The Girl With a Symphony in Her Fingers

by Michael G. Coney

Genres: Science Fiction; Sci-fi Action & Adventure; Military Sci-Fi

Synopsis

Call them the spare parts of people. They chose the risk - jail for convicted crimes or semi-freedom as someone's bonded servant for the same term. The price was that they were body insurance. If their master lost a leg or an internal organ, they would have to supply the missing part. That was the risk. Sagar used bondsmen in his other-world farm where he raised exotic alien pelts to sell to the rich. He had no thoughts on the bondsmen problem, pro or con. But when Carioca Jones, 3-V star, visited him he met her bonded companion, the lovely girl with the musical talent. It's dangerous to fall in love with a bondsmaiden. Doubly so when her mistress is in love with you. Triply so when it might set off the social explosion that had been smouldering beneath the delicately balanced surface of their post-cataclysmic Peninsula.

Release date: March 29, 2013

Publisher: Gateway

Print pages: 320

Sample

We picked the pieces of Harry Alberni out of the cold green waters of the Strait early one September evening, laid him on the deck and gathered around to hear his last words, if he were capable of uttering them.

“Make for port, Sagar!” somebody said to me, his voice canine with urgency. “Give the man a chance. What the hell are you thinking about?”

The water was dribbling away from Alberni’s clothes into the scuppers as his broken body rolled with the motion of the boat. I knelt beside him. The others, freemen and state prisoners alike, were silent, watching, listening. Nobody had ever listened to Alberni before. Why should his words have this new special value, merely because he was dying?

Alberni spoke, the words little whispers, puffs of evanescent steam in the September air. “It hurts like hell, Sagar,” he said.

We all knew that. We could see it in the lines of his face, in the grotesque attitude of his body. The steel spinal support which sling-gliders wear to guard against such an accident as Alberni’s was twisted, projecting from under his body like a compound fracture.

“We have no dope, Harry. I’m sorry. I just brought a few people out for the afternoon to watch the gliding. I didn’t expect—”

There were tears in his eyes. “Oh, God, I didn’t think it would be so bad. Why the hell should it hurt so much?”

There was a rescue boat in sight now, skipping over the waves. I looked at the eight men standing above me. Their faces showed concern of one sort or another; Tranter, the man who had wanted me to head for port, was still fidgeting, face twitching as his eyes flickered from Alberni to the approaching launch. I didn’t know the other men, but I could place them. There were two worried freemen, whose afternoon’s pleasure had been spoiled—or fulfilled—by the tragedy. And there were five prisoners from the state penitentiary. Two of these were immediately identifiable by their dark green coveralls marked S. P. in large white letters front and rear. The other three—

Like their uniformed comrades, they were smiling.

That’s how I knew they were prisoners, despite their plain clothes. They were bonded men under the care of the three freemen, so uniforms were not necessary. But they were smiling as a freeman died—and that was identification enough. The Penal Reform Act had divided mankind into two classes.

I could hear the rescue boat now—that bouncing, thumping whine of fiberplast and turbines hopping waves. I turned back to Alberni and for a moment I thought he heard it too, because his eyes had widened and he was regarding the sky intently. But there was no change in focus as my head cut off his view.

I stood up as the rescue launch cut engines and fell to the water, slowing abruptly and wallowing toward us in a wide turn. Fenders bumped lightly and two men leaped to my deck.

“Alberni, is it? How is he?” The mediman had set down his bag and was already selecting a hypojet. The other man was a state prisoner and he was staring down at the body with an intensity which told me he was Alberni’s personal bonded man.

Two men, bonded together in unequal partnership until death intervened—or the senior partner canceled the contract.

“You’re too late,” I told the mediman.

He shrugged and turned away but the S. P man remained, gazing at the body, his expression changing to one of incredulous, transcendental joy.

“You bastards!” he shouted, a high cracked yell of ultimate delight. “I’ve beaten you all, you bastards!”

He climbed back aboard the rescue launch. His contract was over. He was a freeman. I heard him laughing as the stretcher-bearers arrived and scooped up Alberni.

By now the curious had gathered; a half dozen boats bobbed around us as the occupants strove to get a glimpse of death. Off the port bow the bright remains of the glider drifted away like a dead macaw.

I heard someone whisper, “Carioca Jones.”

