The Icerigger Trilogy: Icerigger, Mission to Moulokin, and The Deluge Drivers (50 page)

Nearby, Hellespont du Kane began chatting cheerfully with the physician the starship captain had thoughtfully sent down in the shuttle to attend his unexpected, famous passenger. Colette stood watching him, responding perfunctorily to September’s gruff and somewhat obscene good-bye and Williams’ more polite, deferential one.

Then there was nothing else to do, no one else to talk to, and Ethan found himself walking over. She moved to meet him.

Several silent moments passed. Perhaps the fact that his mind was now made up enabled him to match her stare more resolutely.

“How’s your father?” he finally said lamely.

“As well as can be expected.” She had to force herself to blunt her natural sharpness. “I keep trying to get him to consent to a body switch … he refuses additional revivifications. He won’t do it. I don’t think it’s a death wish. The psychostics say it’s not. But he won’t agree to it even when he’s senile, let alone during his occasional bursts of full lucidity. Keeps telling me it’s time I took over, that he’s held the reins long enough.”

“You are ready to take over, Colette.” Ethan spoke softly yet with enthusiasm. It was extremely difficult to sell Colette on herself. “I know how the merchant families work. I have to. I work for one myself.”

“Ready or not, I have to.” Her reply was so soft it was hard to believe it came from her. “What do you have to do, Ethan?”

He smiled. It wasn’t easy. “I’m sorry, Colette. Truly I am.”

“First they say they’re telling the truth, then they always say they’re sorry.”

“Colette, …” Ethan fought for words. “I’m not a teller, I’m a told. You were raised, trained to give orders. I’ve matured learning to take them. Advice I can offer, but never orders. I don’t think I’d be any good at it. I’d mess up any executive position you gave me, and then you’d be forced to cover for me. You’d have to explain me to my colleagues, the really qualified executives and compusymbs.” He shook his head dolefully. “I couldn’t handle the kind of snickering I’d be subjected to. And I won’t accept a life as an ineffectual parasite.”

“You have a peculiar conception of what being mated means.” She sounded almost desperate without appearing to beg. “You could do whatever you wanted to, anything at all. Travel, hobbies … it doesn’t even have to be with me.” The gaze lowered just a little. “You could … even have other women on the side, if you so desired. I’d fix it so you could afford the best.” She looked up again.

“You’re a good man. You could do what you wish, so long as you …” she hesitated, “came back to me.”

“No, Colette. I have something I have to see through, here.”

For an instant something flared in her eyes. “It’s that muscular teddy bear, isn’t it?”

“No.” Ethan’s denial gained strength from his honest, obvious surprise. “Elfa’s not a factor. I don’t know what she sees in me, but she’s a member of another race.”

“That hasn’t stopped people in the past,” she countered accusingly.

“It stops me. Where Elfa Kurdagh-Vlata is concerned, any interest other than anthropological is strictly one-sided. Her side. I gave you the real reason. I could never be a professional student, professional traveler, professional hobbyist. Or a professional husband.”

She seemed ready to leave, then grasped him so suddenly and hard he had to fight to regain his balance. She broke away just enough to plead, speaking so softly no one but Ethan could have heard. He found himself momentarily mesmerized by those metal-bright green eyes.

“You’re the first man I ever met who treated me like a human being. You were good to me, and you were honest with me. I know I’m ugly.”

“You’re anything but that, Colette.”

Her smile was full of pain. “For months I was the only human woman around. I enjoyed the isolation. I’m conversant enough with physiopsychology to read in your eyes my loss of five kilos for every month of that isolation. As soon as we reached any outpost of human civilization you’d see me for what I am, for what no doctor can correct. It’s happened since we’ve been here, at this outpost. I’m obese, sarcastic, and bitter to the point of dissolution.”

“The last two you need to survive the important position you’re going to assume,” Ethan told her. “As for the first, that’s an image you have of yourself.” He thought of something September had told him. “Physical shape and attractiveness have little to do with each other. In the dark, all mankind looks alike.

“No, the reasons I can’t marry you have to do with our mental makeup, not our physical.”

She let go of him. His arms would show red where she’d gripped him. “House du Kane has businesses and branches on most of the populous worlds and many of the colonies. If you ever change your mind, Ethan Frome Fortune, you can get in touch with me.” She grinned tightly. “Twenty-two double R, Ethan. It’ll expedite anything.”

