"I'm not scared." He started to shake his head, which did terrible things to his balance centers and semicircular canals. He swallowed, gripped the sides of the harness, and looked out of the port.
He had been given a prime viewing position. As soon as he realized that he was seeing the world the wrong way up, he could begin to pick out a few features. There was the Great Republic, and even from this distance he could see the big difference between that and the Unified Empire. The Republic was groomed, the fields set out in neat patterns. Agriculture in the Unified Empire was a random matter of spotty and straggling development. Was that Skeleton City down mere? And that, spiraling into view . . .
"No. " She grabbed hold of him and turned his head away. "Don't use Earth as your reference frame. We're spinning. You'll lose orientation, and then you'll—"
Too late. She held the bag in front of Mike's face, while he said good-bye to the last meal he had eaten on Earth. For the first time, he wondered if this mission was going to be as simple as Daddy-O had suggested.
* * *
Sick as he felt, Mike was not unhappy. He did not understand what was happening to him, but since his final, reluctant emergence from the Rehab Center he was no longer miserable. There was a sense of impending change—one way or another, something was going to happen to him. A decision point was close. Until it arrived, he would allow himself to be swept along by events.
For a change, he had been well briefed, by Traders who had been up to the Geosynch Ring themselves. The thing that he found hardest to accept was the warning that had come from Daddy-O: "Do not become susceptible to the charms of Chipponese females. It is easy to do so—more than that, it is built into you by nature. It is xenophilia, an urge to draw a mate from outside the tribe. Chipponese women are not initially attractive to Trader men, they are too frail and skeletal; but they are far from you, racially. Be careful. Their appearance may become attractive to you."
Mike looked at the Chipponese woman who had held his head and decided that Daddy-O's warning was quite unnecessary. She wasn't exactly ugly, but she had about as much shape and sex appeal as a grasshopper. The idea that he might be attracted to her was ridiculous. And it seemed that he was likely to be stuck with her as his main liaison for the entire mission.
"My name is Li Xia," she said as soon as they were docked and on the first level of the Geosynch station. She led Mike to a quarter-gee facility, where his stomach would have a chance to put itself back together, and then offered a formal handshake. "I am very pleased to meet you. I will be your principal guide here."
Mike, over the objections of his esophagus, managed to produce a sort of grunt. Traders and Chipponese were both strong on the formalities, but it seemed to him that he had already violated all conventional etiquette by throwing up on her. "Ugh. Hello." He coughed. "I am Mike Asparian."
She was staring at him closely, as though she had never seen a Trader before. He felt entitled to return the compliment. He stared right back.
Li Xia was wearing a yellow sleeveless blouse and shorts. She was tiny and small-framed, just as he had expected. What surprised him was her feeble-looking musculature. Her bones hardly looked as though they would support her weight, and the muscles attached to them were mere knobs of flesh. She could have passed muster in a Lostlands labor camp.
Even so, she was not all that hideous. Her face was far too thin, but it had huge, dark eyes, a clear complexion, and a well-shaped mouth. Her light build gave her a definite grace of movement in low-gee.
She had been looking Mike over from head to toe, and he saw her eyes linger disapprovingly on his midriff. He stood up straighter and pulled in his stomach. Apathy and lassitude after the last mission had added seven or eight kilos, and most of it had settled around his waist. Now he resolved to take it off as soon as possible. There were already enough differences between him and the Chipponese; one secret of successful negotiation was to lessen the psychological distance between oneself and the other party.
While they were still staring at each other, a Chipponese male came forward to stand beside Li Xia. He stood stiffly and self-consciously, waiting for Mike's attention and Li Xia's introduction. The Chip tradition was well defined. If Mike didn't look at him, the newcomer would stand there for hours and never speak.
Mike turned to him and managed a smile that began and ended on his face, with no approval from his unhappy stomach. The man nodded. He was round-shouldered, gray-haired, and withered, and he had a face like a frog.
