The Pharaoh Contract
by Ray Aldridge
To my mother,
Muriel Rice Aldridge,
who has always been so
surprisingly unsurprised by my successes.
Chapter 1
In the dim red light of the Beaster Level, pleasure seekers pressed against Ruiz Aw, a sea of wild eyes, wet mouths, sweat-slick bodies. He moved cautiously through the clamor and stink. Confusion protected him. In this grinding jostle, who would notice Ruiz Aw, who would report him to his employers?
The thought of discovery sent a shudder through him, raised goose bumps on his skin. The Art League’s inquisitors would ask, “Ruiz Aw, tell us. Just what were you doing on Dilvermoon? What mischief brought you to the hold of Nacker the Teach, notorious bootleg minddiver?” And, “Ruiz Aw, how did you happen to be there so soon after receiving your net? Tell us, Ruiz Aw.” Ruiz could conceive of no explanation that would satisfy those grim personages.
He imagined he could feel the death net behind his eyes, tangled around his mind, squeezing.
They can’t be everywhere, Ruiz told himself. And: It’s too late to back out. The thought echoed: Too late, too late, too late.
But no one pointed, no one shouted his name. The tightness in his shoulders eased slightly as he approached the freekill sectors. Once in that concealing dimness, away from the robot monitors that crawled the ceilings of the tourist areas, he would feel safer. There, where blood might legally be spilled, he could cope.
He paused at the radiant point of a half-dozen corridors, where a large domed hall provided space for the herds to congregate.
In the half-light of the overhead glowstrips, the hall seethed. Beasters walked, staggered, crawled, swaggered, hopped. Every near-variant of humanity was represented. Everywhere pointed ears quivered, teeth glinted, fur grew luxuriantly in gardens of human flesh. Gleaming selenium scarabs — the personaskeins, the devices that filled each beaster’s brain with the chosen beast — clung to the base of each skull. No other adornment was permitted on the Level, no garment that might conceal a weapon.
Ruiz watched the passing faces with sidelong glances, concealing his curiosity, fascinated by the animal lusts and fears and rages that twisted the human features. His own personaskein, set at legal minimum, showed him the shadow-shapes that lived within the beasters, ghostly colorless outlines that swirled about the human shapes. That tall, rawboned old man with the carefully coifed mane of white hair, for example: What had moved him to abandon his executive desk for the uncertainties of the Beaster Level, to play the noble stag? And what of that well-kept young woman? She was skillfully painted with fashionable body toners, she wore her thick orange hair in a love knot, and her sharp little fingernails were buffed into crimson perfection. She wore the persona of a great serpent; she stood waiting in the shadows and in her eyes was a slow careful hunger.
Nearing the far side of the open space, Ruiz observed a pack of wolfheads lounging against the bulkhead, a dozen men and women with wide yellow eyes, facial hair in grizzled tufts, and furry bodies as hard and narrow as slats.
As Ruiz approached, the pack leader stepped forward, eyes glowing with interest.
Ruiz suppressed annoyance. The wolfhead smiled, revealing long canines and a thick red tongue.
Ruiz masked his face with indifference, though his gait stiffened almost imperceptibly. He passed under the biolume sign that flashed pangalac law ends here into the darker corridor beyond. Ruiz felt movement behind him as the pack gathered.
Leroe called the brethren together, making the snuffling sound of inquiry.
“Meat goes into the killing grounds,” he said, and growled, a soft sound, full of pleasant anticipation.
“Dangerous?” asked Camilla, his mate, second in the pack. “It moved with great confidence; it smelled of much purpose and little fear.”
Leroe snarled, and Camilla edged back, wary of his strength. “Perhaps the meat is too stupid to be afraid,” Leroe said. “It is only one, soft with humanity. Can we fail to feed?”
All around him the pack expressed agreement. Red tongues licked black lips; eager whines echoed in the corridor.
Leroe fell silent for a long moment, reviewing his impressions of the meat. His man-mind was not so deeply submerged under the personaskein that he forgot Camilla’s intelligence, greater than his own. So he considered further, as carefully as hunger and bloodlust allowed.
The meat was a tall man, heavy shouldered, coppery skinned, with short black hair. Muscle flowed smoothly on that rangy frame. The meat had ignored Leroe as he passed, but Leroe thought he had detected a glint of challenge in the meat’s hard eyes.
And the tall man’s skein was set very low, so that he projected only a suggestion of inhumanity, some sort of predatory creature. But he lacked the face, the face that all beasters wore, a gelmask twitching and shuddering in a storm of animal impulses.
Leroe decided. The meat might struggle, the meat might flee, but the pack was strong and swift, and the meat was only one man, unaugmented in ferocity. How dangerous could he be?
“We hunt.” Leroe pulled his lips back into an eager happy snarl, and the pack howled with delight.
Leroe turned and loped into the dimness, following the scent. Behind him the pack scampered.
Ruiz heard the pack, faint in the distance, and he accelerated into a striding run. The wolfheads would never catch him, but he worried that they might attract other predators. So he ran, keeping to the darkest side of the corridors, wasting just a little of his breath on curses for Nacker. The minddiver lived deep in the freekill sector of the Beaster Level, where none but the most fanatic of beasters and a few suicidal or fatally ignorant tourists might be encountered. But at least the hold was far from prying eyes, and so, for the most part, Ruiz was satisfied with its location — except when he was forced to run like a deer to his destination, when he would much prefer to stroll in easy comfort.
At the end of one long dim hallway, Ruiz paused for a moment, to hear a quick patter of feet. Shadows flickered behind him. Startled by the pack’s speed, Ruiz picked up his own pace, lengthening his stride and pumping great gusts of air through his lungs. The pursuit dropped back, and Ruiz smiled.
Soon, he thought, soon he would arrive at the minddiver’s bulkhead — with plenty of time to go through the lengthy identification procedures that Nacker required.
At that moment, a throat-torn corpse flopped from a lightless niche directly into Ruiz’s path. Ruiz’s reflexes carried him soaring over the sudden obstacle. All might still have been well except for the blood that formed a slick just where Ruiz’s foot touched down. And even then, Ruiz might have gone down with minimal damage, had the tigerheart not come bounding forth after her kill, slamming into Ruiz before she noticed his presence.
Ruiz sprawled, flailing, his left leg twisting under him at an awkward angle. He felt the reinforced cartilage of his knee tear; an instant later the pain seared through him.
Ruiz rolled away, expecting to feel the tigerheart’s claws. But when he sprang up, he saw that she was intent on retrieving her meal. Her bloody teeth were locked in the nape of the corpse, and she growled deep in her throat, dragging her kill back into the darkness. She watched Ruiz with glittering eyes, her pale hair tangled about her broad flat face. The blood sheeting down the knotty contours of her body was black in the dim light.