Li Xia had read his mood. She nodded and turned to Ando. "Let us go back," she said in Chipponese. "He may be the barbarian you say, but some memory hurts him."
Mike had to remind himself that he was not supposed to understand and he must avoid smiling at her in gratitude.
* * *
Seated again at the table, Ando pressed the dark area on the table edge as a command for service to begin. Mike waited with fair interest. The trip to the viewing ports had improved his condition enough to give an appetite, and he was curious to see what was produced. The Chipponese culinary habits were the least known of any.
Dinner was served. The dishes came into view from the midtable hatches.
Mike found the spread revolting. As soon as he saw the first offering he reached for and surreptitiously swallowed a detox pill.
Cold octopus, like strings of chewy rubber, was the first appetizer, followed by sea slugs stuffed with shredded pork. Snake soup—three kinds of snake, Ando proudly announced. And then the main courses, of raw fish, fried eel, chicken parts—Mike had one piece with the beak still in it—and a black, slimy material which he did not dare to ask about. The food was washed down with beer and interspersed with frequent toasts of
mao tai
liquor, strong enough to melt the wax out of one's ears.
Traders' training: Mike sampled everything and murmured compliments as the endless succession of dishes appeared on the table. He drank every potion they offered him, and gradually became louder and more garrulous.
He told them about all his missions. How he had triumphed in the Strine Interior, but how he had failed to return Seth Paramine from Cap City; how he had survived the mind-murdering intentions of Dominic Mantilla and of Sabrina Vandermond, and how he had seen through Rasool Ilunga's plans to use the Traders for his own purposes.
He talked too much, belched freely, knocked over his glass, and was insufferably rude to Ando Jia-Chi. And thanks to the detox pill, he was stone-cold sober, and able to form an accurate impression of his hosts.
About the eleventh course—abalone and mushrooms, a merciful interlude—he was gratified to see that Ando's eyes were bulging, so that he looked more and more like a dyspeptic frog. Ando had been matching Mike drink for drink, though Mike noticed that the other man took only a fraction of a glass each time. Even so, his body mass was probably only half as great, and he had presumably not taken precautions before they began.
Li Xia watched her fiancé become less and less communicative. He slumped lower in his seat, lost color in his face, and let his mouth hang open even more man usual. Mike was careful to notice nothing, and to chat on as usual.
By the thirteenth course she could stand it no longer. She stood up. "I am afraid that Mr. Ando says he cannot stay here with us." Ando had not spoken a word for ten minutes. "His flight will be leaving shortly. If you will remain here, while we say good bye to each other, I will return in just a few minutes."
Mike smiled and watched her go, dragging old frogface behind her. Maybe that would teach Ando a lesson! Next time, he would talk less about barbarians. Mike poured himself another glass of the fiery liquor and watched the tiny Chill table-robots scuttle out of the hatches to take Ando's empty plate.
Another twenty minutes passed before Li Xia reappeared. She slid into the seat opposite Mike and accepted the tiny glass of sweet red wine that he poured and pushed across to her. She had drunk almost nothing. Now she nodded, sipped, and gave him a thoughtful stare.
"Mr. Mikal Asparian, I do not know how it is possible. But you are not intoxicated. Not in the least."
There was no accusation in her tone. So why did he suddenly feel guilty, and why was he reluctant to act drunk any longer?
He thought of how Li Xia had stared wistfully out at the great Chinese river, at the ancient home that was forever denied to her and her people. They were exiles. They could look, but they could never go back.
"You know, you're not the only one. I'm homeless, too." Mike was surprised to hear his own voice.
Was
he drunk? How could he be, with the detox pills that had never failed him yet?
"All the Traders are homeless," he went on. "We don't have any land we can call our own, unless it's the training camps. We're a group that every country thinks of as outsiders. Our homes have to be in every land, or on the seas, or high in the air. Traders are scattered all around the globe. Even our computer is a distributed system. There are storage and computing units everywhere, linked by comsats and microwave lines and fiber optic cables. We are everywhere, but we are nowhere."
