Trader's World

by Charles Sheffield

  Mike flattened himself closer to the ground. The flare of burning rocket fuel lit up everything for miles. The light came from the static firing facility, and it was bright enough to allow Mike to see every detail of the test—and of the two people in front of him. One was Jake Kallario; the other, crouched down and watching Jake, was a stranger in soot-black tribal dress.

  The covering darkness had vanished. If either one chose to turn and look this way . . .

  Mike placed his face flat on the earth. There was fire all along the base of the giant rocket now. He could smell the smoke and feel the vibrations of the combustion through his cheekbone and skull and all the way along his spine.

  Two minutes. Five minutes. Then the glare faded and the thunder ceased. The night became pitch black and graveyard quiet.

  Mike lay motionless, waiting for night vision to return and for his overloaded ears to recover their sensitivity. After a couple of minutes he could see the stars and hear again the soft ripple of night wind across the dried grass. Five minutes more, and Jake was hurrying back toward the outer fence. He made a good deal of noise. His black-clad shadow followed soon after, slipping as silently as ever through the grass.

  Mike did not move. He had taken up his spyglass and was again directing it at the facilities beyond the electrified fence. Workers were moving there, pulling covers over the base of the squat rocket. Then the lights began to go out, one by one, and the level of activity slowly dwindled.

  Mike stood up and looked all around him. There was no sign of anyone, and no point in worrying anymore about possible discovery. He ran to the thorn fence and wriggled through. Then he was back in the electric car and driving fast toward Coronation City.

  Amazingly, the party was still going strong when he got there. Mike looked at his watch and found to his surprise that it was not yet midnight. Groups of people stood talking, eating, and drinking on the borders of the square, and the middle area around the fountain was filled with dancers—solos, couples, and groups. Visitors and natives were one jumble of bodies.

  Mike was starving. He went to a table loaded with food, grabbed a spoon, and filled a deep bowl with fermented bean curd and steaming rice. Then he began to make the rounds, gobbling food as he went. Within fifteen minutes he had said a few friendly sentences to fifty strangers. Halfway along the second side of the square he met Melinda.

  "Where have you been?" She frowned. "If you and Jake—"

  She was interrupted by cheers and whistles from the crowd of dancers. They were applauding a figure, giant mug of liquor in hand, who had climbed the fountain and was now standing dizzily on top of it. He drank deeply from the vessel, gave a shout of triumph, and fell backward. There was a roar of approval from the dancers, followed by screams as gallons of water splashed out over those nearest.

  "That's Jake!" Melly said in disbelieving tones. "Come on." She left Mike and ran forward to the fountain. He followed more slowly. By the time he got there a group of laughing dancers had lifted Jake out of the fountain and was holding him upright. He was smiling foolishly, and still held the empty mug.

  "We'll take him," Melly was saying. "He's all right, isn't he?"

  "Wonderfully all right," Jake said. He beamed at her, grunted, and slid toward the ground.

  "Give me a hand." Melly turned to Mike. "I can't believe this—he's drunk as a Greaser's monkey, and he's supposed to be the leader of our group! Let's get him out of here."

  With Mike holding one arm and Melinda the other they led Jake away through the cheering crowd. Mugs were raised, dancers reached out to slap Jake on the back, and the drums played a long accompanying roll. Finally they reached the dark region at the edge of the square. There Jake paused, straightened, and turned to the other two.

  "That's fine." His voice was sober. "Thank you. And now, I'm going to bed."

  He walked quickly away, heading for their sleeping quarters. Melinda stared after him. "He's not drunk."

  "No, he's not," Mike said. "But he has the right idea."

  "You mean, falling in the fountain?"

  "No. I mean going to bed. Good night." Without another word, Mike walked away after Jake Kallario.

  * * *

  The insect bites had seemed no more than an annoyance when they happened. Mike had been far too busy looking at the rocket facility to pay much attention to them.

  It was a mistake he would never make again. While he slept, an inch-wide region around each bite had become itchy, puffy, and red. Looking into a mirror the next morning Mike saw an unfamiliar bloated landscape, red and blotchy, with narrow slits for eyes.

