid Terran in an ill-fitting suit . . .”
“Raff was never old.”
“So we discovered. It was incredible. He fought like a fiend from the Ninth Pit, and even after his body-bones were broken, he fought on, and killed all the others, and he would have killed me. But the lady Bella saw that I was a Yill, like herself, and that I would yield. She needed me, so my life was spared. Then by my oath I was forever bound to her and to Raff. And to you.”
Outside, the men had begun a game of rolling the tankards their drinks had been served in, and shooting at them. Inside there were only Roan and T’hoy hoy and the bartender frowning worriedly over his pewters and casting glances toward the door.
“Send out a refill,” Roan called. He poured his and T’hoy hoy’s glasses full.
“Dad used to say I was Pure Strain. But whenever I asked him what made me any more valuable than any other more or less pure Terran, all he said was that I was something special. What did he mean, T’hoy hoy?”
“Special you were, Roan, for many men died for the owning of you. But how, I cannot say.”
“This market where I was bought. Tell me where it is; maybe the dealer who sold me knows something.”
“As to the bazaar, tell you I will, but as for the dealer . . . alas, he died of a throat ailment.”
“A throat ailment?”
“There was a knife in it,” T’hoy hoy said a little guiltily. “Ah, I admit, Roan, I was not so even-tempered then as now.” T’hoy hoy told Roan the location of the Thieves’ Market on the far side of Tambool. “But let me advise you to stay clear of the place, Roan. It was an evil haunt of the scum of the Galaxy twenty-five years ago, and the neighborhood has since deteriorated.”
Roan was watching through the window as a large company of Veed gentry went by outside; his crewmen stood silent, watching, but everything in their stance suggested disrespect. Sidis was tossing his knife in the air and catching it without looking, and grinning his steel-toothed grin.
“They’re like children,” Roan started, and broke off. A lone Veed had hurried past, trailing the group, and the diamond at his throat had glinted like a small sun, and from the corner of his eye Roan caught a sudden movement, then a thud.
He was out in the street in a moment, in time to see Noag’s short cloak flutter at an alley mouth. Roan sprang after him and whirled the lumbering Minid around, but it was too late. The young Yill noble’s head dangled at a fatal angle.
An angry buzzing was growing among the gathering bystanders. They didn’t like Veed nobles, but strangers killing them in the public street was too much.
“Come on, you brainless slobs!” Roan yelled. “Form up and let’s get moving!” He looked at Noag, and the Minid fingered his knife and looked back.
“You can stay here with your Veed and his diamond,” Roan grated, and passed him by.
“Huh?” Noag looked puzzled. “You can’t do that! It’d be murder,” he roared, starting after Roan. “I got no Tamboolian money! I don’t know the language! I won’t last a hour!”
“Tough,” Roan said. “Cover him, Askor, and shoot him if he tries to follow us.”
T’hoy hoy was trotting beside Roan, looking back worriedly. “Cleverly done,” he puffed. “The sacrifice will satisfy them for the moment, but you’d best not tarry. Farewell, Roan. Send word to me, for I would know how your saga ends.”
“I will, Uncle,” Roan said. He pressed a heavy Imperial thousand-credit token into the old Yill’s hand and hurried after his men. At the gate he looked back.
Noag was squatting at the alley mouth. Tears were streaming down his face but he was cutting the diamond off the dead Veed.
XXVI
It was a steaming, screaming color blaze of a bazaar, and the dust was like yellow poison, and as Roan marched his men through the narrow, twisting ways between stalls, no one gave them a second look. No one gave anything a second look in the Thieves’ Market unless it was something he wanted to steal.
They came out into an open plaza, and wended their way across it among sagging stalls with sun-faded awnings. Merchants too poor to rent booths squatted by heaps of tawdry merchandise. Gold and green deathflies buzzed everywhere, and the air reeked of opulent perfumes and long-rotted vegetables and sweat and a
ge and forbidden drugs. They passed a scarlet and blue display of Tirulean silks that were worth fabulous amounts and a spread of painted esoterica that was worth nothing at all and came up to a crumbling wall cut from the chalky ochre rockface that towered over the square. A hand-painted sign beside a dark stair said YARG & YARG, LIVESTOCK. Under the first sign, another hung by one rusted pin. It said FOR SALE—VIABLE HUMAN EMBRYOS. Something had been painted beneath the words, but the letters had been scratched out.
