The Demons at Rainbow Bridge

The Erotics had zeroed in on him now, but while he’d watched their dancing with enthusiasm and wondered once again what it must feel like to have a tail like that, he wasn’t at all interested in the follow-up.

One of them, maybe senior, nosed out the rest and headed over toward him with all the sass and sexy moves she had. She had all of them. He watched her come, resigned, and drained the last of his drink. No loss there; in a place where everybody was drinking and popping all the wrong stuff, he was limited to fruit juice.

Up close, she was no less erotic but far less human; what seemed almost a stage costume from afar took on a far different cast when you could see that it was no costume but truly her. In the capital of the central world of an empire encompassing hundreds of races spawned by incredibly divergent evolutionary forces, she nonetheless seemed artificial, unreal, like some kind of animated stage prop created by some bizarre artist.

Which, in a way, was just what she was.

She was almost as tall as he was, taller with that thick mane of hair rising from her head and sweeping behind, although he was, to be sure, rather short and thin himself. Her skin was light brown, her face and torso out of some adolescent male’s fantasies, the eyes unnaturally large, the lips too thick and sensuous, the face and form perfect, the breasts ridiculously oversized and far too large to be as firm as they were, the nipples ever erect. The brows, however, were thin and angled upwards; the blush and eye shadow were not cosmetic but part of her, and above the outer edge of each eye, about midway between the eye and the hairline, were tiny, perfectly rounded short horns.

She had no navel; about where the navel should have been was a covering of short, incredibly soft darker brown hair that went down to her feet. Her hips were a bit odd-shaped and supported two thick legs that were somehow both equine and sexy, ending not in human feet but in two graceful hooves. From the small of her back trailed a magnificent golden tail of the sort that he’d seen on show horses when he was a kid back on his native world; her hair spilled down her back in the same color and style.

She slid up to him. "Hey, bad boy—want a feelie?"

He looked at her. Only something beyond the painted eyes, deep inside her, revealed her hardness, her many years at this trade, and her sense of entrapment in it.

"Nothing tonight, luv," he responded. "Just here for the scenery and the atmosphere, nothin’ more. Maybe some other time."

She’d been around too long to take that as a final brush-off. "Aw, c’mon, big man. You got needs and I can fill ’em."

"Shove off!" he said in such a tone that she actually took a step back. Coldly, but less threatening, he added, "You with all your years got no idea of my needs. Go find a paying customer and get happy."

She stared at him. "You a guv or som’thin’?"

He tolerated the question because he knew it was a natural comment. "I ain’t no guv, girl, not by a hoop. I want less truckin’ with them than you do. I just don’t want no tumble tonight."

Her brow furrowed in puzzlement. "Then why in hell’d you come in here?"

He felt sudden anger and stood up quickly, almost knocking the stool over. "I don’t have to explain nothin’ to nobody, least of all a long-tailed piece of ass." He walked briskly by her and out the door and into the street.

He walked about a block in the crowded district before his anger cooled. He’d been out of line there and he knew it, but what the hell could he say or do? She was just doing her job, the only job she could do, the job she’d been designed to do in some genetics lab. Hell, why had he gone in there, anyway, knowing the scene was inevitable?

Why, indeed, come down here at all? The tourists, the business people, the crews on leave, the conventioneers and politicians—these were the mobs in this gaudy district. He looked around. People, people everywhere, and he was the only damned human in sight.

Maybe that was it. Maybe he’d gone to the only place where he could be certain there would be other human company, no matter what the type and no matter that, down here, those from human stock weren’t exactly creations of nature. You could be close, closer than relatives, closer than blood brothers, to a half dozen creatures who were so different from you that you had little in common except the job, and find them the best friends and mates you could ever imagine, but every once in a while you just felt like you had to be with your own kind, no matter who or what they were.

He took the cross-town tube and headed back for the hotel. He felt depressed and mad at himself, and somehow cut off not just from his own kind but from any kind.

That was the problem, really. Not that he was cut off from his own kind by any barriers or occupation but that he was the one who was different. The others in the glit, they were human, and he had less kinship with them than with the Erotic. Maybe that was why he’d gotten so mad at her. That sense of her entrapment; a mind inside there that was maybe curious or smart or ambitious but that couldn’t really do much about it. With that body, those urges, the built-in genetic compulsions, she might be bored and hate the whole life but she could literally do or be nothing else.

Somebody else had made that decision for her at her conception, within some computer-controlled bio lab that created endless themes and variations of her to fill an age-old market demand. It wasn’t bad enough to have a thousand races to keep track of; there were endless variations of them as well.

He hadn’t been like that. He’d been born in the normal manner from material supplied randomly by two parents, even though he never knew who one of them was. Born poor and raised in the filth of an interplanetary backwater, but he’d been smart and he’d had ambition. The Erotic might be smart and have ambitions, too, but she was trapped from birth and she knew it.

He, now, was different. He’d trapped himself. He’d sold his soul for his ambitions, his dreams, and now that he had them they were hollow, for he couldn’t enjoy his fruits. When you’re poor and without much hope you don’t look too hard for the devil’s fine print.

