by Renee Duke
The work centre was open the next day, but the job placer we went to did not have any jobs to offer us. An alien worker herself (a Delveckian), she explained that the centre was really for older, Gethevian-speaking tourists with established careers, or enough expertise in certain fields to qualify for temporary positions. Jobs requiring no specific skills were so scarce, she doubted the centre could find us work.
Our own attempts did not net us anything either. Upon vacating our rooms at the budget hotel two days later, we had just enough money to go to a small café for lunch (a third of a soft drink and a third of a bowl of soup each). We sat at an outdoor table with our luggage around our feet, the perfect picture of itinerant, poverty-stricken youth.
We would probably have sat there all afternoon pondering solutions to our problem if the café owner’s repeated glares in our direction had not made it obvious that our scanty repast did not warrant the occupation of one of his outside tables. We finished our meal and went back to the work centre to see if any unexpected jobs for unskilled labourers had come in.
Jip stayed outside to watch the luggage while Kirsty and I went in and talked to the same job placer as before. She still had no jobs for us, but as we turned to leave, a middle-aged Gethevian woman came in and hurried up to us, smiling broadly. We smiled back. Encouraged, she pointed outside, to Jip, who was being patted on the head by another middle-aged Gethevian woman. Somewhat alarmed, Jip backed away and came into us, followed by the head-patter. Seeing this, the woman with us pulled out a bag of triangular coins (Gethev’s highest coin denomination) and offered it to Kirsty, jabbering away excitedly in Gethevian the whole time.
“What’s she on aboot?” asked Kirsty.
“They want to buy your slave,” said the job placer, amused.
“Slave?” the three of us chorused.
“Yes. Slavery is legal on Gethev. They’re well treated, of course, but they’re the ones who perform most of the menial work here. That’s why there are so few unskilled jobs available.”
“Why would they think Jip is our slave?” I asked.
“Lots of tourists acquire slaves while they’re here. Others like to try being slaves for a while. With you in here, and your friend outside with your luggage, these ladies just assumed she was your slave. They really do want to buy her, and they’re offering you an excellent price. Maybe you should consider it,” she added, laughing.
“Don’t be ridiculous,” I snapped.
Kirsty was not as quick to dismiss the idea. “What are the laws regarding runaway slaves?” she asked the job placer.
“Quite enlightened,” the girl replied. “Slaves can buy their freedom back at double the price, or just obtain it by getting away and avoiding recapture for a month. Slave owners have no claim on them after that time.”
“Can people who sell slaves keep the money they get for one who runs off almost right away?”
“Yes.”
Kirsty beamed. “Well, fancy that now. It looks like we’ll be having supper tonight after all.”
For a moment, I just stared at her. “We can’t sell Jip.”
“Why can’t we? These two ladies’ll not be hanging onto her, will they, Jip?”
“My bondage is unlikely to be of lengthy duration,” Jip confirmed.
Intrigued, I transferred my gaze to her. “I thought your Vorlan Code of Honour wouldn’t let you use your abilities to escape confinement.”
“Not lawful confinement, no. But slavery is not lawful confinement. Vorlans do not recognize slavery. Or attach any importance to the rights of those who do.”
She was so obviously in favour of the idea that Kirsty and I accepted the women’s money without further ado and headed back to the hotel to re-register. Jip got there before we did, and her unsuspecting owners never managed to track her down.
We spent several days taking in all the interesting places in the Gethevian capital we’d been too broke to visit before. Whenever we required money, we simply sold Jip. She always fetched a good price, and usually got back to us within an hour. We also visited other areas, but Gethev is a small planet, and much of it is uninhabitable. When we tired of what it had to offer, we sold Jip several times in succession and bought tickets for the nearby independent planet of Sustra.
Being back in a starport reminded me of the Derridus and our meeting with the High Prince of Cholar. Curious as to how the search for the stolen Cholarian treasures was going, I stuck a coin in a news viewer to find out.
