The Pharaoh Contract

Chapter 4

When the Vigia reached orbit above Pharaoh, Ruiz’s head ached with the new knowledge it contained. He approached the Art League’s orbital platform with an emotion close to relief. Here would be people, several thousand of them: League employees, consultants, contractors, transshipping travelers. The possibilities for distraction seemed promising.

From below, the platform was a less intense darkness against the blackness of space, showing no lights that some upstart genius on Pharaoh might observe. A crude telescope was well within the technical abilities of the culture below, and although such a development would be suppressed by the League infrastructure whenever it seemed to verge upon realization, the League took no chances.

Ruiz guided the Vigia carefully into her assigned slot, and when the last clashing sounds of the lock-on faded away, he unhooked his acceleration webbing and sighed.

“To work,” he muttered.

He dressed in a black zipsuit — suitable garb for an enforcer — then debarked. In the lock area, a young woman waited for him. She was small and very slightly plump, with short, curly, blond hair and an apparently genuine smile.

“Citizen Aw?” she asked, stepping forward.

“Yes.”

“Welcome to Pharaoh Upstation,” she said, beaming. “I’m Auliss Moncipor. I’m to conduct you to Factor Prinfilic’s office. Will you follow me?”

“Gladly,” he answered, with somewhat more amiability than the situation called for. Auliss Moncipor appeared a pleasant and guileless person, for a League employee, but Ruiz wondered why he was even thinking such things. He walked behind her as she led the way through one of the access tubes that tied the platform’s modules together. He found himself admiring the flex of her buttocks through the thin material of the League-issue overalls she wore. What’s the matter with me? he wondered. Why was he feeling such a flush of heat at the proximity of a rather pretty, but otherwise unremarkable young woman? He shook his head violently, hoping to clear it. It had been a long, lonely trip from Dilvermoon, but ordinarily he postponed his romantic impulses to a time and place where his profession and reputation were unknown — as a matter of principle and of elementary safety.

They arrived at the factor’s office, which was guarded by a small killmech. The sight of the assassin device restored Ruiz’s sense of proportion, to some extent, and he was able to raise his gaze to the young woman’s face as she turned.

“I’ll announce you, Citizen Aw. A moment, please.” She went in, and more than a minute passed. When she returned, she took Ruiz’s arm and guided him through the door. He was briefly but acutely aware of the warmth of her hand.

The factor was an ancient Dilvermoon herman, tall and thin, with disproportionately heavy breasts. It had the distinctively elongated and sexually ambiguous features of its kind, framed by an elaborately coiffed mane of white hair. A blue caste-mark flowered on its wrinkled cheek, identifying it as a member of a prominent clan. It extended a hand in greeting. “Ruiz Aw,” it said. “So happy to meet you. I’m Prinfilic; your servant.” Ruiz reluctantly touched its somewhat clammy hand and then sat down unasked. Auliss left through a side door, smiling over her shoulder.

Ruiz forced himself to alertness. The hermen of Dilvermoon were among his least favorite self-created life-forms; their amoral cleverness was legendary. He wondered that a herman had ascended to such a responsible position in the League, which was as paranoid about its employees’ loyalties as any other far-flung conglomerate.

Prinfilic folded its well-kept hands and leaned back. A look of covert disdain flickered through its eyes. Like hermen in general, it apparently had a highly developed sense of its effect on unmodified humans. But it smiled easily.

“You’re a welcome presence here, Ruiz Aw. The losses have gone far past acceptable levels in the last year or so. But you arrived here much more quickly than I had expected.”

Ruiz ascended to a slightly higher plateau of alertness. Was there a detectable level of guile in the herman’s voice? Was the herman in some way involved with the poachers on Pharaoh? Ruiz reminded himself to be especially wary as long as he remained aboard the platform.

“League Central did not inform you?” he asked.

“Yes, yes, but… the message arrived in a message drone, not six hours ago. Apparently you were contracted immediately following the decision to open this new line of inquiry, and you left without delay.”

