The Pharoah Contract

When he was finished Ruiz rushed back out into the yard. But when he saw that all the family elders were gathered, gazing at Ruiz with varying degrees of sadness, he stopped in his tracks, afraid. The other children watched wide-eyed from the darkness of the cottage windows. He became more fearful when all the elders looked away, except for his bloodmother Lasa, who stood with tears running down her ordinarily serene face.

Ruiz sensed impending tragedy. He ran to Lasa on stubby legs, tears trembling in his own eyes. She lifted him, hugging him so that he could barely breathe. But she said nothing, nor did anyone else.

“What’s it? What’s the matter?” Ruiz asked in a voice that squeaked with fear.

The overseer had a nasal, prim voice. “You’re making far too much fuss over the child; you’ll frighten him needlessly,” said Bob Piyule, taking hold of Ruiz’s shoulder. “Don’t be afraid, Ruiz. You go to a greater family than this huddle of dirt scratchers. You go to the Lord’s School. If you are diligent, one day you’ll wear fine clothing and serve the Lord.”

Ruiz clung more tightly to Lasa. Bob Piyule pulled at him, to no avail. “Come, Lasa,” the overseer said, “is this dignified?”

Ruiz’s demi-father Relito spoke. “What’s dignified about child stealing, Piyule?” Relito’s voice, ordinarily harsh, sounded now as if he spoke through a throat full of stones.

Bob Piyule released Ruiz and whirled to face Relito. “Child stealing, is it? Can Lord Balliste steal what is already his? A less generous master would sunder your family and redistribute the members to more efficient production units, as I have many times advised him to do. Instead, he is merciful.”

“Yes, merciful.” Relito laughed bitterly.

Bob Piyule’s narrow face flushed, and his eyes took on a dangerous gutter. “Enough,” he said. He took Ruiz by the arm and roughly tore him away from Lasa, who fell to her knees, looking as if something inside her had broken.

* * *

Here the memory tattered and streamed away into darkness. Nacker still lay quietly in the ooze at the bottom of Ruiz’s mind. A farm boy, a common slave, Nacker marveled. Who would ever have guessed? This incongruity amused Nacker anew each time he entered Ruiz’s mind.

It was a long time before another touchstone memory drifted into position to be stimulated, long enough for Nacker to grow anxious, worried that one of the subtle guard filaments of the League mission-imperative might brush against him and trigger the death net before he could escape. Or that he’d be attacked by one of the great predatorial neuronic patterns, cleverly birthed by Ruiz to protect his mnemonic ocean from clumsy invasion. But nothing touched him, and eventually Nacker released a second stimulating locus. It detonated against another memory: Ruiz grown almost to manhood.

* * *

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.