“Ain’t they gonna do anything?”
The woman, still shadowed by the bruiser and just as blank-faced as he was, went to a second office, where a Kylkladi man with dyed green feathers, wearing spectacles, put a thin gold chain around her neck. The camera moved along with her but did not shift from its over-the-shoulder point of view.
“Aw, let’s get offa this an find somethin with some action!”
“Shaddup,” a woman said. “I wanna see what happens to her.”
Another man said, “I think this kind of looks like a snuff act. I remember one where they put a chain on her like that.”
“Yeah? Then let’s get on with it!”
“Sure, you’d say so!” the woman snarled.
Ned was rigid, streaming with sweat. Zella pulled away and whispered, “Are you all right?”
His headshake was the barest of gestures, he raised a hand to be let alone. His eyes were locked on the screen, he could not blink.
Zella was staring at him. Then she said, again in a whisper, “You know her.” It was not a question, and he did not answer. She said, in a louder voice, “Why wouldn’t she fight?”
“Maybe she didn’t know what was happening—or maybe it ain’t gonna be that a-tall.”
A Kylkladi woman in purple feathers led the red-haired woman to a store-room where she she removed her clothes and put a corset decorated with spangles, gave her an impervious helmet and a mask in the shape of a scallop shell, and led her down even more halls, all the while touching her on neck, shoulder, or thigh with a feather or a silvered talon while they passed between rows of staring people of strange species.
“That’s a whorehouse.” The others did not answer, and the pornograph fell silent as the gamesters came around to look at the screen.
The scene flicked to a theater with screens, holo receptors, and the camera facing an apron stage where a gigantic Florence flask was waiting; it was filled with liquid, and another tube led into its belly. Swimming inside the flask was a hominid female with a deep red skin, and a tadpole-shaped tail as long as her legs; there was a gold chain around her neck. Her eyes were huge and dark; she stared out for a moment and then retreated to the wall and turned her face away.
“I never see one of them before.”
“Some animal they breed for games.”
The red-haired woman dropped down the neck beside her; she was wearing the shell mask and the impervious helmet. The water blurred in a flurry of bubbles. When it cleared the two were staring at each other; the red-haired woman raised both hands and grasped the aquatic woman’s breasts.
“Yeah! It’s about time!”
“Shut up!” Zella hissed, surprising herself. Ned tightened his grasp on her shoulders as if she were his lifeline. He could not bear to watch, nor force himself to turn away.
The aquatic raised her arms in a startle, then without violence plucked the other woman’s hands away, and the devil’s wife came boiling out of the tube. When the thrash of bubbles settled down the beast had already slashed the woman along the side of her thigh, the screen zoomed close and the ribbon of blood seemed to be splashing the eyes of the viewers.
“I know that! It’s a devil’s wife.”
“And he can keep her too.”
“Them things got esp,” the cyborg woman said.
Smugger called, “Hey Barley, I bet you never fought one of them!”
The man who had brought up the talk of a snuff act answered, “You can bet your eyeballs, pignose, and I never saw one of them killed either. She don’t have much chance with no weapon.”
The woman had wrapped herself around the serpent’s neck and was trying to choke it, but could not get a tight hold on it. Clinging under the jaws, she tried with one arm to push the aquatic toward the neck of the flask. The sea-woman did not understand at first, then pulled herself up and away, but when she saw that the claws of the devil’s wife had raked the fighter’s back, and the helmet had broken away and fallen to the floor of the tank, she dived down from her shelter, snatched up the helmet, and slammed it in the beast’s eye.
Then the serpent’s blue-green blood mixed with the red and turned the water smoky, but before it was completely obscured the red-haired woman had dropped the mask, shoved her face into the serpent’s tangled gills and savagely bitten into them. As its blood billowed again, the devil’s wife twisted its head and bit her halfway through the neck. The screen went black.
There was a moment’s silence, and Barley said, “Looks like she fought.”
Zella murmured, “She was trying to protect the other one. I wonder what happened to her.”
“If she’d died they’d’a showed it,” Smugger said.
Ned thought that was probably true. He scrubbed the tears from his cheek in a one-handed gesture.
