Trader's World (18 page)

"Smash request from Mikal Asparian. I am now at ninety thousand, vectored twenty-two degrees west of north. Air speed two hundred." He looked at the power charge level. "Current estimated range fifty miles, plus ten miles glide phase. Repeat: I am requesting Smash support for ground pickup. Chipponese tracking satellite to provide final aircar vector before landing. I will continue that direction on foot, at estimated seven miles per hour. I expect pursuit. Repeat: Smash request . . ."

There was no return signal, no indication that the message was getting through. Mike continued to send for the next forty-six miles, until the car's charge level was dangerously low. Then he had to concentrate his efforts on a smooth descent through the swirling gusts of the brickfielder. The laser altimeter provided accurate height information, but nothing on ground cover. He had to hope he was over level terrain without trees or boulders.

At six hundred feet he could suddenly see the ground. The brickfielder was thinning, running out of energy. That would simplify the landing, but hasten pursuit. As the car glided in to land, Mike took a final bearing on the moon and now-visible stars. Before the vehicle rolled to a halt he had jumped out and was heading north-northwest at a steady trot.

Within twenty minutes he was winded. The badlands were rough, broken country, crisscrossed by steep-sided gullies. Sharp-edged gravel at the bottom of each ravine cut through his sodden shoes, and climbing out was an effort. Mike was in good physical shape, but the banquet felt like a lead cannonball in his belly. Thirty courses, liter after liter of beer, a dramatic Trader Ritual, no sleep . . . just what you need to set you up for the run of your life, Mike thought. He groaned, rubbed at the stitch in his aching right side, and kept running.

Two hours later the sun was coming up. Mike still staggered along on legs that felt too heavy to lift. He had to stop and rest for a few minutes. At the top of a long incline he finally halted and turned to look back. The track he had made through the sandy bush was easy to follow. It weaved and curved like a drunkard's walk, but it kept the same general heading, west of north.

Mike looked farther back, to the crest of the previous rise. And what he saw mere made him change his mind about stopping to rest. Half a dozen naked abos were running rapidly down the hillside, following his trail. They were no more than a couple of miles away, traveling twice as fast as Mike's best speed.

Hide from them? That thought lasted only a moment. The haploid abos had legendary tracking skills and sensory apparatus. Stay and fight? That was worth even less time. Surrender to them? That was worst of all; haploid abos in the wild took no prisoners, and he had not forgotten Fathom's summary: "a nice long drink and ninety pounds of convenient protein."

Within a fraction of a second Mike was running. He forgot his fatigue, forgot his stitch, forgot the lacerations on his feet as he sprinted over sharp stones. He raced down the long slope ahead, and up another one. At the brow of the hill he took another quick look back. They had halved their distance, strung out in a line over half a mile.

Mike could not hold the pace. He ran on hopelessly.

He was still running, lungs aflame, when the low-flying plane ripped in across the sandhills, whisked him off his feet in a snatch-net, and went at once into a high-speed vertical climb.

"How about that! Smooth as a Chippo's bum."
It was Jack Lester's cheerful voice, speaking into Mike's ear as the snatch-net was reeled into the plane's interior.
"They didn't even get close. I'd say the nearest was still five hundred yards away when we did the pickup. Hey, come on, boyo—now we're out of jamming range the two of us need to have a chat. Wake up! You don't want to be sleeping now."

Mike lay stretched on the cabin floor.
"What kept you?"
he said, and passed out.

* * *

"Congratulations, Mike. You've passed. You're a full-fledged Trader now. Once the medics have done with you, you can look forward to two months of vacation before you begin advanced training. Lucia says the key to the lodge in the Economic Community is on the way. But I want to know one thing." Lyle Connery's voice became exasperated. "Who the devil
was
telling the truth?"

The Trader plane was skimming in a Mach Seven suborbital to the Azores. Connery had come in person with the Trader Smash squad. Now he was sitting next to Mike, with Jack Lester and Daddy-O linked in.

Mike was lying at ease while a robodoc clicked and clucked its way discontentedly around his body. So far he had been given one shot of alcohol inhibitor and a liter of glucose and salt solution. He felt terrible, but to the robodoc's annoyance he had refused any other treatment. "I'm not sure that anyone was," he said to Connery's question. "Maybe Alf and Bet Bates. They seemed to be technological geniuses, so they're perhaps more likely to tell the truth on other matters. But not Fathom. And certainly not Cinder-feller. I knew I couldn't trust either of them."

