by
Jerrad noticed the Sime with the pale gray eyes because she was young and beautiful, and because she was dressed like a high-priced whore. The folded length of fabric stretched across her breasts and buttocks was known as a sardi, and in addition to showing a great deal of skin, it was designed to come off quickly. Working the clubs, where sex-for-pay was one of the myriad forms of entertainment available, he was familiar with the garment. He could see that hers was new and well-made, probably expensive.
She felt him looking and met his eyes, then walked over to stand quite close, which did not surprise him. His pulse speeded up in anticipation of the game. Jerrad was not in the habit of paying for sex, even when he had the means. His finances ran to extremes—in possession of a small fortune one day, broke the next. At the moment, he didn't even have the price of a meal, which was too bad, because he was hungry. But another appetite was distracting him from his empty belly, and he'd found that these girls were often more than willing to take a working holiday, with a little persuasion.
Unfair nageric influence? Perhaps, but what of it? This was Kadanerra, where a Gen sometimes walked away without penalty after murdering a Sime in full view of a dozen witnesses. One less Sime, no great loss. Sometimes he loved this town. Other times, he hated it.
"Let me take you someplace," her voice was like a cat's purr, "and buy you some dinner."
Not exactly what he'd had in mind, and he tried to project sex-lust at her instead, but the thought of food was distracting. And the quality of her garment, along with clean well-kept hair and a few tasteful touches of jewelry, suggested the meal would be a good one.
Allowing a Sime to buy him food seemed right and natural, and yet, he preferred to be the one to set the agenda. Exploring the slopes of her breasts with his eyes for inspiration, he let his nager pick up the pulse of his rising excitement.
She smiled sweetly. "Cost you five hundred dynn. Or we could just go find something to eat, if you prefer."
Jerrad made no verbal reply, just let his shocked disbelief speak for him. Her beauty would allow her to command a high price, but that was ridiculous. Yet her smile did not falter, nor did she step away. "I know a very nice place we can eat." Her voice, though as alluring as before, also revealed an intelligence and self-possession that he found intriguing, especially in one so young, and truly remarkable coming from a Sime trying to earn the price of her monthly needs in such a precarious way.
"Five hundred! Come on, now. I can promise that by the time we're done, you'll want to pay me—but not to worry, I won't charge you a s'dynn." He tried again to awaken her womanly urges, without noticeable results. Too late in her cycle? All his Gen instincts said otherwise. Rejection was one thing, but he'd like to at least sense that she was tempted. He'd hate to think he was losing his touch.
He decided to worry about that later. Win or lose, he started to get hungry about half an hour after the end of a fight, when the adrenalin had worn off completely. He was feeling it now. "So where did you want to go eat?"
She smiled, turned away, and motioned for him to follow. They moved along Kadanerra's winding streets at a pace too brisk for conversation, passing quite a few restaurants as they walked. Jerrad started to get annoyed, and a bit suspicious as well. Sensing this, she slowed and gave him a brilliant smile, gray eyes luminous in the faint glow of the street-lamps fastened high on the sides of the buildings.
"I'm Trey, by the way. I'm happy you could join me for some food, but I have just one small errand first. It won't take long." She held out her hand, fingers and tentacles extended in a nimbus of greeting.
He brushed her palm with his own, rather than the more conventional flick of a finger to one of her own digits. "Jerrad."
"Here we are. Just a moment." She stopped in front of an exchange station, and he glanced up and down the street uneasily. They'd come to a part of town that was unfamiliar to him, and while it looked nice enough, there were few people in sight. He was more comfortable in a crowd. Looking more carefully at the elegant storefronts, he decided they were in little danger of being set upon by a gang of thugs. But neither of them belonged in a place like this, and it would not be long before they were questioned by security guards—some of them scarcely better than thugs, in truth, if they decided you were out of place.
He looked back at Trey and saw she'd done something to transform her clothing, unfolding the cloth of her sardi so that it covered her stomach and the skirt fell almost to her knees. It spoiled the view somewhat, but it did make her less noticeable. She was holding some device in her hand, and she glanced both ways down the street as he'd done a moment ago. Then she held the odd-looking thing—Jerrad thought it looked like a battery interface trying to mate with a small reader-pad—up against the intake port of the exchange station. Jerrad began to feel nervous, and moved away so that he could not see what she was doing, or trying to do. Although he had a fair idea of her intent. He didn't think it would work, though. The exchange stations converted selyn into cash, or vice versa, and had safeguards against attempts to cheat the system.
He heard a satisfied humming noise, and the clink of metal. She emerged from the alcove with one handling tentacle threaded through the holes in a half-dozen coins. It looked like more than enough to buy both of them a fine meal. The odd device was no-where in sight, although he would not have thought she had anyplace to hide it. Once he'd seen the money, she made that vanish too, tucking it into a fold of cloth below her breasts.
"Now for that food I promised you. Not much further." Still walking fast, she led him further from his familiar neighborhood.
Not just a whore, evidently—was that just a disguise, or a sideline? In any event, he tried to convince himself that if they got caught—if she got caught—he didn't know for an absolute fact what she'd done. He just had his suspicions. Hey, maybe it was a perfectly legitimate battery, just some kind of new design. He was no battery expert. He couldn't quite convince himself, but he managed to plant doubt in his own mind—enough to get him through a court appearance, he hoped, if it came to that. With any luck, it wouldn't. He was willing to bet she'd done it before, and she'd probably get caught eventually, but maybe not this time.
A few streets over, they ducked into an unmarked door. That looked promising to Jerrad, because those were always the best places to eat, the ones that didn't have to hang out a sign. The way he was dressed worried him a little; rumpled pants and an old tunic with the arms torn off, neither of them very clean. Somewhat dejected after losing his fight that evening, he had not felt like washing up or changing into fresh clothes. He hadn't even bothered to wipe the blood from the whip-marks on his upper arms. Once inside, however, he saw that he needn't have worried. The place wasn't fancy. But the smells coming from the kitchen and from the plates of diners in the common room made Jerrad feel dizzy with hunger.
The elderly Sime who came to greet them seemed to know Trey, and he led them to a small room where two luxuriously upholstered benches faced each other across a wide table. Jerrad sat down, then had to move over as Trey sat beside him rather than taking the other bench, as he'd expected. The door-Sime set a large pitcher of sweetwater and two mugs on the table, then twitched a curtain closed. Jerrad saw that the cloth was bright with metallic threads—not enough insulation for complete privacy, but a Sime zlinning through such fabric would find the nageric impressions hazy and imprecise, like a scene viewed through smoked glass or sounds heard underwater. And in fact, the cloth was heavy enough to blur the conversation of the diners in the larger adjoining room into an indefinite murmur that rose and fell like waves against a cliff.
The curtain parted long enough to allow a Gen hand to deposit a bowl on the table. Trey pulled the food closer, placing it where they could both reach it, and clearing the way for the next one. Jerrad knew the way things worked in these places. One dish after another would be delivered, blindly and discreetly, and a failure to pull them out of the way could result in clashing crockery.
This first course consisted of small, cheesy muffins stuffed with vegetable paste. They were hot and delicious, but Jerrad was determined to pace himself. He ate only two, and pushed the bowl away with a pang. Trey had speared one with the tip of a tentacle and was nibbling at it delicately, and she gestured for him to dump the rest of them into the bag he carried. The pastries had a hard crust and he thought they'd be almost as good cold as they were now, so he wrapped them in the clean tunic he'd never gotten around to changing into and tucked them away. Trey shoved the bowl to the far end of the table, against the back wall. The staff of the place would not interrupt them to clear away dishes, nor to ask about their preference in food or drink.
Trey ran one finger over the network of scars on his biceps, tracing one of them until it vanished beneath his clothing. "You enjoy skurj-fighting?"
He found it a mildly annoying question. Perhaps she just wanted to converse, and was stumbling around in search of a topic. Gens fighting with whips for the entertainment of juncts was considered low-class by many, but it supplemented what he could earn by giving transfer, and it beat the tedium of having to go to a regular job. Paid better, too. Well, sometimes it did.
"It's all right, I guess. Do you enjoy what you do?" And that was an interesting topic, wasn't it? Was the sardi just a costume, to make it seem as if she had a reason for lurking around in a manner that might otherwise look suspicious? Or was she really accustomed to getting five hundred dynn for sex? "What is it that you do, anyway?"
"A little of this and that." She did not seem happy to have the conversation turned back to herself. Just then, another dish arrived, bringing a lull in the conversation as they investigated. Not knowing quite what to expect from each course was part of the charm of such places.
"Perhaps after we eat, we could take a walk." The food distracted him longer than it did her, naturally, and he was still munching leaf-wraps. He mumbled something incoherent in reply. "Perhaps up to the central reservoir. The view of the city is fabulous from up there, and I sometimes just like to stand near the wall. It's fascinating to zlin, even through the solid stone. I bet you could feel it too. Ever been up there?"