“Hey!” said Barley. “I think I know that woman! Didn’t she use to be a pug? I never recognized her without the gear. She used to be one of that blueface woman’s string on one of the worlds in Central—that funny name, Starry Nova. She had a funny name too. Like, Jambalaya.”
“Hey, Ned, didn’t you come from there?”
“Jacaranda,” Ned said. “Yeah. I knew her. She was a good fighter.”
He walked away blindly, arm still around Zella.
So there just happened to be a holo with Jacaranda getting ripped to death. It was the Khagodi that picked it up off the floor, but all forty-six of them shipped out with me. So this classy armful I got here looks like Jacaranda. If I went to bed with her would she kill me in my sleep? No, I don’t think she would. If the Weird Twins had wanted to stick me with those daggers I’d have been dead as soon as they jumped me. They’d have driven them up through my belly. I would’ve died anyway from everybody pushing me at them if that robot hadn’t saved me. A robot! “Are you still my friend?” I sure as hell need one.
That spytick I was dumb enough to take. Means they—THEY—want to know. Something. Something about the delphine, because we were interested in her, and we never found out anything, but they don’t know that, whatever we know may be too much. So they don’t want to kill me—yet. Just scare me to death. It wasn‘t GalFed, I bet, that sent me here, they just hooked on, and I don’t dare try much spying in this place. But I’ll die of a broken neck if I have to keep twisting my head around looking to see who’s coming at me next. I can’t stay here.
I gotta get outa here, gotta get out. Out.
Fthel V: Lebedev
Two days after the body of Jacaranda Drummond was found, the skambi dealer of the Gamblar at Zamos’s brothel in Starry Nova was offered a much better slot in the Kylkladi GamePlex on the other side of the world. The following day a Miry applied at Zamos’s for the vacated place. He was a small compact man wearing a short zaxwul pea jacket and a Russian peaked cap with a button on top; his eyes were black and heavy-lidded and his grizzled beard was cut close.
“A.G. Lebedev . . . yes,” said the hiring officer, a thin artificially red-headed woman. “Full name, please, spell it.”
“A-L-E-K-S-A-N-D-R G-R-I-G-O-R-I-Y-E-V-I-C-H L-E-B-E-D-E-V.” He offered his GalFed Working Permit. The holo showed him with his mouth crooked up as if he had something awful in his teeth.
“You got a short form for that label?”
“Lebedev.”
The woman looked up from the keypad. She was wearing a big locket that glowed and blinked, saying urgently: I’M SHIRLI!—I’M SHIRLI!—I’M SHIRLI! “Don’t lip me, chubby. We already got twenty-three applications for that slot, and it’s only one table.”
“Excuse my feeble joke, Madame—but none of your bidders seems to be the right one. Your table is shut down, and the table-players are fighting for the machines they usually despise.”
She sniffed. “Where was your last job?”
“In the Investigative Bureau of Starry Nova, Miry Division. Police Inspector.”
She squinted. “Did you play a lot of skambi there?”
“No. That I did in the Starry Nova Institute of Co
rrection and Rehabilitation, Miry Section. As an inmate.” He smiled. “Importing illegal substances. I stole nothing.” He added, “There are a lot of skambi players in prison.”
She kept squinting at him, the gears meshing in her brain almost as visibly as the locket on her chest shrieked, I’M SHIRLI!—I’M SHIRLI! “You have proof of all this?”
He drew a neat packet from his pocket and displayed his employment termination notice with special condemnation, his prison I.D., his ticket-of-leave dated three thirtydays earlier, and was reaching for a birth certificate when she put up a hand.
“Stop. You really think you can handle a table after playing with bread crumbs or whatever?”
“I have visited here many times in an official capacity before you began working at this desk. Your table has a disk shuffler, a scoring display, and a pair of white gloves—and you need a dealer who is not timid.”
She thought for a moment and pushed a button. “Go play a couple rounds on the machines while I check you out. Ai’ia will put away your hat and coat and take you to the Keymaster for tokens. That way.” She pointed to a door different from the entrance way. It led farther into Zamos’s brothel. Deeper. Lebedev nodded and went through it.