"Traders' Rule. Assume everybody is lying."

"I did. But look where it left me if either of them
was
telling the truth. If Cinder-feller were right, I'd lose the recording disk as soon as I was back in Fathom's hands—split open like a herring, if I happened to have swallowed it. And if Fathom were right, Cinder-feller was planning a direct deal with the Unified Empire for the Candlemass Berries. She also didn't intend me to leave for a long time. I'd made Trader deals with
both
of them, and I guess I'll go back there someday. But not for a while. I couldn't see a rosy near-term future for myself in The Musgrave, or with Fathom in Alice."

"Did Cinder-feller try to take you to bed?"
Jack Lester asked curiously.
"From your description of her, I'm not sure you'd be too hot on the idea."

"She didn't—thank God. She'd have crushed me flat." Mike shuddered.

"Too true. I told you, Mike, it's bigmommas on top. Now, if I'd been in your shoes, I'd have—"

"Shut up, Jack," Connery said. "Or we'll cut you out of the circuit. Go on, Mike."

"Thanks. You know, I've been saying 'she' but I'm not sure Cinder-feller is a woman at all. Cinder-feller could just as easily be a man. To hold power in the Strine Interior it would make a lot of sense to pass yourself off as a bigmomma." Mike was silent for a moment. He couldn't get out of his head Jack's unpleasant thought of sleeping with Cinder-feller—male or female. "Maybe that's another reason I wanted to leave in a hurry," he said at last. "We'd done most of our business. Cinder-feller and I had signed formal papers of agreement for the Candlemass Berries, and that took care of my prime mission requirement. So I had only two problems: how was I going to get out of there, and how could I find out the new Dulcinel Protocol?"

"I told you not to worry your head about that," Connery said. "You had quite enough to do as it was—we had no idea we were sending you into such a tangled situation. At least, I didn't." He shot an accusing look at Daddy-O's camera. "You should have ignored the Protocol, Mike."

"I
couldn't
ignore it—not when the evidence was being pushed right in my face. Before I left the Azores, you told me what the new Protocol was supposed to do: rapid healing, tissue restoration, and a few other things. So when I reached the border of Cinder-feller's territory, what was the first thing I found? Sweet Pea, a deaf-mute—who was neither deaf nor dumb,
but who used to be.
Then I arrive at Cinder-feller's labs, expecting to see someone who has been terribly mutilated and burned in an accident."

"That's what the grapevine told us,"
Jack Lester said.
"So deformed she hid away from the world."

"She hid away all right. But I saw her—
lots
of her. And she was gross, and she was huge, but she was certainly not mutilated or disfigured. That should have been proof enough, but the final piece was Cinder-feller's haploid abos. I'd seen abos earlier, when we put down at that airfield in the south. They looked the way you'd expect warriors who have been in the badlands to look: radiation overdose, tumors, toes and fingers missing. But Cinder-feller's abos were nothing like that. They were in superb shape. Put it all together, and the conclusion was obvious: I was seeing the new Dulcinel Protocol in full swing. I guessed that Bet and Alf Bates had developed it, and Cinder-feller and Sweet Pea benefited from it."

Lyle Connery slapped his hand down hard on the console next to Mike. "My God, it would be worth a fortune. We
have
to find a way to trade for it."

"Cinder-feller said no way. They won't trade."

"I don't care. We have to try again."

"I'm not sure we do," Mike said. He leaned back, easing his left arm clear of the chair. "I told you, Cinder-feller wanted to sign formal agreements for everything
except
the Protocol. I told her the Traders wouldn't make that kind of long-term arrangement with an outsider. Before I could sign, she would have to go through the Trader Ritual that would make her an honorary Trader."

There was a baffled silence.

"Honorary Trader?"
Jack said at last.
"What kind of dingo-doo is that? Mike, me old partner, you need a bit of a rest. There's no such thing as a Trader Ritual."