"Sure. My cousin works there. They don't much like people to hang around at night, though." Personally, he thought the reservoir was creepy. Simes sometimes did like to stand around outside the place, and they might claim they were enjoying the view, but sooner or later they would fix their blind, hyperconscious gazes on that unencouraging stone wall. Like they had some kind of bizarre transfer fantasy involving the entire building. And you didn't have to have a set of laterals to be able to sense the barely-restrained potential of all that energy. It was an irregular vibration, like some movement from deep inside the mountain, and everyone knew it was dangerous—far more so to Simes than to Gens.
"Yes, perhaps we should wait and plan the trip in daylight, some time. Have you ever been inside?"
"Sure, my folks and I got the grand tour when Andruss was accepted there as an apprentice. He's more like a brother to me, really. My parents raised him after his mother… died."
"You could probably get in again, then."
"Sure, I guess, but surely you know I can't include you in the invite. No Simes allowed in there, no exceptions, not even if they're on the council. Safety reasons." Kadanerra's power grid was a shaky, patched-together maintenance nightmare, according to his cousin. At the nexus points, it was not uncommon to get fluctuations that might injure even a Gen, and would kill a Sime outright. It was believed by some that the all-Gen Energy Guild kept it that way on purpose, to prevent Sime challenges to their control of the city's most valuable resource. Jerrad had asked Andruss about that, once, and his cousin's only response had been a smile. As far as Jerrad was concerned, it seemed only right and logical that selyn should be controlled by the Gens who produced it.
"It's different in other cities, you know." Trey was leaning close to murmur in his ear, and he was enjoying the heat from her body and the faint smell of Sime that rose from her skin. His response to her had changed subtly, and was no longer strictly sexual. He found his imagination straying to the idea of giving her a sweet, hard, hot transfer… followed by something else that might fit the same description. Not wanting her to zlin too much of this from him, he tried to focus on what she was saying.
"What's different?"
"In Quissa, for example. The selyn grid is maintained almost exclusively by Simes. There's no reason it has to be so dangerous. That's just sloppy design, deliberate or otherwise."
Two more bowls of food were placed on the table, one painted bright green to warn off any Sime that was too dense to recognize the smell of roasted meat. Jerrad found this far more interesting than the subject of municipal selyn management.
He used a hard crust of bread to scoop up some fried fruit-and-vegetable medley from the smaller bowl, and found it delightful. "Here, you really ought to try this."
She followed his example. "You're right. Ever think of leaving Kadanerra, Jerrad?"
"And go where?"
"Wherever your dreams lead you, I suppose. You can laugh if you want, but I fully intend to move to Quissa someday and get a job at their reservoir. I have a knack for working with that kind of technology, and I think I'd find it very interesting."
He paused with a scrap of rabbit-haunch halfway to his mouth. "I've heard they're kind of picky about letting people into Quissa-La. You don't have to answer this, but how do you think their government is likely to, ah, regard you?" In other words, like the punch-line of the old joke; just exactly how junct are you, anyway?
"I've never killed anyone." Her voice held an unconscious arrogance that might cause her trouble if it were overheard by Simes who had, either those who were ashamed of having done so or those who were not. "But yes, that might be a problem. My first transfer…" Her full lips curved in a wistful smile. "The Gen was from the mountains, and she had a wild streak. She'd be your mother's age, but, no offense, she could probably jump in that cage with you, take away your whip and jam it sideways up your ass."
"I'm sure." Jerrad had been in a dozen or so real fights, outside the skurj cages. He'd won a few and lost a few, and there's been a couple where the outcome was less clear-cut. Most of those who could give him serious trouble were males, in the prime of life, but he was not concerned with some Sime's prediction about a hypothetical conflict between himself and a Gen who wasn't even present. "It sounds like you figure they'd make you go through one of those programs, even with a zero body count."
"Yeah, I have no doubt of it." She looked morosely down at the table, picking at a gouge in the wood with a fingernail. "From everything I hear, they actually have more trouble disjuncting someone who's never killed. Because they don't have the guilt to work with, I guess."
"Maybe you should simplify the process, get yourself a cheap pen-pullet some month."
She looked at him with those smoky eyes for a long moment, and he began to wish they'd find some way to heat these little rooms better. He hadn't noticed the problem when they first sat down. "None of the respectable places would even let me in, if I did such a thing for a reason like that. Not the ones that could give me paperwork that Quissa would accept."
"Relax. Try some of these crisps, before I eat them all."
She didn't reach for a candied crisp, but she calmed down—not surprising to Jerrad, since he'd reinforced his verbal suggestion with his nager. "I'm just irritated about the whole business. I didn't mean to take it out on you. I don’t think they have any right to call somebody junct just for having a different style of transfer than they're used to."
Jerrad took another handful of crisps. He was getting uncomfortably full, but they were so good. Junct was one of those words with a hundred meanings, almost as bad as love. A long-ago philosopher of Old Earth—a Farris, reportedly, who had some personal knowledge of the matter—had defined the junct condition as "lust without conscience." More recently, in the words of the Quissan performer-poet Terrantilla, "what you want/when you want." It was part of the bedrock of Kadanerran culture, like the greenish stone of the mountainside into which the city was set like some strange jewel. Jerrad didn't spend much time worrying about who was junct and who wasn't. It was just a word, one he'd heard used for every purpose from its literal meaning of Simes who could not live without Killing, to someone who would not pay a wager that had been made in jest to begin with.
Trey finally snagged one of the last remaining crisps, somewhat to Jerrad's relief. "Please, finish them off, if I eat any more I may explode. You know, I thought the course before this was the last one… the one before that, too, for that matter."
She smiled, and took another one. "There is one more, you know."
"After the crisps? You're kidding, what is it? I don't think I can."
"Spiked tea with whipped cream."
"Oh, a drink course, that's different."
He could tell she had something else to say, but she waited until the tall carafe of tea and the little bowl of rich goat's-milk cream had been delivered. He surveyed the wreckage that filled the back third of the table, eyeing a potato cake that had been overlooked when the next course had arrived. Lust without conscience. He wondered if there were a disjunction program for Gens who could not bring themselves to stop eating. But it had been a long time since he had eaten this well, even when his funds were practically unlimited. He'd have to remember where this place was.
After she'd poured them both an after-dinner drink, Trey remarked, "A lot of dynn in a place like the reservoir—in both senses of the word. Someone with access and a certain amount of raw nerve could score big."
It was not a casual comment, and the lassitude that had crept over him toward the end of the meal dropped away in a hurry. He suddenly wondered if meeting her had been random at all. When he'd talked about his cousin Andruss, had he been telling her things she already knew?
"They could have a brief but exciting career in the entertainment business, is what I think."
"For a Sime, maybe. I don't think the danger would be quite as great for a Gen. But there would be risk, yes, which is why it would require some guts." The Kadanerran courts had a great fondness for sentencing people to death by torture, which had the added benefit of revenue from ticket sales. But they tended to be more lenient with Gens, even though the potential profit was greater. The city could only afford to lose so many selyn-producing citizens. Except for the worst offenses, a Gen was more likely to be sentenced to a year of public servitude, which meant being obligated to give uncompensated transfers to some of the city's more dangerous (but politically connected) juncts. It could be a very educational experience, if the Gen survived it.
Jerrad would not have worried much about his safety, if faced with such a sentence. He'd never had any trouble with abrupt initiation, sudden changes in draw speed or other Sime quirks that sometimes got Gens hurt or even Killed—in fact, he found that kind of thing rather enjoyable. But the part about not getting paid, that would be a disaster. His income as a skurj-fighter was just not steady enough to get by on that alone.
"You should be talking to my cousin, not to me." But even as he said it, he knew he'd find some excuse not to introduce them, if she asked. Trey was so beautiful. Andruss had gotten enough lucky breaks in life as it was.
"The ones who've been let into the inner circle at that place, they get very loyal to the guild. None of them would betray that. Believe me, I've tried to talk to some of them—not your cousin in particular, maybe, but do you have any reason to believe he's any different than the rest?"
Jerrad shook his head.
"I'm not surprised. They do some kind of mental conditioning on them, or something. But I think there's a way in. The lower-level people, the ones that clean the floors and bring in the food, they're not quite as careful about them. They are selective, but the main way they choose seems to be to hire relatives of the engineers."
Jerrad vaguely recalled his mother saying something about Andruss being able to get him some menial job at the reservoir. Even the unskilled work paid very well, which was one of the ways they inspired loyalty. His response had not been polite. He didn't need any favors from Andruss, nor did he need a steady job. He never leaned on his family when his funds were short, so what concern was it of theirs?
