Trader's World (11 page)

If he was mad and quite desperate, there was the north approach. A Trader could go in by any damn fool way he liked through the northern badlands, where the southern fringe of the fallout had swept east. No one watched that coastline. Things still grew peculiarly there, even by Strine standards. And they acted worse than they grew.

Mike had looked at the northern approach for about five seconds, shuddered, and abandoned it. Get through the badlands, and then what? He would be carved up by the Interior tribes, unless he were very lucky or very skillful, before he got to Berra or BigSyd or anywhere else that counted.

As a neophyte on his first full mission, Mike decided he had no real choice. He had to take the second option of the southern sea-route. He would fly to Orklan, then go west by surface vessel to enter at BigSyd on the east coast. From there it would be a tough overland trek into the worst part of the Interior—only a few hundred miles south of the badlands.

And
after
he reached the Interior, the hard part would begin. According to Connery, the Strines were "expecting him." Instead of being reassuring, that somehow sounded ominous.

The flight to Orklan in a Trader transport was dull but comfortable. Mike spent the time taking a last look at briefing documents. The Strine penchant for swords and knives didn't sound promising. Mike had not seen a sword since he left the Darklands, and he certainly didn't know how to handle one. Nor did he intend to try.

Orklan was small and sleepy. The real culture shock began when he was dropped off at the jetty and went aboard the Strine ship waiting at the quayside. Although the three-funneled, broad-hulled vessel appeared to be totally deserted, within two minutes of his arrival the engines had started and they were maneuvering their way out of Orklan harbor.

"The crew—where are they?" Mike subvocalized the question deep in his throat. It went to the organic converter in his cerebellum, generated the hyperfrequency pulse, and sent a directional signal. Mike waited the necessary fraction of a second while the message went up to synchronous orbit, through a Chipponese relay satellite, down to the Azores, and back.

"Probably asleep."
The thread of Jack Lester's voice came amused to Mike's left ear.
"And there should only be one crew member. Read your briefing notes, matie. Don't worry, we'll find him once we're well on our way. Make yourself at home here. These ships can run on full automatic—the Strines use the best microcircuits that Cap City can provide. The only reason for a crew at all is probably to keep an eye on you. Take a good look round, would you? It's too long since I've seen this part of the world."

Mike dutifully took a tour of the deck, looking out now and again across the dark swells of the open sea. He did it slowly, waiting for Lester's acknowledgment at each stage before moving on. The ship was traveling at high speed. Orklan was already out of sight behind them.

"Ah! Smell that air!"
The Mentor's voice was an ecstatic whisper.
"Take a good sniff for me, boyo. There's nothing like that anywhere else in the world. Dust and euclypts and mulgas. That west wind comes here right out of the middle of the Strine mainland; after it passes over Orklan it won't hit land again until the Greaserland coast—seven thousand miles of open sea!"

Mike looked around and felt far from ecstatic. They were well out of sight of land, heading across endless gray water. The brisk wind in his face was blowing the surface of the sea into long, sullen swells, and the ship was plunging straight into them. The black metal deck had begun to pitch and roll in an alarming way. Spray from the bows was blowing back to wet his face.

Suddenly Mike had the feeling that they were cutting through dark hills of thick oil, the rendered fat of some primitive and gigantic beast. He could taste it on his lips. He held tight to a deck derrick, and wondered why the Medlab had bothered to give him a seasickness shot that didn't work.

"Three days before we reach BigSyd. Is it going to be like this all the way?"

"Like this? Nah."
Lester giggled in his ear.
"This is a flat calm. We're in the Roaring Forties, where the winds blow right around the world and hardly see land. When we're farther out, we might get a real blow. Cheer up, boyo, you'll be all right once you get your sea legs. You'll be up and looking for trouble. Your problem is, you don't have enough to do, so you stand around and think about your innards. Why don't you go forward and look for the skipper? I've been wondering if I might know him from other trips."