It was still one of the top stories. Earlier news clips had referred to the theft of several treasures, but updated reports said only one treasure was missing: the sacred Ring of Beom. Since AUP security guards, Mr. XanChiv’s regular guards, and Cholar’s Hereditary Keepers of the Royal Treasures had all been on duty at the time, no one was being accused of undue negligence, and authorities believed the robbery to be the work of professional museum thieves—people who knew the ring would be impossible to fence and would eventually offer to surrender it in exchange for a sizable reward. This had not yet happened, and because the stolen ring played such a vital role in the coronations of Cholar’s Supreme Rulers, the Cholarian Supreme Council was becoming very worried. High Prince Taziol could not be crowned without it, and even if it was found, those who opposed his elevation to Supreme Ruler were against letting him keep his throne. According to their spokesman, a Crown Councilman named Drazok, the chosen successor had betrayed his uncle’s trust by failing to keep the ring safe and was not worthy of succeeding him. He wanted Obruk to be declared ‘Without Named Successor’, which meant the throne would automatically go to Obruk’s son Mardis.
“Och, that’d please the Directorate,” Kirsty remarked. “They’d far rather have Prince Mardis as Supreme Ruler.”
“The Council isn’t going to do it, though,” I said, reading on into the next paragraph. “The succession’s going to be decided by a tribunal, and most people seem to think Taz’s claim will be upheld.”
“Good,” said Jip. “I liked the High Prince.”
We all had. I wondered if the Directorate would consider it disloyal of future AUP employees to have a preference for Taz.
“I dare say they would,” Kirsty said when I voiced the thought, “but Taz was very nice to us. We owe him some loyalty too.”
The final boarding announcement for our ship to Sustra reminded us we had not yet picked up the tickets we had reserved. Scooping up our luggage, we hurried to the ticket counter. Our tickets had been held for us, but we were almost the last passengers to check in at the boarding passage. The woman there figured we’d have to run if we wanted to get on the transit barge. The only person behind us was a middle-aged Ralgonian man with a dark beard and moustache and thinning dark hair that barely managed to form the spiky ringlets worn by most Ralgonian males. And like all Ralgonian males, he was, by Earth standards, extremely short, whereas the women are, in contrast, quite tall. This Ralgonian male was also a little stout, but since he carried nothing but a small holdall, he should have been able to run full tilt along the passage. Glancing back, however, we saw him strolling along in quite a leisurely manner.
His lack of concern did not make us any the less anxious as we hastened toward the barge. We scrambled onto it only two minutes before it took off, and were strapping down in some back seats when the Ralgonian threw himself through the doors, panting for breath.
“He must have finally realized that catching this barge required physical exertion,” I whispered. “I bet he wouldn’t have made it if the barge attendant hadn’t kept the door open for him.”
The Ralgonian gave no sign of appreciating the woman’s thoughtfulness. He dropped his holdall into a luggage pouch and took his seat without so much as a word of thanks.
Kirsty and I thought him most ungracious. Jip was more charitable. “Perhaps the poor man gets spacesick, and does not view the prospect of a two-day interplanetary voyage with the same pleasure we do.”
Chapter Nine
The trip to Su
stra was relaxing and uneventful, but all that changed after we went into orbit. Sustrans are energetic people. Life on their planet moves very quickly. Our transit barge hurtled down to the starport at a breathtaking rate, and officials were urging people to disembark only seconds after it set down. An automatic luggage processor homed in on the claim badges we were wearing and thrust the corresponding pieces into our hands as we stepped into a moving tunnel. At customs, our bags were thrown into a huge luggage sifter that opened each one, searched them thoroughly, and even repacked them before any of us could say we had nothing to declare. It then flung them at our feet.
“Jings, they dinna waste any time around here, do they?” Kirsty remarked as we picked them up and went to change our Gethevian money into Sustran money.