Andruss would probably help him if he asked, for his parents' sake. They had taken him in and treated him like one of their own after his mother was sentenced to death for an unprovoked killmode attack on a Gen. The Gen had not been hurt (in fact, she'd shenned her attacker unconscious and nearly saved the courts the trouble of sentencing her), but it had not been a first offense and Jerrad's aunt had lacked the wherewithal to bribe anyone.
Andruss had been 13 when he'd come to live with Jerrad's family. Small for his age, wiry and quick, he'd been morbidly convinced that he was doomed to the same fate as his mother. It had been no surprise to anyone in the family that she'd come to a bad end, and he had feared that whatever had been wrong with her had been passed along in the womb like some sickness of the blood. The identity of Andruss' father was unknown, and no prenatal tests had been done to predict his eventual larity.
A little over a year after his mother's death, Andruss had what he still described as the best day of his life, when Jerrad's older sister Onne began looking at him with a certain fascination. Her father quickly seized control of the situation and hustled his daughter out of the room. Soon after that, he packed his nephew off to the best Gen school the family could afford—not exactly the Hobarth Academy, admittedly. But although it lacked the upper-class cachet of places like Hobarth, Zigmann's post-graduation survival rate was excellent. Jerrad followed his cousin there a couple of months later.
The two boys were almost the same age, but in many ways they were opposites. Andruss was a remarkably good student, polite and articulate. He made a favorable impression on adults with his neat appearance and his love of learning. Jerrad, in contrast, was always in trouble with their teachers for something. He did well in the classes that interested him, but dismally in all the others. He was a full head taller than his cousin and better at most sports, particularly those that favored strength and the ability to ignore pain. There had been some resentment between them, some competition that went beyond friendly rivalry. Some ugly incidents that he hoped Andruss had forgotten about, or at least forgiven as boyish horseplay. Even if he hadn't, he would still get his cousin that floor-cleaning job if Jerrad's parents asked it of him. Andruss might even enjoy the idea of Jerrad in a role like that, on the periphery of his clique but with a much lower status. It was a moot point anyway. Jerrad had no desire for such a job, particularly not as part of some high-risk scam operation.
"Your turn. I've told you a few of the highlights of my happy childhood, such as it was. What about you? I get the impression you're not from around here, originally." She must have grown up somewhere where there was plenty of food; really, a Sime had no business having all those curves.
"I don't think I had a childhood. I'm not sure what that word means, actually." There was more than a hint of bitterness in her voice, then her mood lightened, with a bit of discreet help from Jerrad. How could she be in anything but the best of moods after such an excellent meal? Whatever was wrong with her upbringing was in the past.
She smiled playfully, and added, "I was raised in a nasty mud-hole. It was so damp, I was lucky to end up with tentacles when I went into changeover, instead of webbed fingers and gills."
"How did you get so mercenary, coming from a place like that? I wouldn't think you'd be too desperate for money, anyway, if you really get paid five hundred for a half-hour of relatively enjoyable work."
"Well, business is slow sometimes, you know. I'm worth it… but you won't pay. Just for instance." She pouted in a way that did nothing to detract from her looks. He was willing to bet she practiced that in a mirror.
"I told you, I don't have it." At the moment, he was happy to have the money to serve as a barrier between them. After all he'd eaten, he wasn't sure he could rise to the occasion even if she did decide not to charge him.
"Sure you do." She extended one lateral to be sure he would take her meaning, and added, "You're carrying way more than five hundred."
He let his disbelief segue into amusement. He wasn't quite full field, and although it might have been safe to do so in many cases, he was among the majority of Gens who followed the safety rule of never giving transfer until their nager had regenerated completely after the last time. Perhaps she felt he ought to go to a channel, make a cash transaction not too different than the one she'd spoofed at the exchange station, and use the proceeds to pay her for sex?
Not likely. About as likely as his going along with her tentacle-brained scheme of trying to rip off the central reservoir.
~~~~
Over the next few days, though, he found himself thinking of her crazy idea again and again. It looked appealing from a couple of different angles. The reservoir was probably well-guarded by technologies beyond Trey's ability to defeat—it was in a different league than some corner-kiosk exchange station. But supposing she could manage it, with his help. That would be quite a joke on his successful cousin Andruss. Not one Jerrad would ever be able to throw in his face, of course. But, still…
And of course, the whole business would give him an excuse to spend time with Trey. They'd parted without her giving him any way to contact her, but he'd expected her to find him, to ask if he'd thought it over, to coax and flirt and perhaps buy him some more food. He'd been looking forward to it, really. But perhaps he'd been too discouraging. In hindsight, he wished he hadn't dismissed the idea so decisively when she'd suggested it. It would have done no harm to agree to think it over, at least.
Then his financial fortunes, always precarious, plummeted to a new depth. It began when he lost his end-of-the-month fight. That was certainly not a first, but he wasn't expecting it. The other fellow was hardly more than a boy, and not even full-field. According to the Sime bartender at Screams, where the fight took place, Jerrad's nager eclipsed his opponent's.
The fights were decided by a judge who stood inside the cage with the combatants, but she really did nothing more than echo the mood and the will of the paying spectators. Jerrad realized he was in trouble when he saw that most of the dripping arms extended through the bars were reaching for the other guy. The kid was a first-timer and obviously terrified out of his wits, which was kind of an unfair advantage. And he could barely bring himself to swing the whip at Jerrad with what little strength his skinny arms could muster. Pulling blows was extremely poor form, of course, and Jerrad might have punished him for it with a brutal beating. But the poor guy actually had tears running down his face, and Jerrad could not find it in himself to do it. He realized the main things his own nager would be projecting were boredom and disgust—not good at all. In desperation, he drew the whip back and tried to 'accidentally' catch himself on the tender inside of his thigh, but only managed to snap the hardened leather tip against one of the straps that supported his jock .
The boy, seeing what looked like the wind-up for a truly mighty blow, cringed and let out a low whimper. He took a stumbling step back, and almost tripped over his own whip, which he'd let droop toward the ground in despair. A few Gens in the audience laughed, but they hadn't paid to get in, so that didn't count for much. Most of the Simes pressed up against the bars were beyond hearing, anyway.
Loosing the fight was bad enough. But then he went off to drown his worries at The Party Pen, his hangout club, which was much more casual and laid-back than the places where he worked the cages. Just a fun little neighborhood bar with few rules and fewer pretensions, where he could relax with his friends and just be himself.
One of the other skurj-fighters, who Jerrad knew somewhat, had won a big purse and was buying round after round. Jerrad had done the same thing himself more than once, and was happy to get plastered at his colleague's expense. The room began to fill up and someone else started buying, and as the result of a wager that had seemed hilarious at the time (but the details of which he could not later recall), Jerrad ended up giving transfer to some Sime he'd never seen before, standing on a table so that their heads almost brushed the ceiling, while the people crowded around them roared approval and threw hard currency at them. It had been a good moment, but then somehow in the confusion, the Sime left without paying him anything. Jerrad gathered up as much as he could of the money lying around, although a lot of it had already been grabbed by people in the audience. For all he knew, the Sime had gotten some of it before vanishing into the night.
He'd planned to use the proceeds from that month's transfer to placate his landlady. The couple of hundred dynn he ended up with was not going to cut it. As far behind as he was, an amount like that would just piss her off. He could probably ask around, find out who the Sime was and try to track him down, but it seemed like a lot of trouble without any certainty of a payoff. And it bothered him that he couldn't remember exactly how things had gotten as far as they did. Maybe he wasn't supposed to get anything for it. Could he really have been drunk enough to agree to something like that? It was all the fault of that banana brandy. Sweet and mellow going down, so you didn't realize how hard it was going to hit.
Hung over and feeling sorry for himself, he went to his parents' house. He would sleep in the street before he would ask them for money. They both had regular jobs, and it wasn't their fault he chose to live like he did. He was reluctant to even let them know that things weren't going well for him. But of course his mom could zlin that something was the matter. Without seeming to pry, she chatted about this and that until, without his even having to ask her, she'd agreed to talk to Andruss about getting him a job.
Two days later, he was sitting in a dark little room in one of the offices of the Municipal Energy Guild. The office was in a nondescript little building in the commercial district, not in the reservoir building near the top of the mountain, as he'd expected. Andruss was there, but he didn't say much. A huge woman named Von was obviously in charge. Jerrad knew it wasn't really possible for her to be wider than she was tall, but she gave that impression. The fourth person in the room was a gormy-looking little Sime whose gender Jerrad could not readily determine, who sat in a corner wearing an expression that conveyed a strong desire to be overlooked.
He'd wondered if they would use a Sime to verify his answers to whatever questions they asked. He'd prepared himself for the possibility, sitting in his bedroom talking aloud to himself in a state of partial self-induced hypnosis. He had no intention of stealing anything; it was true, really. He'd thought of Trey briefly while talking to his mother, but just as an example of how strangely things worked out sometimes; if not for their improbable conversation, it might never have occurred to him to drop a hint about getting a job with the Guild.