"Permit me. This is Ando Jia-Chi," Li Xia said. Her expression was anxious. "He too has come here from Luna. Even though he will be returning there shortly, rather than staying here with us, I wanted you to meet him. Six months from now, Ando and I will be married."
Mike inclined his head, held out his hand, and gave Ando Jia-Chi a more thorough inspection. It confirmed the first impression. Everyone to her own taste, Missie Li, he thought. Ando Jia-Chi is even thinner than you are. I wouldn't like to watch the pair of you on your wedding night: two stick insects, rubbing yourselves together and trying to light a fire.
Were there fat Chipponese, out here in space? Certainly the ones Mike had watched gambling in Dreamtown were substantial enough. But everyone he had seen since they docked was nothing more than skin and bones.
"Delighted to meet you, Mr. Ando," Mike said as they shook hands. (Remember the Chip custom: last name comes first.) "You have a delightful fiancée, and you have made an admirable choice for a bride."
Li Xia looked embarrassed, and Ando lifted his nose in the air at Mike as though he had encountered a bad smell.
"Ando and I are from a traditional tong, Mr. Asparian," Li said. "We were chosen for each other by our families. Your congratulations should be given to them."
Social gaffe number two—maybe worse than throwing up in public. "I hope that I will have such an opportunity. And my apologies to both of you, if I am the reason that you will be separated during my visit here."
"No." Li Xia shook her head. Her face was thin boned, her shiny dark hair cut close to the skull. It made her look even thinner. "That was my doing. I asked to be allowed to take part in the negotiation of the entertainment package. Ando is a specialist in energy systems, so his presence would not be appropriate."
It would be worse than inappropriate—it might be disastrous. The last person that Mike wanted hanging round him on this mission was an energy systems expert. His official mission was the negotiation of entertainment facilities for top Chipponese officials in the Unified Empire. The unofficial mission was to examine the energy-supply systems of the Geosynch Ring. With the Great Republic's progress in fusion methods, they were tired of dependence on Chipponese space power for their base load energy. Old-Billy Waters wanted to renegotiate energy cost, but to do that he needed to know how much margin there was in the Chipponese systems—and he wanted it done quietly, without the Chips knowing it was happening.
Mike nodded at Ando, who stood and stared at him with all the charm of a stuffed dummy.
The other man said something rapidly to Li Xia in Chipponese. Mike quietly reached into his pocket and pressed a button. The miniature Chill translator there had cost a monstrous amount, and it wasn't nearly as good as Daddy-O's fifty-language interpretive service, but it weighed only four ounces, and it did everything that was promised.
Li Xia turned to Mike. "Mr. Ando's apologies," she said. She spoke Trader, and the translator was smart enough to know that it didn't need to give a feed to Mike's built-in earpiece. "Mr. Ando is not fluent in your language."
But he was quite fluent enough to understand what I said about choosing a bride. Be careful! "Perhaps you would make my apologies, too," Mike said. "I am sure his knowledge of Trader language far exceeds mine of Chipponese."
"Mr. Ando asked me to invite you to be our guest at a meal, before he is obliged to leave for Luna."
Food. Mike's stomach muttered its protest. He couldn't eat now to save his life. He turned to Ando, smiled, and no
dded graciously. "The pleasure will be all mine."
Ando smiled back at him like a lizard and turned again to Li Xia. Again there was a gabble of Chipponese.
"He accepted, so we are obliged to go through with it," whispered the translator in Mike's ear. "I suppose that you feel it is necessary if you are to succeed in your work with him. So we will feed him. But he is already disgustingly fat and bloated. I am amazed that there can be more room for food inside him."
"He is indeed corpulent," Li Xia said, again in Chipponese. "But not unusually so for one from Earth. By their standards he is not large. And let us be careful what we say now—his dossier indicates that he is ignorant of our language, but who knows?"
"I do," Ando said. "I can tell it by simply looking at his face. I have told you before, they are barbarians. Five thousand years ago, when we already had a flowering civilization, they were gibbering apes, swinging in the trees. Even today, their ignorance of culture is astonishing."
