The Pharaoh Contract

Chapter 2

Nacker’s infirmary was complete and comfortable. The patient had a wide choice of diversions: sensiedreams, holodrama, a small euphorium, surrogames of all varieties. Ruiz Aw was in no mood to be diverted, however, so he sat and glared at the inoffensive Kaum as the Dirm bondguard clamped a therapeutic coupling around the damaged knee. The coupling’s diagnostic slate immediately lit with red-tagged assessments.

Kaum’s moonstone eyes grew large, and the purple membranes of his ears stiffened with surprise, as he tapped at the slate. “Whooo, Ruiz, you was running on fumes, there.” The Dirm eased the coupling into a more comfortable position with exaggerated care.

“Uh-huh,” answered Ruiz in a poisonous monotone. Ruiz was still irritated with Nacker, and by extension all that belonged to Nacker. There was no reason but Nacker’s whim for the additional injuries Ruiz had suffered in Nacker’s dooryard.

Ruiz needed Nacker, unfortunately. Without Nacker, he would never have taken the job on Pharaoh. He sighed.

Kaum daubed Ruiz’s wounds with replicant gel, and covered them with stim pads. “That should do it, Ruiz.” The Dirm bondguard’s normally placid eyes showed hurt when he straightened up. “Give it two hours, or three. You’ll be feeling better.”

Ruiz felt a twinge of guilt; Kaum was a good-natured being. His reptiloid race — if not terribly quick-witted — was loyal and strong and uninclined to gratuitous violence, which was why they were always in demand as low-level muscle. Ruiz managed a wry smile. “Thanks, Kaum. I feel a little better already.” He patted the Dirm’s massive arm.

Kaum seemed happier for Ruiz’s feeble pleasantry, and he smiled in the manner of his kind, flaring the nostrils at the top of his skull. “Don’t mention it, Ruiz. Always happy to do for a cutie like you.” Kaum tweaked Ruiz’s cheek gently with fingers like scaly sausages and lumbered away.

Ruiz repressed a shudder. “Hey, Kaum,” he called. “When’s Nacker going to be ready?” He couldn’t afford an extended stay in Nacker’s hold; the League would soon notice his absence.

Kaum paused at the door. “As soon as you’re out of pain. He’s considerate, in his way.”

Ruiz lay back against the couch. “I guess so.”

Not a muscle in Ruiz’s body was capable of movement. Silent impellers inserted into strategic vessels oxygenated and circulated his blood. No sound or light or any other sensation reached him; the only active neural tissue in his body was in his brain. It was a particularly helpless feeling. Ruiz concentrated on armoring himself down into a hard dense kernel of personality.

Inside his head, Ruiz heard the synthetic voice of Nacker. It growled up from subsonic rumbles, and then squalled into the upper range, as Nacker experimented, seeking perfect resonance. “Testing. One and a-two and a-three and a-four — who does Ruiz Aw adore?”

Ruiz would have ground his teeth, had that been possible.

Nacker chuckled. “So, Ruiz,” he said, “you’re anxious? Very well, already I sense the death net. A particularly powerful one. Are you sure your employers have told you everything you should know about this assignment?”

“Meaning what?” The thought lifted away from Ruiz, flew up into blackness, where Nacker intercepted it.

“The League appears to be extraordinarily concerned that their interest not be revealed and that they get something, some bit of information, however small, when the net collapses and sends its data home. You’re going to die and transmit at the first drop of the shoe…. The death scenarios are remarkably all-encompassing, far more extensive than would be warranted by a simple game of poacher catching. I would guess, my friend, that you are a silver bullet. Aimed at some hidden monster.”

Ruiz was silent. Here was an unpleasant discovery, indeed. “What can you do?”

“As always, Ruiz, quite a lot. I say without modesty that no one else could help you significantly; the League’s done a very thorough job. Can it be that they suspect your loyalty, at last?” Ruiz heard a synthetic chuckle, an insectile scraping at the unprotected surface of his mind. “No, no, of course not, you’re their best, true? It was unkind of me to bring up uncertainty at such a vulnerable moment.” Nacker became businesslike. “So. The death net, like all Gencha work, cannot be completely subverted. I can blunt the urgency of the compulsion — give you, perhaps, time to change the parameters of the situation enough to gain a respite. But you’ll still die, if you can’t wiggle free from the trigger situation in time. Or I can to some extent degrade the death net’s operant synapses so that if the net is triggered you may only become extremely ill, rather than irrevocably dead. In that case, the net will send no data home, and also you will experience substantial personality decay, should you survive. Please choose.” Nacker’s last statement was made in formal tones.

