Derelict For Trade Read online

  Jellico gave a brief nod. "We’ve studied those."

  Rael, acutely aware of the shades of Jellico’s voice, sensed impatience. She said smoothly, "The explications that were sent along with the text of the Concord were admirable in their completeness, but it seems if we follow the directions contained there, we’ll be spending weeks going from office to office performing polite rituals as we get passed from official to official." She opened her hands. "Unfortunately, we are facing a time limit to our visit here."

  Jellico added, "I hoped you could assist in telling us precisely whom to see and what papers to file so we can keep this process as short as possible."

  The Patrol officer said, "I have no jurisdiction in this area, of course, but I can see if there’s a chance that the trade administrator will be able to aid you. Can you give me your ship ID and that of the one you found?"

  Jellico quoted them, and Ross typed them into the computer, then sent his message. "As you probably surmised, business with Kanddoyds is a pleasant but leisurely affair. Ordinarily it takes time just to get an appointment. As it happens, you are in luck. The Administrator of Trade Executed in Perfect Amity is human—or at least, he was born human." Ross paused, looking slightly pained; Rael wondered if whatever changes the administrator had gone through repelled Ross.

  "Flindyk, isn’t that his name?" Jellico said.

  Ross smiled. "You have done your reading."

  "Isn’t that a Kanddoyd name?" Rael asked.

  Ross turned to her. "It is indeed a Kanddoyd version of his name, which I understand was Flynn von Dieck. He doesn’t use the Terran name at all anymore—hasn’t for a couple hundred years."

  "A couple hundred years ?" Rael repeated.

  Ross nodded. "He’s a nuller now—lives in null grav up near the Spin Axis. He can go down into the low grav of the Kanddoyds for a certain amount of time a day, to work. If you can adjust to that kind of life, you can extend your years almost indefinitely, I understand." He glanced at the communications status light, and then looked up, his dark eyes expressionless. "It probably isn’t going to work, trying to supercede the system, but it was worth a try—"

  A blinking light suddenly went green, and a message flashed across his console.

  Ross looked slightly surprised. "You are in luck. The administrator will see you right now, himself, if you care to go along to his office in the Trade Administration building."

  Rael and Jellico got to their feet. "Thank you," the captain said.

  "Do make certain that all your data is correct, though," Ross cautioned. "Flindyk is known to all three races as being scrupulously careful, a by-the-book administrator, favoring no one or no race over strict adherence to the Concord."

  "Which probably explains why he has been successful for so long," Rael said with a smile. "Thank you, sir."

  Rael led the way out, and they found the maglev that led to the Trade Administration building.

  This building made the most of its lack of weather; it was open to the habitat, with spectacularly elaborate gardens on complicated terracing. The offices were mostly hidden behind flowering shrubs with exotic, delicate fronds that had never known lashing wind or punishing temperature changes.

  Rael had been here before, had been happy to wander about as Teague executed his business. Now they were met by a Kanddoyd functionary who spoke Trade perfectly, and who complimented them each several times before finally asking their business.

  Rael answered as best she could, inwardly hiding her growing

  amusement at Jellico’s impatience. Not that he showed it, but she was sensitive to his moods, and felt him watching the time as the Kanddoyd led them along this garden path and that one—only to be introduced not to Flindyk but to yet another functionary, this one even more elaborate in carapace decoration (and wordage) than the last.

  Finally, though, they were taken to a larger building at the back which had mosaic-lined corridors and offices at intervals along them. Flindyk’s suite was an exceptionally large one, as would be expected for an executive.

  The official took them directly to a door cleverly hidden in a fabulous mosaic. Inside was a room that looked more like a garden than an office. Many of the appurtenances were gold, and everything was screened by delicate ferns that had been nurtured in null grav and grew in fabulous patterns.

  Rael gained a hasty impression of all this artistic beauty, but what drew her attention and kept it was the large holofract of Terra spinning slowly in the middle of the room. All the plants and furnishings were planned around the vast fractal image, evolving slowly to a logic of its own in mimicry of a distant planet that Flindyk would never see again.

