The Merchant's War (6 page)

But Borkmann had had a drink more than he needed too, it seemed, because he too took the path with the beartraps in it. “Oh, I don’t know,” he said. “You have to understand that we Free Venusians have moral objections to forcing people to buy things—especially at the point of a gun.”

“There aren’t any guns pointed at Hyperion, Borkmann! You know that.”

“Not yet,” he admitted, “but haven’t there been such cases right on your home planet?” I laughed, pitying him. “You’re talking about the abos, I suppose.”

“I’m talking about the pitiful few corners of the Earth that haven’t yet been corrupted by advertising, yes.”

Well, by then I was getting irritated. “Borkmann,” I said, “you know better than that. We do maintain a peacekeeping body, of course. I suppose some few of them have guns, but they’re only for protection. I did my own reserve training in college; I know what I’m talking about. They are
never
used offensively, only to preserve order. You must realize that even among the worst of the aboriginals there are plenty of people who want to have the benefits of the market society. Naturally, the old fuddy-duddies resist. But when the better elements ask for help, why, of course we give it.”

“You send in the troops,” he nodded.

“We send in advertising teams,” I corrected him. “There is no
compulsion.
There is no
force. “

“And,” he mimicked, “there is no
escape
— they found that out in New Guinea.”

“It’s true that things got out of hand in New Guinea,” I admitted. “But really—”

“Really,” he said, slamming down his glass, “I have to be going now, Tarb. Nice talking to you.” And he left me fuming. Why, there was really nothing wrong in New Guinea! There had been less than a thousand deaths all told. And now the island was firmly a part of the modern world—we even had a branch of the Agency in Papua! I swallowed my drink in one gulp and turned away … and almost bumped into Hay Lopez, grinning at me. Walking away, glancing back at me over her shoulder, was the Chief of Station. I saw her join the Ambassador and whisper in his ear, still looking at me, and realized this was turning out to be a pretty bad day. Since I was on my way home anyway there was little the Embassy people could do to me, but still I resolved to behave like a proper dip for the rest of the evening.

That didn’t work out, either. Through the luck of the draw, the second partner I drew was Dirty Berthie, the Turncoat Earthie. I should’ve been faster on my feet; I guess I was still a little groggy. I turned around, and there she was, boozy breath, sloppy-fat face and hair piled up on her head to make her look taller. “My dance, I believe, Tenny?” she giggled.

So gallantly I lied, “I’ve been looking forward to it!” What you can say for Dirty Berthie is that even in those spike heels and haystack hairdo, she doesn’t tower over you the way the natives do. That’s about all you can say for her. Converts are always the worst, and Bertha, who is now Deputy Curator for the entire planet-wide Venus library system, was once a Senior Research Vice-President for the Taunton, Gatchweiler and Schocken Agency! She gave all that up to migrate to Venus, and now she has to prove with every word she says that she’s more Veenie than the Venusians. “Well, Mr. Tennison Tarb,” she said, leaning back against my arm to study my shiner, “looks like somebody’s husband came back when he wasn’t supposed to.”

Just a harmless jocularity, right? Wrong. Dirty Berthie’s little jokes are always nasty. It’s “How’s organized lying today?” for a hello, and, “Well, I mustn’t keep you from peddling some more poison baby food,” when she says good-by.
We
aren’t allowed to do that kind of thing. To be fair, most of the native Veenies don’t, either, but Bertha is the worst of both worlds. Our official policy on Bertha is smile and say nothing. That’s what I had done for all those long years, but enough was enough. I said—

Well, I can’t defend what I said. To understand it you have to know that Bertha’s husband, the one she gave up her star class job on Earth for, was a pilot on the Kathy-to-Discovery airline, who lost part of his right leg and an unspecified selection of adjacent parts in a crash the year after they were married. It’s the one thing she’s sensitive about. So I gave her a sweet, sweet smile and said, “I was just trying to do Carlos’s work as a favor to him, but I got the wrong house.”

