“It’s simple. You discover what
they want and give it to them for as near your price as you can
get.” Jagan sat at the wall desk, Charis on a second
pull-seat by the wall. But the captain was not looking at her; he
was staring at the cabin wall as if the answer to some dilemma was
scratched there as deeply as a blaster ray could burn it.
“They have what we want. Look here—” He pulled
out a strip of material as long as Charis’s forearm and as
wide as her palm.
It was fabric of some type, a pleasant green color with an odd
shimmer to its surface. And it slipped through her fingers with a
caressing softness. Also, she discovered, it could be creased and
folded into an amazingly small compass, yet would shake out
completely unwrinkled.
“That’s waterproof,” Jagan said. “They
make it. Of what we don’t know.”
“For their clothing?” Charis was entranced. This had
the soft beauty of the fabulously expensive Askra spider silk.
“No, this fabric is used commonly to package
things—bags and such. The Warlockians don’t wear
clothing. They live in the sea as far as we know. And that’s
the only thing we’ve been able to trade out of them so far.
We can’t get to them—” He scowled, flipping
record tapes about the top of the desk. “This is our chance,
the big one, the one every trader dreams of having someday—a
permit on a newly opened world. Make this spin right and it
means—” His voice trailed off, but Charis understood
him.
Trading empires, fortunes, were made from just such chances. To
get at the first trade of a new world was a dream of good
luck. But she was still puzzled as to how Jagan had achieved the
permit for Warlock. Surely one of the big Companies would have made
contact with Survey and bid in the rights to establish the first
post. Such plums were not for the fringe men. But it was hardly
tactful under the circumstances to ask Jagan how he had
accomplished the nigh to impossible.
She had been spending a certain period of each ship’s day
with Jagan, going over the tapes he considered necessary for her
briefing. And Charis had, after her first instruction hour,
realized that to Jagan she was not a person at all, but a key with
which he might unlock the mysteriously shut door of Warlockian
trade. Oddly enough, while the captain supplied her with a wealth
of information about his goods, the need for certain prices and
profits, the mechanics of trading with aliens, he seemed to have
very little to say about the natives themselves, save that they
were strongly matriarchal in their beliefs, holding males in
contempt. And they had been wary of the post after a first curious
interest in it.
Jagan was singularly evasive over why the first contact had
failed so thoroughly. And Charis, treading warily, dared not ask
too many questions. This was like forsaking a well-worn road for a
wilderness. She still had a little knowledge to guide her, but she
had to pick a new path, using all her intuition.
“They have something else.” Jagan came out of the
thoughtful silence into which he had retreated. “It’s a
tool, a power. They travel by it.” He rubbed one hand across
his square chin and looked at Charis oddly as if daring her to take
his words lightly. “They can vanish!”
“Vanish?” She tried to be encouraging. Every bit of
information she could gain she must have.
“I saw it.” His voice sank to a mumble. “She
was right there—” one finger stabbed at the corner of
the cabin, “and then—” He shook his head.
“Just—just gone! They work it some way. Get us the
secret of how they do that and we won’t need anything
else.”
Charis knew that Jagan believed in the truth of what he had
seen. And aliens had secrets. She was beginning to look
forward to Warlock more than for just a chance of being free of
this spacer.
But when they did planet, she was not so certain once again. The
sky of mid-afternoon was amber, pure gold in places. The ship had
set down among rough cliffs of red and black which shelved or broke
abruptly to the green sea. Except for that sea and the sky, Warlock
appeared a somber world of dark earth, a world which, to Charis,
repelled rather than invited the coming of her species.
On Demeter the foliage had been a light, bright green, with
hints of yellow along stem or leaf edge. Here it held a purple
overcast, as if it were eternally night-shadowed even in the full
sun of day.
Charis had welcomed and fiercely longed for the fresh air of the
open, untainted by spacer use. But after her first tasting of that
pleasure, she was more aware of a chill, a certain repulsion. Yet
the breeze from the sea was no more than fresh; the few odors it
bore, while perhaps strange, were not offensive in any way.
There was no settlement, no indication except for slag scars,
that any spacer had set down here before. She followed Jagan down
the ramp, away from the thruster steam, to the edge of a cliff
drop, for they had landed on a plateau well above sea level. Below
was an inlet running like a sharp sword thrust of sea into the
land. And at its innermost tip bubbled the dome of the post, a gray
dome of quickly hardened plasta-skin—the usual temporary
structure on a frontier planet.