The 3-V star’s hydrofoil was there, idling beside the splintered alloy and torn fabric of Alberni’s glider. Her boat was about forty feet long, sleek and black; across the stern the name Flamboyant was painted in luminous white letters a foot high. Two women leaned against the stainless-steel after-rail, gazing at the wreckage. I recognized Miss Jones although she had been absent from the 3-V alcoves for several years; there was no mistaking that long hair sprayed midnight with Ultrasorb, falling by her downturned face in a jet cataract. She seemed to be wearing a tight black sheath dress, thigh length. A land shark lay at her feet.

The girl by her side was in contrast fair, and her hair short. She looked across at us and smiled slightly, ruefully, as though to say: This is what you get for indulging in dangerous sports. Her eyes were blue and she had a snub nose and, I’ll swear, freckles. Her youthful appearance was belied by full breasts beneath the blue pullover.

I saw all this briefly, very briefly, because nobody looks away from Carioca Jones for long. The star had shifted her position as her boat drifted nearer; the wind threw a curtain of hair across her face and she shook her head. As she straightened up from her scrutiny of the wreckage we saw, startling and dark-tipped, her bare pale breasts. On a late September afternoon … I think every man on my boat drew a sharp breath as desire punched him in the stomach.

She sensed us. That sort of woman always does—it’s basic. She sensed us and looked up as a female animal hears a mating call; and her eyes met mine.

She was old, horribly old, and her black eyes knew me for a necrophile.

That was the end of the summer when everybody on the Peninsula tried sling-gliding, and some fared better than others. I had tried it myself, from the training catapult, borrowing the gear from Doug Marshall and being lucky, because gear must be individually tailored and an incorrectly balanced glider can mean death. After that one flight I kept my feet on the deck and spent the weekends cruising spectators among the offshore islands in my ancient double-ender, while the tiny bright gliders fled silently across the sky like swift paper darts.

Pausing for an instant to gather the appreciation to which she was accustomed, Carioca Jones turned away from the rail and sat down beside the other girl in the cockpit. I heard the faint silver tones of an orchestrella. A weatherbeaten Adonis in S. P. coveralls handed them drinks, then took the wheel and gunned the motor. The craft leaped away, climbing its hydrofoils like stilts.

“Lucky guy,” said a voice. It was one of the freemen; the state prisoners had not ventured any comment. “What a way to serve your sentence.” He chuckled. “Almost makes it worthwhile, eh, Tranter?”

Tranter, the officious type who had tried to take command when we picked Alberni up, grunted. “Not like you think, I reckon. They say she’s gay. Shops around, too. That blonde’s the latest. … Nice-looking kid. Pity.”

Somewhere, somehow, there is always someone who will claim personal knowledge of the homosexuality of a public figure. Tranter was talking garbage, a proclivity of his type. There had been nothing queer about the way in which Carioca Jones’s eyes had met mine; I still felt faintly nauseated.

By Monday I had forgotten about Alberni, Tranter, Miss Jones, and the rest of them, and was back in the weekly routine. I was standing at the window looking at the frosty morning when I caught sight of a movement among the bushes on the opposite side of the tiny bay. Then there was stillness again and a noise from the sea and after a while Doug Marshall’s boat came past, towing some fool on water skis with a glider attached to his back.

I finished my coffee and went out into the keen air. Silkie trotted to greet me, pink with happiness and uttering that high-pitched whine which is the slithe’s way of exhibiting delight. I picked him up, stroking his incredibly soft skin while his reptilian eyes regarded me with cold joy. I carried him to the workshop door where Dave Froehlich was waiting.

I said, “I saw Carioca Jones yesterday.”

“She’s moved in, over Deep Cove way.” Dave knows everything that happens on the Peninsula. “I was meaning to tell you. You ought to cultivate her.”

“Have you seen her? Close up, I mean?” I uttered a short laugh.

He regarded me steadily. “She could be a customer, Mr. Sagar,” he said.

The small factory was emerging from the mist, a gaunt timber structure at the waterside, its cedar shingles silver and black with age. Through the windows I could see the uniformed S. P. girls working. Behind the building, merging into the bushes, were the slithe pens where the little reptiles scuttled.

“Look here, Dave,” I said suddenly. “I saw a slithe in those bushes over there earlier, from my window. They’re escaping again. How the hell do they do it? That’s what I’d like to know.”

“I’m sorry, Mr. Sagar. I’ll inspect the pens again.” His face was wooden.

