Island Worlds (14 page)

The woman behind the desk spared him a flickering glance. "Just off the boat?" she said.

"I thought I looked saltier than that," Thor said.

"The hair's right," she told him, "but the coverall's too new. Your complexion isn't quite right either."

"There's nothing wrong with yours," he said. In fact, her complexion was a perfect gold and looked as delicate as peach skin. Her features were vaguely oriental, with eyes of a startling, brilliant green. To his relief, she had hair, a fair amount of it, a rich chestnut in color, its complex waves held in place by some static process that was new to him.

"Are you looking for work?" she asked coolly.

"That's right. I'm a space-habitation engineer."

"We can't use one. Check with Atterjee Construction. "

"I already did. I left Earth in what you might call a hurried and informal fashion. They weren't interested. What company is this and what kind of work do you do?"

"We're Kuroda-Sousa Freight. We haul highgrade ore.

"And you're one of the Kurodas? I thought you looked like one."

She looked at him sharply. "I'm Caterina Sousa-Kuroda, related to both sides, and how do you know what a Kuroda looks like?"

"I'm Thor Taggart."

She was supremely unimpressed. "Another Taggart. I hope you're not expecting to trade on the name. Did you just arrive on the
Galileo
?" It was a famous luxury liner, probably the one he had seen at the North Pole port.

"Just arrived, but on the
Spartacus
."

Her eyes widened a bit and her manner relaxed a bit less. "One of Martin Shaw's ships. Have a seat, Mr. Taggart."

As he floated back into the unnecessary chair, Thor felt a pang of annoyance. He didn't impress her, but Shaw did. He found himself wanting to impress this woman, but he knew better than to try. "It makes a difference, what ship I came in on?"

"Shaw brings in some rough specimens," she said, "but he never brings in bums or deadbeats. It's a point of honor with him. He's a remarkable man."

"That he is," Thor said, and he was surprised at how hard it was to admit it.

"How did you meet him?"

"He was a name given to me by a friend on Earth. I contacted him in Armstrong and we arranged a passage. Had to fake my death, though." Who the hell was she interested in, anyway, himself or Shaw? Well, that one was easy to figure out.

"He smuggled you off Luna? On short notice? He must see something in you."

This was getting to be too much. "He was well paid."

"So what?" she said. "Shaw doesn't give a damn about money. He has a cause to finance, but he's brought plenty of people out here for nothing when he thought they'd be an asset to the outerworlds. I hear he soaks the rich ones to cover the ones who can't pay."

He was about to bite out something about how Robin Hood legends often gathered around enigmatic crooks, then thought better of it. "What kind of work do you have available? I can learn." He remembered what he had heard about highgrading on Luna. "And I'm not afraid of a little risk."

"What about a lot of risk? What do you know about it?"

"Just a little that I heard from a hirer in Armstrong. He worked for an outfit called Rockbusters. He said that hijacking was a problem."

"They're a good outfit," she said. "Rough as they come, but honest. We don't handle any of the mining like they do, just the freighting. Our clients are small mining concerns, mostly shoestring operations that can't afford their own barges. We've never lost a ship yet, but people keep trying."

Something about it troubled Thor. "I don't get it. This place seems to be a lot more law-abiding than any Earth city, but I keep hearing about hijacking, piracy, organized violence on a big scale. Why is that?"

"On Avalon, you're seeing the best of it. Some settlements are wide open, and not every skipper who brings in immigrants is as conscientious as Shaw. The outer-worlds have been used as a dumping grounds for felons, as well. Most of them are pretty good settler material, but some are scum. And there are the times, as well. In the last few years, it's become almost impossible for new independent operators to get trading permits. It's like the Earth authorities
want
to strangle the economy that's keeping them all afloat. It's driven a lot of otherwise good spacemen into the pirate camp. They'd rather steal than starve." She seemed to realize that she was being garrulous with a mere Earthie and broke off abruptly. "We don't have many specialists in our ships except pilot and engineer. The rest do whatever job is handed out; quartermaster, cargo handler, purser, et cetera. Think you could lay in rations for a voyage?"

It seemed simple enough. It would involve the kind of calculations he was used to from his environment engineering studies. "I don't see why not. Size of crew?"

"Six. Say it's for a four-week voyage."