Roan turned to the men. “Go shopping,” he said, and they stood and looked amazed.
“Go shopping. Spread out so you won’t look like an army; and don’t start anything.”
“Where you going, Boss?” Askor inquired.
“I’m going to see how easy it is to become a father.”
Roan climbed the narrow, hollowed steps, pushed past the remnant of a beaded hanging into a dark and smelly room lit by a crack in the ceiling From behind a desk, a mangily feathered Geek in tarnished bangles looked at him with utter insolence.
Roan kicked a broken chair aside and leaned on the desk.
“What do you want?” The creature rasped in a scratchy, irritable voice. “Who referred you here? We deal wholesale only, to selected customers.”
“I don’t go through channels,” Roan interrupted. “I came to inquire about buying an embryo. A human one, like you advertise outside.”
“We have thousands of satisfied customers,” the dealer said automatically, but in a tone that indicated that he had no need of another. He was looking Roan over distastefully. “How much you prepared to pay—if I should happen to have something in stock?”
“Money doesn’t matter. Just so it’s the real thing.”
“Your approach appeals to me.” The dealer fluffed out his moulted face ruff and sat up a little straighter. “But you have to have at least one wife. Sodomate law. The Feels would get me.”
“Let me worry about that. What have you got?”
“Well, I could offer you a good buy in a variety of FA blood lines—”
“What does FA mean?”
“Functionally adapted. Webbed digits, heavy-gravity types, lightly furred—that sort of thing. Very nice. Guaranteed choice, selected—”
“I want genuine Terry type.”
“What about our number 973? Features the cyclopic maternal gene, rudimentary telepathic abilities that could be coaxed along—”
“I said Terry type. The original variety.”
“Nonsense! You know better than that. It doesn’t exist.”
“Doesn’t exist, eh? He bent close to the dealer. “Take a look. A good look.”
The dealer clacked his tarnished beak and looked at Roan worriedly. His large round eyes were watery. He blinked and look surprised.
“My goodness,” he said. Then: “The feet. You’d be surprised how often it’s the feet.”
Roan stepped back and pulled a boot off and planted his bare foot on the massive old desk.
The dealer gasped. “Five digits! One might almost think—”
He looked up into Roan’s face with a sudden alarm. He slid off his stool and hopped back.
“You’re not—oh, no!”
“Sure I am,” Roan said. “I came from right here. Twenty-five years ago. And now I want to know all about the circumstances surrounding my presence on your shelves.”
“Go away! I can’t help you! I wasn’t here then! I know nothing!”
“For your sake,” Roan said, “you’d better know something.” He took a gun out of his belt and hefted it on his palm.
“My . . . my uncle. Uncle Targ. He might—but he left word he wasn’t to be disturbed!”
“Disturb him,” Roan said ominously.
The dealer’s eye went to a corner of the room, flicked back.
“Tomorrow. Come back tomorrow. I’ll check the files, and—” Roan came around the desk and headed for the corner the dealer had glanced at. There was the tiny glint of an oculus from a shadowy niche. The feathery alien skittered across to intercept Roan. “Uncle Targ isn’t active in the business any more! He’s not a well being! If you’d just—”
“But I see he still retains an active interest.” Roan swept the dealer aside, raised the gun and fired a low-power blast at the wall. Plaster shattered all around the Eye, exposing wires which led down toward a circular hairline crack in the fused-sand floor. Roan brought the gun up and fired at the crack.
The dealer jumped at him and hauled at his arm, squawking. Abruptly, the trap door flew up and a tiny old voice screeched in five languages: “Stop, cease, desist, have done, give over!” A naked, ancient head popped up from the opening, its three remaining feathers in disarray. “Break off, check, stay, hold, cut short! Chuck it, I say!” he shrilled. “Terminate—”
“I’ve already stopped,” Roan said. “Uncle Targ, I presume?” He tossed the dealer aside, stepped to the opening. Spidery stairs led down. He holstered the gun and descended into the heavy reek of sulphur dioxide. Uncle Targ danced on skinny, scaled legs, screaming in at least four tongues he hadn’t used before.
“You swear with great authority,” Roan said when the oldster paused for breath. “Why all the flummery?”
The creature skittered to the wall and plugged a wire dangling from its wrist into a socket.