“Forget it, for God’s sake.” A phrase came into my mind, a phrase from decades, centuries ago when Man found that he was surrounded by equals, and so invented Class Distinction. The phrase: He Knows His Place.

Dave Froehlich Knew His Place and, by God, he was never going to let me forget it.

He is my personal bonded state prisoner for a period of three years—the standard sentence for embezzlement of a sum of not more than two thousand dollars, which was Dave’s crime. I think I am a reasonable master. I provide him with accommodation and pay him a small amount for pocket money, which is more than many bonded S. P. men get. In return he must make himself useful to me in so many ways that one wonders at the possibilities for abuse of the Penal Code. But at least the moral is clear. Stay honest.

The other prisoners, those uniformed girls in my small factory, are not so lucky. I hire them from the state pen at an hourly rate. They receive no pay themselves and they live in the deplorable prison accommodations. A state prisoner’s only hope of escape from this existence is to elect for bondage—which carries an automatic one-third reduction of sentence and the right to live in accommodations provided by his principal. But principals are not always easy to find, since many freemen do not like the idea of having a crook around the house.

“Maybe you ought to realize just how goddamned lucky you are,” I once said to Dave.

“Maybe,” he grunted, helping a slithe to shed its skin.

“I suppose you’d rather go back to the old system,” I said with some heat; it was one of my bad days. “You’d like to sit around on your ass doing nothing all day, kept by society. Is that what you’re saying? You’re saying that because you stole somebody’s cash you have a right to a three-year vacation?”

He flushed, and for once I had him going. “I made one mistake, Mr. Sagar, just one. OK, so I’ve got to pay for it. But the way things are now, you own me. You, can do what you like with me. It’s degrading.”

The slithe skin was hanging from his fingers; he released the reptile, dropping it over the wire into one of the pens. I glanced at the fine, almost transparent membrane which the slithe sheds every six months or so. It possessed that grayish, curiously inert look which is characteristic of the shed skin; a sort of waiting look, waiting for a host, waiting for an emotion to latch on to.

And where Dave’s fingers touched, the skin glowed bright blue.

Just a small area, the size of a fingerprint—but it told me what Dave was thinking, what his emotions were concerning me, concerning everything. It showed, just for a moment, that Dave hated—and there was no way he could fool that membrane.

Yet he had elected for bondage. I’ll never figure that.

It took us an hour or more to examine all the netting, repair the holes and retrieve a couple of escaped slithes, and by that time I hoped Dave’s mood had improved because nobody can go on hating forever; and he is a damned good foreman. He has the interests of the farm at heart, and I’m sure he will be glad when his time is up and he can stop hating, and take up that partnership I’ve half-promised him. We walked slowly toward the factory.

“Hi, there! Have I come to the right place?”

I swung around and saw her standing at the gate. Maybe leaning against it would be a more accurate description, leaning in such a way that the top bar pushed into her breast and made me think of her as a woman. And from the direct stare I received from those aged and ageless eyes, I knew she knew she had come to the right place.

Beside me Dave drew a sharp breath and I tried not to look at the skin he was holding.

Instead I looked at Carioca Jones, and I said, “I hope so. I’m Sagar and this is my slithe farm. Can I help you?”

I moved to open the gate but she was already through, twisting to shut it behind her, then smiling directly at me like a death’s head. “What Sagar?”

“Joe.”

“I’m Carioca Jones. Didn’t I see you … ?”

“Out in the Strait yesterday. I’d just pulled the body of Harry Alberni out of the water,” I said brutally.

“God, did he die?” She was an actress; her expression of horror at the death of a perfect stranger was well done.

“It was an accident, one of those things. The mediman didn’t get there in time. Nobody could be blamed.”

The flymart landed in the yard, rattling off a list of the day’s bargain offers almost before the rotors had stilled. The hatch slid open, displaying shelves of groceries. I handed my list to Dave and moved away from the din, drawing Miss Jones with me. Today she was wearing a sober brown, neck to knee.

“So these are the slithes. I’ve heard so much about them. Where do they come from?”

“They’re imported.”

“Slithes … what a curious name.”

“Lewis Carroll. From slithy, meaning lithe and slimy. I think it’s quite apt—but it tends to distract from the fact that they’re friendly and pleasant little things. And unusually intelligent, for reptiles. Silkie, now—” I picked up my pet, still pink, and held him out to her. She reached out a tentative finger and prodded him behind the ear in that slightly embarrassed manner of the non-animal-lover.

