Trader's World (33 page)

Following formal introductions the Chill party showed no interest at all in Mike. When his own polite shot at conversation was rebuffed he did not persist. He watched the stark scenery drifting past below them, until by four o'clock in the afternoon it was too dark for any sight but the flashing white light on the tip of the wing. Then he stared at that and thought about the mission, wondering how he would handle what came next; wondering, for the first time ever, if he was cut out to be a Trader at all . . . Finally, lulled by the soft whine of the engines, he fell asleep.
Food, drink, sleep—take them whenever you have a chance.

A change in the engine sound woke him. Mike looked sleepily out of the cabin window on the left, then jerked to full attention. The pulsing wing light had become a fuzzy bright point in a dancing cloud of white. They were flying through a snowstorm, a blizzard so intense that visibility did not go beyond the wingtips.

Kristen Waldemar had noticed that he was awake. She nodded coldly from her seat on the other side of the cabin, "In the middle of the descent. Landing in a couple of minutes."

"It's an absolute ice storm out there. How can the pilot see?"

"She can see as much as she is allowed to." Kristen Waldemar gave him another chilly stare. "Don't worry. Even without snow, no one has been permitted to land at Cap City on visual flight rules for more than twenty years. Our descent is all on instruments. There will be nothing to see, and it is time you were ready to go outside. Let me show you how it is done."

As the engines were throttled back further, she handed Mike a compact parcel. He hefted it on his palm; it weighed less than a pound. She picked up a second package by one corner and cracked it like a whip. The whole fabric unfolded to become a glittering quicksilver mantle.

Chillsuit!

He'd heard of them but never seen one. They were not exported from the Cap Federation territories. According to Trader rumor the suit was the most precious possession any Chill could ever own. He looked at it curiously. It seemed little more than a piece of shiny plastic.

Kristen Waldemar lifted her suit in both hands, the head of the unit hanging down, and held it up above her. "Watch now. It looks hard, but it is very easy." She lowered the head unit of the suit to touch the top of her dark curls. As soon as the unit made contact, it
rippled.
Turning inside out, the unfolding suit flowed down over her body to her ankles. She lifted her feet, one after the other. As she did so the chillsuit made closure there. Kristen Waldemar had vanished, replaced by a shimmering figure of distorting mirror surfaces.

The transformation shocked Mike. As a Chill negotiator she had been no more than a rather unfriendly-looking woman, a little taller and thinner than most. Now she was a spectral, menacing figure, with bulging face and spidery limbs.

The main chillsuit material was less than a millimeter thick. It covered the body completely, head to toe, including mouth, nose, and eyes. The chillsuit contoured Kristen Waldemar's slim body to skintight perfection, vacuum tight everywhere except at the face. There the suit bulged grotesquely outward. Optic fiber bundles protruded as silver-green disks. Two inches across, they allowed perfect vision in all directions and protected the wearer's eyes totally from wind and cold. Below the green protruding disks the suit's mouth and nose formed a swollen muzzle. A network of tubes curved out and down under the chin, allowing the chillsuit wearer to breathe air warmed by circulation near the body.

The glittering shape in front of Mike raised a fragile-looking arm and nodded. "You now. Get a move on. We'll be landing in another minute."

He hesitated. What Kristen Waldemar had done looked like an impossible trick—a chillsuit donned and in full working order in less than ten seconds. He lifted the parcel and shook it loose. Then he held it high and gingerly began to lower it toward his head. Even before it made contact he felt the movement. It pulled out of his hands and writhed down to enfold him. There was one unbearable moment when nose and mouth were covered, then he realized that his breathing was unimpaired. And he could see perfectly—better with the suit than without it! There must be enhancement hardware in the optic bundle image reconstruction. He lifted one gloved hand and stared at the dazzling surface of the back of his forearm. He could see tiny sensors there, no more than a few micrometers across. Inside that total opacity, his fingertip recorder must be totally blind and useless.