Inside his room he relaxed, then removed his clothes. When his back was bared, there was a small furry ball down at the base of the spine, a ball that unrolled slowly and began to gradually inch its way up his back and toward his shoulder. It resembled nothing so much as a large slug, but covered with fine, thick baby-blue and snow-white hair. He sat on the side of the bed, letting it climb all the way up.

<Poor Jimmy> said a tiny, whispery, barely audible voice in his head. <Grysta let you out on the town and she senses your unhappiness. Did you want that girl?>

He sighed. "No, not that girl."

The tiny creature made it to his shoulder, then slowly oozed its way toward his neck. He lay down on the bed, knowing that it couldn’t be crushed or hurt in this way. He could have sat and pressed against a steel plate and it wouldn’t have hurt Grysta, or dislodged her.

He thought of the creature as "her" even though, strictly speaking, the race was unisexual. Jimmy understood creatures who were bisexual, or trisexual, or whatever, but only second-hand, as he might understand another race by reading about it. That was part of the problem; Grysta seemed to understand him quite well, while he couldn’t really understand the tiny creature at all. The biology, yes, but not the culture, not the attitude, not her relationship with him.

He turned on his side and Grysta stretched out, tiny "head" against the nape of his neck, body stretched out rigidly along his spinal column. Microscopic tendrils shot out from her underside, penetrating his skin in a thousand places They were long enough to reach right into his nervous system, yet so fine they could not be seen without aid. There was no pain; there was no real sensation at all, until Grysta had control.

Then his mind seemed to fog, his depression vanishing for now, rationality giving way to waves of pure pleasure washing over and through him. Orgasmic waves traveled to every nerve and cell in his body, an ultimate high that few could ever know or understand. And while it went on, while he writhed in ecstasy, Grysta fed, gorging herself on his blood, yet taking none that would be missed in the morning, and she, too, was undulating in pleasure, and whispering to him, <Love you. Love you, Jimmy.>

<You are depressed.> Grysta noted. <Did not I please you during the night?>

"Yeah, you pleased me," he mumbled, bringing himself erect and managing to get his feet over the side of the bed. "You always please me, Grysta. Like a habitual pleasure drug or a stimulator on the brain’s pleasure centers pleases. Nobody can please like you, Grysta." That last was said in a tone of resignation and with a tinge of sarcasm as well. The attitude would be lost on Grysta, he knew.

<You constantly complain that I have deprived you of your inalienable right to be miserable. This I cannot comprehend, even after all this time. If you really wish to be miserable, I can make you so.>

"No!" You’re doing a good enough job of that just being here, he thought sourly to himself. At least he had that one bit of privacy—although the communication was mental in a way, Grysta was not a telepath, and required "interfacing" physically with her host for that. It could be the softest of whispers, but Grysta did require that he really talk to her. It always struck him as ironic that he could have mind-to-mind contact with a hundred different kinds of beings but he had to talk to the one he couldn’t get away from. Grysta thought on different wavelengths than most of the universe.

Grysta was always a "her" to him; he even heard the voice in his mind as that of a woman, although she really was asexual. A strong, assertive woman’s voice, less like a lover’s than that of a boss, or maybe a mother.

<What is it you want, then?> Grysta asked him. She always asked him, but she never could understand the answers. How do you explain to a creature, however intelligent, who required a host to see, hear . . . feed . . . that the host resented her presence? No, that wasn’t right—he didn’t resent her presence, he resented her control. Not that she would hurt him, but neither would she allow him to come to harm, for that would be like setting fire to a room in your house.

"I want a drink," he told her. "I want to get rip-roaring, stinkin’-arse drunk. I want to pop some aphros and go out on my own alone for a night on the town, that’s what. I want to pick a fight, go bloody roughhouse, get tossed in the tank with all the other arse-kickin’ fools blowin’ off steam. I wanna check into an Erotics parlor and indulge all my silly dreams for a bit, that’s what. And I wanna do it alone."

<You know I can’t permit that, Jimmy. Such things are destructive of mind and body, risking at best ill health and at worst injury or death.>

"But that’s what I bloody need, you furry little slug! Risk. The risk that comes with independence. The risk that’s the right of all citizens of the Exchange!"

<We’ve taken risks on many a hostile world, and come close to disaster.> she noted.

"We take the risks! Aye, we do, don’t we. Because we have to work, because we have to be able to afford the basics of life, and because there ain’t no other kind of job that would tolerate the two of us, and if we couldn’t do that, then your dispensation from the coppers wouldn’t hold water and we’d both be discreetly disposed of and you know it. And even now we might be faced with such a thing, being without a ship or crew or commission because your hesitation caused a Thetian life. Who’s gonna hire us now, you bloody worm? We’re Jonahs—bad luck. And there’s no shortage of folks in the Guild Halls to fill the available slots. At least most of them can get some kind of menial job dirtside to tide them through from berth to berth, or they can get off this metallic dirtball and find some colonial job. We wouldn’t even pass the physical for that. You remember the one time we tried that. I hadn’t known until then that burning at the stake wasn’t a mere historical curiosity."

<If I had let you save the Thetian, it would have cost our own lives,> she pointed out. <That is known and on the record. Don’t worry so much—we’ll find something!>

"We better," he responded, sounding like he hadn’t much hope of it. "We’re down to our last few hundred, and when that’s gone we’ll have only ninety days of Guild maintenance."