And as it turned out, Von did not ask him about anything like that. They didn't even ask for an oath of secrecy. She seemed mostly concerned with his health.
"Any problems with your back?"
"No." Jerrad had trouble meeting Von's eyes, which were small and dark and rather penetrating. He didn't want to look at his cousin, either, so he smiled at the little Sime in the corner. The Sime looked away.
"Because we've had trouble with strong young fellows like you signing on with us and then deciding they can't do any lifting, can't stay on their feet too long, can't do much of anything. If we do sign you on, you don't become a guild associate until your year is up. You get hurt, get sick, you're out. The work's not that hard. You know how to lift properly?"
"Sure." He tried to keep his tone respectful—he needed the money—but a bit of bit of impatience crept into his voice. Von smiled, not altogether unpleasantly, and Jerrad started to relax. He reminded himself not to be awed by the mystique of the guild. This woman was just a mid-level bureaucrat, not so different from his own parents.
Von gestured to the Sime, who carried a small barrel from the corner and set it on the floor. "I'd like that on the table, please, between myself and Initiate Andruss."
Jerrad looked at the barrel with some trepidation. The Sime who'd put it there, without any apparent effort, was hardly bigger than the average twelve-year-old. But for all Jerrad knew, the damn thing could weigh as much as—well, Von herself, for example. But there was nothing for it but to try. He walked to the barrel, squatted, and tilted it so he could get his fingers under the rim. The Sime stood close by, probably zlinning for any sign of pain in his back.
As it turned out, the barrel was probably closer to his cousin's weight than that of his boss-lady. Not light, exactly, but well within his ability to handle. He set it gently on the table, placing it as Von had asked, and this time he smiled at Andruss. He'd be willing to bet his cousin would have had some trouble hoisting the thing.
After asking a few more questions, Von told him to come back the next day. It wasn't until Andruss stood and congratulated him that he was sure he'd been accepted. It seemed anticlimactic, somehow.
During his first week on the job, he wondered why they'd bothered with the barrel. There did not seem to be much heavy lifting involved. His home base was at one of the substations, not the main reservoir—a relief, because that would have been a bit of a climb to make every day. From there, he might be sent to another substation with a message or some cargo, but there were powered carts for the heavier items, and they usually sent two Transport Technicians—his new job title—even when one would have been plenty. Other times he was tasked with odd jobs or cleaning chores, and a lot of the time he just sat around talking with the other Gens while waiting for someone to give him something to do.
The schedule was irregular but not demanding, a few hours in the morning on one day, some work in the afternoon the next, perhaps nothing at all the day following. He was provided with a copy of this schedule and had little trouble following it. Apparently some of his co-workers found it quite challenging, and were forever being disciplined for missing a shift or laughed at for coming in when they were not scheduled. The job was, quite openly, a parking-place for cherished but inept relatives of guild members. It made him a bit depressed to be here, but the money was really quite good. And they never asked him to come in at night, so it would not interfere with his real job, once his field strength was high enough for him to fight in the cages. He promised himself he'd only stay long enough to get his finances in shape.
But in the meantime, it was a pleasant novelty to have someplace in particular to go almost every day. The all-Gen environment reminded him of the fighter's lounge typically found behind the skurj cages, and he impressed some of his co-workers with stories about the clubs. Lenna, a young woman who worked at some kind of paper-sorting job that struck him as a slight variation on his own position, expressed an interest in a fighting career.
She talked about it enough that he began to think she was serious, so he decided to see if he could help her. Female skurj fighting was generally separate from the men's, because most of the women preferred to fight with lighter whips that stung rather than cutting, so they would not end up with a collection of scars like Jerrad's. But he knew a few people who worked in what was sometimes called the more refined side of the art.
Before going to any trouble on her behalf, he took Lenna aside and smacked her with a wooden measuring-rule a few times to see if she could take a little light-to-moderate punishment without falling apart. He thought she displayed just the right combination of toughness and vulnerability, and handed her the rule to be sure she could dish it out as well. Bright spots of color rose on her cheeks as she paid him back for the reddened welts he'd left on her bare skin. She was angry but not hysterical, breathing hard but controlling it. This spoke well of her training as a Gen, which was more important in skurj fighting than many people realized.
He asked around, and was able to arrange an audition for her with a women's trainer and her Sime assistant. Word got back to him that Lenna showed potential. She was not a pretty girl, but that would be a trivial liability if her nager showed well in the cage. It gave Jerrad satisfaction to help a younger person move ahead in life.
But he still found himself thinking about Trey. Maybe that was why, on one of his days off, he wandered through the streets to stand outside the restaurant she'd taken him to. He had no intention of going in, because he was trying to be more responsible with his money. He'd come within a hair of being thrown out of his apartment, and had been allowed to stay only after telling his landlady about his new job. He'd promised her a thousand dynn in another week and a half. He could draw his pay anytime he liked, but in order to keep that promise, he would have to leave it on account and let it accumulate. He had a small amount of cash tucked away which should be enough to pay for any meals he couldn't manage to cadge from some Sime or from the free buffets often available at clubs and bars that were hoping to attract more Gen patrons.
He turned away from the restaurant before he could weaken and go inside, and began wandering down the unfamiliar street. It was earlier in the day than the last time he'd been there, with Trey. Stores were open, and many had wares spread on tables outside their doors. He shopped idly, without any real intention of buying anything.
When he looked up and saw her, his mood lifted, and he wondered if she'd zlinned that from down the moderately crowded street. If not, she could probably read the smile on his face, and she matched it with one of her own as she walked rapidly toward him.
"Jerrad! I've been hoping to see you around. I guess congratulations are in order." She linked her arm with his. "We should go somewhere and talk."
"And maybe get something to eat," he said, thinking hopefully of that restaurant.
"Yes, I have food at my place. We can talk privately there."
Well, that sounded promising too. He glanced at her out of the corner of his eye. She was every bit as lovely as he remembered, wearing a bright blue dress that was only slightly more conservative than the sardi. It still looked like something a prostitute would wear, but so might a stunning young woman who just wanted to be noticed. A moot point, he reminded himself. Even if she did put out for pay, he was saving up to make good on the back rent. And besides, he had his principles in such matters. Unless she was hopelessly opposed to men—and he saw no evidence of that—he would talk her around, with a little time and patience.
They left the crowded business district, moving through an area of what looked like small, deserted manufactories. Jerrad looked around alertly, uneasy at being in an unfamiliar neighborhood. They began a steep climb into a more residential area, winding their way along a pathway marked by numerous switchbacks and stairs. Then they turned and moved horizontally for awhile, a relief to Jerrad's legs, and found themselves in a pocket commercial district of no more than a couple of dozen stores.
A haggard-looking Sime came out of an archway and approached them. He looked to be in need, or strung out, or possibly both. Jerrad gave him a sharp nageric warning and was prepared to do more, but Trey held up one hand and said, "It's all right. This will just take a minute." And in fact, the Sime did appear to be focused mostly on her. He continued to approach, giving Jerrad a speculative glance, then moving to position the woman between himself and the Gen when Jerrad repeated the threat.
"Shield us a bit, will you?" Without waiting for a reply, Trey led the other Sime back into the archway. Jerrad put his back to the stone and faced away from them, although he was curious. He'd be willing to bet she was back there selling the guy something, but what? Something he wanted pretty badly, that much was clear.
As promised, it was not long before the two of them came back out onto the street. The Sime man was transformed, relaxed and smiling blissfully, and walked past Jerrad with nothing more than a pleasant nod of greeting. He knew of no drug that could produce such a dramatic result in such a short span of time. As Trey followed her customer out of the archway, Jerrad looked at her with dawning, horrified realization.
"What? You have something against transfer?" She moved closer, breasts almost brushing his chest, looking up into his face. "Maybe you've just never had a really good one. Maybe that's the problem."
Her meaning was unmistakable, and Jerrad could feel his dismay wanting to turn to outright fear. Big mistake to let that happen. He wanted to back away, but didn't.
Almost everyone has one or two special talents, and one of Jerrad's was the ability to feel nauseated on command. Not just queasy, but downright puking sick. He flexed whatever mental muscle it was that allowed him to make that happen, and she was the one who stepped back. Her complexion, normally a rich golden brown, had turned ashy. "All right, quit it. I'm sorry. It was just a thought."
Jerrad took a couple of deep breaths to get his gorge under control. She smiled. "Much better. Come on, I promised you some lunch, and we're almost there."
He briefly considered not following her. Channels were dangerous and unpredictable, and there was no guarantee he could keep the upper hand, as he'd have been confident of doing with an ordinary Sime. But she looked good in that short dress, her slender but shapely hips twitching rapidly as she continued down the street. Also, he was hungry.