Ruiz considered. The decision Nacker required pivoted on a philosophical point: Was anything worse than death? Some would answer no, without hesitation. But he suspected that not many of these absolutists worked for ruthless corporate entities like the Art League or had Ruiz’s wide experience of life on the League’s client worlds. Ruiz could without effort imagine countless scenarios in which he would prefer death. On the other hand, it was Ruiz’s love of his own life that had brought him down here to Nacker, through the dangers of Beaster Level, and the deadlier dangers that would confront him should the League ever get a whiff of his presence here.

Still… if he ever found himself helpless in the hands of his enemies, the Ruiz Aw that might recover from an aborted death net would no longer be Ruiz Aw, but a stranger. He had known victims of botched minddiving. They navigated the unsteady currents of their constricted lives carefully, slack-faced and dim-eyed, objects of pity and revulsion. He would prefer a definite death to such an uncertain approximation of life.

“Slow the trigger ramp of the set as much as you can, but leave the synapses alone.”

“As you say. I’ll have to cohere some touchstone memories until I get my bearings.” Nacker’s voice took on a strong tinge of disapproval. “You will insist on autodiving, against all professional advice. Paranoia, paranoia, Ruiz. Each time I swim you, the geometries are new. You have so many areas locked down or self-circuited. It’s a wonder even the Gench can get a net to stick.”

“It never seems to have any trouble. And it doesn’t talk as much, either.”

“Go away, now,” Nacker said, and Ruiz poured down into his deepest, safest place.

Nacker paused for a moment before transferring in, to look through his own sensors at Ruiz’s motionless body. Ruiz lay on the immo-bed, encased in an amber block of shockgel, his head sprouting a thick crop of silver wires. The scars of Ruiz’s encounter with the wolfheads were fading quickly; if the dive took any length of time, the scars would be invisible before Nacker returned to his bell jar and his own moribund body. In the gel, Ruiz’s dark skin had an almost metallic smoothness and density, as if it would turn a knife, as if it could be polished into a man-shaped mirror. Nacker examined Ruiz’s hands where they floated in the gel, curled into half-fists. Nacker marveled at the hands. To think that such dangerous objects could be so beautiful; the strong fingers tapering, the knuckles curving into perfect scimitars of bone, the whole knitted with wiry muscle and sheathed in lustrous skin.

A moment passed in this pleasurable contemplation. Then Nacker dropped his probe in, delicately, delicately, cleaving Ruiz’s holomnemonic sea, a needle falling point first into the abyss. He sank deeper and deeper, sliding effortlessly around the middepth reefs of Ruiz’s protective self-circuits. He danced nimbly away from the massive, sensitive cables of the Gencha death net, a structure anchored in the abyssal trenches. With equal agility he avoided the fine skein of League mission-imperative that fogged the depths like the tendrils of some great demanding jellyfish.

At last Nacker settled to the floor of Ruiz’s mind and came to rest in the slurry of decayed memories, the dead diatoms of experience that rained down continuously from above. Here he lay quiescent for a long time, extending his perceptions upward, mapping the artifacts of Ruiz’s personality as they wheeled overhead in the slow currents.

When he was satisfied, he detached a bubble of stimulation from his own substance. It rose, twinkling, until it shattered on the stony underside of one of Ruiz’s early memories, a massive thing, so heavily encrusted with protective substance that it was probably no longer accessible to Ruiz.

Ruiz was five years old, helping his demi-father in the barn. It was Ruiz’s special task to gather the warm nodules of orms flesh from the nests when the orms crowded out into their runs for their breakfast. It was a good task, one of Ruiz’s favorites. The freshly budded nodules squirmed in his hands as he collected them into the brood bucket, their tiny palps searching his palms for the feeding pores his human skin lacked, and the sensation was a pleasant harmless tickle. The weight of the brood bucket when he was done was another reward — each nodule represented a small but measurable amount of credit toward his family’s independence. And though in his young mind the concept of independence was a fuzzy one, he knew beyond doubt that independence was a Good, and that the converse quality, bondtotient, was a Bad. This he had learned from the long faces and hushed voices around the dinner table whenever the latter word was spoken. Of late the faces had grown longer and the voices less hushed, a situation that worried Ruiz when he thought of it.