Skambi is not the most popular game in the Galaxy. It does not fire philosophical discussions and seed libraries the way chess, ip, go, huka and bodoko do, even though it is a game like Temple of Brahma, which is a matter of three diamond rods with sixty-four gold rings of different sizes heaped on one of them, and when they are all transferred in the proper order the universe will vanish, pfft! That is a puzzle for mathematicians. Skambi is played across the Galaxy because it has few cultural connotations, no requirement but a good mind, and is only a matter of placing a smaller piece on a larger one in a pile; though the rules are complex and constantly being changed, it can be played with tokens, coins or buttons of different sizes and the same shape, disks of steel—even gold—or pieces of leather, cloth, or plastic, or loops of string, chain, or beads, or with playing cards, tarot, mah jongg tiles or any numbered pieces. Or, by the truly obsessed, with slices of food. A dealer’s call, like “Number fifty-seven today, gentle-persons!” begins it.
Lebedev went to admire the old-fashioned table, then into the huge hall where he found the skambi machines crowded by moping Bengtvadi whose friends had left for home on their mother ship, Zarandu. No one was willing to share a game, but eventually he squeezed in between an emaciated Bengtvad and a thick Varvani who had pulled one of the smoke-cones over his head and was smoking ge’iin. Wisps of escaping smoke made Lebedev a bit light-headed, but he did not complain to the hulk beside him. The game’s vid was holo, and even looked as if real diamond rods were being eternally ringed by gold disks, with sounds to match over a swelling and dramatic music.
“Didn’t know you played, Lev. Thought you just ran us in.”
The not-quite-young woman passing with drinks to the table-rooms had straight brown hair cut to the jaw; there were red lights in it beneath the flickering lamps, and it swayed around her face as she balanced. She paused for his answer.
“Hello, Tally dear.” Lebedev looked round at her, turning his head like a teddy bear so that the rest of his body did not move. “I have missed your sweetness.”
She flushed for a moment under her freckles as she had always done at such remarks, and calmed quickly, knowing that Lebedev truly liked her. “You’ve come to ruffle us about the dead whore again.”
Lebedev smiled. “Your drinks are melting.” He dropped a token in a slot beside the game and drew out a very small Polish vodka. “I came to look for work.” He tossed off the drink.
“Work?”
“A job.”
“That’s a very strange joke.”
“Have you not noticed I have been away for a year?” She stared at him, as if she were not quite sure she really knew this Lebedev. “Yes. All that time I have been in prison. Far from the sunlamps of the Gymnasion. Disgraced. Abased. Everything.”
She gave a hard grin. “I’ve got to hear that story—how you got on in there with all the poor mumpers you dusted and stowed away.” She swept off in a whirl of russet velvet and lace. Lebedev laughed and placed a SayNo wafer under his tongue to dissolve the vapor of alcohol, though it would have been hard to notice through the fumes of ge’iin escaping from the smoke-cone.
“Mister.” He turned. The soft voice belonged to the woman Ai’ia, who had led him to the skambi machines. She was slender, grey-beige in skin, hairless and wearing a black silk wiglike headdress woven with pearls: an impervious helm. He had not noticed her, with her strange near-beauty, when she led him to the Keymaster; in the dimness with his eyes on the footing he had only been aware of the floating hem of her caftan, patterned in oriental waves of seafoam and sky.
“You said something, Mister?” this vision asked.
Lebedev became aware that he had been staring. “I am a romantic, dems’l. I was admiring your beauty.”
Her smile was not an expression of anything in particular. “I come to tell you that you may try out at the tables.”
“Thank you, dear.” He rose and followed; she moved before him carefully, with a learned grace, and seemed conscious of being observed.
The skambi table stood in a niche of its own under a bright light; it was star-shaped and had five seats between the points, each with an individual LED display set into the table in front of it. Three brass rods rose from the center, and the thin disks piled in the mixer were centered and rimmed with brass; they were real mother-of-pearl with streaks of blue, cerise, and yellow-brown, and inside every one of the sixty-five was a tiny alarm that shrieked if it left the table’s circumference.