"You're not finished yet," Kristen Waldemar said, and he realized that he could hear her perfectly, too, even though his ears were covered. "If you went out on the ice cap like that you'd freeze in two minutes. Lift your feet."

Mike did so, and felt the closure around each leg as the chillsuit completed its seals. Just as that happened he also felt a slight shake of the aircar.

The dazzling silver figure in front of him nodded. "Just in time. We're down. Follow me. For your information, it's thirty below zero outside. But see how you feel when you get there. Stay close behind me."

She turned the handle. The cabin door opened as though someone had jerked it violently outward. There was a great scream of wind past its edges, and a flurry of snowflakes.

Mike was supposed to go out into
that
—without any more protection against the cold than the skimpy suit? Kristen left without another word. He paused for a moment on the step down. Finally he said a prayer to the gods of absolute zero and followed her out into the howling winter storm.

He could see a faint pattern of lights ahead, flickering and variable through the whirl of driving snow. Closer was the bright reflection from Kristen's chillsuit. She was gliding along fast—faster than he could travel over the powdery snowpack. He floundered along after her through half a foot of new fall. He was so busy doing it that a minute passed before he realized that he felt no cold at all. He was warm and comfortable. And somehow the raging winds that blew snowflakes horizontally across the field of view exerted little force on his body.

He looked down at the miraculous chillsuit and then stared again around him. The aircar was already invisible behind, though it could be no more than forty yards away. Curious to know if the other crew members were following, Mike continued his turn through a full revolution.

That was a mistake—a
big
mistake. When he had made what he was sure was a complete turn he looked again in front of him.
Nothing.
Kristen Waldemar had vanished. The lights ahead were gone. There was only gray sky gloom and blinding snow. He felt his heart beating faster. He was alone, all alone, out on the Antarctic ice cap in an evening winter blizzard.

Trader training took over. Remember the rules, a voice said inside Mike's head.
Anything
can be a piece of negotiation tactics. Suppose this is Kristen Waldemar's way of softening you up before the real business begins?

He forced himself to stoop down and mark four lines with one chillsuit finger in the deepening snow: one in front, one behind, and one on each side. He could still see them, even when fully standing. He began to turn around, surveying to the limit of vision, then looking back to the ground reference points and turning a little farther. He tried to hurry, aware that it would not be long before the wind obliterated the marks. After a three-quarter turn his eyes at last picked out a faint and flickering light.

Surely his sense of direction had not been so far off? He would have sworn this was not the heading for the first lights he had seen. But there could be no debating the options. Keeping his eyes glued on those lights, he headed steadfastly toward them.

Distances were just as deceptive as directions. One moment the lights were far off and faint; a few yards more, and he had reached them. They were two narrow bars of illumination, one on each side of a low building with a wide door of translucent blue material. When he was within a few feet of the entrance the door swung open. Mike went through and found himself on a platform in front of a curved descending staircase. At the foot stood Kristen Waldemar. She had already removed her chillsuit and was standing looking up with a strange expression on her face.

He hurried down the stairs and stopped in front of her. "Get this damned thing off me. What sort of hosts are you anyway, leaving a guest to freeze out there on the ice cap?" (One hell of way to begin a negotiation—but he remembered Rule 13:
Don't set precedents you can't live with.
)

"Like this." She reached out and pressed under his chin. At once the chillsuit rippled upward, folding into a neat package on top of his head. It would have fallen to the floor, but she reached out and caught it. "You were in no danger. The chillsuit is completely windproof and nonconducting. It allows no more heat to radiate away than the human body itself produces, and its surface minimizes wind forces. We often stay on the surface all day or all night, in complete safety." Her words were casual, but the tone sounded oddly conciliatory. She was even offering a tentative smile. "Do not worry. Nothing like that will happen again."

It sounded like a halfhearted apology. But why let the incident happen in the first place? She must have known that Mike would be struggling along behind her.

"Food and drink?" she said hesitantly. "And then, if you are not too tired, we can begin our official discussions."