He got up, pulled on a shirt to conceal Grysta, then opened the door and trooped down the hall to the communal bathroom. Even as he did so, Grysta was manipulating his internal chemistry, providing stimulation, suppressing the usual aches and pains, generally cheering him up a bit so that while his depression wouldn’t go away, it would be at least tolerable and he could look himself in the mirror.

He was getting old, he thought, and not even Grysta could stop that, only make it easier to live with. The face that stared back at him in the bathroom mirror was lined and weathered, the curly hair about half-gray, the thick, close-cropped beard streaked with white. He was beginning to look more and more like his late father, and Da always did look like he’d survived a bomb blast but the repairs hadn’t totally took.

Here lies Jimmy McCray. His life was a waste of his own time and others’, his purpose was to serve as the eyes and ears of a parasite. Here lies Jimmy McCray and Grysta together; even in death he couldn’t get rid of her.

It was past midday when he left the Guild hostel and headed to the Hall in his daily exercise in futility, but if he didn’t stick his name in religiously, they’d toss him out as a shirker. At least they fed you there.

The City was over a hundred and forty by ninety-five kilometers; a massive complex that spread out as far as the eye could see, and contained within its boundaries well over forty million souls, souls whose only common link was that they were all from someplace else. The whole thing was metal and plastic and other synthetics, and that even went for some of the people and most of their occupations.

The fact was, the whole place could have been run by computer and maintained by robots, but such things as robots on the level of personal or city or company maintenance were banned. The cabs that floated by as he walked toward the train station were various colors for the various racial groups, so that a Drukin wouldn’t attempt to fit in a seat or space engineered for a Klive, or vice versa, and so that you could be assured that the internal environment was to your liking.

There weren’t many blue-and-whites, cabs for his kind. His kind of humans were all over the vast, nearly nine hundred-world empire, but they were a very small minority here.

Such cabs would have human drivers, just as the crimson and gold Kluvian cab over there had one of the ash-white pyramidal Kluvians driving the thing. Hell, if you let robots do the driving and pick up the garbage and clean the streets and vacuum the hotel rooms, why, the vast assemblage here would be out of jobs and without means or purpose. Though the Empire was truly one that prized individual freedom and the work ethic—including the freedom to starve to death if you didn’t have money for food or bleed to death if you couldn’t afford treatment—its leaders were fully conscious of the fact that millions or even billions of people of all races who were starving and bleeding in such huge numbers would quickly form a desperate, revolutionary mob.

The train floated in and stopped, and he entered the small blue and white compartment, alone as usual—except for Grysta, of course. There were some other spacers staying in the hostel who were human, but they were younger and more ambitious than he and they’d been at the Guild Hall when the doors opened at the crack of seven. Berths could open up at any time of the twelve-hour day the Hall was open, but the young eager beavers always were paranoid that the perfect position was going to be there at seven on the dot and filled by seven fifteen.

After several stops through a multilayered mass of buildings and overlapping roadways, walkways, tramways—you name it—that always reminded him of being trapped in the basement of a giant’s office building, the train broke into the open and there was the Exchange in full view, surrounded by a very pretty if odd-looking park. To him, real parks should be varying shades of green and have trees that didn’t look like melted candies or great tentacled monsters of red and blue and yellow, but it was still very pretty and nicely landscaped. In the center of the park, visible from any top floor in the city, rose the smooth, sleek crystalline Exchange Building itself, resembling nothing so much as dozens of monstrous clear quartz crystals bunched together and neatly tapered at the top so they reminded him of organ pipes. Any job that might reach the Guild postings would start there, and the Exchange had far shorter hours.

The train suddenly went into a tunnel underneath the park and the Exchange, and rode for a while in eerie darkness, although, of course, there were lights in his cubicle. Suddenly the vast station burst into view all around him and the train slowed, then stopped. The place, always packed during Exchange hours, looked like somebody’s Alice in Wonderland nightmare no matter what race you were.

Here, bustling, hurrying, scurrying, slithering, and all sorts of other movements were constantly in view and it seemed like no two creatures, or at least no more than two or three, were alike. They were all people, all citizens, but they had exoskeletons and no skeletons, claws and tentacles, two arms, four arms, two to what might have been forty legs, with teeth, mandibles, suckers, you name it. They were every color and shade anyone could imagine and a few that nobody had imagined until they saw them. They came in every shape and size, and perhaps one in five required some kind of aid, from a wheelchair to a breathing apparatus to a full-fledged pressure suit, to get around.

He was watching the parade, getting something of a kick out of it, when he caught sight of a fellow human—a tall, strong-looking but very attractive redhead in a powder-blue jump suit and spacer’s boots—having an animated conversation with a Jurian and a Sloge. Jurians looked to most humans like three-meter land prawns; Sloge looked like giant snails in ringed, curled shells with toothy mouths. They always seemed ready to eat anything that couldn’t eat them first.

He wondered what she was doing there, and considered a telepathic scan on the theory that at least one of them would be readable, but before he could more than note the conversation, the train glided off and was soon back in the darkness. It had been a long time since he’d seen a normal human woman, particularly one that looked as good as that, and, with the red hair, possibly Irish.