"Food only, or are there other consumables?"

"Everything. Food, water, air, plant nutrients, the works. As a matter of fact, follow me. I have to buy rations for my ship, so I might as well see how you handle it."

Thor was bemused by this unconventional job interview, but he couldn't think of anyone he'd rather follow just now. She hung a closed sign over the doorway as they left. There was nothing to lock and nothing inside but a desk and two chairs anyway.

"That's the ugliest architecture I've ever seen," Thor commented as they left.

"Isn't it ghastly?" For the first time she sounded almost friendly. "About thirty years ago a bunch of architectural students came out here and proclaimed that they were going to free mankind from the tyranny of rectilinear housing. They were going to make use of asteroidal hydrocarbons to make 'organic, womb-like environments of psychic value.' " She grimaced. "They perpetrated this complex before they were run off. I think they went straight back home and designed concentration camps. It's like being in the digestive system of some unthinkable monster. Father O'Herlihey has a little church way up there at top. He says he now appreciates the torments of Jonah in the belly of the whale."

"Why do you have your office there?" Thor asked.

"It's cheap. In fact, anybody who wants to move in can do so. Nobody will claim to own it, so all you pay is utilities." They were now out in the main chamber and she led him to a descending ramp. The lower level was an immense warehouse and market, with no internal partitions. Instead, factors stood by heaps of various goods stacked in areas marked off on the floor with red tapes. Some had signs on poles and there were rough districts for everything: foodstuffs, electronics, water, gases, engine hardware,
ad infinitum
.

Thor admired the way Caterina walked. The Avalonian walk was somewhat different from the Lunarian glide. The people here were used to a fluctuating gravity, or zero-g. She was slender, but not as breathtakingly so as the Fu sisters. Space work involved a good deal of hard manual labor, and the usual build was hard and sinewy. She stopped at a sign reading "Chow, Inc."

"Here's where you pick up rations," she said.

"Do you have a recycler?"

She shook her head. "For a four-week voyage, we only recycle air and water. We have a collector for solid wastes and we sell that to Agrispace, Inc. to defray costs."

Avalon, Thor knew, was large enough to have its own agricultural system. Specially-tailored plants were grown in artificial soil or nutrient baths, high-yield grains on short stems so that planting trays could be stacked as high as interior space allowed. Spacers thought in terms of cubic acreage instead of flat fields. Thus, if the trays could be stacked fifty deep, an acre of floor space could yield as much as fifty acres of Earth land. The gene-tailored grains yielded at least ten times the mass of edible matter that the best of Earthly grains had provided a century before. Other vegetables were grown as well, but the staples were grains and soybeans. As the great Ugo Ciano had said when he started the first orbiting agricultural station, "Vegetables is fine, but ya can't make beer outa celery!"

Animal protein was provided mainly by immense salt and fresh water tanks swarming with fish and, especially, shrimp. The tanks also provided seaweed and algae. Quadrupeds had been experimented with in the past, but few could adjust to low gravity and they were inefficient converters at best. Thor realized, sadly, that he had probably eaten his last steak.

An extremely tall, thin Nilotic with ebony skin and an electric-blue coverall came to greet them. "Good to see you, Cat. You buying for
Sisyphus
?"

"He is," she said, jerking her head toward Thor.

"Breaking in a new one, eh?" The towering Nilotic looked down at Thor and grinned. His teeth were filed to points and lacquered in rainbow colors. "What will it be, sir?"

Thor calculated furiously. Shrimp paste, processed soy, and what about dietary customs? He should have asked if there were any Orthodox Jews who couldn't eat shrimp. Oh, what the hell. "Crew of six, four weeks. The usual."

The Nilotic guffawed and Caterina looked at him furiously. "That's cheating!"

"Dealing from the bottom is cheating. This is using my head. He knows you, he knows the ship. He's provisioned her before, so why knock myself out calculating rations?"

"Got a new product, Cat," the Nilotic said. "Shrimp paste and soy, processed and textured to look and taste just like pork. Want some?"

"What's pork?" she said.

"Pig meat," Thor told her. "Don't you ever watch holos?"

"Don't have the time," she said. "But I know how you Earthies eat animal flesh." She made a face. "Disgusting."

