by John Brunner
“Do you mean shared among the crew?”
“Well, this would involve the setting up of a common fund,” Victor said judiciously. “But it’s one of the schemes which we’ve worked out in some detail. If you’re interested…?”
Interested! That was an understatement, Kynance told herself with cynical satisfaction. Her experience before taking off from Nefertiti to come here had shown beyond a doubt that these men were greedy. A share in the most profitable cargoes in the galaxy had looked like the quickest route to their loyalty, and apparently it was working like magic.
“Here’s the captain, I see,” she murmured. “I wonder how he’ll feel about chartering the ship to us.”
It took a whole day, but it worked out. Patiently, citing authority after authority with the assurance due to a solid Earth year of milking the legal data banks installed in the central computer of the main station, Kynance showed how it could be done. First came the question of ownership of the cargo: Philpot-Soames and Honegger versus the Trans-it Company of Loki, 2094, pointed out that it was illegal to transport cargo without the permission of the owners, and hence they could not load pelts without the Zygran government’s say-so.
The Zygra Company owned nothing on Zygra. They had sent the ship to bring away someone else’s property, and this was piracy within the meaning of the precedent set by Balewa and Chatterji versus Earth-Luna Shuttle Corporation back in 1997. No company—vide Olaf Gunarson versus Phobos Metals, 2045—could compel any employee to engage in illegal undertakings; hence the captain and his entire crew were free to accept work with any other employer.
And so forth, and so forth. When she had finished, Kynance was in a state like a waking dream, soaked in perspiration and hoarse with hours of nonstop explanations. But she knew she had done it. She had set precedents which would take years to filter through the successive courts of the galactic legal system, but they would complete the course as surely as the extract of blockweed would come out of the Zygra coating-station—changed, refined, fortified, but ultimately turned into a solid layer of nourishment for many years ahead, to be transmuted by the living pelt on which it was spread into something with far more meaning, far more importance, and almost infinitely greater value. Not price. Value.
A sort of beauty.
Kynance shivered.
Loaded, chartered, under orders, the renamed vessel Kynance Foy dwindled towards the shredded clouds of Zygra’s sky. Victor, Coberley and Evan were somewhere below in the supervisor’s quarters, celebrating their elevation to ministerial rank in this youngest of planetary governments with the help of some Gean wine bought on credit from the ship’s stores, but Kynance wanted to wait a while before joining them. She stood with hands shading her eyes, watching her namesake ship head for the stars.
Abruptly she begame aware that Horst was watching too—not the ship, but her. She laughed self-consciously and smiled at him. He didn’t return the smile.
He said, “I said you were extraordinary. The most extraordinary thing of all is—well, I’ve realized just this minute that none of us know anything about you. Even after a year, jammed together aboard this floating box of ours. No wonder we’re all a little afraid of you. You seem like a machine, a computer full of miracles.”
“I know,” Kynance said after a pause. “I had to be, didn’t I?”
“Yes.”
“Well, I’ve hated it. And thank you for reminding me before it was too late and I got into the habit for life!” She laughed this time without embarrassment.
“I’ll tell you something I’ve never told anyone else,” she went on. “When I left Earth, I had this secret dream. I was going to come home wearing a zygra pelt and a blase expression, just to jolt the hell out of all my friends who said I’d never make it. By the time I ran into Shuster, I was ready to settle for a square meal and a ticket home, and I didn’t give a damn about zygra pelts. Now, if I go home, I’ll be able to take cases and crates and shiploads of the things, and this is simply ridiculous!”
“ ‘If’ you go home… ? Don’t you want to go back to Earth?”
“Surely. It has its points. But—I’ve been on Earth, Horst. I don’t mind going back the long way around.”
“I used to think Earth was the only place in the galaxy where I might fit in,” Horst muttered. “But that’s not true any longer, is it? There’s a planet called Zygra where people like me can fit in…. I wonder if they’ll realize that.”
“I think so. I estimate—oh—half a year before the first applicants for immigration show themselves.”
“I tell you one thing,” Horst smiled. “If you’re going to stop behaving like a machine and start acting like a woman, there had damned well better be some more women among those early immigrants!”
She gave him a mischievous grin and took his hand. “Let’s join the others,” she said. “After all, it’s the first official function held by the Zygran Government, so it ought to be quite an occasion.”
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Also by John Brunner
A Maze of Stars
A Planet of Your Own
Age of Miracles
Bedlam Planet
Born Under Mars
Castaways’ World
Catch a Falling Star
Children of the Thunder
Double, Double
Enigma from Tantalus
Galactic Storm
Give Warning to the World
I Speak for Earth
Into the Slave Nebula
Manshape
Meeting at Infinity
More Things in Heaven
Muddle Earth
Players at the Game of People
Polymath
Quicksand
Sanctuary in the Sky
Stand on Zanzibar
Telepathist
The Atlantic Abomination
The (Compleat) Traveler in Black
The Altar on Asconel
The Avengers of Carrig
The Brink
The Crucible of Time
The Dramaturges of Yan
The Dreaming Earth
The Gaudy Shadows
The Infinitive of Go
The Jagged Orbit
The Ladder in the Sky
The Long Result
The Martian Sphinx
The Productions of Time
The Psionic Menace
The Repairmen of Cyclops
The Rites of Ohe
The Sheep Look Up
The Shift key
The Shockwave Riders
The Skynappers
The Space-Time Juggler
The Squares of the City
The Stardroppers
The Stone That Never Came Down
The Super Barbarians
The Tides of Time
The World Swappers
The Wrong End of Time
Threshold of Eternity
Times Without Number
Timescoop
To Conquer Chaos
Total Eclipse
Web of Everywhere
John Brunner (1934 – 1995) was a prolific British SF writer. In 1951, he published his first novel, Galactic Storm, at the age of just 17, and went on to write dozens of novels under his own and various house names until his death in 1995 at the Glasgow Worldcon. He won the Hugo Award and the British Science Fiction Award for Stand on Zanzibar (a regular contender for the ‘best SF novel of all time’) and the British Science Fiction Award for The Jagged Orbit.
Copyright
A Gollancz eBook
Copyright © John Brunner 1966
All rights reserved.
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sp; The right of John Brunner to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.
First published in Great Britain in 1966
This eBook first published in 2011 by Gollancz
The Orion Publishing Group Ltd
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5 Upper Saint Martin’s Lane
London, WC2H 9EA
An Hachette UK Company.
A CIP catalogue record for this book
is available from the British Library.
ISBN 978 0 575 10140 1
All characters and events in this publication are fictitious and any resemblance to real persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental.
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