  He cursed his own stupidity. He should have swallowed an anti-inflammatory before going to bed. He could make excuses easily enough—other thoughts had pushed worry about his own condition and comfort into the background. But they didn't help. How was he going to explain his peculiar appearance at the coronation ceremony? Dark sunglasses would disguise the effects a bit. Maybe no one would realize that his eyes were swollen almost shut.

  Mike smeared on ointment, swallowed a pill—better late than never—and headed downstairs. It was not until he was in the bright sunlight outside the building that he realized he had nothing to worry about. The previous night's party had apparently been a tremendous success. Standing by the building and leaning on it for support stood a Strine bigmomma. Her face was a bilious yellow-green—even the lips were pale—and her body sagged as though unfamiliar with gravity. She carried a broad white parasol and wore the biggest and darkest sunglasses that Mike had ever seen.

  "Good morning."

  The bigmomma turned slowly at Mike's words. "Gawd. It might be good for you, honey. Not for me." She didn't even look at his face.

  "Are you sick?"

  "Sick? I'm shattered. That bloody Darklands booze! Here, sweetie, gimme a hand to the car. Got to get to the ceremony. But I feel ready to puke all over Rasool Ilunga."

  Mike decided he would go with her. By comparison, he looked the picture of health.

  The coronation ceremony had supposedly been two years in preparation, but it was still chaos. Half the stands on the far side were incomplete. Mike was shown to a third-row seat, right in the middle of a native group who had obviously been celebrating all night long. They were still drinking, but they were beginning to slump in their seats. By the time that Rasool Ilunga, muffled and unrecognizable in a two-foot crown and thick vestments of gold and purple, was carried forward in a great sedan chair, half of Mike's neighbors had nodded off. The Strine bigmomma, sitting a row in front of him, was snoring audibly.

  He could barely see her anyway. Despite the medication, his insect bites had continued to swell. He was peering at the world through slitted eyes, their lids puffy and inflamed. After a while he gave up the battle and closed his eyes completely. If anyone asked Mike about the great coronation of Rasool Ilunga, Emperor of the Darklands, Light of the World, Lord of the Ten Tribes, he would tell them: heat, dust, brass fanfares, drums, speeches, and a parade of weapons. It would be as good as any analysis offered by his suffering neighbors; and a fair description, he thought wearily, of most coronations in history.

  At only one point in the proceedings, when Rasool Ilunga appeared in full regalia for the actual crowning, did Mike open his suffering eyes as far as he could and observe closely. Heavy gold cloth robes, gold and ivory orb and scepter, solid gold crown. They provided the missing element in Mute's mental picture.

  He closed his aching eyes and allowed his head to sag forward onto his chest. In the sunlit square below, the ceremony dragged on and on.

  * * *

  Instead of improving, Mike's condition worsened. By the time they said good-bye to Inongo Kiri he was hot and aching. The albino's smiling face swam in and out of focus, and it was an effort to shake his gloved hand. When the Trader plane took off for the Azores, Mike was shivering and sweating. The whole ride back was a fever dream.

  Lyle Connery took one look at Mike and put him in sick bay for twenty-four hours.
/>   "Malaria, sleeping sickness, dengue—or all three. What the devil have you been doing to yourself? Look at your face. Joints ache?"

  "All over."

  "Could be anything. But a couple of shots will fix you."

  "What about my report?"

  Connery smiled. "If I were you, I'd write it in the hospital. If we don't like the results, you can always claim you were delirious."

  But he was not smiling the next day when Mike Asparian and Jake Kallario were ordered to his office. Mike still felt terrible, weak and feverish, but he had to hear how his report had been received. He struggled out of bed, dressed himself, and walked the hundred yards from sick bay. It took him over ten minutes.