Mike stared around him, belched queasily, and shook his head. Lover-boy Lester might be right, and his conditioning would no doubt eventually take over. But there was no sign of it yet. He clutched his midriff, lurched down a dimly lit companionway to his quarters, and felt his way to a bunk.

"Here, what are you doing? You're not supposed to goof off before you even start."

Mike lay down and tongued the control that cut Lester out of contact. He had been told to do that only when he slept, but the hell with it. The Mentor was more than he could take at the moment. Mike closed his eyes and tried to concentrate on his mission. He had been briefed often enough about what he ought to do when he reached the Strine mainland, but no one had thought it worthwhile to mention how sick he was going to feel before he even got there. What else had they not bothered to tell him? And how many little surprises did the Traders deliberately put in their final test for admission? And whose idea was it to inflict Lover-boy Lester on him as his Mentor? And as for that damned clumsy recording disk . . .

Mike allowed himself five minutes of silent general misery—
Rule 39: Don't be ashamed of self-pity; it is the only sort you are likely to get
—then he forced his mind back to the present situation.

The mission. If he kept his mind on the mission, he wouldn't have time to think about being sick. He would lay out the bare facts and see if anything new came to mind. Think positive, he told himself. We've passed Orklan and are on our way.

Mission profile. It had sounded simple enough; but then, almost everything did, when Lyle Connery explained it. Three months ago, a Strine bigmomma had died of a sex-drug overdose in Ree-o-dee. All the expensive hotel rooms in the Unified Empire pleasure towns were bugged as a matter of course, so within five minutes the hired male consort had been decoupled and whisked away. The room was made ready for a new occupant. The bigmomma's body would be returned to Strineland, assuming suitable payment, or disposed of locally.

No problem. A neat, standard Greaser operation, something that happened ten times a day somewhere in the continent, handled with the efficiency that had made the Unified Empire the world center for illicit sex and drugs. The situation became more complicated when a Trader agent had the opportunity to search the momma's body before anyone else. He had found and removed a small package of yellow berries from a secret compartment of the momma's spiked bootheel. They were smuggled back to a Trader analysis lab, and there the mystery grew. Daddy-O had nothing like them in the data bases—and Lyle Connery assured Mike that if Daddy-O didn't have it,
nobody
did. It was a new plant species, genetically modified. Daddy-O had produced a couple of useful pointers: the berries seemed to be the fruit of some form of Strine euclypt; and the bigmomma had come to Ree-o-dee from The Musgrave, smack in the middle of the Strine Interior. Also she had let it be known in Ree-o-dee that she had something special with her that she might sell for the right price. Add in the Strine biolabs' skills in bioengineering, and the picture was clear. Some Strine lab had developed a new plant species.

"We thought that might be the end of it," Lyle Connery had said, "but it turned out to be the beginning. Our first set of tests on the berries showed that they contained a complex alkaloid, one that we couldn't identify. We weren't sure what we had, and we wanted the most complete analysis we could get. So we let the other regions bribe us a little. That way they could each get their hands on a few berries from our supply."

"Why let
them
into it?" Mike asked. "Aren't our labs as good as theirs? Seems to me they'd try and screw us if they found anything good."

Lyle Connery shook his head. "Our equipment may be as good, but we won't experiment on human 'volunteers' the way that some of them will. And even if they found the berries were valuable, they would still have to deal with us—because we are the only ones who know where the berries come from. The Strines aren't talking. Anyway, about a month ago the agent grapevine began to pass along test results. They were quite something. Look at this video. It's the recent sprint final from the Unified Empire Games."

He called a video onto the display screen. It showed a group of eight runners lined up in starting blocks. At the electronic signal one woman burst off the mark well ahead of the others. She increased her lead all the way to the finish line and won by more than ten yards.

"That's a Chill competitor," Connery said. "Trudi Snorresen, from Cap City. There's no way she should have won. According to Daddy-O's records, before she ran in these games her best time for one hundred meters was about nine point seven. You've just seen her running eight point eight. Rumors from the southern ice cap say that Snorresen was holding herself back all the way in that race—in training, she is supposed to run the distance in just over five seconds."

