Ruiz heard the first feeble groans and whimpers from the rest of the cargo rising into the air on both sides of his trough. He decided it was safe to move, and he found he could do it. He rubbed the dried discharge from his eyes, and concentrated on remaining calm. His fellow slaves were making no effort to do so. Ruiz heard a chorus of fear all about him, as the others discovered their alien surroundings, wailing, shrieking, cursing, praying. As their muscles recovered from the stunfield, the sounds of thumping and flailing from the metal troughs became deafening. Their new surroundings didn’t correspond in even the slightest detail to the Pharaohan version of the Elysian Fields, where they all had expected to wake after the success of the phoenix play. Would the gods trap them first in unresponsive bodies, then in steel coffins? Would heaven smell like piss and vomit?
As time passed, the curses began to outweigh the prayers, at least in volume.
Ruiz began to join in, not wishing to seem unnaturally calm, in case the cargo hold was under observation. His natural inclination was to curse, but he prayed instead, hoping to present a docile affect. He writhed about in as panicky a manner as he could manage without risking injury to his long-inactive muscles.
He became so involved in his performance that he almost missed the first touch of the trank gas. But when he noticed, he began to pray with less fervor, and gradually feigned quiescence, though the gas was too unsophisticated to defeat his conditioning. Still, the gas imbued him with a certain artificial optimism, and he had to make an effort to retain a realistic degree of gloominess.
Soon the hold was quiet again.
With a slight lurch and the whine of servos, Ruiz’s pan began to move. It slid slowly forward, then began to tilt. In moments Ruiz was standing upright, leaning forward against the slight elasticity of the monoline net. He could now see that his pan was part of a transport rack made up of a half-dozen similar containers. Across the corridor were tiers of identical racks, still horizontal.
Some of the other captives in his rack had also sagged against the net and were making happy faces at Ruiz. He mugged back at them and awaited developments.
Somewhere a hatch cracked, and Ruiz sensed the pressure increase, as a thicker richer air flooded in. He heard the footsteps a moment before the inspection party entered the hold.
There were three: a human woman, who seemed to be in charge, a human man, and a Mocrassar bondwarrior. The sight of the Moc extinguished any immediate hope of escape. Its size was unusual, even by Moc standards: the enameled designs on its grasping limbs spoke of great age and high lineage. The immense insectoid wore a soiled Elizabethan doublet, modified to fit its six-limbed body. Ruiz could tell that the crusted fabric had once been fine. The Moc’s midlimb manipulators were fitted with built-in energy tubes. It stank like a barrel of drowned cockroaches.
The man was a much-cyborged specimen, his legless torso mated to a floater console, one arm replaced by a multipurpose weapons mount — now equipped with a nerve lash. His skull was a metal carapace; only below the level of his nose did his face remain flesh. A segmented metal collar replaced his neck. He was a holodrama picture of a pirate, too colorfully authentic to be quite believable. Still, he twitched the nerve lash in a practiced manner.
But after the first moment it was the woman who captured all of Ruiz’s attention. She was tall; she possessed the unremarkable perfection of form available to any pangalac with the means — slender, with small high breasts and long smooth muscles. Where the simple white shipsuit exposed her skin, it was the rich color of old ivory, with an almost iridescent polish. Her hair hung down her back in a businesslike braid, heavy as a black snake. It was her face that made her unforgettable. Ruiz recognized the hand of Arlaian the Younger, that master lineamentor, whose works commanded vast fees. The eyes were a simple blue, the brows dark and slightly tilted, the lips full, colored a natural coral. But from these unpretentious components, Arlaian had formed one of his great masterpieces. It was a face that spoke of power, above all else, power untempered by any soft emotion, power that was its own justification. It was a face that demanded worship, and Ruiz felt a sudden surge of sensation in his loins, a reaction that he swiftly damped. In his present state of undress, such a reaction would be a fatal giveaway, evidence that he was relatively immune to the gas. At the thought of what might then happen, Ruiz had to exert himself to prevent his testicles from trying to withdraw into his body.
Ruiz’s trough was near the far end of the rack, so he had time to observe the trio as they moved along the rack slowly, discussing the other specimens.
She had a voice like a bell, sweet and high and precise. She spoke the pangalac trade language, with a trace of Dobravit accent. “Marmo,” she said, addressing the cyborged pirate, “you’ll have to spend some time on your grabfield algorithm. The bubble is snatching too many by-standers. It’s a serious loose end; the League catchboats are never so sloppy. We don’t want to give rise to any new religious movements, do we? Pretty soon the peasants will be crowding the stages, hoping to be taken to paradise, and we’ll have a destructive overload. Besides, why collect trash?” She stopped before a pan containing a peasant with the facial tattoos and the heavy muscles of a journeyman stonecutter. “This one, for example. See his tattoos? Of what use is he to me? Ours is a high-ticket trade. This one isn’t even worth processing.” The peasant lolled his face against the netting, smiling vacantly and making pawing gestures at her.
She studied him dispassionately. She flipped a safety cover off a switch and pressed. The interior of the pan flared white. A moment later the ashes trickled through the floor grating and were gone.
“I’ll give it my full attention, Corean, soon as we have these safely in the pens,” the pirate replied, in a rich booming bass. She gave him a glance, then reached to a pressplate on his console. When he spoke again his voice was markedly smaller. “The Bansh brain refuses to do the culling — you know how intractable it can be, in certain respects — so that I must run the algorithm on the auxiliary systems. Another difficulty is that if we make the bubble too small we run the risk of losing some portion of the troupe or its equipment.”
“Do your best, then,” she said, moving on.
Marmo rubbed his mouth with the back of his one flesh hand. “Perhaps,” he said, “perhaps I can develop a utility that recognizes tattoo patterns. We have a fairly extensive data base to work with. That way the culling could be done before the bubble closes.”
She nodded.
Before they reached Ruiz’s pan, two more of the captives had been burned, and Ruiz found it hard to maintain his guise of innocent idiocy. He could smell the woman’s perfume, a sweet edge cutting through the odor of burned flesh, the various stinks of the hold, and the overpowering musk of the Moc. In a sudden perceptual inversion, that flowery scent seemed to epitomize death, or at least death of the pointless and unexpected sort. Although he knew there was nothing he could do, his hindbrain howled and gibbered for escape. When she stopped before him, he was almost paralyzed with fear. He struggled to show nothing more than a dazed and affable curiosity. He saw a flicker of distaste cross that magnificent face, and then some other, less definable emotion — but she didn’t reach for the destruct switch.
“Another cull,” said Marmo. “A snake oil peddler, by his marks. Probably brainburned and diseased.” And Marmo flipped open the switch cover.
Corean struck Marmo’s hand away with an effortless flick. It happened so quickly that Ruiz had no time to react.