She led him into an herb market that took up most of the first floor of one of the old stone buildings. Apparently it never closed because there was no door, although the doorway looked as if it had once supported one. Thick stone columns defined narrow aisles that were lined with bins of dried plants—some to cook with, some to smoke, some that were used to treat illness. More expensive items were kept on shelves behind a counter at the back of the store, and in one corner was the foot of a darkened stairway. Trey headed for the stairs, and the attendant behind the counter glanced up at her but said nothing.
The stairway was steep, and illuminated only by occasional small windows that barely let in enought light for Jerrad to see the uneven stone steps. Glancing out, though, he was glad the windows were not big enough to allow the passage of a human body. The back of the building was evidently on the edge of a steep cliff.
The stairs switched direction twice, following the outside wall of the building. The view from the windows was less alarming now, showing bits of the street below and the roofs of lower-lying structures. They passed a number of closed doors. Near the top of the stairway, Trey took out a key and let herself into one of these.
Her apartment was a single room, long and narrow, stuffed with mismatched furniture that appeared to have been repaired inexpertly and painted in a variety of bright colors. At one time, someone had given the rough stone walls an elegant finish by smoothing them with a paste of vegetable fiber, then covering this filler material with wallpaper that looked as if it had been expensive. Now the paper hung in strips, and great chunks of the filler behind it had fallen out, giving the walls the look of a mattress that had been savaged by rats. Colorful lengths of cloth had been hung over this eyesore in some places. There was a bed alcove, covered not by a curtain but by a rod that supported a large quantity of clothing. More clothes—or piles of some variety of cloth, at any rate—were stacked on shelves, along with a wide variety of other items, some concealed in boxes or bags. At the back of the room was a large, open window with a couple of potted plants on the windowsill. Jerrad did not want to get too close. By looking out at an angle, he could see most of Kadanerra. But straight ahead, there was nothing but empty space and some hazy mountains in the far distance.
Trey rummaged through a storage chest and brought out bags of dried fruit and nuts that she poured into bowls and set on a table. There was even a bag of smoked beef chips. Not as good as the restaurant, but he thought it would do, especially after she opened a chiller and pulled out two bottles of sweet ale. Once her duties as a hostess were done, she made herself comfortable on one of the two couches that faced the table, lying full-length so that Jerrad was left with no choice but to sit on the other one. He twisted the cork from his drink, knowing he'd want it handy to wash down the salty food.
"So tell me all about your new job."
"Oh, let's talk about you for awhile instead. I haven't quite figured out what it is that you do, and I have to admit I'm curious."
"I obtain things, by one method or another, and find people who want those things."
Didn't she realize that she would have to give him more than that if she wanted anything in return? Shamelessly, he helped himself to another large handful of food. For the kind of thing it was, it was actually quite good. Or maybe he was just hungry from walking up all those stairs. "So what do you do if you're walking around in one of those skimpy outfits and someone actually offers you the five hundred?"
"You seem to think that's never happened." She toyed with her hair, stretching languorously on her bed of cushions like some large cat. "Here's my take on the matter. Being offered a small sum of money for intimacy is degrading. But if the money is good enough, it becomes flattering. Not to mention lucrative."
"Yeah, I guess you have to come up with more cash every month than most of them."
"Not as much as you think. I'm not one of those really high-powered channels, you know. I probably came on a little strong, earlier, but I want you to know, it would be quite safe for you to give me transfer." She raised one hand and extended her laterals. "Zlinning is useful for all kinds of things, but that's what it's really intended for—finding a suitable prospect for transfer. Particularly for someone like me, who can't ask just any Gen."
"Yeah, well, I think I'll stick with the regular kind of Simes." She wasn't the first channel to suggest that he was wasted on renSimes. His buddy Bazul, a close friend from Gen school, had been told the same thing. Lured by the prospect of exciting transfers at a higher pay scale, Bazul had decided to give it a try, and had not survived the experiment.
"All right, I won't press the matter. But I know you could handle it, and if you did have any trouble, I could slow it up if I had to. I had a year and a half of formal training from a licensed Quissan channel after I changed over."
Jerrad turned his mind back to some of the other things she'd told him about her past. A snort of amusement escaped him. "This was in the same tropical steam-bath where you got that transfer from the mountain Gen, right?" Even taken individually, the few details she'd offered about her past were unlikely; in combination, they verged on the ludicrous.
Her eyes narrowed. "That's right, down in the hollow where the bitey-bugs bite." Fast as an ugly rumor, her hand darted across the table and pinched the skin on the inside of his elbow. It was surprisingly painful. He considered giving her a hard field-slam, but there was a possibility that it might just provoke her. He decided to handle it another way.
"That'll be a hundred dynn for laying your carrot-hooks on me in such a way as to cause physical pain." He examined his arm. "Lucky thing for you it didn't leave a mark, my customary fee for that is a thousand." He didn't care if she picked up the half-truth in his statement. It was his policy as of right now.
She rose halfway into a sitting position, lips slightly parted with indignation. Then, with a disgusted expression, she fished a coin out of a fold in her dress and threw it to him with a gentle underhanded toss. He tucked it away in his own clothing, glad to have a bit of extra cash. It did not surprise him that she had paid. Simes learned not to argue with Gens about things like this, because if it ever went to court, the verdict was almost never in the Sime's favor.
The money put him in a more expansive mood, so he decided to tell her all about his job, if she really wanted to hear. She seemed determined to draw out every detail, and seemed particularly fascinated to hear about the day he and two other guys had spent a long, dusty afternoon cleaning up a storage room that was apparently a graveyard for old manuals. These apparently fell into that popular category of 'too valuable to throw away, but not actually good for anything.' Looking at the clutter that filled Trey's place, he thought she had some familiarity with the concept. The manuals were mostly in boxes, with a few lying around loose. Their task had been to pack away the strays, neaten the stacks of boxes, and clean out the dust and rubbish that had accumulated. It would have been only a couple of hours work for the three of them if they'd been more motivated, but they stretched it out to cover the whole shift. That kind of thing was common, and nobody seemed to care.
"Do you think there's any chance you could get away with borrowing some of those papers?"
"Sure. I don't think anyone really cares about those. It's one of those things where, if I were to ask, of course the answer would be no. But I don't really think it would be any big deal." Petty pilfering went on all the time at the Guild offices, and she wasn't even talking about keeping the manuals. He could not understand why she would want to see them, though.
Over the next couple of weeks, he smuggled quite a few of the old books out of the store-room, and smuggled them right back in when Trey was done with them. She taught him enough about the different types of materials to pick the ones she was interested in, which was all the information he wanted on the subject. She had no interest in the financial records that were also stored there, to his surprise. She wanted to see schematics, and books of formulae. As a rule of thumb, if he opened a book and could make no sense of it at all, Trey would probably like to borrow it.
She was prompt about returning the materials, usually keeping them for only a single night and slipping them into his mail-drop in the dark hours before dawn. When he got back from work, she often met him near his apartment and bought him something to eat. It was one reason he was willing to keep doing it.
And he had to admit, if only to himself, that taking the books and returning them added a bit of excitement to his life. The job was pretty dull, aside from that. He kept expecting someone to get suspicious, but no-one remarked on the stretches of time when disappeared in the general direction of the storage rooms. If they thought about it at all, they probably figured he was off screwing, smoking or just sleeping.
When Trey took him out to eat, she was always interested in hearing stories about his job. He knew if she were Gen, she would waste no time before finding a way to get a job with the Guild herself. He just didn't see what was so interesting about it. Sure, selyn-based energy was a great convenience, almost a necessity. So was the sanitation system. All other things being equal, he'd be just as content to let someone else provide these services.
But Trey never tired of hearing about it, and he thought she'd be particularly fascinated to learn about the Transportable Storage Units that were earmarked for repair in a shed behind the substation he normally reported to.
Jerrad, along with three of the other Transport Techs, had been assigned to bring a malfunctioning unit out to the shed. The TSU—a large selyn battery—was as big as a large man, and much heavier. A lot of the weight was metal shielding. There was no question of lifting it, even with four of them; it was all they could do to rock the wide base of the cylinder back and forth, walking it up a shallow ramp to a hand cart. After retracting the ramp, the four men walked the cart carefully outside. One pulled it while the others walked on each side and behind, each with a cautious hand on the TSU. All of them were big, strong fellows, and as a group they represented an impressive collection of muscle. Jerrad, walking on one side of the cart as he'd been directed to do, planned to move out of the way fast if the TSU unbalanced in his direction, rather than trying to catch it. He would have been willing to bet the others were thinking the same. The thing was nothing to mess with.