  Rael moved closer, admiring the loving detail that highlighted each familiar mountain range and body of water. There were even white spirals moving gently across each hemisphere, realistic weather patterns that made Rael feel a sudden, intense longing to go home.

  "Beautiful, is it not?" a mellow voice said.

  Rael turned, feeling heat burn up her neck.

  Behind a truly splendid console-desk was the biggest Kanddoyd she had ever seen in her life. For a moment she stared at the elaborately beautiful carapace of fine amber-colored wood, gilded and jeweled, covering a body of gigantic proportions. Her gaze traveled up to a round, smiling face and she felt unsettled for a moment, as if her eyes couldn’t decide if this was a Kanddoyd wearing a disturbingly real human face mask, or a human encased in a Kanddoyd carapace. This, then, was Flindyk, the human who was several hundred years old.

  "We appreciate your seeing us right away," Captain Jellico was saying.

  "He probably told you we are on a tight schedule and want to expedite this business as fast as we can."

  "Ah yes," Flindyk said, his hands touching the fine console inset into his desk. The keytabs were extremely costly porcelain, gold-painted. From the faceting on the status lights, Rael strongly suspected that these latter were jewels.

  "You are captain of the Solar Queen, and you seem to have attached a derelict? The. Starvenger!

  "Snapped out of hyper and sucked her into our wake," Jellico said.

  "Well, if you provide proper data, including your visual records and copies of your log, we will compare this with the records from Trade Central, and see if we can get your business moving along briskly," Flindyk said. His hands tapped lightly at his keys, then he sat back and waited. A moment later a spool extruded from a slot. "Here you go," he said, smiling. "Just have your communications officer append the data requested on here, bring it back to the prime facilitator, Koytatik, whose function this comes under, and you’ll soon be on your way."

  "Thanks," Jellico said. "We really appreciate the help."

  "For my fellow humans it is a pleasure to extend the extra effort," Flindyk said genially. One hand waved gracefully at the holo of Terra spinning in the center of the office. "Though I have been happy enough here, I do miss the old world, and I envy you who can go back."

  Rael felt a pang of sympathy for the man; she realized that at his age, and size, he could never risk being in normal gravity again. A visit to Terra would kill him.

  "If there’s anything else I can do for you, anything at all, you know the way to my office," Flindyk said cheerily.

  They both thanked him and departed, Jellico tucking the spool into his tunic pocket.

  "I think our luck has finally turned," he said, smiling.

  6

  Dane Thorson drew a deep breath, and fought the urge to grip the table with both hands. Most of the time he was fine—kept his visual orientation balanced with his inner ear—but if he turned too quickly, or got absorbed in watching the gyrations of the Kanddoyds, without warning he’d lose his sense of down and up, and see himself floating upside down in a revolving canister.

  One breath, two. He looked up, saw an expression of sympathy on his chief’s face. "Drink," Van Ryke said.

  Obediently Thorson sipped at the straw that had extruded from the bubble of nilak, the Kanddoyd versi
on of coffee. He tightened his stomach muscles, determined to conquer what he derided as physical weakness. A Free Trader—particularly a cargo master—ought to be able to adjust to any environment, he told himself.

  As if reading his mind, Van Ryke said, "I have lost count of the number of planets I’ve visited, but of them very few rate as repellent to natural human instinct as one of these cylomes."

  "It’s inside out," Dane muttered. "I tell myself this is the best design for a habitat, but my guts know that down is out, with vacuum underfoot, and the horizon doesn’t curve out of sight, as it decently should—instead it curves up and over. Then." He glanced at a quartet of Kanddoyds passing nearby, and clamped his jaw shut.

  He would not speak a criticism of the indigenous population, even in Terran, which apparently few of the other races understood. It wasn’t the way of a Trader. But still, it made a person dizzy to watch the way the beings zigzagged back and forth across each other’s path, constantly buzzing and humming and chirping and clicking. The tapes hadn’t even remotely made him ready for that; he’d stupidly gotten the idea that they would speak Trade, and augment what they said with one discrete noise of emotional amplification at a time. The reality was, they never stopped making noises, so many it was difficult to distinguish what kind of noise, much less the patterns. He thought grumpily, And this is only what they do in my sonic range.