It didn’t seem to help that Ruiz brought in as many nodules as ever. And no matter how much he exhorted the orms, they refused to bud more than their usual number of nodules. They stared at him with their dull, multifaceted eyes, uncomprehending, while Ruiz tried earnestly to explain how important it was that they do better. Sometimes, if the voices around the table had been very loud, Ruiz ended up crying at the orms, frustrated and tempted to throw pebbles at them, to punish them for their stupidity.

But not today. Today he was happy. He was carrying the brood bucket across the compound toward the wombshed when a glittering contraption came rushing into the enclosure and settled to the ground with a puff of blown dust. Ruiz was so startled that he dropped the bucket, spilling several nodules out onto the dirt. Immediately he set the bucket upright and began retrieving the precious lumps. By the time he’d picked them all up, the hovercar’s doors had, with a pneumatic hiss, lifted open. Out stepped the overseer, a thin snake of a man with a long braided beard and tattooed eyebrows. The overseer’s name was Bob Piyule, a name that brought almost as much tension to the family conferences as the mention of bondtotient.

From the meltstone commonhouse came most of the older family members. Ruiz was curious and wanted very much to stay and listen, but the nodules were his responsibility, and if they were not soon taken to the wombshed they would die. So he carried them inside and distributed them as quickly as he could among the empty conveyors.

When he was finished Ruiz rushed back out into the yard. But when he saw that all the family elders were gathered, gazing at Ruiz with varying degrees of sadness, he stopped in his tracks, afraid. The other children watched wide-eyed from the darkness of the cottage windows. He became more fearful when all the elders looked away, except for his bloodmother Lasa, who stood with tears running down her ordinarily serene face.

Ruiz sensed impending tragedy. He ran to Lasa on stubby legs, tears trembling in his own eyes. She lifted him, hugging him so that he could barely breathe. But she said nothing, nor did anyone else.

“What’s it? What’s the matter?” Ruiz asked in a voice that squeaked with fear.

The overseer had a nasal, prim voice. “You’re making far too much fuss over the child; you’ll frighten him needlessly,” said Bob Piyule, taking hold of Ruiz’s shoulder. “Don’t be afraid, Ruiz. You go to a greater family than this huddle of dirt scratchers. You go to the Lord’s School. If you are diligent, one day you’ll wear fine clothing and serve the Lord.”

Ruiz clung more tightly to Lasa. Bob Piyule pulled at him, to no avail. “Come, Lasa,” the overseer said, “is this dignified?”

Ruiz’s demi-father Relito spoke. “What’s dignified about child stealing, Piyule?” Relito’s voice, ordinarily harsh, sounded now as if he spoke through a throat full of stones.

Bob Piyule released Ruiz and whirled to face Relito. “Child stealing, is it? Can Lord Balliste steal what is already his? A less generous master would sunder your family and redistribute the members to more efficient production units, as I have many times advised him to do. Instead, he is merciful.”

“Yes, merciful.” Relito laughed bitterly.

Bob Piyule’s narrow face flushed, and his eyes took on a dangerous gutter. “Enough,” he said. He took Ruiz by the arm and roughly tore him away from Lasa, who fell to her knees, looking as if something inside her had broken.

Here the memory tattered and streamed away into darkness. Nacker still lay quietly in the ooze at the bottom of Ruiz’s mind. A farm boy, a common slave, Nacker marveled. Who would ever have guessed? This incongruity amused Nacker anew each time he entered Ruiz’s mind.

It was a long time before another touchstone memory drifted into position to be stimulated, long enough for Nacker to grow anxious, worried that one of the subtle guard filaments of the League mission-imperative might brush against him and trigger the death net before he could escape. Or that he’d be attacked by one of the great predatorial neuronic patterns, cleverly birthed by Ruiz to protect his mnemonic ocean from clumsy invasion. But nothing touched him, and eventually Nacker released a second stimulating locus. It detonated against another memory: Ruiz grown almost to manhood.