The shed was nothing more than a narrow passageway between the back of the building and the sheer mountain face behind it, blocked off on both ends and roofed with wooden slats that looked old and leaky. Inside, along with all manner of other junk, were a half-dozen other TSUs of various models. The one they'd just brought in had a gauge readout indicating it held around three thousand dynopters. Despite the relatively low charge, he knew the TSU was considered too dangerous to keep in the main building. There was some danger that a defective unit would suddenly release its stored energy, a localized and short-lived event, but one that could be lethal even to Gens.
Wiping the dust from one of the devices and trying for a tone of idle curiosity, he asked, "What do they do with these, anyway, just leave them here?" His heart began to beat faster as he saw one that read a bit over eighty thousand dynopters. He bent closer, trying to be sure the dim lighting had not fooled his eyes. Then he moved on, not wanting to seem too interested. He did not see any others with a charge of more than a few thousand. Some appeared to be empty, or nearly so.
"They should be moving these out of here before long. As soon as they can find some Sime dumb enough to try and empty them. For some of it, they have to get a channel to do it by hand—or I should say, by lateral." Dosh, the senior Transport Tech who had been pulling the cart, laughed nastily. "Like I said, they have to hunt up one without much brains, which shouldn't be too difficult. Did you notice the charge on that one you just walked by? We moved that one in here last week, and it weighed even more than this one here. Can you say fried tentacles? Now get back over here and give us a hand with this."
After they got the TSU situated, Jerrad arranged to be the last one out the door. Thick stone blocks formed the front and back walls of the storage shed, and the door was metal. Dosh locked it behind them with a large key. But from inside, the door had looked as if it could be removed from the hinges with the right tools. And that roof did not look sturdy at all. Jerrad had broken into a few places before turning his focus to the skurj cages, and had not lost the ability to scope a place out quickly and discreetly.
Later that day, over dinner at Vanno's—the unlicensed restaurant Trey had brought him to the first time they met—he found himself reluctant to tell her what he'd seen. Because he thought she was likely to want to do something about it. Borrowing the books was not a big deal. He thought the worst that could happen if he got caught doing that was to lose the job, and he was getting tired of it anyway. Stealing something like the TSU—or even trying to—was a lot more serious. And supposing they did get it away from there, which he was not at all sure they could... the damn thing was dangerous.
But in the end, he could not resist. And she was just as fascinated as he'd feared she would be. She listened intently, asking few questions. Then she picked up the book he'd brought her and began leafing through it with apparent absorption. As far as he could decipher, it had something to do with underground conduits, and he wondered what the connection could be between that and what he had told her.
She closed the book and handed it to him, with an expression that conveyed some regret. "These manuals are fascinating, Jerrad. They've been even more useful to me than I'd hoped for. I've studied a lot of theory, and looking at the working schematics of an actual system have helped me make sense of a lot of things that I didn’t really understand before. But I think I've reached the point where I've gotten most of the benefit out of these, so I can't ask you to keep taking the risk for me."
She crossed the table to sit beside him, moving so quickly that she blurred momentarily into a streak of bright colors. While Jerrad was wondering how she'd managed it without disturbing any of the dishes or glasses, she unfastened the front of her vest and let it fall open. There was nothing underneath but Trey. She leaned close and caressed his arm. "Why don't you let me follow you back to your place, so I can show you my appreciation for getting those for me."
His eyes dropped to her bare chest. It was almost an involuntary reflex. But there was a restlessness about her, a look in her eyes that he recognized all too well.
"You're past turnover, aren't you?"
"You won't be able to tell the difference, I promise. And it's not as if I won't enjoy it too. Just not in the same way. Sometimes it's a great comfort just to be close to a Gen. And I'll be able to share your pleasure too, of course. I won't do anything out of line. I'm not that far into my cycle."
It wasn't the first time he'd had heard that kind of suggestion from a female Sime. The problem was, however good she was at faking it, she wouldn't be thinking about sex at all. And in the intimacy of the act, five points of contact were almost guaranteed at some point. He wasn't at all sure he could handle her if she got out of control, even when he wasn't distracted by an approaching orgasm.
He ran his hands gently over her tentacle sheathes, working to calm her. "I like the idea a lot, but why don't we postpone it until after your next transfer."
She rested her head on his shoulder and sighed. "It's hard to predict or plan for the future, Jerrad. No guarantees. The offer is open now. Later… who knows?"
She pulled away from his hands and slipped under the table. He wasn't sure of her intentions, until she appeared a moment later on the other side of the table (with her vest tied shut again) and began to prod disinterestedly at a tray of candied fruit slices. She seemed intent on breaking them into pieces, and Jerrad could not bear to see them abused that way, so he pulled the tray toward him and she did not object.
"I have a friend who's good with locks." It took him a moment to understand what she was talking about. He'd almost forgotten about the TSU.
"I didn't think you were planning on telling anyone else about this." He was having more second thoughts about the wisdom of telling her, now that it was too late. She'd already gotten all the details out of him.
"I'll need someone to lend a tentacle anyway. From what you've described, I wouldn't be able to manage it alone. Augmentation has its limits."
"I thought that I…" He clamped his mouth shut. What was he saying? He didn't want to get any deeper into this than he was already.
She reached across the table and squeezed his hand. "Please take no offense, but there are reasons why I prefer another Sime for this. And you might be questioned, so perhaps we should not discuss this any more. You told me a story about your job, and it was very entertaining. On a totally unrelated topic, if one person discovers a resource and someone else finds a way to exploit it—something like a buried vein of ore, for example—the first one should get a substantial finder's fee. But if the ore is molten when it is vented to the surface, it might be wisest for everyone involved to let it… cool off, for awhile." She pulled aside the curtain and slid off her bench. "Don't be too surprised if you don't see me for awhile, Jerrad. I may do some traveling. Who knows? My plans are uncertain. But, by the next time I see you, I probably won't be so low-field."
"In the meantime, Trey… if you run across any veins of molten ore, be damned careful."
She kissed the tip of one tentacle, flicked it in his direction, and vanished around a bend in the corridor.
~~~~
He was getting close to the end of his own cycle, enjoying the feeling of power that came from being high-field. If he stayed that way for too long, he started to find it annoying. But he had no intention of letting things get to that point. For one thing, there was his landlady. He'd given her the thousand, as promised, but she'd reminded him that he was still behind.
Jerrad was a little worried by the way the two mid-month fights he'd scheduled had gone. It wasn't just a question of losing. Not as much was expected of a fighter who wasn't full-field, and he'd actually had a split decision against another guy who wasn't having a great day either. But they'd been lackluster performances on his part, at best. He had to do something to get his career back on track.
Determined to prevent a repeat of last month's fiasco, he'd asked his skurj coach to find him some kesh. Of the drugs sometimes used by skurj-fighters to sensitize the nerve endings and amplify pain, this was one of the mildest. He'd never resorted to chemicals in the past, but he needed an edge. The main problem was his pain tolerance, which had always been high, but seemed to be increasing. This was due partly to scar tissue, but mostly, it was a mental thing. He was used to the pain, knew its limits and no longer really feared it. The best skurj fighters, the ones featured at the really premium clubs, were those who felt as if they were dying in agony with each blow and yet somehow managed to fight on.
His coach not only got him the drug, but on the strength of his willingness to use it, managed to book him at The Auction Block for his end-of-the-month fight. Definitely a step up from Screams. Drinking the kesh made him feel mildly buzzed, but not really impaired. He fought well, although it felt as if his opponent's whip was embedded with shards of jagged glass. Regardless of how it felt, he knew it was causing him no more damage than usual.
His opponent wore no eye protection and protected his loins with only a thin length of cloth, probably so that he could nurture the fear of damage to these sensitive areas. Jerrad used the sharp pain he felt from the other man's whip to work himself into a towering rage, almost as popular with junct audiences as pain and terror. This was a more worthy rival than last month's crying boy, roughly his own size, and Jerrad had no hesitation about lashing the other man with a rapid barrage of strokes, driving him back with the force of his fury. The decision was awarded to him, and the other fighter left the cage while Jerrad stripped off the thick leather guards that protected his forearms.
He sluiced off the sweat that had built up beneath the arm-guards with a rag and bucket brought by his coach. Meanwhile, a team of high-field Gens pulled the audience down to duoconsciousness under the direction of Rikkor Falun, the powerful and deadly channel who ran The Auction Block. He was rumored to be a descendant of Amalie Quesillard, who had organized the Flotilla that had allowed all their ancestors to escape the legendary repression of Old Earth. Whether or not this was true, he was one of Kadanerra's most influential Simes, both nagerically and economically. His generosity was renowned, and he was a good person to know, if you didn't provoke him when he was in need. If a Gen of ordinary field strength made that mistake, it would be their last.