“You’ll find someone else.”

“With my attractions? I can offer my cardmeter balance and my position. Those won’t buy what I want. I’ve asked and pleaded, Ethan. I won’t beg.”

“I know. Begging’s not part of your makeup, Colette.”

A steward was gesturing from alongside the motion lounge her father was strapped into. A faint voice called her name. It came from the throat of a powerful human relic.

“Time to go. Good-bye Ethan. Remember me if you change your mind. Remember me if you don’t.”

She spared him the worry of whether or not to kiss her by turning and striding purposefully toward her father, toward the people and machines helping him stay alive. He watched as the motion lounge maneuvered itself up the rampway leading into the access tube of the shuttlecraft. Snow speckled the window he stared through.

Fifteen minutes died. Then the exchange of cartons and packagings was complete. A muted chemical bubbling sounded through the thick glassalloy window. Red-orange streaks, like spilled oil paint, emerged from the stern of the shuttle. It rose rapidly until it had shrunk to a size no bigger than any of ten thousand other bright ice flakes swirling through Tran-ky-ky’s cold, cold atmosphere.

He rubbed his right arm where she’d clasped him, and thought.

S
EPTEMBER LET HIM STAND
like that for nearly an hour. Then he moved to join him.

“Not easy, feller-me-lad?”

“No, Skua. Not easy.”

“Better this way, though,” the giant said cheerily. “Money’s not everything. She would have gotten tougher before sweeter as the years roll down. There’s a universe full of fledglings waiting to try their wings who are a good deal softer.”

“Skua.”

“What is it, lad?”

“Shut up.” He walked away, moving rapidly down the port corridor, hands jammed deep into his pockets. After a shrug, September followed, keeping the distance between them constant. There was a dark muddy wall raised around the young salesman, and it could only be taken down from within.

Sir Hunnar and his two squires were waiting patiently for them outside the shuttleport building. September had tried to argue them into coming inside to watch the liftoff of the shuttle from closer range. But the Tran had elected to forgo that pleasure, since it meant enduring the unbearably high temperatures inside.

“We saw it rise from out here, Ethan,” the Tran knight said. “It was bigger than the skyboat you came to us in.” A note of childlike wonder crept into his voice. “Does it truly chivan to a ship bigger still?”

“Much bigger, Hunnar.” Ethan was reminded by the Tran’s curious, open stare of the reason for his remaining here. One of those reasons, anyhow. “Let’s find a place in town and have a tankard of reedle.” At least the super pseudomead would salve his throat, if not his confused conscience.

The tavern they located had been smuggled in among more respectable looking two- and three-story structures on a narrow lane. It did not serve reedle, but they found an ample supply of nontoxic intoxicants. Most were derived from varieties of the omnipresent pika-pina or pika-pedan, a few from other plant life. All filled Ethan with an equally warm glow.

“How are we to proceed to form this necessary confederation, friend Ethan?” Suaxus-dal-Jagger sounded thoroughly discouraged, and the expedition hadn’t begun. “We know nothing of this country. No one from Wannome or Sofold has ever been this far from home.”

“So many
satch
,” murmured his counterpart Budjir.

“That can be to our advantage.” September hunched over the table. “The other states we will visit will know nothing of Sofold, but it’s possible they will have heard of Arsudun, and consequently, of the humanx station here.

“We’ve already seen indications that there’re entirely too many local goods goin’ off-planet to have come from Arsudun alone. That means the Arsudunites are trading with the surrounding states. What better way for them to make themselves look big and important than to constantly claim extratrannish wizards—that’s us—for allies?

“So how are they likely to react, when we show up and tell them they’d better confederate for their own good?”

Ethan put down the tall goblet of liquor, used the oversized spoon at his wrist to dip up another helping of the heavily spiced soup in front of him. He sipped at it carefully, the end of the spoon being too wide for his small human mouth. Soup had never been a favorite of his. He preferred more solid food. But Tran-ky-ky’s climate could make anyone a lover of hot food in any form.