“There she is.” Jagan nodded. But it seemed to
Charis that he was in no hurry to approach his gate to fortune. She
stood there, the breeze tugging at her hair and the coveralls they
had given her. Demeter had been a frontier world, alien, but until
after the white death had struck it had seemed open, willing to
welcome her kind. Was that because it had had no native race? Or
because its very combination of natural features, of sights,
sounds, smells, had been more attuned to Terran stock? Charis had
only begun to assess what made that difference, trying to explore
the emotions this first meeting with Warlock aroused in her, when
Jagan moved.
He lifted a hand to summon her on and led the way down a
switchback trail cut into the native rock by blaster fire. Behind
she could hear the voices of his crew as they formed a line of men
to descend.
The foliage had been thinned about the post, leaving a wide
space of bare, blue soil and gray sand ringing the bubble, an
elementary defense precaution. Charis caught the scent of perfume,
looked into a bush where small lavender-pink balls bobbed and swung
with the wind’s touch. That was the first light and delicate
thing she had seen in this rugged landscape.
Now that she was on a level with the post, she saw that the dome
was larger than it looked from above. Its surface was unbroken by
any windows; visa-screens within would be set to pick up what
registered on sensitive patches of the walls. But at the seaward
end there was the outline of a door. Jagan fronted that and Charis,
alert to any change in the trader’s attitude, was sure he was
puzzled. But his pause was only momentary. He strode forward and
slapped his palm against the door as if in irritation.
The portal split open and they were inside the large foreroom.
Charis looked about her. There was a long table, really only a flat
surface mounted on easily assembled pipelegs. A set of shelves, put
together in a like manner and now occupied by a mass of trade
goods, followed the curve of the dome wall along, flanking the
door, and added to the portion cutting this first chamber off from
the rest.
There was a second door midway of that inner wall; the man who
stood there must be Gellir, Jagan’s cargomaster and now post
keeper. He had the deep tan of a space man, but his narrow face,
with its sharp jet of chin and nose, bore signs of fatigue. There
were lines bracketing his lips, dark smudges under his eyes. He was
a man who was under a strain, Charis thought. And he carried a
stunner, not holstered at his belt as all the crew wore them when
planetside, but free in his hand, as if he expected not his captain
but some danger he was not sure he could meet.
“You made it.” His greeting was a flat statement of
fact. Then he sighted Charis and his expression tightened into one
that she thought, with surprise, was a mingling of fear and
repulsion. “Why—” He stopped, perhaps at some
signal from Jagan the girl had not seen.
“Through here,” the captain spoke to her quickly.
She was almost pushed past Gellir into a passage so narrow that the
shoulders of her escort brushed the plasta walls. He took her to
the end of that way where the dome began to curve down overhead and
then opened another door. “In here,” he ordered
curtly.
Charis went in, but as she turned, the door was already shut.
Somehow she knew that if she tried to separate it by palm pressure,
it would be locked.
With growing apprehension Charis looked about the room. There
was a folding cot against the slope of the wall—she would
have to move carefully to fit in under that curve. A stall fresher
occupied a considerable space in the room where the roof was
higher. For the rest, there was a snap-down table and a pull-out
seat to fit beneath it and, at the foot of the cot, a box she
guessed was to hold personal possessions.
More like a cell than living quarters in its design to conserve
space. But, she thought, probably equal to any within the post. She
wondered how big a staff Jagan thought necessary to keep here.
Gellir had been in charge while the captain was off-world, and he
could have been alone, a situation which would cause him to be
jumpy under the circumstances. Normally a spacer of the Free Trader
class would carry—Charis reckoned what she did know about
such ships—normally a captain, cargomaster, assistant
pilot-navigator, engineer and his assistant, a jet man, a medico, a
cook—perhaps an assistant cargomaster. But that was a fully
staffed ship, not a fringe tramp. She thought there had been four
men on board beside Jagan.
Think things out, assemble your information before you act.
Ander Nordholm had been a systematic thinker and his training still
held in the odd turn her life had taken. Charis pulled out the seat
and folded her hands on the table surface as she sat down to follow
her father’s way of facing a problem.
If she only knew more about Jagan! That he was desperately
intent upon this project she could understand. Success meant a
great deal for a fringe tramp; the establishment of a post on a
newly opened planet was a huge step up. But—how had one on
the ragged edge of respectability gotten the franchise for such a
post in the beginning? Or—Charis considered a new
thought—or had Jagan broken in here without a license?
