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."
"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.
Wonderful food and drink, great service, a magnificent setting—and a full eight weeks to enjoy it, with no Mentors, no negotiations, and no recording disks. What more could anyone ask?
Mike sat at the table for a long time after he had finished eating, watching the cloud patterns. They were piling up over the mountains, dark thunderheads towering above the western slopes. The clouds were rolling masses of black and purple-red, shot through with shafts of afternoon sun and changing minute by minute.
Mike had intended to idle away the rest of the day there, but when it was still a couple of hours away from sunset he stood up and left the dining room. The lodge was a two-story wooden building set into the steep hillside, with two bedrooms on the second floor and a living room, kitchen, and dining room beneath them. He went up to his bedroom for a couple of minutes and pawed restlessly through a pile of clean clothes, then wandered downstairs again and continued through into the kitchen. Helga was still there, quietly cleaning the old-fashioned cooking pans. She looked at him inquiringly.
"You need more food?"
He shook his head. "I'm bored. Helga, when will the inn be open, down in the village?"
"Is open now, if you want beer. Is open always, in this season. But it is a very bad time." She gestured at the thickening clouds. "Rain later."
"I'll take the chance."
Mike slipped into his pocket the big, wrought-iron key to the lodge that Lucia Asparian had sent to him. He would need it later. Helga lived down in the village, and she would be heading home in another hour. Although it was the Asparian lodge, and according to Helga the place was usually fully occupied for most of the year, Mike was currently the only guest. He puzzled over that as he walked along the steep, curving path down to the cluster of fifty houses, a thousand feet below, that comprised the village.
By the time he reached the first building the sun was invisible behind dark clouds, and there was a distant grumble of thunder from the west. He increased his pace, hurrying over the uneven white flagstones that passed for a road.
The inn was in the middle of the village. Like the lodge and most of the houses it was built of old, dark wood, but it was four stories tall and much bigger. A noisy row of birds with yellow bills and black plumage sat high along the spine of the roof. As Mike approached the front door, the whole cawing line took sudden flight and headed off toward a small grove behind the inn. Before Mike could read that as some sort of omen, there was a closer grumble of thunder and the first spatter of raindrops.
He pushed open the solid door and hurried inside. Most of the first floor was a long dining room with battered wooden tables. He looked around. Like the lodge, everything here was incredibly clean. Even the hardwood floor showed no trace of dirt, though guests must trek in muck all the time. He self-consciously wiped his shoes on the rough mat at the threshold.
The woman who came to greet him could have been Helga's daughter. She was about twenty years old, with the same high cheekbones touched with pink, the same blooming complexion and braided flaxen hair, and a younger, slimmer version of the buxom body. She was wearing a printed apron with a faded floral pattern, and the long sleeves of her mauve dress were rolled up to reveal pale, muscular forearms. She walked with more sway to her hips than Mike had ever seen before.
"Just in time," she said. She gave him a beautiful, full-lipped smile and gestured at the door. Outside there was a sudden hiss of heavy rain. "It's starting. Something to drink?"
"Beer." But then, when she was already turning to go through to the kitchen, he changed his mind. "Better still, do you have hot chocolate?"
"Of course." She gave him another dazzling smile over her shoulder and left him to seat himself.
The room was a combination of beer garden and dining room, with small tables flanking a wall of wine barrels. About a dozen people were there, drinking beer, wine, and brandy. They had stared at Mike when he came in, but now they were returning to their own conversations. He went to sit at an inconspicuous place in a corner near the window, where he would have a good view of the other patrons.
Most of them seemed like local
residents, but at the far end of the room two men and a woman were dressed in a style that was subtly out of place. Mike pegged them as visitors from the Great Republic. If so, they had wandered far off the usual travel routes through the Economic Community. On the other hand, so had he. Mike turned his attention to a table closer to his.
The two men sitting there wore tweedy jackets and trousers with leather gaiters. They were speaking to each other in low tones. One of them still wore his hat, a squat brown cylinder with a long green feather on the side, and as he spoke the feather bobbed and jerked as though to emphasize his points. A flagon of peppermint schnapps sat on the table between them, and they were drinking shot after shot from little glass cups. As they drank they became gradually more animated and intense, but did not speak quite loudly enough for Mike to hear them.
It was a negotiation. It had to be. Even without hearing a word, Mike could follow the body language. He watched in fascination as the bareheaded man pulled out a folded sheet of paper from his pocket and passed it across the table. The other ran his eyes over it for only a moment, then at once snapped his fingers, took a pen from his pocket, and scribbled an addition to the sheet.
Bad timing! A Trader could read the transaction without thinking about it. Even with no idea what had been written, Mike knew that there should have been a longer pause before a reply. He felt like standing up and offering his services to the man with the hat. In Mike's opinion he was the underdog in the negotiation, and there was always more challenge to taking that side.
It was an urealistic response. Mike knew that a Trader did not indulge in impromptu negotiations, no matter how tempting. And anyway it was too late. The bareheaded man was smiling now and reaching out his hand. The other shook it. They each tossed down one more glass of schnapps to seal the bargain, stood up, and walked to the door. They stood for a minute or so waiting for a lull in the downpour, apparently decided that one was not about to arrive, and hurried out.
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