Ruiz wore the fine clothes that the late Bob Piyule had promised him so many years before, and he crouched at the right hand of Lord Balliste. But nothing else was as it should have been. The front of Ruiz’s brocade coat was stiff with drying blood, the blood of the Lord’s last bondguard. A sonic knife burbled in Ruiz’s hand, transmitting its hungry shimmy to his flesh.

They were hiding in a short passage off Lord Balliste’s audience room. Lord Balliste fondled a gem-encrusted punchgun, shifting it from one hand to the other. The Lord was grown old and weak in both body and mind; his liverish lips trembled, and the breath wheezed in his shriveled chest. The Lord kept up a cackling mutter as they waited. “When they get here, when they get here, then we’ll see, eh Ruiz, then… I want an ice, a nice fresh lime will do…. Why are you dressed in red?”

The Lord nattered on, but Ruiz ignored him. He strained his ears, listening for the next sounds, now that the heaviest explosions had ceased. The free-lance emancipators were finished below, and any moment they would arrive to complete their contract with the former slaves of Lord Balliste.

Lord Balliste was whispering in more urgent tones. “Why, Ruiz, can you tell me? I treated them well, I observed the proprieties. How is it they turn and feed on me now?”

Ruiz didn’t answer. He had heard the scrape of cautious boots in the audience room. “Hush, now, Lord. Perhaps they will not find us back in here, if we are very quiet.”

“Yes, yes, you’re right, young Ruiz, you’re the only one who kept faith.” Lord Balliste clamped his mouth shut, mercifully.

There was a long interlude of silence; then the tapestry that covered the passage twitched. After a moment, one of the emancipators lifted the tapestry slowly aside with the muzzle of a half-stocked splinter gun. He was a large graceful man in scuffed carbon armor, and he followed the muzzle of his weapon with the smoothness of a weasel flowing into a rat hole. Ruiz held perfectly still, hoping that he and the Lord were adequately hidden behind the jumble of dusty chairs stacked in the back of the dim passage.

The man was as still as a statue for six heartbeats; then he turned to go, and Ruiz prepared to release the breath he’d been holding.

At that moment Lord Balliste chose to rise and fire a burst from his ceremonial punchgun. The burst smashed the leg of the emancipator. The impact whirled the man about, and he lost his grip on his weapon. He slid down the wall.

The Lord laughed and pointed the punchgun with a flourish.

Ruiz made his decision.

He stood up and slipped the sonic knife into the Lord’s long skull, just in front of the ear. The punchgun clattered to the floor. Ruiz tugged up, and the knife snarled out of the top of the Lord’s head, spraying liquefied brains, a fine mist that haloed the Lord for a moment before the body folded over.

In the next instant, two more emancipators rolled under the tapestry, ready to fire. “Wait!” the injured man said sharply, and they did, a restraint that Ruiz found remarkable, under the circumstances. But both weapons and two cold pairs of eyes were trained on him, as Ruiz switched off his knife and laid it carefully aside. He crossed his empty hands over his head and stood still.

The injured man looked down at his shredded leg, then back at Ruiz. “You’ll need a new job,” he said. “If we can stop the bleeding, maybe I’ll have one for you.”

Nacker felt a ghost shiver go through his probe-self. Each time Ruiz Aw had come to him, Nacker had touched this memory, and each time Nacker found it disturbing. There was nothing wrong with the decision Ruiz had made; it was the only one that had offered him any chance of life. No, Ruiz could not be faulted on either ethical or practical grounds for his betrayal of the slave-Lord. It was rather the speed with which Ruiz had switched allegiance that chilled. Nacker understood, not for the first time, that Ruiz might react with as much swift lethality should he and Nacker ever find themselves at cross purposes.

Nacker supposed it was from the emancipators that Ruiz had acquired the tools of his trade: intimidation, torture, murder. Evidently the emancipators had been good teachers, but Nacker was sure that Ruiz had been an especially apt pupil. Nacker remembered the economical grace with which Ruiz had destroyed the wolfheads, the odd light in Ruiz’s eyes.

These thoughts disturbed Nacker’s concentration, so he put them from him. He waited again, until a whole cluster of touchstone memories drew into range. Nacker energized them in rapid order, no longer aware of content, but only chronology.