Ruiz said nothing. He allowed the silence to congeal, until the herman finally cleared its throat and spoke again. “Well. Your authorization is of impressive scope; the League must have great confidence in you. For the duration of your stay here, you will be the factor. How may I facilitate your investigations, Ruiz Aw?”

“I don’t know, as yet. When I do, I’ll tell you.” Ruiz glanced about the factor’s office. It was elegantly decorated, if a bit fussy. The walls were covered in some fine-grained silvery leather, seamed with vertical stripes of wine-colored velour. At exactly spaced intervals, in pools of white light, Pharaohan effigies hung at eye level. Ruiz rose and went over to the nearest. It was, he decided, a dustbear’s snarling face, carved from what seemed to be the top of a human skull, stained with rusty pigment, and surrounded by a ruff of black feathers. A red thong held a swag of finger bones and little silver bells. Ruiz touched it and it made a strange, dry, shivery sound.

“A wonderful piece, eh?” Prinfilic spoke at his shoulder, and Ruiz restrained an impulse to jump. “I collect beautiful things from dirtside; it makes my time here pass more entertainingly. And it might make my retirement a bit more comfortable, or so I hope. What do you think; is it valuable?”

Ruiz moved away; the closeness of the factor made him uneasy. “I’m no judge,” he said.

“Ah. Well, how long will you be with us?”

“Not long. I’d like to service the boat. Then I’ll get right to work.”

Prinfilic looked genuinely disappointed. “Ah, no! Surely you’ll spend a day or two with us. At least. Why not have a last taste of pangalac life, before you go down to the dirt-grubbers?”

Ruiz looked at Prinfilic curiously. “Why do you say last? I plan to return soon.”

Its cheeks colored, a bizarre effect on a face so old and rapacious. “I meant, of course, the last time for as long as your mission requires you to be dirtside. Please accept my apologies if any offense was conveyed.”

“Sure,” Ruiz said.

Another silence ensued, and Ruiz imagined that he felt the weight of the factor’s disapproval. He ignored it and moved about the office, staring at the effigies that decorated the walls. Here was a daybat, its fierce raptor’s head carved from polished russet granite, with rubies set like beads of blood along the muzzle’s serrated edges. There was an arroyo lizard, with eyes of blue sapphire and teeth of amber. An obsidian Helldog wailed from a disk of gold and silver filigree.

Ruiz absorbed from these artifacts a sense of vigorous life, undiminished by civilization’s constraints. He grew uncomfortable, for reasons he could not name, and so he finally stopped looking at them.

When he turned, Auliss Moncipor had returned. He felt again that odd heat, and a mild sense of embarrassment. She apparently received a portion of the involuntary message he was sending, and she seemed at least somewhat receptive, with a glisten to her eyes and a slight smile on her pretty mouth. The factor directed a keen glance at Ruiz, then another at Auliss.

“Go with Citizen Aw, Auliss. See to it he has all he needs,” Prinfilic said. It smiled, too, though its smile wasn’t as attractive as the one Auliss wore. “And please, Ruiz, reconsider. Surely you can spare a day or two. Or at least, a night? Eh?”

Auliss led Ruiz through the passageways of the platform, but now she moved at his side, occasionally touching him with a soft hip, and directing him with a hand at his elbow.

“You’ll want to see to your boat first, I’m sure,” she said. “We’ll go to Maintenance Sector. You have your vouchers?”

He patted his pocket.

“Good. I should have known you’d be prepared.” She cast an artlessly flirtatious look at him.

“Yes. Always prepared.”

“And after your boat is ready? What then?”

“I’d planned to leave. Can you suggest a better plan?”

She laughed. “Yes.”

Ruiz instructed a phlegmatic technician in his requirements. He patted the armored flank of the Vigia, a gesture of foolish sentimentality.

Finally he authorized access to the noncritical areas of the boat.

Auliss led him quickly back to her quarters, which were in a small module at the far end of a lengthy spar.

When they entered, he recognized the decor as appropriate to the home of a Pharaohan noble of modest pedigree. In the center of the green-tiled entrance court, a small fountain splashed lazily in the light artificial gravity. Incense drifted in the moist air, a scent of sweet-flowered desert shrubs.