  Van Ryke was watching the four Kanddoyds make their way down the concourse. To human eyes they walked in a continual braiding motion,

  veering only when they encountered others of their kind. Then the pattern evolved into a mesmerizing series of intersecting angles, broken only if they were approached by other beings, especially the bulky, heavy-treading Shver. Then they flowed out of the way in deference, wide berth for high clan rank and just skirting those of low rank. The Shver, Dane noted, did not turn aside from their path for anyone save others of their own kind, and then only for those of higher degree; but they paused and exchanged gestures of formal recognition and obligation first.

  Dane, watching the tall, massively muscled beings gesturing as their low voices rumbled like distant thunder, wondered who would be idiot enough to deliberately cross a Shver’s path.

  The Shver were even bigger up close than seen from afar. Their thick, coarse gray hides and massive bodies called to mind humanoid elephants. Even their ears were almost elephantine, so large and wrinkly were they, though the faces were more or less humanoid—a forbidding sort of humanoid. The sheer size of the Shver, plus their bulk and broody mien, and the savage-looking serrated honor knives worn at their sides, guaranteed that no beings, even the raffish and overdecorated Yip, or the militant Rigelians, got in their way.

  They seemed all-powerful, yet Dane recalled reading that they were phobic about flying insects—and were terrified of spiders. It made sense that their heavy gravity would not support most insect life as known to Terra and other worlds; fragile exoskeletons would be crushed by the creatures’ own weight. Small fauna on the Shver’s homeworld was apparently all vermiform.

  But in addition, for some reason buried deep within the Shver’s prehistory, anything with more legs than five—their sacred number—was considered daemonic. They apparently reacted at the sight of spiders the way most spacers would react to meeting a ghost.

  Van Ryke’s sudden chuckle brought Dane’s attention back to the Shver walking by. As the two men watched, the smallest of three Shver stared at them intently, until one of the taller ones noticed and with a sharp gesture ordered the youngster to turn around again. Dane smothered the urge to grin. He remembered that the Shver considered it indelicate to eat in public, and the gawking youngster reminded him strongly of human children and their infinite capacity for entertainment at the prospect of impolite spectacles.

  "A few minutes more." The cargo master’s voice broke into Dane’s thoughts, and Van Ryke turned to study Dane. "Do you wish me to accompany you, my boy?"

  Thorson shook his head. "No. Thanks. I’ll manage. With the start Flindyk gave us on the process, as the captain said, this is cut-and-dried work. You’ll need all the time we have to secure a good cargo. That’s top priority."

  "Good enough, then," Van Ryke said. "Speaking of which, I ought to be about my business. The sooner I get started on those hours of flowery talk the better. I just hope it comes with suitable refreshments." He gave Dane a smile that the apprentice cargo master knew was meant to be reassuring, rose, and moved at a sedate pace down the concourse.

  Dane sighed. He knew he had the easier job—which would be the more embarrassing if he failed. He fingered the recorder at his belt, with its variety of tones and tinkles that had been established as acceptable emotional modifiers for Trade Speech, then turned his eyes to another group of Kanddoyds who were busy settling at one of the tables nearby. Covertly Dane studied them, trying to muster all he’d learned in order to identify them. Three had huge, gold-faceted eyes, which meant they were females; of these one had light eyes, indicating youth, and the eyes of the other two were a darker honey color, indicating greater age. The four males were also a variety of ages, their green eyes reflecting varied shades.

  All of them had complicated jewel insets and enameling on their exoskeletal components, indicating wealth; Dane did not bother to scrutinize the decorations any more closely, since they were supposedly indicative only of individual tastes—and might change from day to day, if the owner had enough time and money to constantly augment his or her carapace. Kanddoyd, unlike the clannish, hierarchical Shver, did not wear any insignia indicating rank—they were far too individualistic for that.