Probably just as well he didn’t try the scan in there, though. The accumulated mass of thought in that tight space would most likely have overwhelmed him and given him a real bang-up headache.

The next stop was the one for the Guild Hall, and he got off and made his way up the moving stairs to something like street level in the crowded and confusing mass of the city.

The Hall itself was a big building with the Guild emblem atop the big double doors that opened for him as he approached them. Inside was the main hall, with its noisy, milling throngs of out-of-work spacers scanning the big computer boards for what openings there were. Some were also color coded if there was some specific race desired, although most were just the usual white printing on blue background for generalized positions. Few companies were race specific unless they had a particular job that required a particular type, or, of course, the ship was one of the few run by life forms that either breathed the wrong stuff or had one of those nasty living environments.

He pulled out his Guild card and went to a terminal, inserted it, then watched the small screen in the unlikely event that he was just what somebody was looking for. Nothing of that kind showed, and he quickly scanned the ships and positions currently listed to see if anything looked really promising. Most of it was the usual stuff, but there was enough that he punched for a printout. The terminal hummed and then disgorged a small folded document and he took it with him to the cafeteria.

The one trouble with eating in the place was that the guy next to you might smell like rotting meat and be noisily ingesting a huge bowl of creepy-crawlies, and with the preparation of dishes based on the racial breakdowns gleaned from the Guild cards, there weren’t too many choices for his kind of folks. Soup and a sandwich was fine; he lusted after a beer or at least a cup of coffee, but Grysta disliked stimulants and depressants and made sure that if he took one it made him unpleasantly sick. Sitting down with his tray as far away from other diners as he could, he started eating, then unfolded the printout and studied it in more detail.

There wasn’t a whole lot. Black gang stuff, mostly, although that term had lost most of its original meaning. Ship’s engineering assistants, general electronics repair and maintenance, shuttlecraft technicians, that sort of thing.

There were only three areas where telepaths really were desired. One was as security officers, since a good one always could tell something was wrong. The second was on First Teams, the first ones in to a newly discovered world, whose job it was to show up and see what tried to kill them. The third was on ships crewed by races that couldn’t physically speak to each other without lots of elaborate hardware; the telepath knew no language barrier, although often the thoughts were bizarre and the frames of reference of alien races were nearly impossible to grasp.

But the bulk of spacer jobs was on the big ships, freighters and liners, where Talents were pretty well limited to security, medical, and the officer corps. The jobs most common in the Guild listings—repairmen, monitors, quality control, and the like—weren’t for such as he. Talents were not all that common, and weren’t well liked or appreciated by many people. Ones like him, from families without known Talents, and clever enough to realize what they had as soon as the Talent grew and concealed it, hadn’t had to work all that hard, either, until they were found out. You didn’t have to know anything; you just had to read the mind of the smartest kid in the class to get a good grade. He’d been about twelve when the strange dreams and voices he’d heard intermittently over the growing-up years had suddenly coalesced into full strength.

It was rough; you either got control, forced everything else out, learned how to tune in or turn off, and quickly, or the mass of thought would drive you crazy. Many of the unrecognized ones were nuts, particularly those who’d been born and raised in cities. He’d been a farm boy on a sparsely populated world, and it had given him the edge he needed.

It was said, however, that sooner or later everybody got caught, although he was never really sure how they knew that. If you didn’t get caught, they wouldn’t know they hadn’t caught you, right? It was kind of like the perfect murder. They all said that there was no such thing, but, if it was perfect, who would know?

But they were good at catching Talents. The Empire’s most elite, highly trained special branch was devoted to doing nothing else. They’d finally caught on to him—they never told him how—and then they gave him the treatment. The little finger on his left hand was indelibly dyed with concentric white and black rings that would never come off and could not be concealed for long—the damned chemicals burned like hell if cut off from air and light for any length of time. And, of course, the most powerful computer-augmented hypnos in the Empire implanted a bit of ethics in your mind that you couldn’t wash out, either, because you couldn’t tell what was you and what was them. Even the Mycohl did something like that; nobody trusted Talents, least of all other Talents.

Like most telepaths, he kept it shut down most of the time, or, rather, down to a dull whisper that his consciousness could tune out. Non-telepaths never understood how terrifying it was to open up wide in any sort of crowd, to be suddenly flooded with all sorts of alien thoughts in a monstrous mess, like everybody speaking at once. That was why so many telepaths didn’t live to adulthood, and why some who lived but never learned to shut out the world went violently insane.

He stared out at the vast Guild Hall and silently chuckled to himself. What would most of them think, he wondered, if they knew that if he bothered eavesdropping on their thoughts, he would probably be bored to death?

That afternoon he did put in for a couple of Exploiter Team positions that advertised for telepaths, and actually interviewed for one, but as soon as Grysta came up—and in the close confines of a Team you couldn’t exactly not mention Grysta—the "Thank you very much, we’ll be in touch" flag was raised and that was that.

After dinner there was the usual nothing to do, and so he wandered back over to the District, as he sometimes felt compelled to do.