Once the majority of the audience was able to see and hear again, the bidding began. Jerrad stood in the cage letting his coach tend his cuts, the disinfectant stinging more than usual. The bidding rose along with the noise level in the room, and a couple of Gens in the audience were attacked during the excitement. Nobody paid any attention to that, except for a couple of bouncers who moved in to make sure the Simes did not wander off without paying the premium rate the club demanded for an unplanned killmode attack.
Jerrad was eventually bought by an elderly woman for the a price of nine thousand three hundred. His buyer followed the club custom of taking what she'd bid for right in the cage, which raised the collective intil of the crowd even more. Jerrad would keep all but twenty percent of what she'd paid, and would get back some of that in the form of the twelve hundred dynopter purse for winning the fight. The club had not made much off him, really, but he'd set the tone for what would follow. The room emptied as Simes headed up the stairs, where they could turn in one direction to find Gens and channels who were trained to deal with juncts, or in the other, Gens whose major accomplishment in life might have been learning to shit in a sewage-pot rather than in the middle of the floor.
Not that every Sime in Kadanerra was junct or semi-junct, by any means. The city's population also included a substantial percentage of non-juncts and sincere disjuncts (as opposed to those who played at disjunction when the mood struck them or when the budget was tight). But these Simes did not tend to hang around skurj clubs or seek transfers from skurj-fighters. Most of them would sooner suck on a selyn battery.
Before long, there were only a few people at the bars or the tables. The wait-staff was taking the chance to clean up the empty tables and the floor around them. In a little while, many of the Simes who'd gone upstairs would be back, and in the market for food and drink. Others would not make it past the gauntlet of prostitutes, representing both genders and both larities, who would accost them as soon as they ventured out into the hallway. And the club would get a cut of all of it, so it would not matter to Rikkor that he had not actually made much profit from his star attraction for the night.
No longer the center of attention, Jerrad cleaned up and changed into fresh clothes. As he left the fighter's lounge with his earnings tucked away safely beneath his tunic, one of the Gens who'd been attacked motioned him over to join her for a beer, but he walked past with a friendly wave. He barely knew her, and preferred to celebrate with his friends at the Party Pen.
But not before he made a side trip to the bank where his mother worked. He hadn't been inside in years, although his parents had set up modest accounts for himself and his sister when they drew close to the end of childhood. Onne still had hers and added to it regularly, but his was gone within a couple of months after he got out of Zigmann's.
He was hoping his mom would be there, because it made him a bit uncomfortable to go in. He told himself it shouldn't; with almost nine thousand dynn on his person, he was respectable no matter how he was dressed or how many scars he had. And in fact, the young account-keeper who showed him into her office treated him with complete courtesy. He deposited most of the money, keeping aside enough to pay the rest of what he owed on the rent and get a month ahead, along with a few hundred to spend. He was determined to start keeping on top of his finances. Almost getting thrown out on the street had given him pause.
At the Party Pen, he bought a single round of drinks and then sat back to nurse the one he'd gotten for himself. It was fairly common for fighters who won big to splurge on a party that went on all night and filled the bar to the point of overcrowding as word spread, but no one would resent it if he didn't do so. In fact, several of them offered to buy him a congratulatory drink, but he held up the one in his hand to show them he was fine for the moment. He'd heard it wasn't a good idea to get drunk after using kesh.
He did see something he wanted behind the bar, but unfortunately, she was on duty. Min was a pretty young Sime who considered it a privilege to work in a place where most of the customers were Gens. Not that Simes were unwelcome, but they tended to come in only when specifically invited. After speaking to her privately to make sure she was in the mood for a more intimate kind of party, he started asking around to see who could tend bar in her place for the rest of the evening. Several of the people who frequented the place also worked for the owner from time to time. Jerrad figured if he made an effort, he could sway one of them with the argument that, if they were going to hang around there until closing time anyway, they might as well get paid for it. The place was not particularly busy that night, so there wouldn't be that much to do. He took a certain amount of ribbing in the process, but finally got a volunteer.
The next morning, he lay in bed stretching luxuriously and feeling really good about things, until he remembered that he had to go to work that afternoon. Min had taken off sometime during the night, so he went out for breakfast alone. He had no desire at all to go back to his job with the Guild, and now that he had some money, no reason to do so—except that, if Trey did what he suspected she would, it might look suspicious if he suddenly quit just before that happened. He was trapped. He found himself wishing he'd never met her. Channels were nothing but trouble.
For the next couple of days, he found himself glancing out the back windows of the substation at the roof of the shed and wondering if maybe she'd already done it. He kept wanting to find some excuse to bring up the topic of the defective TSUs, but he knew that would be about the stupidest thing he could do at this point. In the back of his mind dwelled the hope that maybe they'd already been taken somewhere for repairs, but if they had, he would have no way of learning about it except by lucky accident.
After the better part of a week passed, he began to forget about the whole business. Until he got home from an early shift and found Trey sitting on the porch of his building with a bottle in her hand and a gloomy expression on her face. As he walked up, she pulled a second bottle out of the canvas sack she was carrying and handed it to him. "Mind if I come in?"
He opened the door and gestured an invitation. The day was warm and he was thirsty, so as they went inside he opened the bottle and took a sip. It was strong ale, and bitter.
Once he'd closed the inner door to his rooms, Trey flung herself into a chair and drained the last of her own bottle. Then she took another one from her bag. "I won't keep you in suspense. On the bright side, we got in and snagged that battery—the one with the read-out showing over eighty thousand dynopters."
"Anything in it at all?"
"Technically, there's what you call residuals in any large storage unit. More trouble to get out than it's worth. For all practical purposes… empty."
"What did you do with the TSU?"
"It's lying in pieces in a deserted building we broke into. I didn't want to believe it at first, so I dismantled it pretty thoroughly. Someone will probably find it and sell it for the parts." She belched.
"Any chance of putting it back together and leaving it back in the shed where you found it before anyone realizes it's gone?"
She gave him an unfriendly look. "I'll be happy to tell you where to find the thing. My friend Foz will probably help you get it back there for a couple of hundred—that's what I had to pay him for helping me, after it turned out we'd done nothing but waste time and energy on this." Her expression softened. "Not your fault. All of this was my stupid idea to begin with. But I like to think I'm a quick learner, and I'm done with the whole business." She stood up. "I guess I'd better get out there and see if I can earn some cold, hard coin. One way or another, I'm going to have to pay my way into one of those programs, not to mention putting together a stake to get started in Quissa. And I don't really feel much like sitting around and drinking tonight anyway."
Trey headed for the door, then turned and added, "The one other positive side I can see to all this, is that the Guild probably knows there was nothing in the damn thing. They'll probably laugh themselves sick when they realize it's gone."
But when Jerrad reported for his shift the next afternoon, nobody was laughing. The place reminded him of an insect-mound that someone had poked with a stick. A bunch of the other Transport Techs were standing around in one of the meeting rooms, and they filled him in on what he'd missed.
Earlier that day, someone had tried to get into the shed and had found that the lock was jammed. After fruitless efforts to get it open, two of the guys had broken a hole in the roof and lowered one of the smaller women down with a rope. She'd shined a light around, and the first thing she and the two men peering down from the roof had noticed was that one of the transport-carts was gone. They hadn't caught on about the missing TSU until later, after the door had finally been removed with a cutting-torch. Jerrad clamped his mouth shut just in time to stop himself from asking why they hadn't just removed the hinges from inside.
"You're lucky you weren't here earlier," someone told Jerrad. "We had to work our tails off all morning, bringing the rest of the TSUs to one of the other substations—under armed guard, just like a regular convoy, even though a lot of those only have a couple hundred on the gauges! Lorshes got the only one that had any charge in it."
"So what are we supposed to be doing now?"
"Wait and see if they need us for anything more, I guess. A lot of us were rounded up on our day off, and now that the TSUs are out of here I guess we just stand around. A lot of the higher-ups are here for a big meeting about this. When they get out of there, someone might tell us what to do next."
After awhile, Dosh came in to tell them it didn't look good for all of them to just stand idly around in the meeting room. He directed them to go wait in a different room, instead. Jerrad did his best to laugh and joke with the other men as they passed the time, but inwardly he was fighting off panic.
He was sure that everyone who'd been in the storage shed recently would be questioned at some point. Leaving the building would not do any good unless he was prepared to flee the city—in fact, it would look very bad. If he'd gotten a share of the eighty thousand, he might have considered leaving Kadanerra, although it was all he'd ever known and he could think of nowhere else to go.
They were likely to have a Sime present for the questioning, and if so he would have to bluster and evade certain questions, working himself into a state of moral indignation at even being subjected to such suspicion. But he was afraid that kind of tactic would be answered by a Question of Law, where the suspect is hauled into court and required to answer anything that was asked by the Questioners, who were generally channels or other unusually sensitive Simes. Simes who had training and experience that allowed them not only to detect outright falsehoods, which any Sime could do, but to explore gray areas and nuances that others might overlook. These Questioners were said to have an uncanny intuition that guided them in knowing what to ask.
