“That’s what I came to do.” Rydra turned to the Customs Officer, who shrank against the iron banister. (God, he thought, she’s going to introduce me!) But she cocked her head with a half-smile and turned back. “I’ll see you again, Lome, when I get home.”
“Yeah, yeah, you say that and say that twice. But I no in six months see you.” He laughed. “But I like you, lady Captain. Take me to Caesar some day, I show you.”
“When I go, you go, Lome.”
A needle leer. “Go, go, you say. I got go now. Bye-bye, lady Captain—” he bowed and touched his head in salute—” Captain Wong.” And was gone.
“You shouldn’t be afraid of him,” Rydra told the Officer.
“But he’s—” During his search for a word, he wondered, How did she know? “Where in five hells did he come from?”
“He’s an Earthman. Though I believe he was born en route from Arcturus to one of the Centauris. His mother was a Slug, I think, if he wasn’t lying about that too. Lome tells tall tales.”
“You mean all that getup is cosmetisurgery?”
“Um-hm.” Rydra started down the stairs.
“But why the devil do they do that to themselves? They’re all so weird. That’s why decent people won’t have anything to do with them.”
“Sailors used to get tattoos. Besides, Lome has nothing else to do. I doubt he’s had a pilot’s job in forty years.”
“He’s not a good pilot? What was all that about the Caesar Nebula?”
“I’m sure he knows it. But he’s at least a hundred and twenty years old. After eighty, your reflexes start to go, and that’s the end of a pilot’s career. He just shuttle-bums from port city to port city, knows everything that happens to everybody, stays good for gossip—and advice.”
They entered the café on a ramp that swerved above the heads of the customers drinking at bar and table thirty feet below. Above and to the side of them, a fifty-foot sphere hovered like smoke, under spotlights. Rydra looked from the globe to the Customs Officer. “They haven’t started the games yet.”
“Is this where they hold those…fights?”
“That’s right.”
“But that’s supposed to be illegal!”
“Never passed the bill. After they debated, it got shelved.”
“Oh…”
As they descended among the jovial Transport workers, the Customs Officer blinked. Most were ordinary men and women, but the results of cosmetisurgery were numerous enough to keep his eyes leaping. “I’ve never been in a place like this before!” he whispered. Amphibian or reptilian creatures argued and laughed with griffins and metallic-skinned sphinxes.
“Leave your clothing here?” smiled the check girl. Her naked skin was candy green, her immense coif piled like pink cotton. Her breasts, navel, and lips flashed.
“I don’t believe so,” the Customs Officer said quickly.
“At least take your shoes and shirt off,” Rydra said, slipping off her blouse. “People will think you’re strange.” She bent, rose and handed her sandals over the counter. She had begun to unbuckle her waist cinch when she caught his desperate look, smiled, and fastened the buckle again.
Carefully he removed jacket, vest, shirt, and undershirt. He was about to untie his shoes when someone grabbed his arm. “Hey, Customs!”
He stood up before a huge, naked man with a frown on his pocked face like a burst in rotten rind. His only ornaments were mechanical beetle lights that swarmed in patterns over his chest, shoulders, legs, and arms.
“Eh…pardon me?”
“What you doing here, Customs?”
“Sir, I am not bothering you.”
“And I’m not bothering you. Have a drink, Customs. I’m being friendly.”
“Thank you very much, but I’d rather—”
“I’m being friendly. You’re not. If you’re not gonna be friendly, Customs, I’m not gonna be friendly either.”
“Well, I’m with some—” He looked helplessly at Rydra.
“Come on. Then you both have a drink. On me. Real friendly, damn it.” His other hand fell toward Rydra’s shoulder, but she caught his wrist. The fingers opened from the many-scaled stellarimeter grafted onto his palm. “Navigator?”
He nodded, and she let the hand go, which landed.
“Why are you so ‘friendly’ tonight?”
The intoxicated man shook his head. His hair was knotted in a stubby black braid over his left ear. “I’m just friendly with Customs here. I like you.”
“Thanks. Buy us that drink and I’ll buy you one back.”