My joke wasn’t very funny. Bertha didn’t even try for one in response. She gasped. She pushed free of my arms, stood stock-still in the middle of the dance floor and cried, loud and clear, “You bastard!” There were actual tears in her eyes—rage, I guess.

I did not have a chance to study her reaction. A beartrap grip closed on my shoulder and the Chief of Station herself said politely, “If I can borrow Tenny a moment, Bertha, there are some last-minute things we have to settle …”

Out in the corridor she squared off, head to head. “You
ass,
” she hissed. Sprinkles of saliva like snake venom ate pits in my cheeks.

I tried to defend myself. “She started it! She said—”

“I heard what she said, and the whole damned room heard what
you
said! Jesus, Tarb!” She had let go of my shoulder, and now she looked as though she wanted to take me by the throat instead.

I backed away. “Pam, I know I was out of line, but I’m a little shook up. Don’t forget somebody nearly murdered me today!”

“It was an
accident.
The Embassy has officially listed it as an
accident.
Try to remember that. It doesn’t make sense any other way. Why would anybody bother to murder you when you’re on your way home?”

“Not me. Mitzi. Maybe there’s a double agent among the spies she’s recruited, and they know what she’s doing.”

“Tarb.”
There was no snake venom this time and no hiss, not even anger. This was just an icy warning. She looked quickly around to make sure no one was nearby. Well, of course I shouldn’t have said anything like that while there were Veenies in the building—that was Rule Number One. I started to say something, and she raised her hand. “Mitsui Ku is not dead,” she said. “They’ve operated on her. I saw her myself in the hospital, an hour and a half ago. She hadn’t regained consciousness, but the prognosis is good. If they wanted her dead, they could have done it in the operating room and we never would have known it. They didn’t.”

“All the same—”

“Go back to bed, Tarb. Your injuries are more severe than we realized.” She didn’t let me interrupt, but pointed toward the private rooms.
“Now.
And I’ve got to get back to my guests—after I stop in my office to add some remarks to an efficiency report. Yours.” She stood there and watched me out of sight.

And that was the last I saw of the Chief of Station, and almost the last I saw of anything at all for quite a while—two years and a bit— because the next morning I was hustled out of bed by two Embassy guards, bundled into a station car, hurried to the port, packed into a shuttle. In three hours I was in orbit. In three hours and a half I was lying in a freezer cocoon, waiting for the sleepy drug to put me out and the chill-down to start. The space liner was not due to start its main engines for another nine orbits—more than half a day—but the Ambassador had given orders to get me put away. And get me put away they did.

The next thing I knew I was being eaten alive by fire ants, that unbearable arm’s-asleep feeling you get when you’re first thawed. I was still in the cocoon but I was wearing an electrically warmed skinsuit with only my eyes exposed, and bending over me was somebody I knew. “Hello there, Tenn,” said Mitzi Ku. “Surprised to see me?”

I was. I said I was, but I doubt that I managed to express just how surprised I was, because the last thought I remembered, just before the whirly-down sleepiness took over, was rueful regret that I hadn’t had that last farewell appearance in Mitzi’s bed, and was not likely ever to get a chance to make it up.

I was startled at her appearance. Half her face was bandaged, only the mouth and chin exposed, with two little slits in the dressing for eyes. Of course, that was natural enough. Healing doesn’t take place when you’re frozen. Effectively Mitzi was only a few days out of surgery. “Are you all right?” I asked.

She said sharply, “Sure I am. I’m fine! I mean,” she qualified, “I probably won’t be
all
fine for weeks yet, but I’m ambulatory. As you see,” she grinned. I
think
she was grinning. “When the doctors said I could leave the hospital I made up my mind that Venus had seen the last of me. So I tore up my reenlistment papers and they got me on the last shuttle. I stayed unfrozen for a while, until they could get the stitches out—and here I am!”

The itching had dwindled to the almost bearable range. The world suddenly looked brighter, and I started to peel off the hotsuit. Mitzi nodded. “That’s the spirit, Tenn! We touch down on the Moon in ninety minutes— better get your pants on!”