The Question of Law was carefully regulated. It was not used as readily as it was in places like Quissa and the other so-called Free Cities, where it was felt that those who'd done nothing wrong should be happy to be questioned in an official manner, and thus cleared of suspicion. In Kadanerra, those in power were not too anxious to see this kind of questioning applied indiscriminately. If it were, it might eventually be used on them.
But the protection of the law was not extended equally to all, of course. The Guild was a power in Kadanerra, and Jerrad thought that if they really wanted to impose the Question of Law on him and the other Transport Techs, they would do so.
He could, to some extent, try to edit his own memories. He'd told Trey about the shed, true, but had he actually thought she would do it? He did his best to convince himself that he hadn't. Just a bullshit session with a woman he'd hoped to get into bed. Really, he was more a victim himself than a member of any criminal conspiracy. His feelings turned from fear to anger, and he found himself wishing there were some way to turn her in without implicating himself. But Trey was doubtlessly long gone, perhaps already enrolled in some disjunction program that might make it possible for her to get into Quissa.
Of course, if he mentioned her ambition, that might help them track her down… but no. He would keep that from them if he could. Because it would probably mean her death if she was caught. Nothing she'd done could make him wish that on her. If they did catch her, he decided, he would try to buy her a mercy cocktail like his parents had obtained for his aunt. Redeeming the life of a convict was expensive, and was only a realistic option for the wealthy, or perhaps a moderately affluent family willing to spend all its resources to save one of their own. A quick, painless, and relatively dignified death was much more affordable.
And his own punishment? If he was really lucky, he might be let off with a public flogging. He grinned at the thought, but then he realized they'd take his profession into account, and probably give him something a lot stronger than kesh to enhance the experience. More likely, they'd go after his new bank account. The city government was strongly prejudiced in favor of penalties that would fill its coffers, either through fines or ticket sales.
Eventually, the Transport Techs were sent home with instructions to come back the next morning whether they were scheduled or not. Jerrad found it hard to drag himself back to the substation the next day, but short of leaving the city, his best policy was to maintain a façade of normalcy and innocence as long as he could. Once he arrived there, he was directed to report immediately to the chief engineer's office, where he found that Von had appropriated the chief's desk.
"Close the door and sit down." There was nobody in the room but the two of them. Of course, this might only be the first round of several. He sat, controlling his breathing and trying for an expression of polite inquisitiveness.
"You've probably heard about the break-in the other night." He nodded. Best to let her do the talking as long as she was willing to. "We've examined the evidence, and we're pretty sure it was an outside job. But we have to look into all aspects of what happened. This is a serious matter, given the amount of energy that was stolen." She looked away from him, frowning as if she were grappling with something difficult, and then continued.
"I've been assigned to head the investigation, and unfortunately, it has already been necessary for me to terminate the employment of the two guards on duty that night. They've admitted they were playing cards in one of the meeting rooms when the incident occurred."
Jerrad would have been willing to bet that was what they did every night, and that it had never been a problem until now. He felt a little sorry for them, but not very. Now they might have to get jobs that involved actual work.
"Strictly because you're a very new employee, a certain amount of suspicion has been directed at you." Jerrad forced himself to look directly at Von, but she did not meet his eyes. "Personally, I don't believe it. I've worked closely with your cousin, and I have a lot of faith in his judgment. But sometimes we have to play politics when something like this happens. I'd feel even worse about this, but I get the impression you weren't planning to be with us long-term anyway. Am I right in that?" Jerrad nodded again, not trusting himself to speak. This was it? No Sime-supervised interrogation? Just fired from a job he was tired of anyway, and rather diplomatically at that?
"If I did think you'd played any role in this crime, any part whatsoever, I would not rest until the truth were brought out. Since I don't, I feel it’s appropriate to offer you some token of our appreciation for your service during the brief time you were here." She met his eyes, her expression warm and maternal, and held out a stack of ten hundred-dynn coins. "This is in addition to your regular pay, of course. You'll have to draw out whatever you have on account, because we need to close out the books on your employment here. I'm very sorry."
As he reached for the coins, Jerrad suddenly understood. The eighty-odd thousand was gone, all right. But Trey didn't have it. He wondered if his cousin was in on this, if he'd gotten a cut. He suspected so, because Von and Andruss were seen together frequently, mentor and protégé, close as khilgaree.
He found himself having to fight back laughter. Part of it was relief. And he'd always prided himself on being able to take a joke, to see the humor even when it was at his expense.
She held up one palm as if concluding a business deal. "No hard feelings?"
He pressed his hand against hers for a moment, and repeated, "No hard feelings. What would be the point?"
~~~~
Late that night, he went to Trey's neighborhood and stood outside her building, looking around forlornly in the hope of spotting her. There was a fair amount of night life, but she was nowhere to be seen. He went into the herb market, which was open—how not? But which seemed to be deserted. He headed for the stairs that led to her apartment, prepared to bluster his way past anyone who popped out from behind a rack and tried to stop him, Sime or Gen. Nobody did. The stairs were dark indeed with no daylight coming through the windows, but enough light escaped from around the edges of various doors that he could see well enough once his eyes adjusted. No light could be seen under Trey's door, however.
She'd moved on, he was sure of it. Even though she'd told him the truth about the TSU, she had gotten nervous about the consequences of breaking into Guild property, and he would never see her again.
He told himself that was foolish. She might not be home, but that did not mean she had abandoned her apartment. He couldn't convince himself, though. He considered knocking and decided against it. But he couldn't quite bring himself to walk away, either.
A light came on and the door opened. The first thing he noticed was that her hair, usually coiffed into some elaborate style, was in distinct disarray. Apparently, his timing was not good. He felt a stab of unwarranted jealousy.
"I thought it was you. Come in."
He looked more closely at her face, and now he saw the sleepy look in her eyes. Had he woken her up? Even Simes had to sleep sometime, he supposed.
"Here, you should try this. Imported berry-beer from the mountains." Hoping to find her, he'd brought it as a kind of apology for all the unkind thoughts he'd had about her while under the belief that she'd taken the selyn and run.
She took the bottle, but set it down long enough to wrap a scarf around her head. Then she picked it up again and examined the label, frowning uncertainly.
He opened one for himself and took a sip. At eight and a half dynn per bottle, he didn't indulge often, but the stuff was worth it.
Zlinning his enjoyment, she decided to give it a try. As the taste hit her mouth, she made an incoherent noise of delight that made his temperature rise a notch. She closed her eyes and took another swallow, and he watched her throat move, lit from the side by the dim lamp she'd turned on.
"Let me tell you what happened today." They sat down, and he related his conversation with Adept Von of the Municipal Energy Guild. "I think you should get half of the little bonus she gave me. Waste disposal fee, I guess."
He held out five of the coins, but she did not reach for them. She was looking at him very intently, and he could not guess what she was thinking. Then she shook her head.
"No, it's your money. The opportunity to study those reference books was priceless to me. I guess the rest was just a wild fantasy. You should get something for your trouble."
He set the money on the table. "I've gotten plenty, believe me. I thought you were saving up to move to Quissa? Just take it."
"I'll get there, don't worry." She took another sip of berry-beer, but did not reach for the coins.
He recalled the way she'd reacted when she had first tasted the beer, and asked, "You've had transfer recently, haven't you?"
"Earlier this week, yes. It was..." She smiled dreamily, lost in thought as she searched for words that would adequately describe the experience.
Simes would go on and on about transfer, if you once let them get started. He'd only been looking for a yes or no answer. He picked up the coins, moved them closer to her, and set them back down. "Five hundred dynopters. I'm calling your bluff."
She stood up. "I was never bluffing, Jerrad. But after all we've been through together, I wouldn't charge you. You lost your job because of the whole business. Keep the five hundred."
"I was going to quit that job anyway." Here they were, arguing about the five hundred again. It was ridiculous. They'd just switched sides, that was all. He didn't intend the money as an insult, and he did not think the offer had offended her. She was just being stubborn again, and so was he. "Give it to that guy who helped you with the TSU, if you want to. Two hundred wasn't much for that bit of work, considering the risk."
"As you like." She began to undress, slipping out of her clothes quickly and laying them neatly across the back of a chair. Naked, she looked even better than she had in those revealing outfits she favored.
Jerrad began taking his own clothing off, more slowly and with no concern about where it ended up. He could not take his eyes off her. Their big heist had not gone according to plan, but he was not too displeased with the final outcome. They'd both gotten something out of it, and while he suspected his cousin would be laughing behind his hand at him for years to come, Andruss was the one who had to go to some boring job just about every day of his life. Whereas Jerrad, in the true spirit of Kadanerran life, would go on doing what he wanted, when he wanted to.
~~~~