  When they were all seated Connery nodded at the monitor. "Daddy-O read your reports and is online. We have a rare situation here. Four trainees go on a straightforward mission to attend a coronation. Four trainees, four reports—all with different statements on what was seen, heard, and done." He tapped the four documents sitting on his desk. "You can't all be right. I'm starting with you two, because you had the complicated stories. Jake, here's a direct question: did you drink any alcohol the night before the coronation?"

  "No, sir."

  "But you don't deny that you climbed up the fountain and fell into the water, as Melinda and Mike here claim? It was not in your report."

  "I don't deny it." Jake looked very comfortable. "I omitted it from my report, true; but I climbed the fountain for a purpose."

  "To make Traders look like buffoons?"

  "No, sir. To make everyone remember that I had been at the feast on the night before the coronation, and not somewhere else." Jake gave Mike a smug look. "And they did think that, all of them. I pretended to be drunk for the same reason. You see, sir, when we were given our tour it was obvious that something big was being hidden from us. The Darklanders have a space program that they didn't want us to see. Transportation, and manufacturing—there were synthetic gemstones on display at the Trade Fair, wonderful ones, so big and pure they could only be made in a zero-gee environment. That's when I decided I had to take a close look at their main facility north of the town. When it was dark, I left the other three at the feast and drove out to the space center. And I saw a static test firing, of a rocket as big as anything used by the Chipponese. The Ten Tribes have come farther and faster than anyone dreamed. I concluded that they are now a powerful region, with a spacegoing capability."

  "Which is just what you reported." Daddy-O's voice entered the conversation. "Did you two compare notes during the mission?" Both youths shook their heads. "So you, Jake Kallario, did not know that according to Mikal Asparian you were shadowed on that nighttime trip? By a Darklander?"

  Jake stared, first at Connery and then at Mike. "I'm sure I wasn't." He paused. "At least, I don't think I was—and how could he possibly know?"

  "Because he also visited that facility on the same evening. He saw you, and your shadow. Mikal Asparian, please give your report."

  Despite the medical treatment, Mike was still in bad shape. He tried to stop his teeth from chattering as he began to talk. "I feel sure we were both shadowed, though I didn't ever see the person trailing me. When we returned from the sightseeing tour I felt, as Jake Kallario did, that there were things we hadn't been allowed to see. But my reaction was a bit different from his. If you want to keep a secret, you simply don't allow people to get anywhere near it. The last thing you do is tempt them with a quick look, then make sure they have the time and opportunity to come back for a good look later. But that's what was done with us. And we—the Trader trainees—were the only people given that sneak look at the space facility, plus easy access to ground vehicles. So far as I can tell, the other visitors didn't leave Coronation City. I decided we were being set up for something. Rasool Ilunga and Inongo Kiri wanted us to go back for a second look."

  "That makes no sense." Jake was shaking his head. "If they wanted us to see it, they could have shown it to us."

  "That's what puzzled me." Mike shivered and turned to Lyle Connery. "Why did they want us to sneak in? And why did they make sure we could only do it at night? I didn't know—until I saw their test firing. That was impressive, lots of sound and fury, the static test of a gigantic new rocket. It was deafening. It would have been heard easily in Coronation City—unless there happened to be a mighty party going on there at the time, with everyone talking and singing, and the bands playing. So the night test seemed to make sense, if you wanted to keep it secret. But when I thought about it some more, I realized it still didn't have to be what it seemed. Jake and I were a fair distance away, outside the fence. The test could just as well have been the firing of old solid rockets, lots of them; old weapons, all clustered together. They didn't have to do anything, except look enough like a test to fool us. No Darklands 'space program,' just an elaborate illusion of one. And why at night, on this particular night? Because that's when we could be there to see it. We were manipulated perfectly. The people shadowing us must have signaled the facility when it was time to start the show."

  Mike paused. He wished he were back in bed. His logic had seemed ironclad when he was in Coronation City; now it sounded weak. Jake Kallario was staring at him in disbelief, and Lyle Connery's expression was unreadable.

  "But why you?" Connery said softly. "Why would Rasool Ilunga and Inongo Kiri want to fool four Trader trainees? Why not the Chipponese, or the Strines? In fact, why anyone?"