He paused. There. He had made a fool of himself. But Li Xia was not laughing or scornful. She was sitting quietly, looking directly at him with wide, sympathetic eyes.
"Go on," she said after a moment.
"I'm being a bore."
She smiled. "I do not think you could be boring if you tried. Please go on. You are very proud, are you not, to be a Trader?"
Conflicting emotions were at war inside him. He wanted to say that she was quite wrong, that he hated the Traders, that they were a ruthless group who had used him and abused him to suit their purposes. Instead he said, "I'm very proud. We are a small, weak group. Yet we are the ones who permit commerce to be carried on among the great power groups. We have little power of our own, but we are absolutely essential. We are the glue that holds Earth together."
His pretentious words made him cringe. He was saying things sober that he would not normally have said drunk. Now surely she must be laughing at him. But he saw nothing but warmth in those great, sad eyes staring at him across the table.
She smiled then, the little hands cupping the silvery glass. As Mike ran out of words she put down her wine, reached across to take his left hand in both of hers, and turned it palm-side up.
"Permit me." The dark head bent to study the lines that crisscrossed his hand.
She was silent for a while, running soft fingertips delicately across his palm. Then she shook her head. "A wanderer's hand, and a wanderer's life. You will travel all your years, across strange seas and unknown lands. But I see humor and affection there, and the chance for great happiness."
"I wish you could tell me when that happiness will begin." Mike's hand was tingling under her touch, but at the same time he felt relaxed and comfortable for the first time in months. He did not want to pull away. "Can you tell me anything more specific? How long will I live, will I ever marry, how many children will I have?"
She looked up, smiled, and shook her head. "That I cannot see. I wish that I could—in my own hand, as well as in yours." The smile vanished from her face, as some other thought came to her. "I must apologize for what happened this evening. Mr. Ando's behavior was not good. He is not accustomed to drinking alcohol."
"He was merely tired. Please do not worry about it any more."
Perhaps she was smart enough to suspect that Mike could read Ando's feelings from the man's face even without knowing what he was saying. Ando had liked Mike no more than Mike had liked him. "Ugly, stupid, and greedy," he had said in Chipponese before he had passed out. "A fat Trader swine . . . a bloated imbecile . . . a parasite on society . . . a slobbering, drunken glutton." Perhaps it was just as well that Ando was going back to the Moon. Even with Li Xia's moderating influence, the relationship between the two men had nowhere to go but down.
Li Xia was still holding Mike's hand in hers. They both became aware of it at the same moment, and she released him and stood up quickly.
"Well." Her voice was breathless. "Mr. Mikal Asparian, let me say how much I have enjoyed this dinner with you. The things that you told me were enthralling. One of my long-held dreams is that some day I might visit Earth, and you brought it closer to me than ever before. I feel as though we could sit and talk and laugh together for many more hours, and the time would fly past us."
Mike stood up awkwardly, still adjusting to a quarter-gee environment. "Perhaps we will have another chance in the future. Miss Li, you are a wonderful listener. People tell you things without knowing it. You would make an excellent Trader."
"Thank you." She smiled. "I know that you have paid me the highest possible compliment. But now we must stop. The first meeting with the senior members of our delegation is twelve hours from now. You need rest before that. Let me show you to your quarters."
* * *
Rest was an attractive notion, but Mike could not take that luxury.
Aware of what free-fall might do to his system, Mike had requested a sleeping area on the outermost lower disk of the station. That lower wheel was reserved for living quarters, communications, and recreation. It rotated about the fixed axis that connected all the wheels. With a diameter of four hundred meters, the lower disk had an effective gravity that ran from near zero at the hub to a quarter gee at the outer rim. Mike was close to that rim, while Li Xia had a room a third of the way in, with effective gravity close to Luna's.
The uppermost wheel was unfortunately the one that Mike was most interested in. It did not rotate about the central spindle, and so had negligible effective gravity everywhere, and no residents. The equipment for power generation, construction, and maintenance was all located on that thick upper wheel. It was not off-limits to Mike, but getting there was another matter.