As he nodded heavily, his green eyes narrowed. He reached between her breasts and fingered up the gold disk that hung from the chain around her neck. “Captain Wong?”
She nodded.
“Better not mess with you, then.” He laughed. “Come on, Captain, and I’ll buy you and Customs here something to make you happy.” They pushed their way to the bar.
What was green and came in small glasses at more respectable establishments, here was served in mugs.
“Who you betting on in the Dragon/Brass skirmish, and if you say the Dragon, I’ll throw this in your face. Joking, of course, Captain.”
“I’m not betting,” Rydra said. “I’m hiring. You know Brass?”
“Was a navigator on his last trip. Got in a week ago.”
“You’re friendly for the same reason he’s wrestling?”
“You might say that.”
The Customs Officer scratched his collarbone and looked puzzled.
“Last trip Brass made went bust,” Rydra explained to him. “The crew is out of work. Brass is on exhibit tonight.” She turned again to the Navigator. “Will there be many captains bidding for him?”
He put his tongue under his upper lip, squinted one eye and dropped his head. He shrugged.
“I’m the only one you’ve run into?”
A nod, a large swallow of liquor.
“What’s your name?”
“Calli, Navigator Two.”
“Where are your One and Three?”
“Three’s over there somewhere getting drunk. One was a sweet girl named Cathy O’Higgins. She’s dead.” He finished the drink and reached over for another one.
“My treat,” Rydra said. “Why’s she dead?”
“Ran into Invaders. Only people who ain’t dead, Brass, me, and Three; and our Eye. Lost the whole platoon, our Slug. Damned good Slug too. Captain, that was a bad trip. The Eye, he cracked up without his Ear and Nose. They’d been discorporate for ten years together. Ron, Cathy, and me, we’d only been tripled for a couple of months. But even so…” He shook his head. “It was bad.”
“Call your Three over,” Rydra said.
“Why?”
“I’m looking for a full crew.”
Calli wrinkled his forehead. “We don’t got no One anymore.”
“You’re going to mope around here forever? Go to the Morgue.”
Calli humphed. “You wanna see my Three, you come on.”
Rydra shrugged in acquiescence, and the Customs Officer followed behind them.
“Hey, stupid, swing around.”
The kid who turned on the bar stool was maybe nineteen. The Customs Officer thought of a snarl of metal bands. Calli was a large, comfortable man—
“Captain Wong, this is Ron—best Three to come out of this Solar System.”
—but Ron was small, thin, with uncannily sharp muscular definition: pectorals like scored metal plates beneath drawn wax skin; stomach like ridged hosing, arms like braided cables. Even the facial muscles stood at the back of the jaw and jammed against the separate columns of his neck. He was unkempt and towheaded and sapphire-eyed, but the only cosmetisurgery evident was the bright rose growing on his shoulder. He flung out a quick smile and touched his forehead with a forefinger in salute. His nails were nub-gnawed on fingers like knotted lengths of white rope.
“Captain Wong is looking for a crew.”
Ron shifted on the stool, ra
ising his head a little; every other muscle in his body moved too, like snakes under milk.
The Customs Officer saw Rydra’s eyes widen. Not understanding her reaction, he ignored it.
“Don’t got no One,” Ron said. His smile was quick and sad again.
“Suppose I found a One for you?”
The Navigators looked at each other.
Calli turned to Rydra and rubbed the side of his nose with his thumb. “You know the thing about a triple like us—”
Rydra’s left hand caught her right. “Like this, you have to be. My choice is subject to your approval, of course.”
“Well, it’s pretty difficult for someone else—”
“It’s impossible. But it’s your choice. I just make suggestions. But my suggestions are damned good ones. What do you say?”
Calli’s thumb moved from his nose to his earlobe. He shrugged. “You can’t make an offer much better than that.”
Rydra looked at Ron.
The kid put one foot up on the stool, hugged his knee, and peered across his patella. “I say, let’s see who you suggest.”
She nodded. “Fair.”
“You know, jobs for broken triples aren’t that easy to come by.” Calli put his hand on Ron’s shoulder.
“Yeah, but—”
Rydra looked up. “Let’s watch the wrestling.”