“Come in,” Auliss said, tugging him inside. “What do you think?”

“Pleasant,” he said, glancing about.

“Well, we’re probably unduly influenced by the dirtsiders. After all, it’s our main entertainment, watching them at their odd little lives.” She seemed faintly apologetic, as though Ruiz had caught her in an admission of provinciality.

“No, no, it’s a fascinating culture,” Ruiz said. “And a lucky coincidence that you’ve arranged your rooms so authentically. I can begin my acclimation before I leave the platform.” But he thought, as he said this, that he was unlikely to visit any noble homes.

But Auliss seemed pleased by his diplomacy. “Good! I like to be helpful.” She stroked his arm and pressed lightly against him.

She seemed to transmit a carnal current to his body, another intense shiver of lust. He grew alarmed. He couldn’t understand the source of these abrupt passions. It was as though his mind had become a stranger’s, for the moment. He wondered if this disturbing condition was related to Nacker’s handiwork.

“But first,” she said, “a meal and some Pharaohan wine. Have you had any yet?” She seemed innocently enthusiastic, as though her question had no other meaning than the obvious one.

“No,” he answered. “Though I’d like to try a little.”

She colored, and he saw that she understood him well enough.

A curtain at the far end of the entryway lifted aside, and a very young Pharaohan woman stepped through, to stand with downcast eyes and folded hands.

Auliss glanced toward her. “Oh, this is Meraclain, my bondservant. She’s an excellent cook. While we eat, if you like, she can entertain us with some traditional songs of the desert. Her voice is quite passable.”

Ruiz’s throat was suddenly dry. Auliss was attractive, but Meraclain was beautiful — the difference between a gaudy artificial gem, and a cabochon of black opal. Meraclain had long, thick, black hair, brushed back from an oval high-cheekboned face. Her skin had the look of ivory velvet, her eyelashes were long, and her dark mouth curved to perfection. She wore a gauzy robe that concealed nothing of her body, which was elegantly spare, as handsome as her face.

“Mistress? You’ll be wanting dinner for two?” When she spoke, the illusion of grace suffered somewhat. Her voice seemed rather nasal and whiny, and Ruiz made a note not to encourage her to sing. Perhaps she dances, he thought, and recovered some of his equilibrium. This evidence that he worked for slavers had cooled a bit of his ardor, but not enough to make him leave. Perhaps, he thought, Auliss is no worse than I, though this rationale did not comfort him entirely.

Auliss conveyed him into an inner atrium, where they dined under an armorglass bubble that revealed a disc of starry space.

The meal was tasty. Though Auliss told him that the seasonings were adjusted for pangalac tastes, Ruiz was still pleased by this evidence that his sojourn on Pharaoh might not be a culinary trial.

When they were done, Auliss went away for a few minutes, then reappeared in what seemed to be a pangalac adaptation of Pharaohan seraglio wear, a wispy aquamarine scarf that wrapped around one thigh, cinched her waist and then veiled her small breasts with a mist of color, to finish with a turn around her shoulder. Her skin was very smooth. She soon pointed out that the knot at her shoulder would succumb to a single tug, which he confirmed.

She made love with more enthusiasm than skill. Ruiz found this charming and disarming.

After a period in which they lay together, looking up through the bubble at the stars and sipping a sweet Pharaohan wine, she asked, “Shall I call Meraclain? I trained her myself, but she has a natural aptitude. I think it’s a cultural thing.”

Ruiz was momentarily tempted; but then he felt a flicker of weary distaste. And perhaps Auliss might take any interest in her bondservant for disappointment in her unassisted performance. “Another time, perhaps.”

Auliss smiled, and Ruiz perceived that he had made the correct decision. “Perhaps. A shame you’re not already wearing your Pharaohan disguise; we would ask her to critique its authenticity. How will you go? You could easily play the part of a noble, with your height and features.”

“Alas! No such appealing role for me. I’ll learn more and travel faster as a snake oil peddler than as a muckety, though my bed won’t be as soft.” Ruiz touched Auliss’s breasts delicately and lay his head against them. She laughed and pulled him down into the cushions for a more measured exchange of pleasure.