Connery flicked off the display. "Those berries are something special. Apparently the alkaloid we discovered in them totally changes synapse speed and reaction times. The Chills call the active component 'Velocil,' and that's not a bad name. When a human being gets ten milligrams or so into the system, the only limit on speed of movement seems to be simple tissue-tearing stresses. We've heard reports from the Great Republic of a Yankee woman catching swallows out of the air with her bare hands, and a man grasping a rattlesnake safely by the head while it was striking at him. The Ten Tribes have a movie of a hunter running down an antelope in full flight, and from up in orbit there's a rumor of a Chipponese woman picking a bullet out of the air—though we're still skeptical about that one. But the rest are quite enough. Those berries are a unique new resource."

"But who wants them?" Mike had been dazzled by the speed and grace of the runner, but it was hard to see why improved reaction time was so valuable. "Isn't everything that needs really fast speed computer-controlled anyway?"

Connery smiled. "Most of the serious things are. But the Unified Empire would like to see Velocil completely under their control. Think what unlimited use of it would do to their businesses. It could screw up horse races, athletic contests, card games—everything that the visitors to the Unified Empire bet on. With a dose of Velocil, a card player could change a jack to a king so fast that no one would see anything happen. Cockfights and bullfights and horse racing would be completely unpredictable. I suppose the Greasers could drug-test everything and everyone, but that would be a terrific hassle. Far better to control it at the source."

"But why not let them buy the rights from us?"

"Two reasons. First, we don't
have
the rights—though we haven't told anyone that. The other regions assume they can deal with us. Second, the Yankeeland farmers are also interested in the berries, as a Great Republic agricultural crop. Remove the alkaloid, and in what's left you have the highest vegetable protein per gram anyone has ever seen."

"Then why not just negotiate with the Great Republic and the Unified Empire—and the Chills and Chipponese, too, for that matter. I assume they're all interested."

"They are." Connery sighed. "And we can't. We have to work with the Strines—because someone else is at least as smart as we are. Those berries have seeds in them, but they are
sterile.
They were exposed to a big dose of radiation before we got our hands on them. Someone has to go to the Strine Interior and confirm the source of the Velocil berries. We need solid facts on their growth and production. That's your mission, and that's what they're expecting from you. After that we will have to strike some kind of deal for a guaranteed supply, but we're not asking you to do that. You don't have the experience for it. All clear to you?"

Mike nodded. "Information, not final negotiation. I'll remember."

"Good. One other thing before you go. Rule Four."

Mike cleared his throat. Rule Four was the kicker that could kill a Trader. "Sure. 'Anyone who isn't working two agendas at once should give up being a Trader.' "

"Right. We don't apply that to trainees, so there's no
official
second item. But here's something unofficial. A few weeks ago we had a rumor of something else in the Strineland Interior—something that might be a lot more important than Velocil. Did you ever hear of the Dulcinel Protocol?"

Mike stared at Lyle Connery and racked his brains. The Dulcinel Protocol. Something that had been a passing reference, near the beginning of Trader training. Where did it fit? Back at the very beginning of the Lostlands War, before the Chipponese went to space.

"Wasn't that a Strine development, too?" he said at last. "A long time ago. Something to do with the abo teams?"

"Not bad." Lyle Connery nodded approval. "It's nice to know that some of the lessons stick. The original Dulcinel Protocol was used with the first haploid abo killing teams, forty years ago. It's a lymphocyte change to permit rapid self-healing after wounds—part of the reason the abos were so effective against the Chipponese. We thought we knew the whole story on it. But now we hear reports of a major new development. This time the Protocol is more general. It can be applied to anyone, not just haploid abos. And it does many more things: rapid healing, resistance to disease, shrinking of malignant growths, tissue restoration, lessened need for sleep, and greater endurance. But there's a problem: the Strines are telling us that the new Dulcinel Protocol doesn't exist, so there's nothing to discuss. And it's not the usual situation, where they keep something close to their chests just to get a better deal. This time they don't want anyone to have it—period. We hear they'll kill anyone who tries to get it."