<I don’t understand why you keep coming,> Grysta commented, puzzled. <I don’t really care one way or the other, and I could understand if you were actually entertained or found companionship or something but all it seems to do is depress you.>

"You depress me, you little worm," he muttered. And yet, Grysta was right. He couldn’t go on a tear like he wanted to do—Grysta would see to that—and there really wasn’t much here otherwise. There was in fact only one club on the whole street that catered primarily to humans, and he’d found nothing there the past evening. Still, what the District offered him was quite tangible, quite real. It was live. The street was alive, teeming with all sorts of creatures with nothing but fun on their minds, in a city that seemed otherwise as curiously inanimate and deathly silent as its masters, the Guardians, that curious, ancient race that really ran the Empire.

And the crazy thing was, not a soul here even knew what the hell they were.

At least you knew that the Mycohl, masters of their own empire, were some kind of communal parasitic organism; they had a biology, a reality, of sorts. And the Mizlaplan, while not very mobile, at least had a known form and known evolutionary path and were very real to the citizens of their own empire. But here, in an empire that didn’t even have a name, let alone an emperor, in the only free society of the Big Three empires, nobody at all knew who or even what the bosses were. Their great cities, like this one, were built by others for the comfort and convenience of others. The Guardians themselves had no cities, no monuments, not even an official history—not one they let anybody else know about, anyway.

Some thought them a great computer or assemblage of master machines; some thought they were beings of pure energy, pure mind. Many deep down didn’t believe they really existed at all, but were just some construct created by the board of the Exchange as a false front for their own rule. Unlike those citizens of the Mycohl Empire or those of the Mizlaplan, however, the Guardians—whatever they were and if they existed or not—were not thought about much at all by the people of their empire, which seemed to suit everybody just as well.

He looked in on the Club and saw that the stage review, in the round, was in full swing. It was dirty enough, all right, if you were into bestiality. Big, goat-horned satyrs doing obscene and unnatural things with the sexy equine dryads, who were able to twist into amazing positions. It was rough and brutal, to the sounds of overly loud canned music, and it did little for him.

<I don’t understand why they go in for the half-human, half-animal thing,> Grysta commented. <But if that’s what sells, you’d think they’d have more varieties of animals.>

"They do," he told her. "This particular lot is booked in for a week or two, then they’ll have mermaids or centaurs or any one of a thousand varieties of mixes, while this group moves on to one or another of the big cities on the other worlds. This one just happens to have that theme."

<It seems to me that they’d be more of a stimulus if they just used attractive people.> Grysta didn’t really understand much about this kind of sexuality, let alone perversions for sale, but she was getting at least an academic concept.

"That’s a no-no," he told her, thinking he’d told her this several times before. When Grysta was trying to figure something out and having trouble she often asked the same questions every time the subject came up. "It’s called prostitution and it’s done, of course, but rarely. Too many really nasty quick-mutation sexually transmitted diseases. Space travel, strange suns, odd atmospheric balances, and varied radiations—the same sort of stuff that caused the birth of Talents—also caused brand new birth defects and mutations, and a nice variety of human diseases, particularly viruses and other tiny buggers. In fact, these Erotics were actually created in an attempt to stamp out such things. It was a crusade for morality on many of the human worlds."

<I understand enough to know that that is not morality on that stage. Ethics, morality—some of it might be silly but it is at least comprehensible. Genetic manipulation to that degree amounts to human slavery.>

"Yes, you’d recognize slavery, no matter how subtle, wouldn’t you?" he muttered, mostly to himself. "But they aren’t what you think. They’re constructs, androids—genetically engineered, yes, but from synthetic materials, not human stock. One of the few legal uses of the advanced science of robotics allowable, created and programmed to do just what you see, and they neither want nor think about anything else. And because they’re synthetic, human viruses and diseases can’t survive inside them."

He turned away, walking back out into the street. Grysta was silent for a few moments, then commented, <I can see darker uses for that sort of technology.>

He nodded, although it was meaningless to the creature. "Fortunately, it takes a bloody fortune plus lots of expertise and research to do that sort of thing, and various components that can be rigidly controlled. The Mycohl, for example, have been trying to find out how it’s done for decades and failing. The Mizlaplan, of course, consider the whole thing an abomination."

<And you do not?>

"I think it’s probably done what was intended with no harm to anyone. There are still perverts out there, and people either desperate or stupid or defenseless that fall prey to them, but it’s way down, perhaps as far down as a society that doesn’t engineer its people and dictate their minds can bring it. Every cure has its price."

As Grysta considered that, he relaxed and looked around the streets and alleyways and opened up his mind a bit.

<GOBBLEGOBBLEGOBBLEGOBBLE. . . . !>

Oops! Too wide. Bring it down to a dull roar.

<Gobblegobble . . . went to the wall on that one . . . gobblegobble . . . chanted the Fifth Order Cycles . . . gobblegobble . . . first maze Sudura crimped . . .> What the hell did that mean? So many races, so many odd concepts and ways of thinking. It was strange that something like eighty per cent of carbon-based life used bands within a rather narrow range for primary-level thinking. Secondary and deeper thought levels were often way off the mark, beyond all but the most powerful and expert to even touch, with a great variation in the bands even among people of the same race.

