Trader's World (16 page)

Cinder-feller suddenly groaned. Mike watched in fascination as the great body levered itself off the sofa. The Strine bigmomma was even more impressive standing, towering half a head above Mike.

"For tonight, enough." The voice was weary, and the cowled head nodded past Mike. "
He
will show you to your quarters."

Mike jerked around. He had heard nothing, but right behind him squatted a haploid abo. "For your own sake," Cinder-feller said, "do not try to leave those quarters during the night. There is a danger that he might . . . misunderstand your actions." There was a throaty laugh. "You will find ample food and drink in your quarters. Sleep well, Trader Mike."

* * *

Cinder-feller's final words were good advice, but Mike had trouble following them. The abo warrior led him silently along a descending staircase to a windowless hexagonal room containing a bed, bathroom, and kitchen facilities. Mike went inside, closed the door, then after a minute or so opened it again. The abo was squatting at the far side of the corridor, eyes closed. Mike looked for a few seconds at the man's smooth, shining skin and peaceful face, until finally the head lifted and nostrils flared to sniff the air. The eyes opened. Mike went back inside and closed the door.

The kitchen area was large and liberally stocked with food and drink, most of it unfamiliar. There was the usual dried mutton, beer, bread, and bean-curd concentrates, but they were flanked by a dozen other jars and bottles. Mike sampled a small amount from each container. He could recognize the tang of fermented euclypt berries, and the resinous flavor of blackboys and prickly pear, and that was all.

He lay on the bed, checked the recording disk, and made his oral daily report. It was a slow business, and several times he paused to reconsider. How much did he actually
know
? Very little. He wished that Jack Lester were available to bounce ideas off. Crazy or not, Jack knew the psychology of the Strines. If Fathom were right, what Cinder-feller said could not be relied on; if Cinder-feller were telling the truth, then everything that Fathom had done, including the whole time on the ship from Orklan, had been a setup designed to win information via Mike regarding the operation here in The Musgrave. And if
both
were lying?
Rule 30: Assume everybody is lying . . .

Mike thought again of his instructions from Lyle Connery; of Sweet Pea, the deaf-mute who wasn't; of Cinder-feller, the "hideously mutilated" boss of The Musgrave, whose voluminous clothes might hide any deformity, but whose face and hands showed no signs of one; and finally, of the superbly conditioned haploid abo who now sat outside the door. Mike compared that man with the warrior column he had seen running off into the roiling dust storm.

The conclusion that he reached kept him awake for many hours.

* * *

When he finally fell asleep, he dreamed . . .

. . . he was running, fleeing north across the flat, open land of the Strine interior. The sun was in his eyes, blinding him. When he turned toJook back they were always there, fifteen or twenty of them. They were a couple of miles behind . . . closing steadily. Haploid abos, naked, slamming effortlessly across the badland barrens. He looked ahead. The sea lay in that direction, due north. It was only a few miles away, but it might as well have been at infinity. He was nearly exhausted, moving more and more slowly. The abos had broken their silence. Now he could hear them cooing and calling to one another, in thin whispers of sound . . .

Mike awoke. He was sweating, and his heart was pounding. The room was lit by one faint fluorescent wall tube. He jerked upright. As he did so, two people who had been talking together in low voices near the door fell silent. After a few seconds they looked at each other and moved closer.

"Good thing you woke," one of them said. "We didn't know if we should let you sleep or not. It's nearly noon."

Mike shivered and put his hands to his head. The detox pills worked, but sometimes they had their own brief aftereffects. After a few moments the room steadied. The intruders were a man and a woman, identically dressed and so similar in age and appearance that they had to be fraternal twins, if not cross-sex clones. They were in their middle twenties, with tight curls of dark brown hair, bright brown eyes, and cheeky expressions.

It was the girl who had spoken to Mike, and hers was the voice he had somehow woven into his dream. Now she came to the side of the bed. "We're here to show you round the labs," she said when Mike did not speak. "I'm Bet Bates."

"And I'm Alf Bates," the man chimed in. Even their voices matched, his half an octave deeper than hers. "We'll show you the whole place, but there's no hurry. If you want to wash or eat, we can wait outside for you."

