Watchers of the Dark (11 page)

“I like high society less and less. Why the Romeo act with those, if you’ll pardon the expression, chickens?”

“It’s the solemn obligation of the unmarried male guest to pay court to the daughters of the host and hostess.”

“Oh, joy! I’ve heard of mixed marriages, but that would be hilarious. How come all four daughters look like their mother?”

“Miss Schlupe!” Darzek said sternly. “I have been telling you to get out of the office now and then and find out what goes on in the galaxy. You are observing the inevitable result of the completely integrated interstellar society. Marriages between biologically incompatible species are bound to occur. Among the sophisticated classes they are the rule. One does not marry for such a trivial purpose as reproducing his kind. One marries for social, business, political, or economic reasons.”

“Just like on Earth,” Miss Schlupe observed.

“It’s nothing like on Earth, and you know it. Stop interrupting. At the same time one strives to find a marriage partner who will be an intellectual companion and helpmeet. There are a surprising number of instances where people marry because they happen to like and admire each other—once the other requirements are satisfied, naturally.

“But there is no logical justification for forbidding a person to reproduce merely because he has married a wife from a species with which reproduction is impossible. Therefore we have two-dimensional marital arrangements. Every husband is entitled to a mate of his own species; and every wife is entitled to a mate of hers. These mates may be married to husbands and wives of other species, who will of course have mates of their own, and so it goes. In this society a household can become a rather complicated institution.”

“It sounds scandalous to me.”

“It is not. Scandal ensues only when a person is so unwise as to take both a marriage partner and a mate of his own species. A person stupid enough to do that is asking for trouble. Gula Azfel is a delightful hostess, and she and her husband have a successful marriage with many things in common, though not their children. With regard to marriage the society is scrupulously monogamous, but less so where mates are concerned. There are those species that have more than two sexes, and for them the arrangements become vastly more complicated. The one colony here on Yorlq keeps pretty much to itself, having perhaps all the social problems that it can cope with at home. I am reliably informed that the one-sex species have a rather easy time of it.”

“You mean that they actually expect you—that you’d even consider—”

“Making a nonbiological marriage? Of course. Every promising young bachelor needs a wife to run his home and furnish intellectual companionship, not to mention providing him with all kinds of important connections. I’m seriously considering it. Wouldn’t one of Gula Azfel’s daughters make a charming hostess?”

“Ugh!”

“Have you seen the water dancing? Come along.”

They lingered for a time in the aquaroom and then looked in on the darkened arena, where in a central enclosure two luminous
dmo
plants were locked in mortal combat. The spectators cheered lustily; the glowing branches traced fantastic patterns in the darkness as they whipped about, grappled, struggled for a death hold.

“Eventually one will pull the other up by the roots and eat it,” Darzek said. “Want to watch?”

“No, thank you. Isn’t there an outside door anywhere? And a terrace where one can enjoy the moonlight?”

Darzek shook his head. “Sometimes I wonder if these people know that an outdoors exists. What do you think of them?”

“They’re scared,” she said.

“Rhinzl?”

She hesitated. “Maybe ‘scared’ isn’t the right word. He’s certainly uneasy.”

“True. I wondered if you’d notice. Yorlq is poised on the brink of the Dark like a house teetering on the edge of an abyss, and its inhabitants pretend not to notice. The traders blithely carry on with their trade, and their childish fun and games. The natives go their native way and spice their mundane lives with the traditional cycle of folk festivals. When a common product is no longer available because the Dark has taken the world of its origin, the traders find a substitute without seeming to give a thought as to why a substitute is needed. It’s as if all of them have made a pact not to mention the Dark, and they won’t even think about it if they can help it. But they know it’s there, and they’re frightened.”

“What was the angle with the oil?”

“It’s a vegetable oil, and it comes from a world called Quarm. It was once in common use here, being readily available and cheap. Then the Dark took Quarum.”

“Ah!”

“There were plenty of substitutes, so the passing of Quarmer oil didn’t seriously inconvenience anyone. The point is that it was a well-known product. The native who found those two casks knew what it was. Anyone in this part of the galaxy having anything to do with oils would recognize it. The interesting thing is that no one did. I’m not sure about old E-Wusk—he deals mostly in luxury goods, which this Quarmer oil isn’t. And as far as I know, your friend Rhinzl has never dealt in oils, so perhaps he was telling the truth. But all the others knew what it was and said they didn’t. It’s very interesting. You might even call it fascinating. Normally these traders are scrupulously honest, but tonight at least seven of them deliberately lied to me.”

Darzek had his connections, but he still had nothing to trade.

His one asset was his solvency credential. His unlimited solvency credential. Darzek was skeptical.
Large-talk
words had a disconcerting tendency to take on meanings not implicit in the translations he had been taught, or to mean different things in different circumstances.

“How unlimited is unlimited?” he demanded.

“Spend some of it and find out,” Miss Schlupe suggested.

“I’ll spend all of it,” Darzek said. “Anything less than a colossal deal would be a waste of time.”

He quickly found three natives who had talent for investigation—
that
kind of business he understood—and after several days of patient inquiry they reported to him that Gul Zarkun, a merchant who stood high in the local traders’ pecking order, had a warehouse crammed with unmarketable
mosf
skins.

Darzek called on Gul Zarkun, who greeted him with polite reserve. “Trans-Star Trading Company? I don’t recall—”

“We’re just commencing operations in this sector,” Darzek said glibly. “I understand that you have a surplus of
mosf
skins.”

