Mike nodded. "I will. From the way you've been behaving so far, the thing you need is correct information about Traders: how we're trained, how we operate. You don't have much idea about that—if you did, you'd never have tried that corny bit with the sword." He looked at her exposed body and shook his head. "And other things, too. Tell me what you think you know, and I'll take it from there. Even if the two of us can't make a deal this time, you'll need accurate data on the Traders for future deals."
"Fair enough." Fathom frowned, her gray eyes shadowed by thick blond eyebrows. "Let's start at the beginning. I guess that means with the Lostlands War? That's when the Strines got pretty isolated."
As she spoke the autochef chimed its message. Mike stood up and brought over the dish. It was barbecued mutton on a platter of cultivated saltbush seeds. Mike quietly swallowed a detox pill, then began to eat. The food was alien and quite unpleasant, but his Trader training allowed him to work his way through it and smile while he did so. He should probably count himself lucky—Jack Lester had told him horror stories of the roasted 'tremes offered as food—bills, feet, and all—in some parts of the Strine Interior.
Fathom ate her portion with obvious relish. While she did so she gave Mike a fascinating and strangely distorted version of world history. According to Fathom, it was the passage of fallout across northern Strineland that stimulated the rate of new species development and caused the growth of the secret biolabs in the Interior. All the other regions had been ruined then, but the Traders had taken unfair advantage of the general world chaos.
"You saw your chance and you jumped in," she said, pushing her empty plate aside. "You had that old, puritanical, moralistic society of yours, and you argued moral authority to become negotiators between all the regions." She paused, disconcerted, when Mike laughed out loud. "What's so funny?"
"I've heard the Traders called a lot of things—but puritanical and moralistic are new ones to me. Is that why we're sitting here with no clothes on, so I'll be too shocked to think straight? Fathom, you've got the whole thing backward. We're
Traders,
in the game for what we can get out of it. Commercial, yes. Immoral, if you insist on it. But
puritanical,
forget it—I'll tell you Trader yarns that would make your hair curl." There was a delighted cackle of
"Right on, boyo,"
in Mike's ear. "I'll sit bare as long as you want to. But you have to learn one central fact about us Traders: when we strike a deal, we stay bought. And what we're told under Trader Oath never goes any farther. Never, ever. Not even if people try to torture it out of us. Our conditioning would make us die before we talk against our will. We're Traders; and we make deals. And so—"
Mike finally pushed away his own plate and stared directly into Fathom Lavengro's eyes. "—I'm a Trader. Do you want to make a deal?"
She sat staring at him for a moment, her cheeks flushed. Finally she nodded. "I guess I do. Let me tell you what I can do for you, then you do some thinking about how much that's worth. I'll tell you now, I won't do it cheap."
"Whoo-ee! There you go, partner. She's hooked."
Jack's voice was an excited shout in Mike's ear.
"But watch your step when you try to haul her in. If I know the Strine mommas, she's angling for some agenda of her own—we have to find out what it is."
"I know, Jack. I'll do some thinking about that later."
He nodded at Fathom. "Tell me your deal."
"Here's what I can do for you." She leaned close, her face only a foot away from his. "I can get you to the right place in the Interior—fast, safe, and easy. No entry to BigSyd and long trek overland for us. We'll put the ship on auto and take the hydrofoil launch. That'll bring us along the coast to Eucla, down on the Nullarbor Plain. I have an aircraft there, and we can fly straight up to The Musgrave. Second, I'll introduce you to the momma who controls the Candlemass Berries. All that ought to be worth a lot."
Mike nodded. "Agreed. I'll have to think about our terms, but don't worry. It's one of the Traders' basic rules, a deal that's not good for both sides should never be signed. Let me do some figuring tonight, and we'll nail down the details in the morning."
He rose to his feet and began to move back to the bedroom to collect his clothes. To his surprise Fathom at once stood up and followed him. She put her arms around his waist and moved into close contact with him, rubbing herself gently against his back.
"You need to learn Strine customs. If we're going to work as a team, we might as well operate as one." She spoke softly in Mike's ear, her hair fine spun on his neck and cheek. "I don't know Trader ways, and I doubt you know Strine ones. It's time we both learned."