It was a good test of Mike's self-control. He wanted to say that his own lineage might be suspect, but the Traders, as a group, could trace their origins back well over five thousand years, all the way to the Phoenicians and the sunny shores of the Mediterranean Sea. Instead he stood and smiled.
"Tell him we will go to dinner now," Ando went on. "We will get him drunk, and then you will find that we can manipulate him easily. We will find out what he knows."
All three still stood smiling and bowing at one another. Mike elevated Li Xia a notch in his esteem. She had some of the right material to be a Trader. Trader rule: Say what you have to, but think what you want to.
With Ando leading the way they walked around the rim of the quarter-gee chamber to a place where food could be ordered. As they sat down at a table, Ando spoke again to Li. "Ask him if he would like me to order food for all of us."
Mike waited for Li's translation, then nodded.
Ando called up the menu, studied it for a few seconds, then touched his finger to a long series of items. Mike watched closely. His understanding of written Chipponese was quite good, much better than his experience of the spoken language, but he could translate little of the menu. The only thing he was sure of was soup. There was a good chance that he could handle that, even with his protesting stomach. He was curious to see what would be served, since all the Chip food had to be shipped up. Ninety percent of it still came from the Great Republic, in exchange for an assured energy supply.
"It will be a few minutes before our dinner is ready," Li said. "Meanwhile, perhaps you would like to take a look at Earth?"
Mike was tempted to decline politely, recalling what had happened the last time that he had tried to look at Earth. But it was time he began to learn his way around this element of the Geosynch Ring, and he would not gain that knowledge sitting in the dining room. He nodded, and Li Xia rewarded him with a delighted smile.
"Wonderful." She clapped together tiny, thin-fingered hands. "You see, I have had no opportunity to observe this for myself, since we arrived from Luna. And since Ando and I both live on Farside, a look at Earth is a rare occasion for us—and never from such a close distance as the Ring."
It was interesting to note the change in her when Ando Jia-Chi was not running the conversation. She became the cheerful girl Mike had first observed during final shuttle docking.
The Chipponese Geosynch Ring justified its name as a concept, not as a single structure. This station was a single standalone portion of the hundred separate elements that together made up the whole Ring. The elements, spaced fifteen hundred miles apart, were coupled through energy and signal transfers, but each moved freely in its own orbit. The common construction pattern for each station was a set of hollow wheels, skewered like shish kebab on a long central axle. Effective gravity ranged from a quarter of a gee on the wheel perimeters, to free-fall on the central spindle.
The axis of the station pointed to a fixed direction in space. At the moment, its thicker end was pointing down toward Earth. Li Xia led the way in to the zero-gee area of that hollow center, then turned and headed Earthward, moving along the spindle for two hundred yards to its lower end. Mike's insides did one horrid turn-around when they reached weightlessness, then decided they had to make the best of a bad situation. He suddenly felt steadier. With Ando guiding from behind and Li tugging from in front, he floated along like a jellyfish toward the end viewing port.
Now that he was not on a small and rapidly spinning ship, the disorientation was tolerable. Earth hung ahead of them through the port, a thousand times the area of a full moon. The planet was a streaky blue marble, its hazy surface half-obscured by cloud formations. They were hovering over the equator, in the middle of the Indian Ocean.
"See there?" Li Xia pointed excitedly off to a cloud-free area on the right. "That is where my family lived before the Heavenly Cloud came. My grandfather was working on the Unification, and my grandmother was there with him."
Mike discreetly refrained from comment. The Chips had a talent for euphemism that exceeded anything he could manage. He might give a moving mass of deadly radioactivity, thousands of miles across, many names, but Heavenly Cloud was not one of them. It had wiped out at least four billion people—maybe more, because no one had even attempted an Asian and European census since the Lostlands War. And that "Unification" Li had referred to was just as bad. The Chinese and Japanese had been busy murdering each other, with the Japanese marginally losing, when the fallout of radioactivity had changed all their priorities.