“Oh, look at that. He’s changed color!”

“They do. That’s their attraction.”

“Yes, I suppose so. It’s funny”—she laughed girlishly—“I’d never thought of the animals changing color. I mean, I knew the skins changed color, that’s what they’re, uh, for. But the animals themselves … I’d never really thought about animals, you know.”

She thought the skins grew on trees, was what she meant—if she’d ever thought of trees, that is. But she looked more like a customer every minute. I continued the spiel which had been interrupted by Silkie’s involuntary display of distaste. “The chameleon effect fulfills a number of purposes for a slithe on its home planet. It’s a mating display, for one thing. When the animal turns red it lets the love-object know of the attraction. Then, as a defense mechanism, when the slithe feels itself threatened it will turn a livid purple in an attempt to frighten its enemy.”

“How positively fascinating, Joe.”

“The skin holds the secret. It’s triggered by changes in the body, by heat, sweat, adrenaline, or whatever. But the most remarkable thing is, it lives even after it’s been shed. Put it against human flesh and it’s sensitive to human emotions.”

And, I refrained from saying, slithe skin has learned some new colors, that way.

We entered the small showroom and she admired the displays; fingering the bandannas, kerchiefs, muffs, pendants, wristlets, all those things women wear when they hope to display an affection they are too shy to put into words. Or, as frequently happens, when they are so completely the exhibitionist that they want to parade their emotions—any emotions—in front of the world.

Carioca Jones stood too close to me and handled all these things, and turned them deep pink.

“I want a dress!” she cried suddenly. “I want a whole dress made out of your skins, and I want it to fit close. What do you think of that, Joe?”

“We don’t really do that sort of thing,” I mumbled as she arched her back over the display counter and looked up at me, her throat wrinkled like a condor’s. “There’s a lot of work in joining skins so the seam doesn’t show. And it’s difficult to match the tones. The cost is out of all proportion. We restrict ourselves to things which can be made out of one skin.”

Her eyes had narrowed slightly. “And why do you think the cost should worry me?”

“Well, I … I like people to know what they’re letting themselves in for.”

“Listen to me, Joe Sagar. I never go into anything with my eyes closed, not anything, I want you to remember that.” Then suddenly she was smiling again, toying with a slithe-skin bandanna which had undergone as rapid a color transformation as I had ever seen—pink, blue, pink almost as quickly as you can say it. “Make me a nice dress, Joe. I can afford it.”

“I’ll let you have the estimate tomorrow, Miss Jones.”

She turned away and I accompanied her across the yard to the gate; Silkie trotted at my heels. Her car was parked under the trees; there was a faint sound of music. I opened the door for her.

The blonde snub-nosed girl was sitting in the passenger seat, an orchestrella on her bare knees. She wore a light gray sweater and a no-skirt skirt. She looked up and smiled, but her smile was for Carioca Jones. The music changed tone, became gay as her long fingers shifted and worked inside the egg-shaped instrument.

Somehow I managed to bid Carioca Jones a polite goodbye, then the car rose from the ground in a swirl of damp autumn leaves and glided away, taking the girl and the music with it, leaving me with the aftersight of beauty.

Of course I had to find an excuse to call on Miss Jones—and the blonde girl—as soon as possible. When the estimate for her dress was worked out I persuaded Doug Marshall to take me gliding, and contrived to make a clumsy landing near the beach which backs onto the Jones residence. I fought my way clear of the harness and waded through the shallow water to the shore, dragging the tiny glider after me. Then I climbed the steps above the high-water mark and hurried through the trees in the direction of the house.

I heard the music while I was still among the trees, that melodic yet unearthly tone which characterizes the orchestrella. For a second I paused, trying to establish from which direction the sounds came, then I walked on again, turning left through a pergola which gave onto a tiny sunken lawn.

The girl was sitting on a rustic seat, the instrument in her lap. She was totally oblivious of my presence as I stood behind her waiting for a break in the flow of the music, reluctant to interrupt. It was like a setting from an ancient oil painting: the lawn, the shrubs with their late September flowers, the girl dressed all in white—as though I had stepped into a dreamlike past. So I waited for just a little while, and the music flowed on from her sensitive fingers.

At last I recalled myself to the present. I coughed, thinking what an ugly masculine noise it was in the mids. . .