  Sucking absently at his drink, he realized it was empty when the fragile bubble collapsed in his hands. He slid the crushed bubble into a recycle bin and shuffled out onto the concourse, careful to move slowly. A forgetful step and he’d bound in the air, legs and arms pumping for balance, making him look like the rawest newbie.

  A glance up the concourse toward a place where bright lights and loud music emanated forth caused him to grin. There, right in the middle of a

  group of flashily dressed Traders from half a dozen widely scattered civilizations, was Ali. To all appearances he was just partying, but Dane knew better. Sometimes the quickest way to find out what you need to know is to go where the spacers hang out, and listen to gossip, Ali had said when he and Rip held their planning session.

  Better you than I, Dane thought, turning toward the mag-lev. His chrono showed it was time for Prime Facilitator Koytatik’s duty to start at the registry office, something he’d taken care to ascertain earlier. He slid into a pod, moving around a pair of Shver. A cluster of other beings, all from different worlds but wearing the brown indicative of Trade, pushed in from behind.

  "So they swapped them, cargo for cargo, and sold for double."

  "... got a week of leave before we blast out for the Thstoths-Buool Run."

  "... so they think the Deathguard must have done it. No evidence anywhere—"

  Dane sneaked a peek when he heard that one, but the speaker’s voice lowered, and he could not tell which being had said the words.

  "... the grace and beauty of your excellent ship, but we poor Traders cannot possibly hope"—Regret, with Elements of Doubt—"to compete with the great and powerful Traders from the Deneb."

  The pod drew to a halt, and the talk blended into general noise as the travelers pushed out, everyone bounding lightly into the microgravity and ricocheting off in various directions.

  Dane looked up at the vast, terraced edifice with the holographic poles declaring in the three main languages that this was the Trade Administrative Center.

  He finally made his way straight for the widest pathway in the middle. Just under an archway he saw a Kanddoyd spot him and come scurrying forward. The Kanddoyd escorted him to a pleasant waiting room while assuring him that the locutor would promptly interrupt her activities to serve him, using about four times as many words as were necessary.

  While he was waitin
g, Dane forced himself to walk forward to the huge window overlooking the interior of the cylome and gaze out. The reluctance he felt triggered a sudden realization: that the Kanddoyd had doubtless put him here to exploit the well-known Terran aversion to habitats.

  " The Kanddoyd are indeed the friendliest of all alien races," he remembered Van Ryke saying. " That does not mean they do not desire their own advantage."

  Despite himself, Dane found himself fascinated by the view. The locutor’s office was in the middle of the Kanddoyd levels: a compromise for the comfort of the many races who might visit here. It faced down the length of the habitat, and there were no obstructions to his gaze.

  And the view was utterly strange. Dane found that if he looked straight ahead, it was much like being in an aircar above a planetary surface, flying through an immense canyon— like the Slash on Immensa, he thought—with distance softening the juts of buildings among greenery into analogues of distant mountains. But then the curve of the cylindrical walls drew his eyes up and over and vertigo seized him anew as he saw towering structures skewering out into the air far above him, apparently in defiance of all gravity and engineering. Fortunately, he thought, the radiants that lit the interior of the vast habitat blocked any view of the opposite surface—he didn’t know if he could have tolerated seeing an entire half a world hanging upside down overhead.

  " The hindbrain knows nothing of spin gravity," he remembered Craig Tau saying dryly.

  It was clever, though, Dane thought, how the design of the habitat fit the nature of the two races who inhabited it. The inner surface was at 1.6 gee, giving the Shver not only the acceleration they’d evolved in but also the lion’s share of the living space—just as that expansive race preferred. The Kanddoyds, on the other hand, lived high up in the immense tube-shaped towers that transfixed the cylinder from side to side, giving them the lower gravity and combination of enclosure and exposure that they preferred. They did not mind the imbalance in territory, for their long, losing battle on a dying planet had bred them to enjoy close quarters.