Li was pointing at the place where her other grandmother had been born, an area on the east side of the continent where a great river flowed to the ocean. They turned the telescope on and swept across the region. There was no sign of any city south of the river. According to Li a great metropolis, the home for twenty million Chinese, had once stood there.
She turned to Mike. "Have you ever been there? I was told that Traders go everywhere on Earth."
"Everywhere there is something to trade. Not, unfortunately, in that area. But look here." Mike swung the telescope to point a thousand miles farther west. "This is where I was raised as a small child."
Li Xia studied the image. "But that is Hiver territory."
"That's right."
"So you must be racially close to a Chipponese. You do not look it. Are you?"
"I don't know. I don't know where I was born, or anything about my parents. But you are right about my appearance. The Traders' computer estimates that I was captured from somewhere much farther west. Now, of course, the Traders are my family."
"But I did not realize that the Hives traded. Have you been back there?"
"Not yet. One day, perhaps. They trade very little." And the other things they do, I would rather not think about. Mike scanned on westward, across the dark uninhabited plains of India, Pakistan, and Afghanistan, where the Lostlands War had started. He swung south into Africa and halted the telescope to look closely at the Atlantic seaboard.
"You visited that place?" Li asked excitedly. "You are so lucky!"
"My first mission away from the training center was there." Mike focused on Coronation City. It showed as a tiny unresolved blob of darkness against the lighter background. "See? Where the river forks."
"And how about here?" She was moving east again, to a great rift valley that split the African continent. "Have you been here?"
Mike shook his head. "One short visit, that was all. It is beyond the territory controlled by the Ten Tribes."
He did not tell her the rest of it. They had touched down there as a final part of training, rumbling to a halt on a rutted earth runway. The plan had been to evaluate the idea of building a hydroelectric station on the great river that ran half the length of Africa. Construction ought to be easy, and such a station would produce many gigawatts of power.
In less than a day they knew what Daddy-O had known before the computer had sent them there. The plan was hopeless. This part of the continent, without Rasool Ilunga's subtle touch, had turn
ed its back on the twenty-first century. It was regressing, feeling its way back to the old balance with nature. The population was falling; the technology of even the last generation had gone. The heat was murderous, and there was a terrible stillness on the flat, smoking landscape.
Li Xia had read his mood. She nodded and turned to Ando. "Let us go back," she said in Chipponese. "He may be the barbarian you say, but some memory hurts him."
Mike had to remind himself that he was not supposed to understand and he must avoid smiling at her in gratitude.
* * *
Seated again at the table, Ando pressed the dark area on the table edge as a command for service to begin. Mike waited with fair interest. The trip to the viewing ports had improved his condition enough to give an appetite, and he was curious to see what was produced. The Chipponese culinary habits were the least known of any.
Dinner was served. The dishes came into view from the midtable hatches.
Mike found the spread revolting. As soon as he saw the first offering he reached for and surreptitiously swallowed a detox pill.
Cold octopus, like strings of chewy rubber, was the first appetizer, followed by sea slugs stuffed with shredded pork. Snake soup—three kinds of snake, Ando proudly announced. And then the main courses, of raw fish, fried eel, chicken parts—Mike had one piece with the beak still in it—and a black, slimy material which he did not dare to ask about. The food was washed down with beer and interspersed with frequent toasts of mao tai liquor, strong enough to melt the wax out of one's ears.
Traders' training: Mike sampled everything and murmured compliments as the endless succession of dishes appeared on the table. He drank every potion they offered him, and gradually became louder and more garrulous.
He told them about all his missions. How he had triumphed in the Strine Interior, but how he had failed to return Seth Paramine from Cap City; how he had survived the mind-murdering intentions of Dominic Mantilla and of Sabrina Vandermond, and how he had seen through Rasool Ilunga's plans to use the Traders for his own purposes.
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