The only way to reach it was to travel in from his sleeping quarters on the rim of the lower wheel, all the way to the center, then upward along the spindle to the topmost wheel, and finally back out again toward its periphery. It had sounded easy when Mike was briefed, down on Earth, but in practice he had problems. The thing that slowed him the most was infuriatingly trivial: he did not know where the light switches were located in the spindle. It was impossible to fumble along in the dark
and
in free-fall. Without gravity to orient him, Mike could not tell which way he was going, or even if he was tumbling end-over-end.
Once he found the light switches, progress was fast. The upper wheel itself was well lit, and there were a few people in the corridors, dressed in technician's uniform. As an obvious non-Chip, Mike received the expected number of polite inquiring glances. He moved along as though he knew just where he was going, and no one tried to stop him.
He got farther than he expected, until at a branch point in all the outward corridors big signs in red announced: DANGER: HIGH RADIOACTIVITY SECTOR. NO ADMITTANCE TO THESE AREAS WITHOUT BADGE AND PERMITS.
The warning was an excellent way to keep people out, but was it true? Mike suspected that the signs were there for just that purpose—to discourage nosy visitors—because they were written in all the major Earth languages as well as in Chipponese. The sensors in his own fingertip recorder certainly indicated no dangerous radiation levels. But radioactivity was not something to be messed with. He turned around and quietly headed back toward his own quarters.
On the way he passed a couple of familiar faces, individuals who had certainly been in the corridors earlier. That made sense: The Chips were double-covering Mike. Li Xia was Team One; the second team would remain unobtrusively present, as a good backup team should.
Mike went back to his quarters, lay down on his bed, and closed his eyes. It was a good time to test the usefulness of his new implant. A passive version of the Diamond Fly's audio-input module, one-sixteenth of an inch in diameter, was tucked away behind his larynx. Mike subvocalized his report, a full description of events since he left the surface of Earth. When he returned home, the full audio record would be transferred to Daddy-O.
The memory unit of the Fly was durable. Lyle Connery had told Mike that it could survive accelerations of ten thousand gees and temperatures of four thousand degrees. It would survive orbital reentry without shielding. Since Mike estimated his own limits as twenty gees and a couple of hundred degrees above freezing, Connery's words had been no special comfort. As for reentry without shielding, that was a prospect Mike preferred not to dwell on.
He finally finished his recording and listened to the playback. Someday the Chills would develop hardware that would pick up from a distance the subvocalized inputs or the playback to one's ear. After that, what? Possibly it would no longer be safe even to
think
one's reports.
Not my worry, Mike thought. Not for today. He switched off the Fly brain recorder, lay back with eyes closed, and was dreaming within minutes.
* * *
Mike was beginning to have second thoughts. Maybe Li Xia was Team Two, not Team One. Certainly the group who were meeting for negotiations were no pushovers. There were four of them, in addition to Li. Each one spoke perfect Trader, had a totally unreadable face, and wore a near-invisible earpiece that told Mike they were being prompted by other Chips and Chipponese computers.
Even without all that he would have been wary. The Chip toughness in negotiation was legendary.
But so was the Traders'. Mike was as keyed up as he had ever been, and still quite confident—though it would have been nice to have Daddy-O, Connery, and Lover-boy Lester whispering in his ear when he needed it. They had sat down, five on one, around an aluminum-topped table. As part of the natural attempt to keep Mike off balance, the Chips had chosen to negotiate in a low-gee conference room. The traditional hot tea and sugar lumps were served—but the tea was drunk from a squeeze-bulb, and the sugar lumps tended to float away if he took his eye off them.
Li Xia had opened the discussions, while the others looked on. "We are prepared to pay thirty gigawatt-hours, to be delivered over a two-year period, to any selected point or points of the Unified Empire grid, with the exception of space-pointing laser sites. We are also willing to deliver elsewhere in the Western Hemisphere, subject to the same restriction. We offer a two-to-one daytime/nighttime ratio, and a forty-percent power increase during Southern Hemisphere winter. In return, we want a two-year access contract for one hundred people, entry point Guyana, with free movement across the Unified Empire."