"No. Give me a few seconds to get my head together." Mike stood up slowly, rubbing his eyes. He had to wipe out that nightmare of abo pursuit. "All right, I guess I'm ready. Where's Cinder-feller?"

"Where she always is." Bet Bates sounded surprised. "She doesn't leave Headquarters, except sometimes at night she'll go out and swim in the lake. And she can get to that right from her rooms."

"I thought she wanted to see me again today."

"She does," Alf said cheerfully. "We'll take you to her when we're finished. Anything special you want to see?"

Their attitude was oddly casual and confident. Neither seemed much impressed at meeting a Trader, or at all deferential toward Cinder-feller.

"I don't know what there
is
to see," Mike said. "But I'm a Trader. So show me anything here in The Musgrave that you think might be worth trading."

The other two exchanged pleased looks. "Right," Bet said. "Come with us." They led the way from Mike's quarters into the corridor and up three full turns of a long spiral staircase. "Hold tight," said Alf, pushing open a heavy metal door. They were at once hit by the full sunlight of midday Strineland. After the gloom of the underground facility the effect was shattering. Mike squeezed his eyes shut, seeing a dull red glow through his eyelids and waiting for his pupils to make their adjustment.

Alf laughed. "Gotcher. You have to be ready for that. Don't worry, we'll be going back down in a minute. This is just a short cut to the main labs."

The heat was enough to make Mike feel dizzy. He took a deep breath and gazed around him. The ground was like baked brick, red and bare, without even the scrubby vegetation that he had seen through most of the Strine Interior. The only exception was a thin ring of trees that grew in a rough circle about two miles across. Their blue-green leaves rustled in the hot noon breeze, and their species were unfamiliar to Mike. After a few moments he realized that they must mark the boundary of the underground lake. If so, the body of water was a good deal smaller than his earlier night impression of it.

Another flotilla of light aircars was parked close to the trees, each carrying the same quadruple spiral insignia on its blunt nose. There were even more of them here than Mike had seen in the underground garage. Alf saw the direction of his look. "Local transport. We use them to travel inside The Musgrave and patrol the borders. Of course, we hardly need them for that. The abo teams stop anything coming in or going out."

A barbed message from Cinder-feller?
Don't try to get away, you'll never do it without my help.
Maybe. Mike walked closer to one of the cars, studying its design. It was quite different from the vehicle that had carried him from Eucla to Alice. These were electric-powered runabouts, Yankee imports with a range not much more than a hundred miles. They would get him to the border of Fathom's territory, or northwest into the badlands, but nowhere else. He pointed at the marking on the aircar's nose.

"Our sign," Bet said proudly, without waiting for a question. "Just you wait. In a few years you'll see that on half the biolab products anywhere in the world." She jerked her thumb toward the trees and bushes that marked the edge of the underground lake. "Alf and me, we designed every one of those. They're all valuable, and all different. They're biological concentrators."

Mike stared at the dusty vegetation. On a closer inspection he could see odd nodular fruit growing in close to the main stems.

"For different materials," Alf added. "Metals and rare earths, mostly. See that one? It concentrates selenium. Takes it in through the roots and deposits the oxide in the black fruit."

"What about water?"

"The taproot is strongly hydrotropic. It'll grow from a seed, right down till it gets to the edge of the lake. The tree next to that one handles vanadium—seventy percent pure in the red fruit. Both of them can tolerate seawater on their root systems."

Mike looked at the plants for a long time. "
You
developed these?" he said at last. "The two of you?"

"Sure did." Bet shrugged. "You like them? That's nothing. We did veggies when we were first starting, four years ago. They're old stuff. Wait until you get inside our new labs."

They were skirting the tree line and approaching a long escalator that ran down parallel to it. Mike took a last look around him, scanning the scene. He made his own assessment of distances and locations, then followed the twins onto the descending staircase.

How old was the Trader information on the Strine biolabs? It had been five years since Jack Lester was in southern Strine-land, three since the last Trader visit. And nothing in the briefings had hinted at what Mike was seeing now in The Musgrave. Cinder-feller was no more than a name in the Trader data banks, while Alf and Bet—
Alpha and Beta
?—Bates, inventors extraordinary, were not even mentioned.