But on the primary band, most species did their thinking within ranges that even telepaths of totally alien evolution and biology could intercept. Mostly, of course, he just heard what they were saying aloud to someone, or what was foremost on their minds. You couldn’t go on a fishing expedition in somebody else’s head—that took machinery and psychophysicians—and there was a lot of mostly banal stuff on the surface. Listening to races that were off his bandwidth and beyond his powers, he still got the sense of someone or something there, like a silent but active channel on a radio. And, every once in a while, he’d feel the odd twinge of a mind instinctively pushing back, of some kind of barrier—not usually hostile, just automatic, like he himself did when another telepath scanned him.

What disturbed him, though, particularly here, was something he couldn’t really explain to any non-telepath, not even Grysta. The street, the immediate neighborhood, was to a telepath like a living organism, a kind of mental life that could be felt as something tangible. But on this particular world, even in crowds, there were occasional and jarring dead spots.

Unless he picked them out and scanned them exclusively he couldn’t spot them, but they were here. Black holes of the mind, dead to Talents, dead in other senses as well. Zombies, perhaps, or so he and most others thought, but the one link between the Guardians and this mass that were always there.

They were called cymols. Real people, living people, who were no longer themselves, who had as part of their brains a small controlling computer. They were the losers, mostly, in this society—habitual criminals, murderers, suicidal types, the incurably insane. Their minds, some said their souls, had been replaced, reprogrammed by the Guardians. They could plug in to each other, or to the computer grid, and perhaps to the Guardians themselves.

As far as he was concerned, they were all coppers, and scary types to boot. They looked, talked, and acted just like regular folks, and none but some of the Talents could tell them apart from the crowd.

There’d be a bunch of them down here, of course, checking on the crowds, checking, too, on the people and companies that ran the District, looking for serious criminals and clip artists, making sure that the most wanted didn’t vanish into this deliberately created cesspool.

In truth, so long as you weren’t arrest bait, this was one area in which the vast majority who had no Talents had the edge. They could conveniently forget that the cymols existed, just as they could ignore the Guardians, and interact with them in ignorance as if they were just ordinary blokes. Talents, though, particularly telepaths and empaths, had to know them for what they were, and it gave them all, including Jimmy McCray, the creeps.

He turned and walked quickly down the street, turning off into a dark alley where the glitter and noise of the District barely reached, cursing himself for having opened up so wide in a place like that without thinking about the obvious presences he would touch there. Odd to think that there were presences that stuck out because of the absence of signal.

<This isn’t the safest of courses to take,> Grysta noted nervously. They’d been on a lot of worlds that were sheer horrors, but always with a team—backups, protection, and weaponry at their disposal. Jimmy ignored the danger of dark alleys and side streets here, but Grysta felt suddenly very exposed and insecure. <Don’t you think you ought to take one of the main ways out?>

"Cymols," he muttered, shivering. "You know how they give me the creeps."

<Dark alleys in bad sections give me the creeps.>

"Oh, relax. We’re not exactly defenseless, and even if we got pounced on, what in heaven’s name have we got worth stealing? Besides, I’m still open on the primary band. We’ll not be surprised."

It was a telepath’s confidence, something a non-telepath could understand but not really accept. Nor, of course, was it fully warranted. Some of the best crooks could fool a telepath, and, while Talents weren’t all that common, one telepath who was slightly stronger or more skilled could easily fool a lesser. And, here, on this world, there were plenty of the one race no telepath could scan.

<AGH! YOU HORSE-ASSED BITCH! I’ll teach you—!>

It was a man’s "voice," very loud on the primary band and only slightly less so on the hearing level, so strong and powerful that the speaker had to be very close, but, save for its virulence, Jimmy didn’t think of such things as any of his business. He was no voyeur. The sounds of a nasty electronic buzzing and the subsequent screams of real pain in a loud female voice changed that.

Telepathy had uses, but it wasn’t very directional unless you fixed on the subject visually, and the layers of the great city, like some monstrous metallic wedding cake, created echoes and false signals. He looked around, tried to pick out the likely source, and saw a very dark, narrow service alleyway to his left. He headed for it, then broke into a trot as the victim’s screams and the man’s curses both grew stronger and louder. He could see a glint of light pierce the darkness for a moment with each electronic sound.

<Are you crazy? This isn’t any of our affair! They’re probably trying to lure you in there to take your head of!> Grysta protested, to no avail. She had the power to stop him, of course, but her own strange moral code made it very much a last resort.

Jimmy wasn’t sure just what he’d see when he got there, but he wasn’t quite prepared for the sight ahead of him.

They were on a loading dock in back of the Club, the human Club, and there were two of them in near total darkness. The only illumination came from a tiny yellow safety light on the back door, and a blue-white electrical light that flashed intermittently from something in the man’s hand.

He was a big man, that was for sure, although there wasn’t much else you could tell about him in this light, and he had a foot on some dark shape on the dock, holding it down, and as he cursed and screamed threats, the blue-white light flickered once more and became a jagged whip-like pencil of energy, which he brought down on his captive. As the energy whip struck, she screamed again in pain and pleaded nearly unintelligibly for him to stop.

"Hold it, mister!" McCray cried out, his own voice echoing down the narrow street and up the many layers of the city. "You’re in civilization here, and that sort of thing just won’t do!"