“I would rather,” Hunnar replied petulantly, after considering September’s logic, “begin in the neighborhood of Sofold.” He pushed back in his chair, balanced on the two hind legs. Ethan knew the knight wouldn’t fall. He’d never seen a people with such perfect, innate sense of balance.

“No. I think we’ll have the better chance, Hunnar, here where we’re all strangers to the folks we’ll be tryin’ to convert, and where humankind’s dubious reputation has maybe preceded us.”

“Ta-hoding should have voice in this too.” Budjir put in a word for the
Slanderscree
’s captain. “It will be he who will bear considerable responsibility for taking us safely across uncharted ice, and for maneuvering us to safety should trouble arise.”

“That’s incidental,” September countered vigorously. “I’ll grant old Ta-hoding his piece, but it’s more important that we—”

“I detect an odd smell in here, Baftem.” Conversation at the table ceased.

The speaker was a richly dressed Tran standing very close to their booth. His dan spines were lacquered silvery chrome and pink, and he was nearly smothered beneath the impossibly thick fur of some slick white-striped and black-spotted creature. Next to him stood one of the largest Tran Ethan had seen, well over one and two-thirds meters tall and broad in proportion to a normal Tran physique. The latter had one paw resting lightly on the butt of some weapon banded to his left leg. It was dull white and gray and looked like the femur of some walking animal, possibly that of another Tran. Intricate bas-relief covered the club. Its knobby bottom end had been shaped into points.

“An offensive odor—I smell it too,” said the giant, smiling unpleasantly. Ethan noted that conversation in the tavern had dropped to a steady, low susurration. Most eyes were on them.

The wealthy local performed an elaborate gesture through the air in front of his nose, accompanying it with much expressive grimacing. Continuing to shield his muzzle from some imaginary olfactory offense, he made a show of searching the area around the booth, peering beneath chairs, sniffing the table, checking the floor. On all fours he approached Hunnar’s seat, stopped sniffing, and stood. For effect, he sniffed once more, loudly enough for all the onlookers to hear.

“I believe I’ve found the source, Baftem,” he told his companion. “Someone has had the bad manners to bring a castrated
bourf
into the room.”

The quiet became total. When no one at the table reacted, the giant wrinkled his own muzzle distinctively, squinted at Hunnar and made a disgusted sound.

“You know how the enoglids drain once they’ve been neutered. Awful smell!” He looked around the table, exclaimed in mock surprise, “Yet the source seems to be more than one.”

“Gentle, Baftem. It behooves a citizen to be polite, even to a fixed
bourf
.” He bent over the table, leaning between Ethan and Hunnar. “Would you get out?”

Ethan admired Hunnar’s control as the knight looked over his right shoulder, shouted. “Innkeeper, whose tavern is this; yours or his?”

With admirable prescience the innkeeper had already retreated to the vicinity of the cookroom doorway. In response to Hunnar’s query he made some incomprehensible gabbling noises and ducked inside before further elucidation could be requested.

“Perhaps you are the innkeeper after all.” Hunnar gazed nonchalantly up at the interloper. “Yet you look more like a rockworm to me.” His gaze dropped to the other’s feet. “But the slime you trail behind you leads from the entrance, not the back rooms.”

Stepping back and pulling his sword in the same motion, the offended citizen slashed down. Hunnar was still balanced on the rear two legs of his chair. As the blade descended he shoved back. The sturdy back of the chair hit the attacker in the midsection, sending him stumbling away.

Ethan had managed to slide from behind the table and draw his own weapon. It weighed more than a cardmeter, but he’d been forced to learn how to use this new persuader in the past months. He didn’t see the Tran who’d slipped up behind all of them, but dal-Jagger did. The would-be assassin threw Hunnar off-balance as he stumbled into him, clawing blindly at the squire’s dirk which protruded between his eyes.

Everyone in the tavern, it seemed, charged them then. Ice swords and axes of bone and metal flailed wildly at the newcomers. Ethan found himself on the floor, trying to avoid the lance a husky customer was thrusting at him. He rolled, and the lance point struck sparks from the stone paving. The lance wielder tried raising his weapon for another strike when a table hit him in the face.

After throwing the table, September found himself wrestling with the giant Tran who’d backed up the wealthy insult-monger. The enormous bone club thrummed through the air. September skipped agilely out of its path. It took a head-sized chunk out of the wooden wall of the booth.