Mike heard Jack's wild cackle of triumph in his ear.
"I knew it! I told you she fancied yer—get in there. Remember, though, let her make the moves. And bigmomma on top!"
Mike turned to look at Fathom, her eyes wide and pale in the dim light. Intimate contact, with running commentary from Lover-boy Lester? No way.
"Goodnight, Jack,"
he whispered, deep in his throat.
"Maybe some other time, but not now."
As he tongued to sever the Mentor connection he heard Jack's howl of rage and supplication.
"No, Mike, don't cut me off. We're a team! For God's sake, we're in this together—"
"There it is, sweet baby," Fathom said softly. "Doesn't that feel nice? Come to momma."
"—partners! Mike, we're
partners—"
The cabin was warm and dark. The ship surged west through rising seas.
* * *
Fathom Lavengro kept her part of the deal. In return for Mike's guarantee that she would be the Strine agent in any Trader deal for Velocil or anything else involving the Candlemass Berries, she moved them to the mainland through the Eucla port. Entry to Strineland was both quick and simple. Within twenty-four hours, Mike was heading for the Interior. Soon after that he had his first meeting with a killer Strine.
The aircraft was on course for The Musgrave when Fathom called back to Mike from the pilot's seat.
"Hold tight. Brickfielder up ahead." Without another word she put on her headset and plunged them down from fifteen thousand feet in a fast landing pattern.
"What's she talking about, 'brickfielder' ?"
Mike whispered.
"Dust storm,"
said Jack Lester's scratchy voice, after a moment's silence. It had taken him half a day to forgive Mike for cutting him out of sensory contact, but now his natural cheerfulness was reasserting itself.
"This time of year,"
he went on,
"you get brickfielders around here—hot, dry, dust storms out of the Strine Interior. We ought to be able to fly above it to Alice and her territory, or go through it on instruments. I don't know why she brought you down. So keep your guard up—there might be a trap here. We're a long way south of The Musgrave, and farther still from Fathom's base."
Lester's voice had a strange, dry crackle to it, as though it were being filtered during transmission.
"Is it the brickfielder that's interfering with signal reception?"
Mike asked.
"I'm having trouble hearing you."
"No. We can handle any natural interference. What you're seeing is the first signs of the signal blackout. We knew it was coming. This part of the Strine Interior is covered by a Chill jamming system. Daddy-O will hold signal as long as possible."
"How long are we going to be stuck here on the ground?"
"No idea."
Jack Lester's voice was a shade weaker and less clear.
"Storm could last a few days."
They had finally halted in the middle of a single dirt runway. While Fathom was busy in the cabin with radio communications, Mike climbed down from the plane and wandered off to the edge of the landing field, to stare at the flat ochres and purples of the worn surrounding hills. Jack Lester had been quite right when he described the Strine Interior as battered. There was a primitive feel to the land, a timelessness that could not be expressed through any training sessions, and it had nothing to do with its current inhabitants. The surface rocks in this area were the oldest on Earth.
As Mike was looking around him, a silent file of dark figures came trotting around the landing field perimeter. They were all males, each no more than four feet tall, with thin legs and powerful torsos. "Haploid abos!" Jack said. Mike nodded. The men were hairless, with impassive, unlined faces and dusty black skin. Every one was deformed in some way, with ugly tumors, missing digits, or deep abscesses on body and limbs. They each wore a light one-piece garment of fine metallic mesh and carried a silver-black attack tube. Though they passed within fifteen yards of Mike, they appeared to take no notice of his presence.
It was hard to believe that these squat, sick-looking little men were the most formidable fighters that the planet had ever known. But Mike knew it was true. Back in training camp, he and his fellow trainees had seen and marvelled at Chipponese high-resolution videos of abos in action. In one display, an unarmed haploid abo had tackled a pair of trained attack dogs and killed them both bare handed in twenty seconds; in another, an unarmed abo swimming offshore north of Strine mainland had been attacked by an eighteen-foot white shark. The naked abo had lost a foot and three fingers, but within fifteen minutes the disemboweled shark was thrashing helplessly in a widening cloud of its own blood.