The man at first didn’t seem to hear, but then at least the fact that somebody else was there and yelling at him seemed to penetrate his thick, angry skull. He paused, but did not move to free his captive. Instead, he flicked a thumb switch on the electric whip, changing it into an electric torch that suddenly illuminated McCray and nearly blinded him.

"Hey! What . . . ?" The man muttered, a bit confused. "What the hell are you doing here, sport?"

"I heard screams," McCray responded calmly. "That’s not done on this world, even in this place."

"You mind your own bloody business!" the big man snapped. "If I want to kill this fucking bitch—or maybe not-fucking bitch would be a better term for her worthless hide—I’ll bloody well do it. She’s bought and paid for and got no rights." The torch swung suddenly off McCray and onto the hapless victim, and McCray took a breath.

It was one of the pretty equine Erotics.

"You ain’t no copper I got to explain nothin’ to," the man added, "and I can do what I damn well please with my property."

<That’s it. You said they were synthetic and all that. Say you’re sorry and let’s blow this place,> Grysta said urgently.

Jimmy McCray looked at the girl with the hooves and tail, lying there, stark terror on her face, part of her hair singed and bloody welts on her skin. In a legal and technical sense Grysta was right, of course, but no one seeing that terror and that pain could have walked away and not also left his last shred of honor and dignity. His honor and dignity were pretty much all he had left.

"You’re right, I’m no copper," he responded to the man in that same even tone, "and I’m no lawyer, either, but where I come from, whipping dogs or horses is still a crime even if you own them. Cruelty to animals, they call it, and that is far more than a dog or a horse. In fact, we tend to whip the owners of the mistreated animals so they know what it feels like."

"You arrogant little Mick bastard!" the man spat. "A thousand years of gettin’ your asses kicked in and you’re all too dumb to ever learn a thing!"

Jimmy stepped closer, almost to the edge of the loading platform. "Maybe I just never had a good enough teacher."

The man glanced at McCray’s left hand, always a precaution before you got into these things if you weren’t fillet with rage. Mixing it up with a hypno or a telekinetic would be suicide.

"Telepath, eh? You damned mind readers bleed for everybody, don’t you? Well, Swami, after the first move, that little talent don’t help you one bit in a fight and you know it." The thumb moved the switch back to the whip. "And all I got to do is get you to make the first move."

He raised his arm, clearly intending to bring it down once more on the helpless Erotic, and Jimmy moved. With near effortless motion he jumped from the street to the platform, and at the same time the big man varied his wrist motion to bring the whip straight over onto McCray.

The man was a good head taller and maybe forty or fifty kilos heavier than Jimmy, but what Jimmy lacked in bulk he more than made up in speed and agility. Although the big man slashed in a couldn’t-miss pattern, McCray bent and ducked and jumped and the lash did in fact miss him. Before the arm motion could be checked, Jimmy crashed into the man’s chest, driving him backward into the rear wall of the club. McCray’s hand shot out and twisted the whip away from him, sending it flying into the alley.

The big man’s knee came up, catching Jimmy, but he was quick enough to anticipate the move and partly deflect it by a backward motion. It still hurt like hell, but it wasn’t the debilitating blow the big man intended.

Still, the big man bellowed his rage, now transferred entirely to Jimmy, and he used his momentary advantage to charge forward. Both he and McCray went down on the platform, but McCray was able to take advantage of the man’s forward motion once again and roll backward with him. The result was that the big man fell off the platform, while Jimmy barely stayed on.

Up until now, Grysta had been totally against this whole thing, and still was, but now they were in a fight and that took precedence. Pain suppression on, adrenaline on high . . .

As the big man was picking himself up from the alley, McCray stood and then jumped him. The man went sprawling again, but McCray’s acrobaticlike balance served him well, and he remained on his feet and started in with karate kicks that landed painfully on the larger and still-disoriented foe.

The big man was a street brawler type, the same kind of big bully Jimmy McCray knew all too well when he was growing up. The same kind that had driven him, out of pride and a need for self-preservation, to attain the sort of gymnastic skills he now used, and to study the martial arts as the only way a small fellow could best a bigger one like this lug. Such martial arts weren’t well-known to the average human of the Exchange; the vast bulk of Oriental humanity had wound up in the Mizlaplan.

Like most big men, this guy could hardly believe he was being struck hard and kicked in the face and beaten bloody while his fists met only empty air. McCray was about to set the man up for what could have been the kill, But in this case would only be the knockout blow, when the man’s thoughts checked him:

<Damn it! He’s a pro!>

Aloud the man gasped, staggering a bit, "Enough! Enough! There’s no more sense in this!"

Being a telepath, Jimmy could tell that the man was sincere. He knew when he was beaten.

The big man managed to make it to the side of the platform and collapse against the side, sinking down and breathing hard. Jimmy, who knew that he would feel tomorrow what Grysta was blocking now, took a few moments to get his own wind back, then walked over to the big man.

The Erotic handler was taking in air in heaves, but now he seemed to have some of his control back, and he sat there and began to laugh.

"So you beat the big man in a back alley brawl," he managed, between gasps for air. "So what did it get you except a few bruises and a little Irish ego?"

The comment took Jimmy McCray by surprise, and he struggled to recover. "I stopped the beating."

"For the moment. Now what do you do?"