  "It's preposterous," Jake said. His face was pale. "You're suggesting that the Darklanders were faking a space capability. Why should they? "

  "Well, Mikal Asparian?" Daddy-O said. "Those are good questions. Do you have answers?"

  "Yes." Mike forced himself to sit up straighter and looked into the camera eye. "I have answers. You gave them to us yourself. In the briefing materials for the mission, you said that the Chipponese were looking to the Darklands as a possible equatorial launch and landing site. Correct?"

  "Quite correct. They have been considering it for some time. They need a permanent Earth-based facility."

  "All right. Ilunga wanted that agreement. Traders' Rule: 'Anything can be a negotiation technique.' Rasool Ilunga controls a primitive region, and he seemed to have little to offer the Chipponese. But he's very intelligent, and I think he's also devious."

  "Rasool Ilunga participates in the Chess Network. My assessment is that he occupies fourth place among Earth's human players, just above Max Dalzell."

  "So we can assume his actions won't always have their face value. Very good. Everything we saw in the Darklands, and everything that happened to us there, makes sense if it is regarded as preliminaries to a negotiation between the Ten Tribes and the Chipponese. Ilunga was maneuvering for an opening position, and he wanted us as some of his pawns."

  Mike was leaning forward, talking fast. His head was reeling. He had to get it all out quickly, before he collapsed. "Here's another Traders' Rule: 'Never show that you need what is being offered.' Ilunga wants a treaty with the Chipponese desperately. But he pretends he has no need for one. He wants us to tell the Chipponese that he has been developing a big space program of his own—we saw it with our own eyes. If Traders say something is so, other groups usually believe it. And the Chipponese representatives at Coronation City will support the idea. They saw artifacts—the gemstones—that required either an unmatched Earth-based technology, or a space manufacturing capability. Of course, Ilunga couldn't let the Chipponese visit his 'space test center' for themselves—they would see through it in a picosecond. But four gullible Trader trainees, who could be steered where he wanted them, like little children, and be made to watch things from a suitable distance . . ."

  Mike shivered and swayed on his chair. Lyle Connery reached out and took his arm, supporting him. "Steady now. God help us, you're burning up again. You should be back in the hospital. Why didn't you tell me you were feeling so bad? Kallario, give me a hand."

  Mike allowed himself to be lifted from the chair. "I'm
all right. I had to come here and explain why I did what I did."

  "Well, you're leaving now."

  "I can walk."

  "I'll help you." Kallario's face had mirrored his feelings while Mike was talking. He had been incredulous, uneasy, and finally resentful. "But if you're right about all this, the rest of us are idiots." His voice was bitter as he helped Mike to stand up. "That's the hardest thing for me to accept. Come on. I'll take you back to the hospital."

  With Mike's arm across his shoulders, they headed out of the room. At the doorway Jake paused. "Wait a minute. Maybe they were faking the rocket test. But what about the synthetic gemstones? Everyone agrees they couldn't be fabricated without hi-tech programs and space operations. Isn't that true, Daddy-O?"

  "Quite true. I know of no technique for such synthesis without a space environment." Everyone looked at Mike.

  He nodded. "That worried me. And then I realized that we had also been given the answer to that in our original briefing. But I couldn't confirm it until I saw the actual coronation ceremony. There was something in the briefing material about the fabulous jewels that Rasool Ilunga would be wearing—can you quote it for us?"

  " '. . . He plans an elaborate coronation,' " Daddy-O's voice began with no perceptible delay, " 'putting on display the wealth of the Darklands. And to observe those ceremonies, with their jewel-encrusted robes and jeweled and priceless emblems of office, and also to be witness to his imperial greatness, Ilunga has invited representatives from every region.' Is that the statement to which you are referring?"

  "Exactly. I watched closely. At the ceremony there were miles of gold cloth, and a solid gold crown. Everyone else must have seen what I did. But apparently no one else wondered, where were the jewels?"

  Connery looked at Jake, who thought for a moment, then nodded reluctantly. "He's right. I saw no jewels."