To my surprise, the two deported Marines were on the same ship. That was a good thing. Without them helping me limp off I doubt I would have made it. Mitzi, all bandaged and broken, was fine. I was not. I was sick, and by that I mean, man,
sick.
I’ve always been susceptible to motion sickness, but it had never occurred to me that it was just as bad to be on the Moon.

Venus is terrible, sure, but at least on Venus you weigh what you expect to weigh. The Moon isn’t that friendly. They say after the first six weeks you stop throwing your coffee across the room when you only want to put it to your lips but I’ll never know that for myself —I don’t like the place. If we’d come on a regular Earth rocket we’d have shuttled down to the surface right away, but it was a Veenie vessel and had to stop at quarantine.

And that, really, was a farce! I’m not saying anything against the Agencies. They run the Earth very well. But the whole idea of quarantine is to keep Veenie diseases out, right? That includes the worst Veenie disease, the political pestilence of Conservationism. So you’d expect that on the Moon they’d give the Veenies a hard time in Customs and Immigration. In fact Immigration waved them past with no more than a cursory look at their passports. I don’t mean just the crew, who weren’t going anywhere but the nearest flopjoint anyway. Even the handful of Veenie business people and dips, transshipping to the Earth, got greased through in no time.

But us Terrestrials—wow! They sat Mitzi and me down and magnetic-checked our papers and pried through our bags, and then the questions began. It was report all contact with Venusian nationals in line of duty for past eighteen months; give purpose of contact and nature of information communicated. Report all such contacts
not
in line of duty—purpose and information included. We were three hours in that sealed cubicle, filling out forms and answering questions, and then the interrogator got serious. “It has been ascertained,” he said—grammatically speaking the voice was passive, but the actual voice rang with loathing and contempt, “that certain Earth nationals, to secure easy admission to Venus, have performed ritual acts of desecration.”

Well, that was true enough. It was just another typical lousy Veenie trick, like the Japanese making Europeans trample on Bibles centuries ago. When you got to the Veenie Immigration checkpoints you had a choice. You could go through four or five hours of close questioning, with all your belongings opened and most likely a body search. Or you could take an oath renouncing “advertising, publicity, media persuasion or any other form of manipulation of public opinion”; toss off a few slanders of your Agency; and then, depending on how good an actor you were, breeze right through. It was a big joke, of course. I chuckled and started to explain it to him, but Mitzi cut in ahead of me. “Oh, yes,” she said, nodding earnestly, her expression as disapproving as his own, “we’ve heard that, too.” She gave me a warning look. “Do you happen to know if it’s true?”

The Immigration man put down his stylus to study her face. “You mean you don’t know whether that happens or not?”

She said carelessly, “One hears stories, sure. But when you try to put your finger on it, you just can’t find a single concrete bit of evidence. It’s always, no, it didn’t happen to me, but I heard from this person that he had a friend who— Anyway, I can’t really believe a decent Terrestrial would do such a thing.
I
certainly wouldn’t, and neither would Tennison. Apart from the plain immorality of it, we know we’d have to face the consequences when we came back!”

So grudgingly the man passed us, and as soon as we were outside I whispered to Mitzi, “You saved my tail—thanks!”

“They just started doing that a couple years ago,” she said. “If we’d admitted taking a false oath it would go on our records—then we’d be in the stuff.”

“Funny you heard that that was happening and I didn’t.”

“I’m glad you can see the humor of it,” she said bitingly, and for some reason, I perceived, she was furious. Then she said, “Sorry. I’m in a bad mood. I think I’ll try to get a few more of these bandages off—then it’ll be time for the shuttle!”

Earth! The birthplace of homo sapiens. The homeland of true humanity. The flowering of civilization. When we came to the shuttle in its lock and I caught a glimpse of its graffiti I knew I was home. “Everett Loves Alice.” “Tiny Miljiewicz has herpes in his ears.” “Rams all the way!” There’s nothing on Venus like our native Terrestrial folk art!