There were off worlder prostitutes here, too, controlled by other off worlders higher up in the covert power web that covered the Maze. There were worlds in the Hegemony where slavery was an accepted fact or a tacit one — and Arienrhod did not interfere with the customs of her customers. Some of them looked no different from the local body sellers (only, to his eyes, more exotic); but there were the zombies, too, flesh-and-blood victims for hire who satisfied the kind of customers who weren’t content with dreams. They moved nearly naked through the crowds, flaunting their scars — no, flaunting was the wrong word. They were the living dead, they moved vacant eyed, like sleepwalkers; theirs was the dream, and the nightmare. They were drugged, he had been told, or drugs had already destroyed their brains. He had been told by Arienrhod that they felt nothing. And once, when his own mood had turned especially black, he had almost…
But the memory of lying helpless in an alley while four slavers called him “pretty” had broken the black mood the way his shell flute had broken that night; left him wondering whether it was really the off worlders he despised, or the off worlder in himself.
But Arienrhod had eased his conscience again, brushed away his questions, laughed gently and told him that there would always be evil, on any world, in any being, because without it there would be no measure for good…
Sparks took a deep breath as the casino doors swept shut behind him, stood letting his lungs clear on the inset slab of rare metallic ore that served as a doorstep. A tawny cat slipped past his feet, disappeared into a hidden cranny in the wall, hunting.
“…Come on, S’eing, gimme a break.” Something familiar yet strange about the voice made him turn and look along the building front. “I’ll do anything, for gods’ sakes, anything to get out of this hellhole and back to someplace where they can help me! Sign me on—” The speaker was an off worlder thick dark hair, brown skin, a sparse half-grown beard. He sat on a box, propped against the wall, wearing a stained crewman’s coveralls with no insignia. He was a stranger; he looked like a strong man slowly starving to death, and Sparks began to turn away from the sight of him. But the voice… “You owe me, damn you, S’eing!” He watched the stranger push away from the wall with an awkward twist of his spine, catch the pants leg of the second man’s flightsuit.
The second man was a freighter captain, he guessed, or something less official: a heavy man with a scarred face. He stepped back suddenly, jerking the seated man off-balance. Sparks watched the first man sprawl helplessly into the street, realized with a shock of empathy that the man’s legs were paralyzed. The scarred officer laughed, the kind of laughter he’d never wanted to hear again. “I don’t owe you shit, Herne , if you can’t collect.” Herne ’s curses followed him down the alley.
The man called Herne rearranged his useless legs laboriously, ignoring the subtle and the not so subtle stares of the passersby. Sparks stood staring like the rest, trapped in the voyeurism of pity. He moved forward at last, tentatively, as he watched the man try to drag himself back onto his seat. The man glanced up at him; slid back down onto the pavement.
“You!” Hatred followed recognition like night behind day. “Did she send you here? Did she tell you where to find me?… Yeah, take a good look, kid! Fill up your eyes, fill up your brain; and then don’t ever forget that someday she’ll do the same to you.” Herne ’s hand closed on a fistful of dust, flung it away.
“Starbuck.” He was not sure he had even spoken it aloud, but he knew it for the truth. “She — she said you were dead.” He had imagined she meant fallen thousands of meters into the sea. But there were platforms and machinery jutting out into the shaft. One of those must have broken his fall… and broken his back. And now he might as well be dead — but he was alive. Sparks felt the sudden release of an unconscious pressure somewhere in his chest, a thing he became aware of only in its absence. “I’m glad…”
Herne twisted in futile rage; his hand leaped out at Sparks ’s leg. “You son of a Summer slut! If I could get my hands on you I’d finish what I started!” He slumped back again, letting his hand drop. “Go ahead, enjoy it, kid. I’m still twice the man you are, and Arienrhod knows it, too.”
Sparks stood just beyond reach, his face burning. The memory of what Herne had done to him, and failed to do, there in the Hall of the Winds drowned his compassion like a gnat in a bowl of bitterness. “You’re no man at all, Herne, any more. And Arienrhod is all mine!” He turned and started away down the alley.
“You fool!” Herne ’s angry laughter beat at his retreating back. “Arienrhod is no man’s! You belong to her, and she’ll use you until she uses you up—”
Sparks walked on. not looking back, until he reached the corner of the Street. But he did not start uphill toward the palace; he stood while his anger drained away and left him purposeless, before he chose the downhill route. He walked aimlessly for a long time, moving into the heart of the Maze. He passed the bars and casinos that had become a second home to him; glanced desultorily at shop windows filled with imported spices and herbs, jewelry, paintings, caftans, terminals… and a hundred different technological toys: costly, sophisticated baubles spread out for the jostling free port trade and the wondering eyes of the natives. Once every window had stopped him in his tracks, and a walk in the Maze had been like a walk through heaven. Now they barely caught his eyes; and somehow, without his being aware of it, time had coated his awe with a rind of disillusionment, and the wine of wonder had turned to vinegar.
Even the many-colored alleys, the fert’le meeting ground where artisans of this world and seven more let their creativity bloom, had grown strangely dim and separate from his own reality. He was no longer drawn into the sight and fragrance and music as he moved along them; and now the vivid bruise left on his awareness by Herne ’s living death pressed painfully, acutely, against the walls of yielding glass that closed him in. Surrounded by the beating heart of the city he had come here to discover, he discovered instead that somehow the thing he had reached out for had slipped through his hands again. Like everything he had ever cared about, or counted on… His hand closed violently over the stem of a kinetic sculpture in the display stall he was passing; harsh notes clashed among its spines, leaping like cats. But the jangling isotonic music stopped at his skin, the cool metal stem swayed into another dimension. Or maybe he only imagined their unreality; but still it did not pass… Why? What’s wrong with me? What’s wrong?
He let it go in disgust as the sculptor came indignantly to the door of his shop. He went on, realizing only now what alley he had come into: It was the Citron Alley, and ahead of him he could already see Fate
Ravenglass sitting as she always did with her trays and trimmings on her doorstep. The place he had come to once before for shelter, and been taken in without question or demand. The place that he could always come back to, a haven of calm and creation in a universe of indifference and broken parts.
He saw that Fate was not alone, saw her visitor rise from the step in a cloud of midnight-blue veils embroidered with rainbows. He recognized her friend Tiewe — by the veils, he had never seen anything more of her than her ebony hands. He heard the sweet song of her hidden necklace of bells. He had asked Fate why she never showed herself, thinking that she must be disfigured; but Fate had said that it was a custom of her homeworld. He had seen only one or two others like her since, carefully protected by chaperones. Tiewe was uneasy in the presence of men, and he felt a jealous gratification as he realized that she was leaving because she had seen him. Fate had many friends — but there were none who seemed to be anything more than friends to her. He had wondered from time to time about her celiacy.