Suppose, just suppose, he had seen the chance to land well away
from any government base, start trading. Then, when he was located
by a Patrol from whatever headquarters did exist on Warlock, he
could present an established fact. With the trade going, he could
pay his fine and be left alone, because the situation could be so
delicate locally that the legal representatives would not want the
natives to have any hint of dissension between two off-world
groups.
Then a time lapse in establishing proper contact with the aliens
would goad Jagan into action. He would have to take any
short cut, make any move he could devise, to get started. So, he
needed her—
But that meeting on the desert of the unknown world where she
had been traded from the labor ship to Jagan—what was that
place and why had Jagan been there? Just to pick her up—or
some other woman? An illegal meeting place where traders in
contraband exchanged cargoes—of that she was sure. Smugglers
operated all over space. A regular stop for the labor ship and
Jagan was there, waiting on the chance of their carrying a woman
for sale?
Which meant she had been taken by an illegal trader. Charis
smiled slowly; she could be lucky because this trade had gone
through. Somewhere on Warlock there was a government base where all
contacts between off-worlders and natives were supervised. If she
could reach that base and protest an illegal contract, she might be
free even with Jagan holding her signature and thumbprint against
her!
For the time being she would go along with Jagan’s trading
plans. Only—if the captain were working against
time—Suddenly Charis felt as cold as she had when crouched on
the Demeter mountainside. She was only a tool for Jagan; let that
tool fail and . . .
She took an iron grip on herself, fought the cold inside her
which was a gathering storm to send her beating at the door of what
might be a trap. Her hands were palm-down on the table, their flesh
wet. Charis strove to master the sickness in her middle and then
she heard movements. Not in this cell—no—but beyond its
wall.
A pounding—now heavy, now hardly more than a
tapping—at irregular intervals. She was straining to hear
more when the sound of metallic space-boot plates clicking against
the flooring made her tense. Coming here?
She slipped sidewise on the seat to face the door. But that did
not open. Instead, she heard another sound from beyond the
wall—a thin mewling, animal-like, yet more frightening than
any beast’s cry. A human voice—low; Charis could not
make out any words, just a man’s tone close to the level of a
whisper.
Now the sound of footsteps just without her own door. Charis sat
very still, willing herself into what she hoped was the outer
semblance of calm. Not Jagan entered as the door split open, but
one of the crew she did not recognize. In one hand he carried a
sack-bag such as the crew used for personal belongings, which he
tossed in the general direction of her cot. In the other, he
balanced a sealed, hot ration tray which he slid on to the table
before her. The room was so small he need hardly step inside the
door to rid himself of both burdens.
Charis was ready to speak, but the expression on his face was
forbidding and his movements were those of a man in a hurry. He was
back and gone, the door sealed behind him before she could ask a
question.
A finger-tip pressure released the lid of the tray and Charis
savored the fragrance of stew, hot quaffa. She made a quick
business of eating, and her plate was cleared before she heard more
sounds. Not the thumping this time but a low cry which was not
quite a moan.
As suddenly as that plaint began, it stopped and there was
silence. A prisoner? A member of the crew ill? Charis’s
imagination could supply several answers, but imagination was not
to be relied upon.
As the silence continued, Charis rose to investigate the bag on
the cot. Jagan or someone had made a selection of trade goods, for
the articles which spilled out were items intended to catch the eye
of an alien or primitive. Charis found a comb with the back set in
a fanciful pattern of bits of crystal; a mirror adorned to match; a
box containing highly scented soap powder, the too strong perfume
of which made her sniff in fastidious disgust. There were several
lengths of cloth in bright colors; a small hand-sew kit; three
pairs of ornamented sandals in different sizes for a fitting
choice; a robe, which was too short and too wide, of a violent blue
with a flashy pattern of oblak birds painted on it.
Apparently the captain wished her to present a more feminine
appearance than she now made wearing the coveralls. Which was
logical considering her duties here—that she register as a
woman with the natives.
Suddenly Charis yielded to the desire to be just that
again—a woman. The colonists of Demeter had been a
puritanical sect with strong feelings concerning the wrongness of
frivolous feminine clothing. Suiting themselves outwardly as well
as they could to the people they must live among, all members of
the government party not generally in uniform had adapted to the
clumsy, drab clothing the sect believed fitting. Such colors as now
spilled across the cot had been denied Charis for almost two years.
While they were not the ones she would have chosen for herself, she
reached out to stroke their brightness with an odd lightening of
spirit.
There were no patterns by which to cut, but she thought she had
skill enough to put together a straight robe and skirt, a very
modified version of the colony clothing. The yellow went with the
green in not too glaring a combination. And one pair of sandals did
fit.
