The Merchant's War (5 page)

Grin and bear it! I was on my way out of this hellhole anyway. We ordered the white wine, obediently, and Mitzi commented, “Look, there’s an ambulance chopper by the path. I wonder if somebody got hurt.”

“They probably keep it there for the people they swindle on the oxygen,” I joked, bending to look out. The chopper had been there a while, because the rotors were still. Two men were having some kind of an argument beside it. I was mildly surprised to see that one of them was the man with the traffic-light head from the tram. That wasn’t so surprising, because there are just so many Veenies and you can’t help running into the same ones over and over. But I was beginning to get a little tired of this particular one. “Drink up,” I said, dismissing him and paying the waiter at the same time. “A toast! To our good times together—past, present and future!”

“Ah, Tenn,” said Mitzi, raising her glass, “I wish. But I’m still going to reup.”

The wine was good and cold—well, no; it wasn’t all that good, but at least it was cold. Thinking about Mitzi wasting herself for another year and a half, at least, on this smelly cinder of a planet spoiled it for me. “They say if you spend too much time with the Veenies you’ll turn into one.” I was half-joking—half at the most. And immediately she got her defensive look.

“My Agency has no reason for dissatisfaction with my work,” she said stiffly. “The Veenies aren’t so bad! A little misguided.”

“A little.” I gazed around the lounge. The tables were bare plastic. There was no Muzak, no friendly advertising posters decorating the walls.

“It’s just a different life-style,” she insisted. “Of course, compared to what we have on Earth it’s
pathetic.
But all they want from us, really, is just to be left alone.”

The conversation was not going at all the way I wanted it to. Sometimes, when I was talking to Mitzi when she was off-duty and off-guard, I wondered if the old saying wasn’t true for her. She had been on Venus for eighteen months. She had covered the whole planet, just about, and she had dealt with its seamiest citizens, the turncoats. If there was anybody in the Embassy who should have been sick and disgusted with this primitive place it was Mitzi Ku. But she wasn’t. She was going to sign up for another hitch in the oven. She even, sometimes, acted as though she
liked
it here! There were even stories that sometimes she went shopping in the Veenie stores instead of the PX. I didn’t believe them, of course. But sometimes I wondered … And yet what she said was true. Her Agency, which was the same as my own, could certainly find nothing wrong with her record on Venus. Her official designation at the Embassy was “visa clerk,” but her real work was running a network of spies and saboteurs that stretched from Port Kathy to the Polar Penal Colony. She did it superbly. The computer analyses said the Veenie Gross Planetary Product was off a good 3 per cent just because of Mitzi’s work.

And yet she said such strange things! Like, “Oh, Tenn, give them credit. They took a planet that an Arizona rattlesnake couldn’t stay alive on, and in less than thirty years they’ve made it livable—”

“Livable!” I sneered, gazing meaningfully out the window.

“Sure it’s livable! At least where they’ve covered it over. Naturally it’s not a South Seas paradise, but they’ve done a pretty good job, considering what they had to work with.” She glanced irritably across the room, where a Veenie family was trying to quiet a screaming child. Then she shrugged. “Oh, they’re annoying,” she admitted. “But they’re not such bad people. Consider what they started from—half of them came here because they were misfits on the Earth and the other half got exiled as criminals.”

“Misfits and criminals, right! The dregs of society! And they haven’t got much better here!”

But there was no sense spending our last day together arguing politics. I swallowed and changed direction. “Some of them aren’t so bad,” I conceded. “Especially the kids.” That was safe enough, everybody’s in favor of kids, and the poor little tyke hadn’t stopped screaming. “I wish I could cheer him up,” I offered tentatively, “but I think I’d scare him out of his mind—some big huck coming at him that way—”

“Let him yell,” said Mitzi, gazing out the window.

I sighed—but silently. There were times when I wondered whether it was worthwhile trying to keep up with Mitzi’s moods and peculiarities. But it was. The important thing about Mitzi Ku was that she was a gorgeous woman. She had that perfect silky-brassy honey-almond skin and, for a person of Oriental ancestry, quite a womanly figure. Her eyes weren’t that Oriental shoe-button black, either; they were light blue—some fooling around among the progenitors, no doubt. And she had perfect teeth and knew just when to, very delicately, use them. Take her all in all, she was well worth the taking.

So I tried again. I reached out for her hand and said sentimentally, “There’s something about that little boy, honey. I look at him and I wish you and I could some day have—”

She flared, “Knock it off, Tarb!”