The last memory Nacker touched was a small thing, nickering among the deepest currents, swift and elusive. It appeared to Nacker that Ruiz had left the memory unprotected, as if Ruiz hoped for its demise. But the memory was too strong, too active, too crucial to the man that Ruiz had become. Nacker’s curiosity was aroused.

Ruiz waited to die. His thoughts were sluggish and poorly formed; he was sinking into the unresponsive clay of his failing body. So the blaze of Line’s sun no longer burned him as fiercely as it had three days before, when the Lineans had strapped him to the needle tree. The pain was no longer urgent, as the tree’s thorns slowly quested deeper and deeper into his body. Occasionally a thorn would penetrate some sensitive organ, and Ruiz would thrash briefly until his small strength was exhausted, but he had stopped screaming.

The part of him that still lived traveled among memories.

…Ruiz, arriving on Line in a nighttime drop. He fell from the skies in the company of two hundred other emancipators, all of them full of confidence and righteous anger. He remembered that younger self with as much amazement as scorn. He could hardly imagine how he could have seen the universe in such simple terms: Slavery was evil. Eradicate it.

…The horrendous callousness of the Lineans, devolved alien cetaceans who bred humans in small isolated communities for various specialized markets. The alien breeders committed unspeakable acts against any of their slaves who by word or deed or omission supported the rebellion. Images nickered through Ruiz’s darkening mind: hideous death, torture; all the colors of horror, red of blood, black of burned meat, the pale clotted flesh of corpses. How much was his fault, the fault of his unforgivable naïveté? Ruiz tried to shake his head, but the thorns held him fast.

…The despair Ruiz had felt when, after months of bitter fighting in which thousands of innocents had perished, he had discovered that his company of emancipators had been hired by the Art League, the vast multisystem conglomerate that for several millennia had controlled the majority of legitimate slavery in the pangalac worlds. He had gone to his commanding officer, fall of betrayed rage. “Why?” he had asked.

“Because it’s better. It’s not perfect, but it’s better. The Lineans are monsters. The League is a business.” His commander’s face shifted in remembrance, until Ruiz could see only a steel mask, an inhuman shape, devoid of expression. “It’s better, Ruiz.”

…The clean fury that had impelled Ruiz to recruit from among his fellow emancipators a group to oppose both the Lineans and the Art League.

…His futile campaign, unsupported by the slaves, successful only in prolonging the agony on Line. It had ended in another treachery, one that had brought him to this slow sacrifice on the needle tree.

The last trace of the memory, one that seemed only carelessly etched into the artifact that carried it, was of the League agents who had taken Ruiz alive from the tree. There was no tinge of gratitude in the memory — only a stony acceptance.

With the geometries firmly established, Nacker extended his sensorium along the floor of Ruiz’s mind, spreading out through the concealing ooze of dead memory. Nacker came to surround the roots of the death net where they struck deep into Ruiz’s cerebral bedrock. No direct attack on the net was possible; any such efforts would be detected instantly, triggering the net. But indirectly there was much that could be done. A thin slippery film of passionate energy, drawn from Ruiz’s libidinous reserves — the essence of love-of-life — could be injected under the anchorage system of the death net. If the net was triggered, the cables would slip harmlessly for precious moments before they tore loose. The only drawback to this approach was that it would leave Ruiz, his brain buttered with sexual energy, somewhat vulnerable to romantic impulses. But nothing was ever gained without loss. Nacker found this an amusing — and personally satisfying — solution to Ruiz’s problem.

And besides, Nacker thought, no other solution would work as well.

He had chosen no easy technique. Each anchorage point had to be approached with exquisite caution. The actual insertion of the lubricant required a delicacy that only a half-dozen non-Gencha minddivers in all the pangalac worlds could have managed.

At last he was done.

But before he withdrew, Nacker treated himself to a recent memory, of Ruiz in his hideaway.

Nacker watched comfortably from behind Ruiz’s eyes as Ruiz went out onto his terrace, built at the edge of a great rift. Scattered about at the edges of the terrace were deep planters, in which bloomed flowers from a hundred worlds. Outside, nothing but raw rock; inside, the sweet smell of blossoms.

Ruiz filled a long-spouted watering can from a tap and began to water the beds, slowly and methodically. The fierce blue sun was moderated into a warm caressing light by the same boundary field that retained the terrace’s atmosphere. The only sound came from the bees that buzzed among the flowers, moving to and fro between the beds and the hive that stood in a shaded corner of the terrace.