Charis set out the toilet articles on the table, piled the
material and the robe on the chair. Of course, they must have
brought her the least attractive and cheapest of their supplies.
But still—she remembered the strip of native material Jagan
had shown her. The color of that was far better than any of these
garish fabrics. Someone who used that regularly would not be
attracted by what she had here. Perhaps that was one of the points
which had defeated Jagan so far; his wares were not fitted to the
taste of his customers. But surely the captain was no amateur; he
would know that for himself.
No—definitely she would not combine the yellow with the
green after all. One color alone and, if there was not enough
material, Jagan would have to give her the run of his shelves to
make a better selection. If she was going to represent her race
before alien females, she must appear at her best.
Charis measured the length of green against her body. Another
modification of the cut she had planned might do it.
“Pretty—pretty—”
She swung around. That sibilant whisper was so startling that
Charis was badly shaken. The figure in the slit of the opened door
whipped through and drew the portal tight shut behind her as she
stood, facing Charis, her back to the door, her lips stretched in a
frightening caricature of a smile.
“It’s simple. You discover what
they want and give it to them for as near your price as you can
get.” Jagan sat at the wall desk, Charis on a second
pull-seat by the wall. But the captain was not looking at her; he
was staring at the cabin wall as if the answer to some dilemma was
scratched there as deeply as a blaster ray could burn it.
“They have what we want. Look here—” He pulled
out a strip of material as long as Charis’s forearm and as
wide as her palm.
It was fabric of some type, a pleasant green color with an odd
shimmer to its surface. And it slipped through her fingers with a
caressing softness. Also, she discovered, it could be creased and
folded into an amazingly small compass, yet would shake out
completely unwrinkled.
“That’s waterproof,” Jagan said. “They
make it. Of what we don’t know.”
“For their clothing?” Charis was entranced. This had
the soft beauty of the fabulously expensive Askra spider silk.
“No, this fabric is used commonly to package
things—bags and such. The Warlockians don’t wear
clothing. They live in the sea as far as we know. And that’s
the only thing we’ve been able to trade out of them so far.
We can’t get to them—” He scowled, flipping
record tapes about the top of the desk. “This is our chance,
the big one, the one every trader dreams of having someday—a
permit on a newly opened world. Make this spin right and it
means—” His voice trailed off, but Charis understood
him.
Trading empires, fortunes, were made from just such chances. To
get at the first trade of a new world was a dream of good
luck. But she was still puzzled as to how Jagan had achieved the
permit for Warlock. Surely one of the big Companies would have made
contact with Survey and bid in the rights to establish the first
post. Such plums were not for the fringe men. But it was hardly
tactful under the circumstances to ask Jagan how he had
accomplished the nigh to impossible.
She had been spending a certain period of each ship’s day
with Jagan, going over the tapes he considered necessary for her
briefing. And Charis had, after her first instruction hour,
realized that to Jagan she was not a person at all, but a key with
which he might unlock the mysteriously shut door of Warlockian
trade. Oddly enough, while the captain supplied her with a wealth
of information about his goods, the need for certain prices and
profits, the mechanics of trading with aliens, he seemed to have
very little to say about the natives themselves, save that they
were strongly matriarchal in their beliefs, holding males in
contempt. And they had been wary of the post after a first curious
interest in it.
Jagan was singularly evasive over why the first contact had
failed so thoroughly. And Charis, treading warily, dared not ask
too many questions. This was like forsaking a well-worn road for a
wilderness. She still had a little knowledge to guide her, but she
had to pick a new path, using all her intuition.
“They have something else.” Jagan came out of the
thoughtful silence into which he had retreated. “It’s a
tool, a power. They travel by it.” He rubbed one hand across
his square chin and looked at Charis oddly as if daring her to take
his words lightly. “They can vanish!”
“Vanish?” She tried to be encouraging. Every bit of
information she could gain she must have.
“I saw it.” His voice sank to a mumble. “She
was right there—” one finger stabbed at the corner of
the cabin, “and then—” He shook his head.
“Just—just gone! They work it some way. Get us the
secret of how they do that and we won’t need anything
else.”
Charis knew that Jagan believed in the truth of what he had
seen. And aliens had secrets. She was beginning to look
forward to Warlock more than for just a chance of being free of
this spacer.