“I have,” Gul Zarkun admitted, with truly confounding frankness. “A large surplus. I had a good market for them, but business conditions have changed.”

Darzek nodded wisely. Gul Zarkun’s market had been the world of Borut. He had astutely cornered the
mosf
supply, and then the Dark had swallowed Borut and the
mosf
market and left him with a surfeit of
mosf
skins that no one wanted.

“There are markets,” Gul Zarkun went on, “but with transportation costs and the competition from local products I would have to take a heavy loss. I’ve been holding onto them in the hope that something will open up.”

“I have a client who might be able to use them,” Darzek said. “Quote me a price on the lot.”

“The lot? All of them?”

“Of course. There’s no solvency these days in handling small orders.”

“No, indeed,” Gul Zarkun breathed. “All of them, you say? Well—” The magnitude of the proposition made him wary. “What—ah—financial arrangement do you propose?”

“Full and immediate solvency. It’s the only way I do business. I’ll want a certified inventory, but if I’m unable to consummate the exchange I’ll reimburse you for your trouble.”

“That’s fair enough. I’ll have the inventory made and send it to you with a quotation.”

For the next two days Darzek kept the transmitting relays sizzling with messages to his various connections, and when Gul Zarkun’s quotation arrived he was ready.

He did not even consider haggling over the price. The money meant nothing to him as long as his solvency credential covered it. What he desperately needed was a reputation.

“A hundred thousand solvency units,” he told Miss Schlupe. “Nice round figure, isn’t it?”

“How much money is that?”

“No idea. A quarter of a million dollars, at least. Keep your fingers crossed.”

With Miss Schlupe looking on nervously, he touched out the code that would transfer a hundred thousand solvency units from his account to Gul Zarkun’s. After several interminable seconds the board clicked and cleared itself.

“Is that all there is to it?” Miss Schlupe demanded.

Darzek nodded.

“And—you’ve paid Gul Zarkun the hundred thousand?”

Darzek nodded again.

“Unlimited means—unlimited!”

“We still don’t know that,” Darzek said, “but there’s no doubt that it means quite a lot.”

He hurried off a memo to Gul Zarkun informing him that the quotation had been met and applied himself to the tedious task of shipping the
mosf
skins.

A full term went by before his factors disposed of the last of the skins and transferred payment to Darzek. Totaling up his expenses, he found that he’d recovered little more than a quarter of the purchase price. Transportation costs were high, factors’ commissions took greedy bites out of the resale price, and he discovered to his consternation that galactic civilization was less beatified than he had supposed: there were taxes to pay, and assorted inspection and license fees.

A hurried calculation convinced him that he had lost, on this first business transaction, the equivalent of nearly two hundred thousand dollars.

He considered it a bargain. Gul Zarkun was overwhelmed. He came personally to pay his respects to Darzek, and he bragged to his friends—not about his own good fortune in disposing of a dead white elephant, but on Darzek’s astuteness in finding a profitable market none of them thought existed.

“If I’m not careful, that astuteness will ruin me,” Darzek told Miss Schlupe ruefully, but in truth he was elated. He paid for Gul Zarkun’s
mosf
skins with Jan Darzek’s solvency credential; when the skins were resold, payment was made to the Trans-Star Trading Company. He lost some seventy-five thousand solvency units he hadn’t known he had, and Trans-Star gained a third of that amount in liquid solvency.

His company was in business, it had solid assets—and he had acquired the reputation he so desperately needed.

He quickly ran up a series of similar transactions, in each instance making payment with his personal solvency credential and returning the—considerably smaller—receipts to the Trans-Star Trading Company account. On each transaction he lost a fortune and his company became richer. He had the dizzying sensation of having discovered, quite inadvertently, a philosopher’s stone of economics. In half a period he lost an enormous amount of solvency and became a millionaire.

Around Yorlq’s trading community his status quickly became legendary. He no longer had to surreptitiously snoop out potential business deals. The other traders came to him with their surpluses, and, because he wanted to be known as a brilliant businessman rather than a magician, he had to exercise restraint and become severely selective in the offers he accepted. He could easily have lost four times as much solvency and become four times as rich.

He hired several promising young undertraders from the lower reaches of his competitors’ organizations. His own radical ideas on how to run a trading company merely bewildered them, but left to their own devices they gradually developed a volume of business of a more prosaic sort, and Trans-Star began to show a modest profit.

He also expanded his staff of investigators, keeping that organization separate from his trading company and as anonymous as his ingenuity could make it. Its headquarters were a Trans-Star warehouse; certain alterations were effected before the trading company occupied the premises, and none of the trading personnel were aware that the building’s internal dimensions were somewhat smaller than they had been originally. The rooms thus concealed were easily accessible by transmitter but in no other way; and by transmitter only to those who knew what transmitters to use, and how. With a secret headquarters, and with a staff of trained investigators, he felt that he was at last ready to learn a thing or two about the Dark.

But his trading company still required a disproportionate amount of time and energy that he would have preferred to expend on more vital matters. He had his reputation, but it would quickly wilt if he did not keep it nourished.

On the day following Gul Azfel’s party, he sent for his first undertrader and flashed invoices on his ceiling screen until he found the one he wanted. “It says here,” he remarked severely, “that you have just purchased two shiploads of
skruka-gum.”

“Yes, Sire,” Gud Baxak admitted humbly. “It seemed like a very good price.”