She placed his chillsuit on a stand by the entrance. Her own went, carefully folded and packed, into a satchel at her side. As they walked into the interior, Mike had his first chance to examine the unique architecture of the underground caverns of Cap City.

Wood and metal were in short supply here. The builders had been obliged to use their only plentiful construction material. The walls were thick sheets of ice, covered by a thin layer of chillsuit material. Highly reflecting and nonconducting, it permitted a comfortable living temperature in each room without melting the walls. A system of vents to the surface allowed any heat passing through to the ice to be removed. Over the years, the Chills had gradually extended the underground structure, burrowing deeper and deeper into the ice cap. No outsider knew the extent of that development.

They went through a long communal dining hall to a private room at the end. Kristen Waldemar called up a menu on the tabletop screen and ordered a meal without consulting Mike. He put on a worried look that said, "How many ways are there to cook seal and penguin?", then pretended to be gratified by the number and nature of the dishes offered on the menu.

She must have caught the look, because the earlier half-smile warmed to a real grin. Since leaving him out there in the snowstorm, her whole attitude seemed to have changed.

"Wait and see," she said. "Traders must be familiar with all the foods of the world. But I feel sure that ours will amaze you. It is the best that can be found
anywhere
."

The dishes began to appear from the midtable hatches. Little of the food was familiar, and Kristen made no move to taste anything. She was waiting for Mike. He finally picked up a fork and took a first tentative bite. Trader training dictated the protocol: regardless of taste he would offer compliments. In this case, he expected to be on safe ground.

Sure enough. It was delicious.

"What
is
this?" He took another, bigger forkful.

Kristen laughed in delight, and Mike revised his estimate of her age downward by five years. "That is seaweed, fried in fish oil. But the special flavor comes from the morel and lactarius garnish. When we have some spare time, I will show you the mushroom caves. Five hundred feet below us is the best fungal growth environment in the world—temperature and humidity exactly controlled, radiation budget precisely right. But there are better courses to come." She finally dug into her own heaped plate and began to eat heartily. "You see," she said between mouthfuls, "we have heard how the rest of the world regards our food. All they know is our seal-oil toast for a safe journey, and that is an old ritual I would be happy to do without. Now, at one time our reputation
was
justified. We had nothing, and we ate whatever we could find. But today we are the world's gourmets. We have the pick of the sea farms, we harvest the waters beyond the ice shelf, and we grow the world's best vegetables and fungi in our underground tanks."

That was all very plausible, but Mike was having second thoughts. Kristen must know that Mike would have been briefed on Cap Federation ways before he was ever allowed to leave Trader Headquarters. The food might surprise a casual visitor, but not a Trader. Therefore, Kristen's delight at surprising him, no matter how well presented, was not genuine. This was all part of the game of negotiation, and she knew just how it played.
Trader Rule: Tell them what they know—it gives them a feeling of confidence.

Mike's respect for her acting ability increased. From now on, it would be unwise to assume that
any
of Kristen Waldemar's responses were spontaneous. And yet he was still convinced that the change in her general attitude toward him was genuine.

Wishful thinking?

He let his thoughts run free and concentrated on enjoying the best meal he'd eaten in years. There was a generous array of drink and drugs set out at the end of the table, everything a human might want to snort, smoke, pop, or mainline. Mike ignored them all. So did Kristen. If there were anything added to the food, they were both ingesting it; but as an added precaution he quietly downed a detox pill between courses.

It was Kristen who broke the spell of genteel dining pleasure. After a dish of candied kelp she sat up a little straighter in her chair and glared at him. "Mikal Asparian, how old are you?"

Mike cleared his throat—twice. "I'm twenty-three," he said at last.

"You could pass for less. And how many Trader missions have you been on?"

"This is my—er, my fourth. Or maybe my fifth. It depends how you count."

"Sweet Scott. What are your people doing? First, they send a
man.
You know, don't you, that we had specifically requested a female negotiator?"