But when they did planet, she was not so certain once again. The
sky of mid-afternoon was amber, pure gold in places. The ship had
set down among rough cliffs of red and black which shelved or broke
abruptly to the green sea. Except for that sea and the sky, Warlock
appeared a somber world of dark earth, a world which, to Charis,
repelled rather than invited the coming of her species.
On Demeter the foliage had been a light, bright green, with
hints of yellow along stem or leaf edge. Here it held a purple
overcast, as if it were eternally night-shadowed even in the full
sun of day.
Charis had welcomed and fiercely longed for the fresh air of the
open, untainted by spacer use. But after her first tasting of that
pleasure, she was more aware of a chill, a certain repulsion. Yet
the breeze from the sea was no more than fresh; the few odors it
bore, while perhaps strange, were not offensive in any way.
There was no settlement, no indication except for slag scars,
that any spacer had set down here before. She followed Jagan down
the ramp, away from the thruster steam, to the edge of a cliff
drop, for they had landed on a plateau well above sea level. Below
was an inlet running like a sharp sword thrust of sea into the
land. And at its innermost tip bubbled the dome of the post, a gray
dome of quickly hardened plasta-skin—the usual temporary
structure on a frontier planet.
“There she is.” Jagan nodded. But it seemed to
Charis that he was in no hurry to approach his gate to fortune. She
stood there, the breeze tugging at her hair and the coveralls they
had given her. Demeter had been a frontier world, alien, but until
after the white death had struck it had seemed open, willing to
welcome her kind. Was that because it had had no native race? Or
because its very combination of natural features, of sights,
sounds, smells, had been more attuned to Terran stock? Charis had
only begun to assess what made that difference, trying to explore
the emotions this first meeting with Warlock aroused in her, when
Jagan moved.
He lifted a hand to summon her on and led the way down a
switchback trail cut into the native rock by blaster fire. Behind
she could hear the voices of his crew as they formed a line of men
to descend.
The foliage had been thinned about the post, leaving a wide
space of bare, blue soil and gray sand ringing the bubble, an
elementary defense precaution. Charis caught the scent of perfume,
looked into a bush where small lavender-pink balls bobbed and swung
with the wind’s touch. That was the first light and delicate
thing she had seen in this rugged landscape.
Now that she was on a level with the post, she saw that the dome
was larger than it looked from above. Its surface was unbroken by
any windows; visa-screens within would be set to pick up what
registered on sensitive patches of the walls. But at the seaward
end there was the outline of a door. Jagan fronted that and Charis,
alert to any change in the trader’s attitude, was sure he was
puzzled. But his pause was only momentary. He strode forward and
slapped his palm against the door as if in irritation.
The portal split open and they were inside the large foreroom.
Charis looked about her. There was a long table, really only a flat
surface mounted on easily assembled pipelegs. A set of shelves, put
together in a like manner and now occupied by a mass of trade
goods, followed the curve of the dome wall along, flanking the
door, and added to the portion cutting this first chamber off from
the rest.
There was a second door midway of that inner wall; the man who
stood there must be Gellir, Jagan’s cargomaster and now post
keeper. He had the deep tan of a space man, but his narrow face,
with its sharp jet of chin and nose, bore signs of fatigue. There
were lines bracketing his lips, dark smudges under his eyes. He was
a man who was under a strain, Charis thought. And he carried a
stunner, not holstered at his belt as all the crew wore them when
planetside, but free in his hand, as if he expected not his captain
but some danger he was not sure he could meet.
“You made it.” His greeting was a flat statement of
fact. Then he sighted Charis and his expression tightened into one
that she thought, with surprise, was a mingling of fear and
repulsion. “Why—” He stopped, perhaps at some
signal from Jagan the girl had not seen.
“Through here,” the captain spoke to her quickly.
She was almost pushed past Gellir into a passage so narrow that the
shoulders of her escort brushed the plasta walls. He took her to
the end of that way where the dome began to curve down overhead and
then opened another door. “In here,” he ordered
curtly.
Charis went in, but as she turned, the door was already shut.
Somehow she knew that if she tried to separate it by palm pressure,
it would be locked.
With growing apprehension Charis looked about the room. There
was a folding cot against the slope of the wall—she would
have to move carefully to fit in under that curve. A stall fresher
occupied a considerable space in the room where the roof was
higher. For the rest, there was a snap-down table and a pull-out
seat to fit beneath it and, at the foot of the cot, a box she
guessed was to hold personal possessions.
More like a cell than living quarters in its design to conserve
space. But, she thought, probably equal to any within the post. She
wondered how big a staff Jagan thought necessary to keep here.
