He unpacked the bedroll and stowed it in its cupboard, shucked his top and jeans and pulled on the thin shadowsuit (an old but good Lyhhrt artifact, fine as spider-silk) that would turn him into mist if he jumped out of his clothes and pulled its hood over his face when he was running late for GalFed. Topped that with the clean clothes he had unpacked, didn't know what his laundry prospects were. Folded his impervious helmet small and tucked it in his pea jacket because few had ever seen him wearing it. Then buckled his wrist into another agents' souvenir, an interworld trans-comm that looked like a cheap local message pad. Done.
In the mirror he found a fairly presentable man who was out of work, a well-used pug something under forty, good muscle and no belly yet. Scarred mug turning a bit weath-erburned, and dark blond hair bleached from the light of five suns; not a deep thinker, hardly ever learned anything on purpose except fighting. But smart enough to suit his surroundings.
That's you, Ned.
Â
Â
The weather was cloudy and close to rain, and he was glad of this, because it dulled the ache of leaving homeânot knowing where he was going. He hunched his shoulders
against the wind, and when a tree branch whacked his face and made him turn he realized he was being followed.
He frowned over his carelessness but didn't dare change his pace. Couldn't make out who, kind of pudgy, vaguely familiar. He had that old feeling of being very isolated. He didn't dare use the comm to call for help because the Lyhhrt was in too much danger already. Nothing to do but keep moving.
The road was opening up into Plaza Square, and his mind dodged about for bolt-holes among the old buildings that made casings for new shops. He stared unseeing at the Tarot cards, sex aids, beers from forty-seven breweries on five worlds, cashbooks, dried sea-stars from Khagodis, and ganja (ge'inn and karynon in the back room). Follower ducked and lingered among broken columns that had become decorative statuary scrawled with graffiti. Ned did his own ducking toward the one place he could hope for help, and began to run.
The tracker lost patience and came out in the open, panting, his puffy face red with effort. Ned knew him. The other fighter in the bar; not Geordie.
Lyhhrt's anger and terror flashing:
Watch it, manâthat's Geordie, he drinks here!
Hey Geordie, where's your friend?
Ned found the alley he was looking for, and the entrance, slowing to take a couple of long breaths and calm himself: he could afford that much.
Waxers Works was a small gym set in the ruins of a once-beautiful stone grotto, an old and now shabby place with dirty floors and peeling walls where Ned and Zella used to work out once or twice a tenday, and usually found some old friends and fighting partners. They'd given it up when the money ran down. Nobody around today but Hammer Head and Knuckle Duster dueling with sliver-sticks, both wearing baggy purple pants and black and white checked jerkins, their near-identical freckled faces grinning with big
teeth, flaming red hair flying. They were good.
“Hullo, girls! What's doing here?” Ned wiped sweat from his forehead.
“Heyo Ned, ain't seen you in whiles, got new work?”
The pair were sisters whose real names were Daphne and Prunella, but they answered to Knuck and Ham readily enough.
“Lookin' for it, you heard of any?”
They stopped and thumped their sticks on the floor so that the little bells on the tips of them jingled. “Nah, we're too old for the porno, just slivers or chebok. But we got too whizzo for 'em nowdays, everbody gets pissed cause we're not bleedin. So whatsit, Ned, we help you look?”
“Thanks-oh girls, but whatsit is a boyo tailing me, he's comin' up the street there, an' I dunno what he is but I don't like 'im.” He glanced out the window, saw the edge of a shadow.
“We wipe 'im for ya, Neddo?”
“Nah, just scuff him a bit, change his mind for him.”
“We do.” The sisters were half-a-head taller than Ned, and each weighed half again as much. “You want to take a dekko out the back way?”
Ned was tempted. Then took a thought and added, “I'm gonna open up here easy one sec 'cause if he's just some gormless wacko I'll be in real trouble, so you just keep by me, hey?” He did a little two-step to warm up and launched himself out the door, question on his tongue.
There was no time to ask it. First he saw nobody and then a glastex dagger with a fat-fingered hand gripping it ticked him under the chin. It had wavy double edges, looked longer than it was, and sharp, very sharp. It shone white under the white sky.
Ned gripped the wrist of the hand holding it with his left hand and shoved back into the fat face till the elbow joint growled, Attacker yelped, Ned kicked his shin for him, and
when the knife flew from his fist Ned slammed his nose with the heel of his right hand.
Geordie's friend stared gaping. A thread of blood slipped down the cut that ran from forehead to jaw while his nose turned crimson. Ned ducked back in before he could pull himself together, and slid the door closed. He was suddenly, sharply, unreasonably aware that one of the local gendarmes in his khaki slops and cheap elastic gunbelt was shuffling down the lane toward his refuge.
“Eh Ned, y'done it y'rself! That's a steal!”
“Y'were here when I needed.” He was heading for the back way,
just to see if Geordie
â
:HE WAS BUT WE ARE HERE NOW
,: the Lyhhrt said from somewhere in that sharp mindvoice. Ned stood still and began to shudder, found himself giggling a bit. “Nothing's wrong, ladies, there's nobody out here, it's all right ⦠. Thanks a lot, darlings, just go on fighting and you didn't see a thing.”
“Bangers an mash tonight, Ned, you come on over?”
“'Nother time!” He gave them a wave goodbye, they thumped their staffs till the bells jingled, and he took a good last look at them standing like an Anglo-Saxon version of Ashanti warriors.
When Ned closed the door behind himself no one was in the back alley. There was a thought-trail and he followed it, but his mind was still jingling with Knuck and Ham. He took a long calming breath. Yes. They were the kind of warriors Brezant might think he needed, but Ned wasn't going to steer them.