"There is now," Mike said wearily. He turned his left arm over, to reveal the long, fresh scar running up the inside of his forearm. "After we'd had dinner, and after thirty or forty tankards of booze, I had to invent a full Trader Ritual, just for Cinder-feller. See that scar? We made that with a table knife. We're blood brothers—or maybe I mean blood sisters. I'm still not sure about Cinder-feller."

"But why the devil—" Lyle Connery began. Then he paused.

"Remember what you told me." Mike gave a tired smile. "The Protocol is a lymphocyte change. If you'll just have the robodoc there take a few drops of my blood, you'll have enough modified lymphocytes for a flying start on analysis of the Dulcinel Protocol. And of course, that's the
other
reason I had to get away from Cinder-feller's labs. Once Bet and Alf heard what happened, they'd have seen through that blood-mingling game in a second."

Under Daddy-O's control, the robodoc was already back at Mike's left leg, feeling its way to a suitable vein.
"Azores landing in five minutes,"
Daddy-O said.
"There's a lab waiting for you there."

"So that's why you've been refusing to let the doc put antibiotics into you," Connery said. "Hey, maybe you're getting the benefit of the Protocol yourself."

Mike shook his head. "Not feeling the way I do. There has to be a lot more to it than a simple blood transfer. But this is a start—and by now Cinder-feller knows she was tricked. According to Jack, that will
help
us deal with her for the rest of the Protocol."

Connery was leaning back to his seat. "What a mission. I knew it might be tricky, but I had no idea it would turn out to be as complicated as this. There were more risks than anyone expected."

"I know. You thought it might be easy, because someone in the Strine Interior
wanted
a deal for the Candlemass Berries. But the feuds make everything there more complicated. You need somebody there with more experience. Somebody like Jack Lester."

"That's not funny, Mike."

"I think it is." Mike laughed, and touched the scar on his arm. "If the new Protocol is as powerful as I believe, it will do far more than simple skin repairs. We'll be able to do complete
organ regeneration.
You can rebuild Lover-boy. And the sooner you do
that
, and get him out of that damned tank and back to work as an honest Trader, the easier it will be on the rest of us."

His last words were lost in Lester's howl of mingled excitement and protest.
"Mike, you're a beauty and a bloody marvel. I'll get my balls back! But we have to stay
partners.
You know, we make one hell of a
team . . ."

Mike leaned back, tongued Jack out of contact, and closed his eyes.

Daddy-O was receiving an urgent incoming call for computer power elsewhere. A small fraction of capacity remained assigned to the Smash plane, but most circuits had to be transferred to deal with the new problem.

There were two items to attend to first. Into Mikal Asparian's file went the notice of official change from trainee to Trader. And into Daddy-O's locked data file went a ciphered annotation showing that ingenuity and nerve matched the desired profile. There was one negative note: too much success was more alarming than too little. Daddy-O added an acknowledgment that the probability of final failure had been increased.

CHAPTER 8

The woman who brought the late-afternoon meal was an attractive forty-year-old with a full, sturdy body and a plump face. She placed the dish in front of Mike and stood waiting.

After three days, Mike knew what was expected. He took his fork, speared a small piece of sausage, loaded pickled cabbage onto it, lifted it to his mouth, and chewed slowly and reflectively.

"Wonderful," he said after a judicious pause. "The best dish yet. I don't know how you make food so delicious."

She dipped forward in a little curtsy, and at last poured the May-wine into his glass. "We have had practice," she said happily. "We have been cooking
choucroute
this way for two thousand years. Would you like anything more, Trader Asparian?"

Mike shook his head.
Trader Asparian.
Presumably the feeling would fade eventually, but even after six weeks of use the words still gave him a thrill. As the woman left, he settled back to enjoy a leisurely meal. The dining room of the lodge faced southwest. He could watch the afternoon sun dipping toward the snowy peaks, far away across the valley, and smell the perfume of mountain wildflowers drifting in through the open window. The Azores and the Trader lab felt light-years away.

The place was all that Lucia Asparian had promised, and more. She had mentioned the grandeur of the Alps, but not the freshness of the air at seven thousand feet, or the bright flowers, or the colored patchwork of the valley spread out below the lodge. Every square foot was cultivated, every hedge and fence trimmed and tidy. Compared with this valley, everywhere else in the world was rude, frantic, and uncivilized.