Along the counter, people raised their heads. At the tables, patrons released the catch in their chair arms so that the backs swung to half-recline.
Calli’s mug clinked on the counter, and Ron raised both feet to the stool and leaned back against the bar.
“What are they looking at?” the Customs Officer asked. “Where’s everybody—” Rydra put her hand on the back of his neck and did something so that he laughed and swung his head up. Then he sucked a great breath and let it out slowly.
The smoky, null-grav globe, hung in the vault, was shot with colored light. The room had gone dim. Thousands of watts of floodlights struck the plastic surface and gleamed on the faces below as smoke in the bright sphere faded.
“What’s going to happen?” the Customs Officer asked. “Is that where they wrestle…?”
Rydra brushed her hand over his mouth and he nearly swallowed his tongue, but was quiet.
And the Silver Dragon came, wings working in the smoke, silver feathers like clashed blades, scales on the grand haunches shaking. She rippled her ten-foot body and squirmed in the anti-gravity field, green lips leering, silver lids batting over green. “It’s a woman!” breathed the Customs Officer.
An appreciative tattoo of finger snapping scattered through the audience.
Smoke rolled in the globe—
“That’s our Brass!” whispered Calli.
—and Brass yawned and shook his head, ivory saber teeth glistening with spittle, muscles humped on shoulders and arms; brass claws unsheathed six inches from yellow plush paws. Bunched bands on his belly bent above them. The barbed tail beat on the globe’s wall. His mane, sheared to prevent handholds, ran like water.
Calli grabbed the Customs Officer’s shoulder. “Snap your fingers, man! That’s our Brass!”
The Customs Officer, who had never been able to, nearly broke his hand trying.
The globe flared red. The two, pilots turned to one another across the sphere’s diameter. Voices quieted. The Customs Officer glanced from the ceiling to the people around him. Every other face was up. The Navigator Three was hunched in a fetal knot on the bar stool. Copper shifting; Rydra too dropped her eyes to glance at the lean bunched arms and straited thighs of the rose-shouldered boy.
Above, the opponents flexed and stretched, drifting. A sudden movement from the Dragon, and Brass drew back, then launched from the wall.
The Customs Officer grabbed something.
The two forms struck, grappled, spun against a wall and ricocheted. People began to stamp. Arm reached over arm, leg wrapped around leg, till Brass whirled loose from her and was hurled to the upper wall of the arena. Shaking his head, he righted. Below, alert, the Dragon twisted and writhed; anticipation jerked her wings. Brass leapt from the ceiling, reversed suddenly, and caught the Dragon with his hind feet. She staggered back, flailing. Saber teeth came together and missed.
“What are they trying to do?” the Customs Officer whispered. “How can you tell who’s winning?” He looked down again: what he’d grabbed was Cam’s shoulder.
“When one can throw the other against the wall and only touch the far wall himself with one limb on the ricochet,” Calli explained, not looking down, “that’s a fall.”
The Silver Dragon snapped her body like bent metal released, and Brass shot away and spread-eagled against the globe. But as she floated back to take the shock on one hind leg, she lost her balance and the second leg touched too.
An anticipatory breath loosed in the audience. Encouraging snapping; Brass recovered, leaped, pushed her to the wall, but his rebound was too sharp and he, too, staggered on three limbs.
A twist in the center again. The Dragon snarled, stretched, shook her scales. Brass glowered, peered with eyes like gold coins hooded, spun back quaking, then leapt forward.
Silver whirled beneath his shoulder blow, hit the globe. She looked for the world as if she were trying to climb the wall. Brass rebounded lightly, caught himself on one paw, then pushed away.
The globe flashed green, and Calli pounded the bar. “Look at him show that tinsel bitch!”
Grappling limbs braided one another, and claw caught claw till the stifled arms shook, broke apart. Two more falls that went to neither side; then the Silver Dragon came headfirst into Brass’s chest, knocked him back, and recovered on tail alone. Below the crowd stamped.
“That’s a foul!” Calli exclaimed, shaking the Customs Officer away. “Damn it, that’s a foul!” But the globe flashed green again. Officially the second fall was hers.