An exit tunnel swept us out to the parking lot, where ground buses screeched to a halt before queues of waiting passengers. As soon as they were full, they zoomed away and others moved in to take their place. Above and around them, ground and air taxis darted about. When hailed, drivers braked abruptly and jumped out to stuff luggage into luggage compartments, and passengers into passenger compartments. Then they, too, were off.
Incoming Sustrans got transport vehicles almost at once. So did non-Sustrans familiar with the way things worked there. First-time visitors did not fare as well. We couldn’t find anyone willing to take us into the capital. Aggressive types elbowed us aside in the bus queues, and taxi drivers ignored us. I caught sight of the Ralgonian man once, and he wasn’t having much luck either. His tendency to hang back from crowds practically invited people to push him to the back of every queue.
The noise and fumes from so many vehicles made our heads spin. Convinced we would never commandeer anything within the starport, we picked up our luggage and headed for the gate on foot. Our initiative was not appreciated. A parking attendant refused to let us walk amidst the fast-moving traffic.
“No pedestrians,” he said firmly. “You have to take your own vehicle out of here or ride in a public conveyance.”
“None of the public conveyances will stop for us,” I whined.
“Where are you going?”
“To the capital. There’s a youth hostel there and—”
The attendant put two fingers in his mouth and gave a shrill whistle. A nearby ground taxi deposited three passengers in front of the starport, whirled around, and sped up to us. “Capital. Youth hostel,” the attendant snapped as the driver leapt out to grab our bags. “There you are, girls. Hurry and get in. You’re holding up traffic.”
We scrambled into the taxi and shouted a quick “Thank you” as it sped out of the starport.
Ground cars on Sustra went much faster than we were used to. Traffic heading into the capital moved in a swift and steady stream, and no one was content with his or her position in any of the lanes. Whenever an opening appeared, six drivers tried for it at once. Ours must have been especially skilled, because he nearly always got it.
Needless to say, it took no time at all to get to the youth hostel. The driver hurled our bags onto the pavement in front and roared off, snatching his fare as he went.
The hostel manager was a fast worker too. Inside of five minutes, she had booked us in, led us to a dormitory, and presented us with a complimentary city info-card containing a map and information on local attractions and tourist services. After stowing our bags in the lockers beside our bunks, I slid the card into my computer and called up the map to help us locate a working-tourist job centre. There was one nearby, so we decided to go there and register.
“It’s a shame Sustrans dinna go in for slave trading,” Kirsty commented on the way.
“Yes,” I replied. “Selling Jip was a good source of income. We won’t be able to do it here.”
“Perhaps we could sell something else,” said Jip. She pointed to a building across the street. It was a pawnshop—with a sign in the window that said the owner was willing to make small loans to anyone who could put up reasonably valuable items as security. “We must be carrying around several things we could do without, or, between the three of us, have duplicates of,” said Jip.
“Hmm. I’ve got a pendant I never wear,” I mused.
“And we’ve certainly no more use for oor info-cards from other cities,” said Kirsty. “Or oor compu-texts from oor edu-tour days.”
We hurried back to the hostel to rummage through our belongings. We found quite a few pawnable items, and when we presented them at the pawnshop, the owner presented us with a nice sum of local currency. Except for our compu-texts and info-cards, which he bought outright, he gave us claim tokens for all our goods and told us to redeem them in a week if we wanted to retain ownership. None of them were especially precious to us, so we did not have any qualms about squandering the money we got for them on a few days sightseeing. We did not sign on at the work centre until we had spent every bit of it.
Almost all Sustrans speak Galacto, which meant our inability to speak the language did not affect our ability to work. Our lack of serviceable skills limited the type of jobs open to us, but doing some housework for a wealthy woman whose staff had gone away for the weekend seemed well within our capabilities.
Mrs. Thoyen was a smiling middle-aged matron who wore her jet-black hair in a tall stook. When we arrived at her mansion, she ushered us inside enthusiastically and bustled along in front of us. Sustrans bustle everywhere. It’s their natural way of moving.