"See how light they travel,"
Jack said faintly.
"Wish us Traders were as efficient. The abos never carry food or water, and they can live off the land anywhere in the world . . ."
His voice faded to a thread of sound, and there was a sudden burst of random noise in Mike's ear. He listened intently for a signal from the Mentor.
"Jack, I've lost you."
There was another crackle of static, from which a recognizable tone finally emerged.
"Same at this end."
Jack's voice had taken on a bizarre mechanical quality.
"We've hit the jamming system. Daddy-O's jockeying frequencies and filters to try to keep us in touch, but we're losing it . . ."
The voice in Mike's ear faded, then came back weaker than ever.
". . . in real time and feeding it to me and Daddy-O. Use your recording disk now, I'm losing you. The images I'm getting from your optic chiasma aren't in color any more, we're right at the edge of acceptable signal-to-noise ratio. Good luck . . ."
There was a series of clicking burps, followed by a buzz of white noise. Mike sat at the edge of the landing field, listening hard and staring straight ahead of him.
No Mentor!
Several times since the mission began he had cursed the authorities who had assigned Lover-boy Lester to him. Now, without that jaunty and irrepressible voice in his ear, he realized how reassuring Jack's hidden presence had been.
Mike squinted down at the recording disk on his shirt. He was beginning to realize its one great disadvantage: it could
take
information, but unlike Jack Lester it couldn't
give
it. Even if it worked perfectly, it wouldn't help on this mission—only for planning future ones.
Mike checked to make sure that the disk was recording.
Trader Rule: make a good mission record.
Even at that intense emotional moment with Fathom when he cut Jack out of the circuit, Mike had been conscious of the disk in his abandoned shirt, still making its audio and infrared recordings. He had remained aware of its presence for at least the first few minutes of what followed. But if that knowledge had affected him, Fathom apparently found no cause for complaint.
The recording disk was set now for wide-angle coverage. Off to Mike's left, the haploid abos were trotting single file toward the horizon—or what should have been the horizon. As Mike looked, he realized that the far distance was a single, endless wall of dull, rust-red haze. Land and sky merged seamlessly together.
"I guess Fathom Lavengro isn't lying about the brickfielder, whatever else she's lying to me about," Mike said softly to the recording disk. He began to hurry back toward the plane.
Did the abos know what they were doing, running directly at a storm?
Those low, flat foreheads and that dwarfed cranial capacity supported the figure of sixty-five for the average IQ usually assigned to the haploid abos. But their uncanny skill in combat, plus the ability to draw food and water from the most unpromising environment, suggested that their intelligence was not measurable by the usual methods. If a haploid abo could survive on the Chill ice cap without clothing or weapons, in the Grand Erg Oriental without water, and in the Strine northern badlands without radiation treatment or protection—all circumstances that would mean certain death to Mike—who should be assigned the higher intelligence? Mike climbed back into the plane and closed the door securely behind him. Although it was only midafternoon, the sun had disappeared and the northern sky had darkened to an ominous dried-blood red. At the front of the cabin Fathom was still crouched over the commset, ignoring Mike completely.
He went to sit quietly in the back of the aircraft. If she was not worrying about the coming storm, then what
was
she doing so busily? Mike could not produce even a plausible guess. Jack Lester insisted that some deep Strine plan was being worked out, something that Mike and the Traders knew nothing about; but he had been unable to make any suggestion as to what it might be, and Mike was equally baffled. According to Daddy-O, their destination, The Musgrave, did indeed have a bigmomma boss—but it was Cinder-feller, Fathom's sister, rather than Fathom herself. So was Cinder-feller the momma who controlled the Candlemass Berries and, therefore, the source of Velocil? Or was there some other game being played between the two Lavengro sisters?
Daddy-O's data base, according to Jack, showed that the two bigmommas were deadly rivals, enemies who would rather feud than cooperate on anything. They would normally not even enter the other's territory. And according to Jack Lester, Cinder-feller had been so hideously mutilated by her accident that she refused meetings with anyone outside her immediate circle of servants and advisors. So why fly Mike to her territory?