McCray frowned, then jumped to the platform. The Erotic girl was still there, curled up a bit, still sobbing from the pain. She looked up at him, but it was an odd mixture of gratitude and fear. "Are you all right?" he asked her gently. "Can you stand? Do you need help? Come, come! You have nothing to fear from me!"

Like all the Erotics, she was on an off-band. He couldn’t scan her, just get a kind of soft, empty hiss.

"She feels good she lived long enough to see somebody beat the crap out of me," the big man called from his resting place, a smugness in his voice. "And she also knows I can’t let the others hear of this or there’d be discipline problems for the next six weeks, and we close here tomorrow night."

"Kill me," her voice said, almost too soft to hear, and cracking slightly. "Kill me and ship me back."

Jimmy was totally, completely shocked. He turned and walked back to the edge of the platform, where the big man was just getting unsteadily to his feet, still chuckling a bit between grimaces from the sore spots.

"You touch her, let alone kill her, and I’ll come back and finish the job I started on you," Jimmy growled.

The big man shrugged. "Got to, sport. I got forty in this company and I’m hypno-bonded. Now, if you’d lost this fight, it’d be different. A nice lesson for her to take back to the forty-odd rest of the company. You give ’em the idea that some little guy interfered with my discipline out of a kind heart and beat me square, and they’ll start pushing, taking advantage, screwing up just to get even. Maybe even gang up on me. Time we got through I’d be beat up worse than this and I’d also have to deal out some real nasty discipline, maybe even slow-kill a couple, to get ’em back in line. Better to lose one now and have done with it than go through all that, maybe have to also abort the tour and ship home early, which will cost a lot of money. And you kill me, the whole group gets shipped home under seal by the coppers. They’ll all be outcasts when they return, and the cops’ll be after you for murder. You see how it is, sport? Your little act of kindness just did nothing but give you a little smug satisfaction and kill your damsel in distress."

As a telepath, Jimmy McCray understood instantly that the bastard was telling the truth. The worst part about it was, the big man wasn’t too thrilled at the idea of killing, but considered it just part of the job.

"And what you say isn’t murder?"

The big man sighed. "Hey, sport—I don’t make the rules. They ain’t people, remember. They’re designed by a computer and grown in a lab someplace. They’re like machines. Machine goes bad, you see if you can fix it, and if you can’t, you toss it out and get a new one. I was doin’ the fixing tonight and you stopped that. Now I got to toss her out."

He looked back at the Erotic, who suddenly seemed so tiny and helpless, her body trembling a bit, her face all too human in spite of the animal-like parts and the artistic design.

He turned back to the big man, who was walking down to retrieve his whip. "What if she went with me?" he asked the man, the question just forming of its own accord. "You’re leaving tomorrow, you said. Off-planet, I gather. She wouldn’t see or talk to the others, and your problem would be solved."

The man sighed and shook his head in wonder. "Sweet Jesus, man! I’m supposed to send them all back, so none of ’em are unaccounted for. Besides, what the hell would you do with her? They’re not all that bright, they’re designed for only one thing, really, and they have no citizenship or rights. You rich enough to keep her around as some kind of household accessory?"

That last was just humorous enough to bring a dry chuckle to his throat.

<Holy shit, Jimmy! If you wanted a pet, a cat or something is a lot easier to take care of and a lot cheaper to feed!>

"I can’t let him just kill her," he muttered under his breath. "Particularly not if it was really my fault."

<I warned you not to get involved! Damn it, now you’ve got us in a hell of a fix! With her our cash is cut in half; and we’re saddled with somebody who’s a dead weight. It brings our starvation closer and only postpones her own fate.>

"Let me have her," Jimmy told the man. "You’re a bright lad. You’ll figure out a way to explain why she wasn’t sent back. I’m sure there are a few lies you can tell to get permission to dispose of her on the spot. It’s either that or we’ll have to go at it again until you’re out for the night, and while I doubt I could hide her forever, I could certainly outlast your ticket out in a day or two in a city of this size."

The man shrugged. "You want her, you take her, sport. Then, when you got to get rid of her, you just call the Club here and they’ll tell you where to send the remains. No skin off my nose."

McCray turned back to the Erotic, who had stopped shaking and was now looking at him as if he were some sort of god.

"Here, here! None of that! He’s probably right," Jimmy told her, feeling a bit embarrassed by the look. "Can you walk?" He put out his hand and she took it and got unsteadily to her feet.

"They’re fast healers," the man told him. "If they weren’t, I wouldn’t be using this kind of thing on them. Good luck, sport. You’re gonna need it. I almost hate to see you do this. Been years since I got licked in a fight, and I kind’a like you. I can’t figure out why the hell you’re even doin’ this."

"No," sighed Jimmy McCray, "I suspect you probably can’t." He turned to the girl. "Can you walk? We’ll have to get to a train."

"Yes, master. I can do whatever you wish me to do," she responded softly.

"We’ll have none of that!" he snapped. "My ancestors spent too many years as other people’s lackeys. I’ll not be legitimizing the process! You’ll call me Jimmy like most other folks."

She smiled. "Jimmy. That’s a nice name."

Besides, he added silently to himself, I’m hardly in a position to be the muster of anyone, being a vassal myself.

<Jimmy what the hell have you done to us now?> Grysta wailed.