“I should have let you rot! I should have decanted you at the first sight of that accursed box with its crests and jewels and its stink of trouble! Because of you, my very own pouch-brother was hacked to spare-ribs in the flower of his dealership! But instead, I maintained you at the required ninety-eight degrees Fahrenheit for days, and this is the thanks I get!” He stopped and breathed heavily for a moment. Then:
“Go away,” he piped in a calmer tone. “I’m an old being.”
“You’re an old windbag, but that’s your problem,” Roan said carelessly. “All I want to know is, who am I?”
“All that shooting! You could have shorted my metabolic booster unit!”
Roan looked around at the dim-lit room. There were no windows, but the walls were panelled in pure gold and somebody kept it polished. There was a chandelier hung with diamonds and a burl desk that must have cost a couple of thousand Imperial to import from Jazeel. The creature’s flimsy old body was swathed in yards of silver damask, and in one side of his beak he wore a ruby that looked like the heart of a rare red wine.
“You’ve got a right nice sickroom,” Roan said. “And it’s a matter of no moment to me whether you’re evading the Feds or the tax collectors or if you just like to be alone. But I’m still waiting for an answer.” He tossed the gun impatiently and motioned with his free hand at Uncle Targ’s wires. “I can either plug you,” he said, “or unplug you.”
Uncle Targ squeaked around in the back of his throat as though he were pulling out rusty file drawers in his head.
“I’ll have to get your records.” he hesitated. “Don’t look, now.” He sounded as though he had them in his bra.
Roan went on looking, but Uncle Targ played a tune with his fingers on a solid piece of wall and a drawer slid out. A card flipped up.
Roan reached over Uncle Targ’s shoulder and grabbed the card. Somehow, he’d expected to see names on it: his father’s name, or his mother’s. Or a country.
Instead, it said, Pure Terran, Beta. ITN Experimental Station, Alpha Centauri. (Special source d.g.)
“What does ‘Beta’ mean?” Roan asked.
“Beta is you. Alpha was somebody else. And then there was Gamma, and the others.”
“Others. Pure Terran?”
“They weren’t viable.”
“Were they my brothers?”
Uncle Targ shrugged. “Alien biologies have never been a hobby of mine!”
“But what else do you know?”
“What’s the difference? Why do you care? You’re you and it seems to me you’re pretty lucky. Suppose you were me, getting older and older and all the money I’ve got won’t buy even a minute of the pleasures you can get fr
ee.” The screech was a whine now.
“Why I care is my business. Telling me is your business.”
Tremulously, the old creature unplugged himself, teetered across to his stool, perched and lit up a dope-stick. It was obvious from the way he caressed it that he wasn’t allowed to have them very often.
“So long ago,” he murmured, looking at the ceiling.
“Did you know I was stolen?” Roan asked.
“You are crude,” Uncle Targ said distastefully. He pushed a button and the trap door slammed shut in his nephew’s face peering from above.
“I’m waiting.” Roan reminded him.
“I, ah,” Uncle Targ said. “That is, so many of one’s usual sources had withered away. You understand—”
“What made me so valuable?”
“You? Valuable? You retailed for a miserable two thousand, if I recall correctly.”
“Still, there was your brother. And someone went to considerable trouble to come after me.”
Uncle Targ blew smoke from orifices in the side of his head. “Who knows? You do seem to be a more or less classic specimen of Man, if anyone has an interest in such matters.” He sighed. “I envy anyone who cares that much about anything at all. With me it was money, but even that palls now.”
“The card said I came from Alpha Centauri. Can’t you tell me any more than that?”
Uncle Targ rolled one beady eye at Roan. “On the flask,” he said, “there was a name: Admiral Starbird, and the notation ‘Command Interest.’ I have no idea what “that might mean.”
“Are there Terrans on Alpha?”
“I know nothing whatever of this Alpha place,” Uncle Targ piped. “And I do not care to know. But there are no Terrans living there—or anywhere else, for that matter. The Pure Terran is a myth. Oh, ten, fifteen thousand years ago, certainly. They kept to themselves. Lords of the universe! Practiced all sorts of racial purity measures—except for the specially mutated slaves they bred. But then they had the poor judgment to lose a war. Since then the natural tendency toward environmental adaptation has had free rein. And with the social barriers down, the various induced mutations inbred freely with the Pure Strain. Today you’re lucky if you can pick up what we in the trade call an Eighty X; a reasonable superficial resemblance to the ancient type.”
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