There were four people already sitting impatiently at the table. One was a Bengtvadi woman wearing plain working clothes, her long narrow head tattooed with complex clan insignia; her wrist was looped with a cord carrying an unlimited GoldCred disk. The second was a blue-pelted Dabiri man with an elaborately waved tail. The remaining two were a Solthree couple, a businessman in a dark green brocaded zip with fancy epaulets and his company’s logo on the breast, and a thin fluffy young woman all mascara and lip rouge.
Lebedev found and pulled on the white dealer’s gloves which had been folded in a little drawer beside him, along with a pair of armbands, purple with pink yeye flowers; he leaned over the table to wind the crank that traditionally mixed the stacks, and withdrew the first disk to appear in the slot.
“Number twenty-eight today, gentlepersons! Enter credit I.D.s and wagers on your panels. Numbers fourteen, thirty-nine and fifty-one are wild.” He punched numbers to light up the displays, gave one more wind of the crank to send the disks into the players’ racks, set the clock, and threaded number twenty-eight on the first spindle, belonging to the Bengtvadi woman on his left.
“West plays twenty-five, North twenty-two, East nineteen, South eighteen,” the game went on to fill the first spindle with twenty-four disks, the second with twenty, and battled on to the third, where the winner would be the first player who stopped the game with an unbeatable piece or, when all pieces were gone, made a similar move from one disk to the other.
“South passes, West fifteen, North—sir,” to the Dabiri, “five is disallowed if you have a higher number in hand that is within minus five of fifteen, Cruxan Standard Game Rules”—the Dabiri snorted, tossed his mane and played twelve—“but that move will not lose you a point on this round, courtesy of the house, sir, East plays eight, South—” he looked hard at South, the businessman, who was offering 3: he was almost certain that this player was holding number 6; he had noticed in his earlier examination that 6 had an odd little dent on its brass edge that was visible only in the bright light. “Sir, do you wish to play three?”
“Question!” the Dabiri and the Bengtvad cried in unison.
South flushed deep red. “You calling me cheater?”
Lady East shrank back, and Lebedev spoke quickly before North and West could put in another word:
“Oh no, sir. I thought you were intending to play six. The symbols are somewhat alike.” His foot was poised over the alarm button.
There were one or two watchers impatient for a game; South swallowed his anger and drank most of a large mauve liqueur garnished with zimbfruit slices. He muttered, “I suppose I did mistake it—I seem to have a six here.” North and West wisely did not argue, but settled back into the game and their drinks: the Bengtvadi tossed back her pepper vodka, peppers and all, the Dabiri lapped at straight gin.
South lost the game by one point, whether or not because he had been prevented from playing his three would never be clear. As soon as the game was over he retrieved his credit chip, stood up, and marched off leaving his companion staring at his back. She rose as if to follow, then glanced aside at Lebedev and he shook his head very slightly; she nodded, snatched up her feather boa and left to chat up someone else: she did not want a thick lip.
Tally, pausing to refresh drink orders, murmured, “That’s a rough one, but he drops a lot of money, in the house too. He give you any trouble?”
Lebedev, looking across the room, saw that South was lingering near the poker tables. “He might have if we had been alone.” The vacated places were already filled by eager players, and the Bengtvad was snapping her fingers for more pepper vodka. Lebedev wound the crank and said in a croupier’s voice, “Number forty-three today, gentlepersons!”
It was nearly evening by the time his afternoon shift ended; Lebedev slotted the disks and glared at his gloves in disgust: “Feh. Such beautiful things and all so dirty.”
“Mister.” He turned to find Ai’ia at his shoulder. “Keymaster says you are in, Mister. You get a tenday’s pay, and find cheap room and board next door with other employees.”
He stood up stiffly. “Also I would like a little time to pack and move.”
“You ask Keymaster for that.”
“It is a change of clothing and a soup crock,” said Lebedev. The Keymaster’s office was up one floor, and he found the rank of chutes; as he stepped in and turned round to find the UP button, the closing door was wrenched back open and the flushed face grinned at him savagely.
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