Â
Â
The Lyhhrt had holed up, literally. At the very base of the Grottoes, past where Geordie's friend had squatted and the sea just touched the lip of the weathered platform, was a weed-choked cavern too small and wet for use by others.
Ned bent to crawl into the dark and reeking hole, sidestepping
rippling pools and dodging the patches of slime on the walls. The floor rose gradually and after a half-score steps opened up into a small dry room lit with a coldlight standard and neatly fitted with a narrow set of shelves; Ned felt the bubble-pop of a force-field as he stepped into it: the air was clean here. Spartakos was standing against the wall motionless, with his afferents turned down.
The Lyhhrt was shelving jugs, jars and instruments. He had removed his artificial skin and was now a smaller figure in brushed silver. He turned his electronic eyes toward Ned, saying, “All that I own now is here ⦠.” but Ned was looking at Spartakos. He had never seen Spartakos new, and the robot was far from that now, but the Lyhhrt had found something in his magic shelves powerful enough to remove any tarnish, recover most of the lost gloss, polish the pearl fingernails. He gleamed.
The Lyhhrt said, “Would you resume your afferents, Spartakos.”
The diamond eyes opened. “Hello, Ned!” Spartakos moved his arms up and out and added with innocent relish, “Am I not beautiful?”
“You are,” Ned said.
But the Lyhhrt spoke without warmth: “Now, Helper, what have you to say?”
Ned was frowning. “Did you know who those chukkers were last night?”
“I realized eventually, yes.”
“You pulled that Geordie out of the sea, and that was his fat friend trying to shuck me.”
“Should I have let him drown? I've taken good care of both of them. Nowâ”
“And they knew me too!”
:They knew you from Scudder's Inn, Garden Vale, State of Bonzador five years ago when you saved the child of our Others. Like you, I would not have touched them until I was
sure of that. Now tell me how we will go ahead.:
Ned took a sharp breath and a step forward, eyes up. “You want a hop between stars, Lyhhrt? I'm sorry you're lost and have no Other with you, but for all your money you have no ship unless you can find one to hire, and I haven't heard of any, and you have a helper who is just a pug. The only way we'll get to Khagodis from this hole is with all the other pugs and scruff that hires on with Brezant and let him pay our way.”
Life went on for a day in the forest mansion, and no one looked sidelong at Tyloe. He wondered if everybody else had gone through the initiation. He walked carefully, uneasily wondering how far he could make himself go in the service.
Toward evening a runner came, and Brezant began to scream: Everyone came running.
The room Brezant used for his office had a desk with everything built into its surface, but he was not paying attention to the newstrips, stock quotes, sports-wins that flashed at him from seven worlds. “Whose goddamn dumb idea was that! Thought they'd shuck him in a barroom fight? Assholes! Last thing a show pug wants is a fight he can't control! They wasted their time on him? He's a nit, a nothing, he hasn't been in GalFed service the last five years! Come on, Lorrice, whaddya say!”
The room was stuccoed, its ceilings vast, its massive cabinets in dark wood with deeply carved doors and knotted brass handles; Tyloe, from his scrapings of liberal education, recognized Varvani work, an art heavy and full of dread.
But Lorrice, she was cool today, he thought, tuning fork muted. Perhaps sex had made her calmer. She said, “I never
met him,” Brezant snapped his fingers and she added without any hurry, “but Tyloe here, you took fighting lessons from him in that school, didn't you? He'd recognize you.”
“That was a while ago, he'd have forgotten me,” Tyloe muttered. “I was the wrong shape to get the hang of his style.”
“You mean you couldn't beat him,” Brezant said.
“I ran into his fist on Shen IV,” Oxman said.
“He's been beaten plenty,” Tyloe said impatiently. “He's got a mess of scars on his face and a bad jaw graft. Whether or not I could beat him, there were no more jobs for pugs.”
Arms akimbo, Brezant surveyed his muster, snapping, “Nobody else got a word here?”
Heads turned back and forth until Lorrice, staring at the messenger cowering in the corner, said, “Frankie, just take that helmet off and let me look at you?” She forestalled Brezant's surge: “I can do it myself, Andres. Just let me.” She took the helmet from Frankie's head. “What did Geordie say?”
“Well, he wasn't in very good shape when I saw him in the hospital.” He seemed less afraid of Brezant than of Lorrice, cold as a dagger in her gray silk suit.
“He was beat up?”
“No, but his eyes was turned up an he couldn't talk very well. Something gone wrong in his head.”
“An ESP attack!”
“They said he'd get better.”
“And he said ⦠something. Think.”
“I don't much want toâawright, I think what he said was, a real weird Earther come in the bar, sizes up Ned GattesâGeord never saw âem before, and he was drinkin there a thirtyday, and the first thing he thought it might be a Lyhhrt 'cause they walk funny in those machine shells, even though this one was wearin clothes, and next thing he was dumped in the water and forgot everything else.”
“Sonofabitch!” Brezant whirling and snarling, “That Lyhhrt will know everything about us! Those are two I want wiped. You all say yes?”
Nobody said anything except Cranshawe, the lawyer, in his even voice, “You might have other Lyhhrt coming after him.”
“Then maybe we just get us some tame Lyhhrt! Go get him you jokers, Oxman and Hummer, you go out there and really whack him!” Sweeping the air with his hands, “Out out everybody, eat high, drink up and sleep tight! Just you, Lorrice, you stay with me!”
He danced there punching the air with high fists, his vital and powerfully sexual essence running over and spilling, “You get it out of 'em baby, no secrets! Love ya love ya love ya,” shoving his face between her breasts and snorting. “Do for me baby, do for me! Stick with me and I'll pave your ass in diamonds!”
Â
Â
Tyloe sat in his bedroom holding his dizzy head.
He's crazy
.