An hour later, he had become restless, which Auliss sensed and seemed not to take personally. Perhaps she had kept company with other League agents whose mission-imperative allowed them little relaxation. After a while, she suggested that they dress and go up to the crew recreation area.

“Why not?” he said.

As they left, he glanced at Meraclain the bondservant. She returned his look boldly.

The crew area began with a broad corridor in the main module of the station. The station employed thousands of humans and a number of other beings, and at first glance it seemed to Ruiz that there was a different bar for each of these, marked by a string of glowing holosigns that disappeared around the curve of the hull.

Auliss tugged him toward one of these, called The Little Friend.

Inside, the bar was dark but for the bluish glow of a holotank in one corner. The tables clustered around the tank, and a dozen or so humans gathered there, intent on the flickering images.

“Come,” Auliss said. “Let’s see what we can see.” She led him to a table, signaled a barmech, exchanged greetings with several of the others. It was soon apparent that she was a regular at The Little Friend.

The barmech provided them with drinks, a pale smoky brandy that Auliss recommended. Ruiz looked at the holotank, curious to see what Auliss found so entertaining.

The hot sunlight of Pharaoh glared on a dry wash, where three children, two girls and a boy, were playing some elaborate game. They seemed to be twelve or thirteen, just at the threshold of puberty.

The children stood a few meters apart from one another, in a roughly triangular pattern. At the feet of each was a pile of stones. The game seemed to involve guessing, bluffing, and physical agility. The children would engage in a vigorous dialogue, laughing and making faces, then at some unseen signal extend their hands, which would contain a varying number of stones. A shout would go up, and the children would dart for each other’s bases. Occasionally a collision occurred, which was cause for more laughter. The tank’s viewpoint shifted among the players, occasionally zooming in for a close-up of the boy, who had clean regular features, strong white teeth, and heavy-lashed sloe-shaped eyes.

All in all, an engaging scene, Ruiz thought, though, glancing at his fellow patrons, he wondered at the intense attention with which they watched the children.

“It’s the boy,” Auliss whispered. “He’s the one.”

What was she talking about? He started to ask her for a clarification, but the holotank switched modes. The scene of the playing children shrank down into the lower third of the tank, and a chubby smiling man, dressed as a Pharaohan, appeared in the top.

“Hello, hello,” he said. “Key your bids now.”

Ruiz felt his face grow stiff.

Auliss smiled eagerly at him. “I wish I could afford him, but he’ll go too high for me. I had to scrimp for a sixmonth before I could get Meraclain. And she’s getting a little old; she must be sixteen or seventeen by now. I’ll have to start saving again.” She seemed to sense his disapproval, though he struggled to keep it from showing on his face. “Oh, it’s perfectly legal, Ruiz. The League allots its surface agents a personal quota, as long as they don’t draw it from the traditional conjuror families, or any specially tagged specimens. Only the conjurors can be profitably exported outsystem, after all. It’s only fair compensation for the hardships of our life here, don’t you think? And it makes our tour here on the platform so much more civilized.”

Ruiz nodded, a bit jerkily. “I suppose.” His flesh crawled a bit where she clutched his arm. All around them the other patrons were entering bids on the keypads set into the top of the table, in a murmur of excited anticipation.

A moment later, a spotlight flashed on, to pick out a heavy-jowled sweating man, whose companions whooped and thumped him on the back. “Oh, he won the boy cheap,” said Auliss, looking quite vexed. But then she seemed to recover her good humor. “Well, perhaps I’ll do as well next time. I can hope.”

“Umm,” Ruiz said, noncommittally. “Is it expensive to keep two bondservants?”

She ducked her head, a bit embarrassed. “Well, yes, actually — what with paying the life-support fees and the luxury penalties. But if I can’t sell Meraclain to someone with different tastes, I’ll have her mindwiped and released back into her natural environment. I’m not the sort that would space an unwanted helot, after all.”