“I only meant—”

“I know what you meant! Let me tell you the facts. One, I don’t like kids. Two, I don’t have to like kids, because I don’t have to have any —there are plenty of consumers to keep the population up. Three, you’re not interested in a kid anyway, you’re only interested in what you do to get one started, and the answer is no.”

I let it drop. It wasn’t true, though. Not much more than half-true, anyway.

But then things began to get a little better. I had a powerful ally in the Veenie wine; however it tasted, it had a handsome kick. And the other ally I had was Mitzi herself because the logic of the situation convinced her the way it had convinced me: there was no sense getting into a spat when we had so little time left.

By the time we finished the capsule I had moved over next to her. When I slid my hand around her waist it was just like old times, and, like old times, she leaned into my arm. With my free hand I lifted my glass, with the last quarter-inch of wine in it, and offered a toast: “Here’s to us, Mits, and to our last time together.” Funny, I thought, peering past her —that bus-person clearing off the tables at the far end of the room: she looked a lot like the woman I’d sat next to on the flight from the Pole.

But I thought no more of it, because Mitzi raised her own glass, smiling at me over the brim, and gave back the toast: “To our last day together, Tenn, and our last night.”

That was as clear an exit line as I’d ever heard. We got up and headed for the stairs to the tram station, arms around each other. We were definitely fuzzy from the wine, but even so I nudged Mitzi as we passed the table by the door. Half the Veenies I had ever met seemed to be in this place today; this one was old red-hair green-eyes again. Evidently he’d settled his argument out at the ambulance chopper because he was sitting alone, pretending to be reading the menu—as if that could take more than ten seconds! He glanced up just as we passed. What the hell. I wouldn’t have to be seeing any of their bleached dumb faces any more after the shuttle took off, so I gave him a smile. He didn’t smile back.

I didn’t expect him to, after all. So I just led Mitzi out the door and down the stairs, and forgot the whole incident—for a while.

Hand in hand we strolled to the nearest platform where a tram was waiting. I had thought I had seen people boarding it, but as we were about to get on a Veenie guard hurried up. “Sorry, folks,” he panted, out of breath, “but this one’s out of service. It’s got, uh, a mechanical defect. The next one out—” he pointed—“will be right over there on Platform Three.”

There was no tram at Platform Three, but I could see that there was one at the junction point, its nose just poking out from the tunnel, waiting for the signal lights to clear so it could enter the platform.

For some reason I was feeling a little dizzy and generally vague. The wine, I assumed. It kept me from wanting to argue. We turned to start back down the platform but the guard waved us across the tracks. “Save time if you just cut through here,” he said helpfully.

Mitzi seemed a little blurry, too, but she asked, “Isn’t that dangerous?” And the guard gave us an indulgent let’s-not-hit-the-booze-so-hard-next-time chuckle and guided us to the track. No, he didn’t guide us. He
shoved
us … just as there was a clatter from the end of the platform.

Out of the corner of one eye I saw the tram galumphing down on us. We were right bull’s-eye in its path.

“Jump!” I yelled, and, “Jump, Tenny!” yelled Mitzi at the same moment, and jump we both did. I grabbed for Mitzi, and she grabbed for me, and it would have worked out really well if we had jumped in the same direction. But we didn’t. We bumped each other. If Mitzi had been smaller, instead of taller, than me, I might have tossed her or tugged her clear; as it was she went one way and I went another, but not quite in time. The tram slammed me out onto the platform, with yells and cursing and screeching of brakes. Flames of pain ran up my legs as I slid across rough concrete on my knees. Somewhere along the line I hit my head a good one—or the tram did.

The next thing I knew my knee and my head were competing to see which one could hurt me the most, and I was hearing yelling voices—

“—couple of hucks tried to cross the track—”

“—one dead and one pretty bad—”

“Get that medic in here!”

And somebody out of the tram was leaning over me, ruddy whiskered face pop-eyed with surprise, and to my astonishment it was Marty MacLeod, the Deputy Station Chief.

I don’t remember much of the next little while. There are only flashes: Marty demanding I be taken at once to the Embassy, the medic obstinate that ambulance patients went to the hospital and nowhere else, someone peering over Marty’s shoulder and blurting, “Jeez! It’s the male huck, and he’s alive!” The someone was the traffic-light Veenie.

Then I remember the cement-mixer bumps and jolts of the ambulance chopper as it leaped the hills around the park, and I went quietly to sleep. Thinking about Mitzi. Thinking about how I felt. Thinking that it wouldn’t be right to say that I loved her, exactly, and certainly nothing she ever said to me, in bed or out, sounded like she felt anything like that … but thinking mostly that it was really sad that she was dead.

But she wasn’t.