Warily now they swam in the sphere. Twice the Dragon feinted, and Brass jerked aside his claws or sucked in his belly to avoid hers.
“Why don’t she lay off him?” Calli demanded of the roof. “She’s nagging him to death. Grapple and fight!”
As if in answer, Brass sprang, swiping her shoulder; what would have been a perfect fall got messed up because the Dragon caught his arm and he swerved off, smashing clumsily against the plastic.
“She can’t do that!” This time it was the Customs Officer. He grabbed Calli again. “Can she do that? I don’t think they should allow—” And he bit his tongue because Brass swung back, hauled her from the wall, flipped her between his legs, and, as she scrambled off the plastic, he bounced on his forearm and hovered centrally, flexing for the crowd.
“That’s it!” cried Calli. “Two out of three!”
The globe flashed green again. Snapping broke into applause. “Did he win?” demanded the Customs Officer. “Did he win?”
“Listen! Of course he won! Hey, let’s go see him. Come on, Captain!”
Rydra had already started through the crush. Ron sprang behind her, and Calli, dragging the Customs Officer, came after. A flight of black tile steps took them into a room with couches where a few groups of men and women stood around Condor, a great gold and crimson creature, who was being made ready to fight Ebony who waited alone in the corner. The arena exit opened and Brass came in sweating.
“Hey,” Calli called. “Hey, that was great, boy. And the Captain here wants to talk to you.”
Brass stretched, then dropped to all fours, a low rumble in his chest. He shook his mane, then his gold eyes widened in recognition. “Ca’tain Wong!” The mouth, distended through cosmetisurgically implanted fangs, could not deal with a plosive labial unless it was voiced. “How you’d like me tonight?”
“Well enough to want you to pilot me through the Specelli.” She roughed a tuft of yellow behind his ear. “You said sometime ago you’d like to show me what you could do.”
“Yeah,” Brass nodded. “I just think I’m dreaming.” He pulled away his loin rag and swabb
ed his neck and arms with the bunched cloth, then caught the Customs Officer’s amazed expression. “Just cosmetisurgery.” He kept on swabbing.
“Hand him your psyche-rating,” Rydra said, “and he’ll approve you.”
“That means we leave tomorrow, Ca’tain?”
“At dawn.”
From his belt pouch Brass drew a thin metal card. “Here you go, Customs.”
The Customs Officer scanned the runic marking. On a metal tracing plate from his back pocket, he noted the shift in stability index, but decided to integrate for the exact summation later on. Practice told him it was well above acceptable. “Miss Wong, I mean Captain Wong, what about their cards?” He turned to Calli and Ron.
Ron reached behind his neck and rubbed his scapula. “You don’t worry about us till you get a Navigator One.” The hard, adolescent face held an engaging belligerence.
“We’ll check them later,” Rydra said. “We’ve got more people to find first.”
“You’re looking for a full crew?” asked Brass.
Rydra nodded. “What about the Eye that came back with you?”
Brass shook his head. “Lost his Ear and Nose. They were a real close tri’le, Ca’tain. He hung around maybe six hours before he went back to the Morgue.”
“I see. Can you recommend anyone?”
“No one in ’articular. Just hang around the Discor’orate Sector and see what turns u’.”
“If you want a crew by morning, we better start now,” said Calli.
“Let’s go,” said Rydra.
As they walked to the ramp’s foot, the Customs Officer asked, “The Discorporate Sector?”
“What about it?” Rydra was at the rear of the group.
“That’s so—well, I don’t like the idea.”
Rydra laughed. “Because of the dead men? They won’t hurt you.”
“And I know that’s illegal, for bodily persons to be in the Discorporate Sector.”
“In certain parts,” Rydra corrected, and the other men laughed now. “We’ll stay out of the illegal sections—if we can.”
“Would you like your clothes back?” the check-girl asked.
People had been stopping to congratulate Brass, pounding at his hip with appreciative fists and snapping their fingers. Now he swung his contour cape over his head. It fell to his shoulders, clasped his neck, draped under his arms and around his thick hams. Brass waved to the crowd and started up the ramp.