Nacker sank more deeply into the memory, seeking Ruiz’s thoughts as he went about his task, but Ruiz seemed empty of thought, empty of emotion, existing only in the moment, and Nacker wondered how such a thing was possible.

Each time Ruiz came to him, Nacker found such a memory and marveled at it. So strange, that Ruiz Aw — feared enforcer for the Art League, a man who killed with a directness and detachment that was surely pathological — should spend his uncontracted time on an empty lifeless world tending flowers, all alone.

A very odd man. Nacker withdrew into himself and remembered a conversation he had once had with Ruiz, on one of the enforcer’s first visits to his hold.

“You’re a former slave yourself,” Nacker had said then, full of wry amusement. “How can you work as a slave catcher for the League?”

“There are worse masters. The League treats its property as well as is practical.”

“Do you feel no qualms of conscience?”

Ruiz had looked at him with neutral eyes. “Should I?”

“Well… perhaps. Some would.”

Ruiz made no comment for a long moment, then spoke in a patient voice. “Have you ever heard of Silverdollar, the ice world? It’s somewhat beyond the pangalac frontier, spin-ward. A mining planet.”

“No,” Nacker said.

“They have what amounts to a sapient fish there; it lives under the ice for most of the year, emerging into open water only during the equatorial thaws. Well, it’s not really a fish; it’s warm-blooded. But it has gills, so I call it a fish. Perhaps the fish aren’t really sapient, since they have no technology at all, but they have a language of their own, and they’ll tell you strange fish myths that you can almost understand. They absorb new languages with extraordinary ease. It’s not just an idiot savant ability; the fish are in high demand as translators of poetry and novels and other verbal works of art. They seem to have the ability to transcend the species barrier, to translate the intent and the specific emotional coloration of a work. No one understands how this is possible, not even the fish. Their existence has spawned several competing new schools of neurolinguistics, but no one really has any idea how they do it.”

“They must be very valuable.”

“Oh, yes. For years, the only supply came from hunters who ventured under the ice, a dangerous business because of the other predators of Silverdollar. Clones raised off Silverdollar were nonverbal, useless as translators; some unknown factor in their native environment triggers the development of the facility. The price of one of these fish was consequently very high, until entrepreneurs came to Silverdollar and built a hatchery. They enclosed a suitable area of under-ice ocean with a force field and burned open a thread of open water. The fish, thinking that the thaw had come early, congregated along the thread, where they were easily scooped up, cloned into multitudes, and released into the safety of the field. It worked well and the entrepreneurs became wealthy.”

Nacker could not find the relevance of Ruiz’s story. “And what does this have to do with your work?”

“The fish are slaves; would you agree?”

“Yes….”

Ruiz had turned away, so that Nacker could not see his face. “The hatchery is heavily fortified, protected by both planetside and orbital weapons. The security forces are Dilvermooners, numerous and well trained. No frontal assault would succeed, unless the attackers were willing to burn a hole out of the ocean — which would defeat the purpose of the exercise.”

Ruiz stopped, as though his story was finished. Nacker finally grew impatient. “And so?”

“And so.” Ruiz sighed. “What if you were willing to take a job at the hatchery? What if, some dark night, you were to creep forth with a dip net and a bucket? Which approach would yield the greater number of liberations?”

Ruiz fell silent.

Nacker thought about the story. After many minutes of silence, he said, “So, Ruiz. Have you gotten any use from your dip net yet?”

But Ruiz had lost interest in the conversation and wouldn’t answer.

Nacker drew himself back into a probe of minimum caliber and began the touchy business of rising back to the surface of Ruiz’s mind.

Ruiz heard the last of the liquefied shockgel draining away, slurping down the immo-bed’s drains. He opened his eyes. Nacker sat at his side, unmoving, as always.

“Ah, you’re with us again,” Nacker said. The synthetic voice was an exhausted whisper, for effect. Nacker could as easily have reverted to his elf voice, or any of the other vocalizer styles the minddiver favored.

Ruiz ran his fingers through his wet hair, raking off the silver halo of probe wires. “Yes… what success?”

“Enough, my friend. Though, as always, I remind you of my motto: I do good work; still, don’t get caught.”