They kept me an hour in the emergency room—a couple of Band-Aids and an X-ray series—and when they released me into Marty’s custody they told me Mitzi had nine fractures counted and at least six internal ruptures that showed on the tomography. She was in intensive care, and they’d keep us posted.

Good news! But it didn’t make my heart sing. Because by then I was getting my head straight, and the straighter it got the more certain it became in my mind that the accident had been no accident.

I will say for Marty that when we got inside the bug-proof Embassy compound she listened seriously while I told her what I thought. “We’ll check,” she promised grimly. “Can’t do anything till we see what Mitzi has to say, though—and for now, you’re going to sleep.” It wasn’t a suggestion. It wasn’t even an order. It was a fact, because they’d slipped me a shot when I wasn’t looking, and it was bye-bye time.

When I woke up I had barely time to dress and get down to the farewell party in my honor.

Now, really, that’s kind of a joke. The Veenies don’t have many public holidays, but the ones they have they celebrate with a lot of enthusiasm. That’s embarrassing for us dips. We need to be part of the festivities, because that’s what diplomacy is all about, but we certainly can’t admit to celebrating most of their holidays—they have names like “Freedom from Advertising Day” and “Anti-Christmas.” Still, we have to do something, so for every holiday we cook up an excuse to hold a party —for a totally different reason, of course—at that time. There’s always some excuse. Sometimes the excuses are arranged before the dip gets assigned here. There’s old Jim Holder, for instance, from Codes & Ciphers; they say he was sent here because he happened to be born on the same date as the renegade Mitchell Courtenay.

So tonight’s party was—nominally—a send-off for me. All the people I ran into congratulated me on shaking this place loose at last—and, a couple of steps down on the priority list, oh, yes, your lucky escape from the tram, too, Tenny. That is, the Earth people did that; the Veenies were as always a whole other thing.

Let’s be fair to the Veenies. They don’t like these ceremonial parties any more than we do, I guess. If they’re high enough on the totem pole they get invited. If they get invited they come. Nobody says they have to enjoy themselves. They’re polite about it—reasonably polite—if they’re female they dance two dances with two separate male Earth dips. I think they like that part, at least, because they’re almost always taller than their partners. The conversation is almost always about the same—

“Hot today.”

“Was it? I didn’t notice.”

“The new Hilsch plant’s coming along nicely.”

“Thank you.”

—then the second obligatory dance with a different partner and then, if you happen to look around for them—though why you would do that I can’t guess—they’re gone. The male Veenies do about the same, except that it’s two drinks at the bar instead of two dances, and the conversation isn’t about the weather, it’s about Port Kathy’s chances against North Star in the rolley-hockey league. It’s just as bad when we have to go to one of their formal parties. We don’t linger, either. Mitzi says that her spies tell her the Veenies’ parties usually get to be real hell-roaring balls after we leave, but none of us are ever urged to stay. Dips’ parties are meant to be diplomatic: nothing heavy discussed, and certainly not much fun.

But sometimes it doesn’t go like that. My first duty dance was with a slim young thing from the Veenie Department of Extraplanetary Affairs—fishbelly skin, of course, but it went well enough with her almost platinum hair. If I hadn’t been so sore about Mitzi I might have enjoyed dancing with her, but she would have spoiled it anyway. “Mr. Tarb,” she said right off, “do you think it’s fair to make the Hyperion miners listen to your advertising slop?”

Well, she was
very
junior. Her bosses wouldn’t have said anything like that. The trouble was, it was my bosses who were nearby, and the conversation got worse: Why were armed Earth spacecraft orbiting Venus every now and then without explaining their errands? And why had we refused permission for the Veenies to send a “scientific” mission to Mars? And—and everything else was pretty much the same. I made all the right defensive replies, but she’d been speaking pretty loudly and people were looking at us. Hay Lopez was one of them; he was standing with the Chief of Station, and they exchanged glances in a way I didn’t much like. When the dance was at last over I was glad to head for the bar. The only open space was next to Pavel Borkmann, head of some section of the Veenie Department of Heavy Industry. I’d met him before and intended ten minutes of nonthreatening chat about how their new Hilsch barrage in the Anti-Oasis was going, or whether they were satisfied with the new rocket plant. That didn’t work out either, because he too had heard snatches of my little dialogue with the Extraplanetary Affair. “You ought not to get into fights where you’re overmatched,” he grinned, referring both to my late dance partner and to the obvious scars I had collected from the tram. If I’d had any sense I would have chosen the meaning that was least chancy and told him all about the tram accident. My feelings were ruffled; I took the other course, “She was way out of line,” I complained, signaling for a drink I certainly didn’t need.