Our employer had an automatic maintenance system that took care of most of the house and yard work, but someone had to programme it and keep an eye on things. Since Jip had occasionally helped her father’s housekeeper do something similar on Heltiga, she volunteered to do that. Kirsty and I got the supposedly simple job of exercising Mrs. Thoyen’s pet snurboks. These were a pair of large, solidly built quadrupeds with orangey-yellow fur. Their huge heads were almost on level with our shoulders and had three short, bumpy antennas attached to them.
The control devices for the holding beams attached to the snurboks’ collars had a number of functions. Unfortunately, we had no chance to familiarize ourselves with them before the animals shot out the door.
“They seem a little rambunctious today,” Mrs. Thoyen commented as we sailed past her. “Be firm with them, girls. They’re strong, but manageable.”
Manageable? We begged to differ. We even couldn’t pull them up in time to stop them crashing into the hapless individual walking by the gate. Descending to the ground in a tangled heap of people and snurboks, I recognized our victim as the Ralgonian man from our ship. I wondered if he had come to Sustra on vacation. If so, he did not seem fated to enjoy himself.
We scrambled up, full of apologies, but had no time to help the Ralgonian to his feet. The snurboks took off again, loping through the streets with us running full throttle behind them.
This went on until we got to a park. Obviously familiar with the place, they scorned the use of public paths and with yelps of joy, plunged down a slope leading into a wood. I tripped and tumbled to the bottom, letting go of my snurbok’s control device.
He went on quite well without me. Looking up, I could see Kirsty was still attached to her snurbok, which was pursuing a zigzag course through a section of trees. Just beyond the trees was a wide, but fortunately for Kirsty, shallow, stream. The brute went right through it, stopping only long enough to shake itself on the opposite bank. Lunging forward again, it jerked its control device out of Kirsty’s hands. Unable to stop, she went headfirst into a large, prickly bush.
The snurbok continued on its way until the handle of the control device flying loose behind it got snagged in a tree. Hearing its forlorn yowl, my snurbok stopped tearing around and went to join it. Before I could jump up to recapture it, Kirsty extricated herself from the bush and went stamping across to the snurboks. She was dripping wet, covered with prickles, and absolutely furious.
“That does it!” she roared. “I’ve had it. Who do you two, big, daft, furry gawks think you are, thundering aboot all ov
er the place? I expected to move along at a fair clip with creatures your size, but I’ll not, I repeat, I’ll not, be trundled up hills, and doon hills, and through mucky water, and into prickles. Look at me. I’m drookit!”
Frightened by her outburst, the snurboks cowered and tried to hide behind each other.
By some miracle, the holding beams, and their control devices, were still locked onto the snurboks’ collars. “Here,” said Kirsty, tossing one of the control devices to me. “From now on, these beasties are going to walk where we want to walk.”
They did, too. We went all the way around the park and back to Mrs. Thoyen’s mansion with the animals walking sedately beside us.
Chapter Ten
We worked for Mrs. Thoyen the whole weekend, and obtained enough money to take in the last of the capital’s attractions that were of interest to us. These included an environmental-effects dome capable of recreating the surface conditions of any planet in the universe, and a lovely circular park containing a thousand different statues of a celebrated Sustran beauty.
To finance a move to another city, we visited a pawnshop to unload a few more items we considered superfluous. Coming out, I saw a familiar figure across the street looking in the window of another shop. “There’s that man again,” I said in astonishment.
“What man?” Jip inquired.
“The Ralgonian from our last ship. Kirsty and I saw him a few days ago when we were out walking Mrs. Thoyen’s snurboks. He was the man we knocked down. You’d almost think he was following us.”
Kirsty laughed. “What would he be following us for? He’s a tourist, same as we are. It stands to reason he’ll be visiting some of the same places.”