The staircase took them down to a lab deep underground, a room nearly two-hundred yards long. It was tall ceilinged, white walled, and impeccably managed.

"Plants," Bet said simply, and led the way.

Plants . . .

. . .plants thriving in almost total vacuum.
"Chipponese market material," Alf said confidently. He dug his thumbnail into a thick, waxy leaf. The wound healed itself in seconds. "We want to do a little more work on this. It'll be another year before we look at its use in space."

. . . fruits that were violently explosive, ranging from pea-sized squibs to powerful bombs as big as melons . . .

. . .fruits with ninety percent ethyl alcohol.
"The boozer's dream," Bet said. "Alcohol, fructose, and flavor—even has a pop-off top at one end."

. . . high-protein food fruits, duplicating the composition and texture of beef, pork, chicken, and fish . . .

. . . forty yard blackboys, their horizontal trunks built of spirals of monofilament carbon strands, far stronger than any metal.
"The neat trick here was to make them grow flat," Alf said. "We had to take the phototropic and geotropic impulses and turn them through ninety degrees. We did it taking DNA splicing from iris rhizomes; they grow that way naturally. Come on, let's look at something else."

Bet led the way through a triple series of doors to a smaller lab.

"Animals," she announced.

. . . tiny, modified jerboas, patiently assembling microscopic electronic components and staring at the visitors with calm, intelligent eyes.
Next to them was a cage of sluggish, jewel-eyed lizards, their necks swollen with gland sacs. "Full of nerve poisons," Bet said happily. "A thousandth of a gram would kill the lot of us."

She led the way to a huge, flower-filled cage. Hummingbirds, silver and crimson and purple, flashed around the interior so fast that they could be seen only when they hovered briefly in front of a blossom. "Just for fun," Alf explained. "I did these as Bet's twenty-first birthday present."

. . . ant and termite colonies, fashioning elaborate transparent lattices from their own body secretions according to some precise prescription.
"They build perfect lenses and mirrors," Alf said. "We pass them structural specifications through chemical messengers in the food supplies. That's the hardest part. And we're still working on spiders. They're tough to control— can't do it chemically, has to be microcircuits." He shrugged. "Give us another year or two."

"Don't get started on spiders," Bet said. "Or we'll be here forever." She grinned at Mike. "They're his favorites, but it's getting late and we still haven't got to mine." She led the way through another series of doors and into an oddly-lit set of interlocking chambers, then turned to Mike. "Symbiotes. The most fun of all."

And the most complex, with their elaborate amalgam of plant and animal DNA.

. . . mobile carnivorous plants, calyxes framed by circles of primitive eyes, hunting insects across a sandy desert floor . . .

. . . lethargic, slothlike creatures hanging lazy from the trees, wings spread wide for photosynthesis.
"Still a failure," Bet said. "We haven't been able to get the energy absorption rates high enough for full mobility."

. . . the polytropes, half-meter spheres containing within themselves complete ecosystems, requiring for their continuing function only a supply of radiation and an energy sink.

And finally, almost as an afterthought, Bet had taken Mike to a small nursery, where a dozen shrubs carried the Candlemass Berries from which Velocil could be extracted.

Long before that, Mike had reached his own conclusion: what he had seen made the search for Velocil of minor importance. The original mission objective was dwarfed by the potential of the rest of Cinder-feller's operation.

And he had by no means seen everything. Throughout the tour, Alf and Bet Bates had kept up a running commentary. Their casual chat about genetic surgery and nuclear splicing was far more impressive than any boasts, and they openly admitted that six labs for human development were off-limits to Mike and all visitors.

"How does Cinder-feller fit into all this?" Mike asked at last, when they were emerging from the fourth and final underground facility. "I mean, if you do all this, what does Cinder-feller do?"

They looked at him in bewilderment. "Why, Cinder-feller's the bigmomma," Bet said. "Runs the whole show—defense, weapons arsenal, deals, fights, finances, supplies. Nothing could move without her."