NOTHING CAME AT ALL

1563 4D

The liftcar door opened into a large room with a gently-arched ceiling. Brief flashes of color from panels on dark walls punctuated the dim light. Andros, dressed in dark coveralls, sat in twos and threes in soft chairs, their conversation spattering the high end of the audio spectrum with anjive. Andrew looked for other humans, and found none. Evenly-spaced deepenings in the wall-shadows suggested four doorways facing him from the opposite side of the room. On the floor lay a firm but spongy covering, dark and shiny. One by one, faces turned to stare at the new arrivals. The whole room went slowly to silence.

“You’re on the wrong level,” a voice said. Andrew turned his head but couldn’t find the speaker. Janny stuck her finger in her mouth, and pressed against Andrew‘s leg.

Grendel buzzed anjive for a second. Eyes widened; then an andro woman came to them. “This room is under surveillance,” she muttered. “Come with me.” With Ezzar and Andrew supporting Grendel, they followed her through the left doorway into a hall and then a small chamber with cushions all across the floor. “We’ll get you some washes and clean clothes,” she said, “so wait here.” Gently, Andrew and Ezzar let the big man down onto some cushions. They stacked the guns in a corner.

“Maybe some food?” Andrew asked. The woman had left. His stomach twisted like an empty sack. The walls danced with color; his nose filled with a shifting array of aromas that darkened from soft rose down through citron to petroleum and mold. In the soft light, he could barely see Ezzar‘s hands move. He asked her, “What is this place?”

Grendel said, “We’re on an andro level. Jeddin told me to come here if I needed help. This is a resting area, I guess. It’s like a skerrishee, where we go to share.” Several white faces, male and female, appeared at the door. They smiled at Grendel and disappeared.

“Do they know you or something?” Andrew asked.

“I’ve killed some people — humans. Most of these folks in the City can’t even think about doing such a thing. Conditioning. I’ve got a price on my head that would buy the train we came in on.” Grendel massaged his upper leg.

“Were the corpos looking for you back at Engrammatic?” Andrew asked him. As if there wasn’t trouble enough.

“Yes.”

A woman, pale and tall with long hands and fingers, came in with a transparent washing bag and clean coveralls. She and Grendel buzzed at each other. Still sitting, he stripped off his coverall and showed her his leg. Just below the bulge of muscle in the back of Grendel‘s right thigh, Andrew made out a slight indentation. The woman looked at it and shook her head. Grendel stripped, worked his way into the bag, and activated its storm of cleansing fluids. When he emerged, naked and almost white, he spat out the bag’s breathing tube and smiled.

“It’s been too long,” he said. He pulled on a coverall the woman handed him, and fell asleep where he lay, not even closing the fabric over his chest. The woman left.

Ezzar stripped away her clothing piece by piece, stood in the bag, pulled it up over herself, bit the breather and turned the bag on. Her lean, muscled, dark body gleamed through the swashing spray; she twisted and stretched herself; the curves of her legs and hips and waist articulated themselves as she moved. Her left breast stood out, firm and ample. Where the right one had been, her chest lay flat, the skin scarred and withered. Andrew searched inside himself, looking for some stirring of desire or pity or repulsion, but nothing came at all.

When Ezzar emerged, she bundled her clothes and put on a City coverall.

Andrew went next. He pulled off his coverall, feeling Ezzar‘s and Janny‘s eyes on him. As he drew the bag up, he looked down; his network of half-faded scars zigzagged across his entire skin like a map of fiefdoms carved from a single nation. With the memory of the cuts, he shuddered.

Ezzar‘s eyes widened. She said, “I didn’t know it was so…" and turned her head down and away. Embarrassed, Andrew quickly cleaned up, the spray lashing and needling his interlaced marks, and dressed.

Janny wanted no part of the washing bag. She let Ezzar take off her clothes, but she fought to keep her rattail necklace and knotted hair, gurgling as she bit back screams. On her belly stretched a large, crude tattoo of a face with long white teeth and white eyes. Only when the andro woman returned with hand cloths and water sprays, touching Janny gently and slowly to cleanse away the other smears and stains from her skin, did the little girl allowed herself to be washed.

The woman took the smock and gave Janny a slightly-too-large child’s coverall. Ezzar cuffed the sleeves and ankles. Janny stood looking up at Andrew, her hair-knots making her look like a weed growing out of a little sack.

“We’re very hungry,” Andrew said to the woman. When food came, they woke Grendel. While they ate, the woman massaged Grendel‘s leg with unguent, and he smiled.