"Shrimp is God's creatures too, Cat," the Nilotic said, with a tic of his cheek to Thor. Thor decided the tic was equivalent to a wink.

"Shrimp are too ugly to qualify," she insisted. "No, thanks in any case." They agreed upon a price and went off to find more provisions.

After an oxygen-buying operation, they stopped at a sign atop a huge plastic bladder full of amber liquid.

The sign proclaimed: "Trés Estrellas Cerveza." The merchant handed them tall, frosted tubes of beer. Thor still had trouble coping with low-gravity fluids. The way they moved always made them look thick and gluey. The beer was the best he had ever tasted and he said so.

"It is the water,
señor
," the merchant said. "The best beer can only be made with comet water. Think of it, sir; for untold billions of years, since fifteen minutes after the birth of the solar system, this cometary ice has roamed the farthest reaches of our system, keeping itself pure and pristine until space travel could be developed so that brewers might have it at their disposal. This water, sir, has never formed on ocean, which is an unsanitary environment. It has never flowed across dirty ground. It has never passed through the digestive system of any animal. At Trés Estrellas we use only ice fresh-cut from comets, never mere recycled H
₂
0. This beer sir," he waved at the tube Thor was holding, "has never, and will never, form any urine except your own. This beer—" further rhapsodies were cut short by a commercial transaction transferring a two-keg bladder of the product in question to the
Sisyphus
.

"So you take beer on a voyage?" Thor said.

"Beer or wine, nothing stronger. We make beer and
saké
here in Avalon because we're the biggest grain producer in the Belt. The best wine comes from Canary, which grows nothing but grapes. We'll be picking up some of that over at the vintner's market. Except for some of the ships run by religious communities, running out of wine or beer is considered grounds for mutiny. The outerworlds don't produce the variety of foodstuffs you have on Earth, but Canary alone produces more than four hundred types of wine. It's fighting words out here if you suggest somebody can't tell a good Tokay from a bad one."

"I'll remember that," Thor assured her. He saw a familiar form across the cavernous room, near a fuel dealer's booth. "I think that's Martin Shaw over there," he said.

"Where?" Caterina said. He began to point but she pushed his hand down. "Not with the hand. It's an insult."

He faced Shaw and jerked his chin in the general direction. "By the fuel booth, in the gray coverall. His hair's kind of long in back."

"Introduce me."

"Do I get the job?" he needled.

"Sure. Now quit wasting time." He wondered what she found so fascinating. Shaw was impressive, but so were other men. Thor was sure he was at least as good-looking.

Shaw grinned as they approached. "Thor! Hadn't expected to see you again so soon." He turned to Caterina and raised a hand before his chin, palm down. It was the equivalent of a bow, developed for freefall, where bowing was meaningless. "And I believe your companion is one of the Sousa-Kurodas. Are you Joana?"

She smiled like a Catholic who has just been singled out of a multitude for the personal attention of the Pope. Thor wanted to belt her. "I'm Caterina. Joana is my cousin."

"I've done business with your family," he said. He turned to Thor. "Both the Kurodas and the Sousas are among the oldest families of space settlement."

"So are the Taggarts and Cianos," Thor said.

"Uncle Minoru," she said, ignoring Thor, "has hinted that it was you who went down into the Hong Kong riots five years ago and snatched Tomás Sousa out of the People's Detention Center where he was being tortured. He hints that you got him out here without passing through a single emigration checkpoint."

"I'm just a businessman," Shaw said, modestly. Thor wanted to floor him and jump up and down on him for a while, at full gravity. "People just talk a lot. How is Tomás, by the way?"

"Almost fully recovered. His hands will never be good for much, though."

"It's his mind that counts." Now Shaw was being dead serious. "It won't be long now. Tell him I'll be in contact."

"So soon?" she said. "I wasn't expecting anything for years."

"Is anybody going to let me in on all this?" Thor asked. Caterina glared at him with barely concealed hostility, as if he were some kind of spy eavesdropping on a conspiracy.

"You've read a lot of my writing, Thor, you know what to expect." He turned back to Caterina. "I've just been arranging for publication of my writings throughout the outerworlds. It will be done simultaneously, so the authorities can't get wind of it and clamp a ban on it. Not for several months, though. It's a delicate operation, especially getting around the computer censors on Luna and Mars."