Ray Aldridge: The Pharaoh Contract

Ruiz wore the fine clothes that the late Bob Piyule had promised him so many years before, and he crouched at the right hand of Lord Balliste. But nothing else was as it should have been. The front of Ruiz’s brocade coat was stiff with drying blood, the blood of the Lord’s last bondguard. A sonic knife burbled in Ruiz’s hand, transmitting its hungry shimmy to his flesh.

They were hiding in a short passage off Lord Balliste’s audience room. Lord Balliste fondled a gem-encrusted punchgun, shifting it from one hand to the other. The Lord was grown old and weak in both body and mind; his liverish lips trembled, and the breath wheezed in his shriveled chest. The Lord kept up a cackling mutter as they waited. “When they get here, when they get here, then we’ll see, eh Ruiz, then… I want an ice, a nice fresh lime will do…. Why are you dressed in red?”

The Lord nattered on, but Ruiz ignored him. He strained his ears, listening for the next sounds, now that the heaviest explosions had ceased. The free-lance emancipators were finished below, and any moment they would arrive to complete their contract with the former slaves of Lord Balliste.

Lord Balliste was whispering in more urgent tones. “Why, Ruiz, can you tell me? I treated them well, I observed the proprieties. How is it they turn and feed on me now?”

Ruiz didn’t answer. He had heard the scrape of cautious boots in the audience room. “Hush, now, Lord. Perhaps they will not find us back in here, if we are very quiet.”

“Yes, yes, you’re right, young Ruiz, you’re the only one who kept faith.” Lord Balliste clamped his mouth shut, mercifully.

There was a long interlude of silence; then the tapestry that covered the passage twitched. After a moment, one of the emancipators lifted the tapestry slowly aside with the muzzle of a half-stocked splinter gun. He was a large graceful man in scuffed carbon armor, and he followed the muzzle of his weapon with the smoothness of a weasel flowing into a rat hole. Ruiz held perfectly still, hoping that he and the Lord were adequately hidden behind the jumble of dusty chairs stacked in the back of the dim passage.

The man was as still as a statue for six heartbeats; then he turned to go, and Ruiz prepared to release the breath he’d been holding.

At that moment Lord Balliste chose to rise and fire a burst from his ceremonial punchgun. The burst smashed the leg of the emancipator. The impact whirled the man about, and he lost his grip on his weapon. He slid down the wall.

The Lord laughed and pointed the punchgun with a flourish.

Ruiz made his decision.

He stood up and slipped the sonic knife into the Lord’s long skull, just in front of the ear. The punchgun clattered to the floor. Ruiz tugged up, and the knife snarled out of the top of the Lord’s head, spraying liquefied brains, a fine mist that haloed the Lord for a moment before the body folded over.

In the next instant, two more emancipators rolled under the tapestry, ready to fire. “Wait!” the injured man said sharply, and they did, a restraint that Ruiz found remarkable, under the circumstances. But both weapons and two cold pairs of eyes were trained on him, as Ruiz switched off his knife and laid it carefully aside. He crossed his empty hands over his head and stood still.

The injured man looked down at his shredded leg, then back at Ruiz. “You’ll need a new job,” he said. “If we can stop the bleeding, maybe I’ll have one for you.”

Nacker felt a ghost shiver go through his probe-self. Each time Ruiz Aw had come to him, Nacker had touched this memory, and each time Nacker found it disturbing. There was nothing wrong with the decision Ruiz had made; it was the only one that had offered him any chance of life. No, Ruiz could not be faulted on either ethical or practical grounds for his betrayal of the slave-Lord. It was rather the speed with which Ruiz had switched allegiance that chilled. Nacker understood, not for the first time, that Ruiz might react with as much swift lethality should he and Nacker ever find themselves at cross purposes.

Nacker supposed it was from the emancipators that Ruiz had acquired the tools of his trade: intimidation, torture, murder. Evidently the emancipators had been good teachers, but Nacker was sure that Ruiz had been an especially apt pupil. Nacker remembered the economical grace with which Ruiz had destroyed the wolfheads, the odd light in Ruiz’s eyes.

These thoughts disturbed Nacker’s concentration, so he put them from him. He waited again, until a whole cluster of touchstone memories drew into range. Nacker energized them in rapid order, no longer aware of content, but only chronology.

The last memory Nacker touched was a small thing, nickering among the deepest currents, swift and elusive. It appeared to Nacker that Ruiz had left the memory unprotected, as if Ruiz hoped for its demise. But the memory was too strong, too active, too crucial to the man that Ruiz had become. Nacker’s curiosity was aroused.

Ruiz waited to die. His thoughts were sluggish and poorly formed; he was sinking into the unresponsive clay of his failing body. So the blaze of Line’s sun no longer burned him as fiercely as it had three days before, when the Lineans had strapped him to the needle tree. The pain was no longer urgent, as the tree’s thorns slowly quested deeper and deeper into his body. Occasionally a thorn would penetrate some sensitive organ, and Ruiz would thrash briefly until his small strength was exhausted, but he had stopped screaming.

The part of him that still lived traveled among memories.

…Ruiz, arriving on Line in a nighttime drop. He fell from the skies in the company of two hundred other emancipators, all of them full of confidence and righteous anger. He remembered that younger self with as much amazement as scorn. He could hardly imagine how he could have seen the universe in such simple terms: Slavery was evil. Eradicate it.

…The horrendous callousness of the Lineans, devolved alien cetaceans who bred humans in small isolated communities for various specialized markets. The alien breeders committed unspeakable acts against any of their slaves who by word or deed or omission supported the rebellion. Images nickered through Ruiz’s darkening mind: hideous death, torture; all the colors of horror, red of blood, black of burned meat, the pale clotted flesh of corpses. How much was his fault, the fault of his unforgivable naïveté? Ruiz tried to shake his head, but the thorns held him fast.

…The despair Ruiz had felt when, after months of bitter fighting in which thousands of innocents had perished, he had discovered that his company of emancipators had been hired by the Art League, the vast multisystem conglomerate that for several millennia had controlled the majority of legitimate slavery in the pangalac worlds. He had gone to his commanding officer, fall of betrayed rage. “Why?” he had asked.

“Because it’s better. It’s not perfect, but it’s better. The Lineans are monsters. The League is a business.” His commander’s face shifted in remembrance, until Ruiz could see only a steel mask, an inhuman shape, devoid of expression. “It’s better, Ruiz.”

…The clean fury that had impelled Ruiz to recruit from among his fellow emancipators a group to oppose both the Lineans and the Art League.

…His futile campaign, unsupported by the slaves, successful only in prolonging the agony on Line. It had ended in another treachery, one that had brought him to this slow sacrifice on the needle tree.

The last trace of the memory, one that seemed only carelessly etched into the artifact that carried it, was of the League agents who had taken Ruiz alive from the tree. There was no tinge of gratitude in the memory — only a stony acceptance.