“I’m glad to hear it,” Ruiz said dryly. He felt an overpowering desire to leave — to see the last of Auliss Moncipor. “Ah… it occurs to me that my instructions to the technician were insufficient… would you excuse me briefly?”

She nodded, and patted his arm absentmindedly, her attention already fixed on the holotank, which now displayed a scene of what Ruiz guessed to be a Pharaohan schoolyard. Scores of raggedly dressed children played on the hard-packed clay. The holocam swooped in to examine a small girl with delicate features and large violet eyes, who was speaking seriously to a crude doll.

Ruiz lurched forth from The Little Friend, stomach sour. He went directly down to the bay in which the Vigia rested, intent on leaving the platform as soon as possible.

He walked out onto the bay’s wide steel floor, to see a figure in technician’s overalls slide furtively from the Vigia’s dorsal drive tube. Instinctively, Ruiz hid behind a column of service plumbing, and observed.

The technician was a small slender man, who glanced about quickly and then drew a levitor pallet from the tube, upon which some rather large delicate object had been carried, judging from the loose straps and contoured blocks with which the pallet was equipped.

Ruiz’s carefully nurtured paranoia flared up brightly. He followed the technician, gliding from covert to covert, as the man left the bay. The man stopped at a storeroom and guided the pallet inside. Ruiz stepped into the storeroom, making no sound. The technician, intent on stowing the pallet in a wall rack, did not notice him.

Ruiz kicked shut the door and seized the technician’s arm. Pivoting, he slammed the technician into the wall, face first, hard enough to stun, but not hard enough to kill. The man bounced off the wall and fell on his back, face bloody. Ruiz knelt on his chest, patted him for weapons, found none.

“What did you do?” Ruiz asked, gently.

The man looked up through a red mask and tried to smile. He pushed bits of shattered teeth from his mouth. “Sir?”

“What did you do to my boat?”

“Maintenance, of course.”

Ruiz took hold of the man’s nose, which seemed broken, and gave it a vigorous twist. The man opened his mouth to shriek and Ruiz clamped his hand on the man’s windpipe. Just before the man’s eyes rolled up into his head, Ruiz released his grip. “No noise.”

The man nodded, no longer smiling.

“We’ll try again. What did you do to my boat? Don’t dissemble; when I’m finished with you, I’ll crawl up the tube and look, so you might as well tell me. While you’re at it, tell me who ordered you to do whatever you did.”

“Well, since you put it that way,” the man said, and died.

Ruiz remained atop the corpse for a moment, watching the eyes glaze. Odd, he thought. Surely he hadn’t banged the fellow into the wall that hard. A death net? But where would a conspirator find a Gench to do the work, here in this undeveloped system?

Ruiz took the technician’s tool belt and trotted back into the bay. At the vent, he discovered a tiny discolored pinhole where the technician had burned through the Vigia’s skin, disabling the sensor cable that serviced the tube. The Vigia would have been unable to report the invasion of her innards. He shinnied up the dorsal tube and found, emplaced into an injector nacelle, a rather large block of monocrystal explosive, enough to reduce the Vigia to a cloud of drifting molecules. He examined it with great care, found no booby traps or any evidence that it could be remotely detonated. Apparently the saboteur was relying on Ruiz to fire the tube on entry into Pharaoh’s atmosphere, which was a simple and foolproof plan. It would have succeeded nicely but for the attack of distaste Ruiz had suffered in The Little Friend.

Ruiz detached the block and shinnied down the tube. He carried the block into the storeroom and set it next to the corpse, then hotfooted it back to the Vigia, which he entered and buttoned up for departure.

He had an uneasy moment when he signaled the bay to evacuate and open a takeoff slot. Would the bay respond?

A field flashed down the bay, squeezing the exterior air into the far end; Ruiz felt the field’s passage as a tug at his viscera. The outer clamshell cracked open, and the stars blazed through.

Ruiz sat back. “Take us out,” he told the Vigia, and she answered with a sweet harmonious tone, the sound of her engines. The boat swooped through the opening clamshell into free space, and Ruiz felt a sudden lightening of his spirit.

He accelerated around the curve of the world, crossed the terminator into the sunlight, and slowed for descent.