Gellir had been in charge while the captain was off-world, and he
could have been alone, a situation which would cause him to be
jumpy under the circumstances. Normally a spacer of the Free Trader
class would carry—Charis reckoned what she did know about
such ships—normally a captain, cargomaster, assistant
pilot-navigator, engineer and his assistant, a jet man, a medico, a
cook—perhaps an assistant cargomaster. But that was a fully
staffed ship, not a fringe tramp. She thought there had been four
men on board beside Jagan.
Think things out, assemble your information before you act.
Ander Nordholm had been a systematic thinker and his training still
held in the odd turn her life had taken. Charis pulled out the seat
and folded her hands on the table surface as she sat down to follow
her father’s way of facing a problem.
If she only knew more about Jagan! That he was desperately
intent upon this project she could understand. Success meant a
great deal for a fringe tramp; the establishment of a post on a
newly opened planet was a huge step up. But—how had one on
the ragged edge of respectability gotten the franchise for such a
post in the beginning? Or—Charis considered a new
thought—or had Jagan broken in here without a license?
Suppose, just suppose, he had seen the chance to land well away
from any government base, start trading. Then, when he was located
by a Patrol from whatever headquarters did exist on Warlock, he
could present an established fact. With the trade going, he could
pay his fine and be left alone, because the situation could be so
delicate locally that the legal representatives would not want the
natives to have any hint of dissension between two off-world
groups.
Then a time lapse in establishing proper contact with the aliens
would goad Jagan into action. He would have to take any
short cut, make any move he could devise, to get started. So, he
needed her—
But that meeting on the desert of the unknown world where she
had been traded from the labor ship to Jagan—what was that
place and why had Jagan been there? Just to pick her up—or
some other woman? An illegal meeting place where traders in
contraband exchanged cargoes—of that she was sure. Smugglers
operated all over space. A regular stop for the labor ship and
Jagan was there, waiting on the chance of their carrying a woman
for sale?
Which meant she had been taken by an illegal trader. Charis
smiled slowly; she could be lucky because this trade had gone
through. Somewhere on Warlock there was a government base where all
contacts between off-worlders and natives were supervised. If she
could reach that base and protest an illegal contract, she might be
free even with Jagan holding her signature and thumbprint against
her!
For the time being she would go along with Jagan’s trading
plans. Only—if the captain were working against
time—Suddenly Charis felt as cold as she had when crouched on
the Demeter mountainside. She was only a tool for Jagan; let that
tool fail and . . .
She took an iron grip on herself, fought the cold inside her
which was a gathering storm to send her beating at the door of what
might be a trap. Her hands were palm-down on the table, their flesh
wet. Charis strove to master the sickness in her middle and then
she heard movements. Not in this cell—no—but beyond its
wall.
A pounding—now heavy, now hardly more than a
tapping—at irregular intervals. She was straining to hear
more when the sound of metallic space-boot plates clicking against
the flooring made her tense. Coming here?
She slipped sidewise on the seat to face the door. But that did
not open. Instead, she heard another sound from beyond the
wall—a thin mewling, animal-like, yet more frightening than
any beast’s cry. A human voice—low; Charis could not
make out any words, just a man’s tone close to the level of a
whisper.
Now the sound of footsteps just without her own door. Charis sat
very still, willing herself into what she hoped was the outer
semblance of calm. Not Jagan entered as the door split open, but
one of the crew she did not recognize. In one hand he carried a
sack-bag such as the crew used for personal belongings, which he
tossed in the general direction of her cot. In the other, he
balanced a sealed, hot ration tray which he slid on to the table
before her. The room was so small he need hardly step inside the
door to rid himself of both burdens.
Charis was ready to speak, but the expression on his face was
forbidding and his movements were those of a man in a hurry. He was
back and gone, the door sealed behind him before she could ask a
question.
A finger-tip pressure released the lid of the tray and Charis
savored the fragrance of stew, hot quaffa. She made a quick
business of eating, and her plate was cleared before she heard more
sounds. Not the thumping this time but a low cry which was not
quite a moan.
As suddenly as that plaint began, it stopped and there was
silence. A prisoner? A member of the crew ill? Charis’s
imagination could supply several answers, but imagination was not
to be relied upon.
As the silence continued, Charis rose to investigate the bag on
the cot. Jagan or someone had made a selection of trade goods, for
the articles which spilled out were items intended to catch the eye
of an alien or primitive. Charis found a comb with the back set in
a fanciful pattern of bits of crystal; a mirror adorned to match; a
box containing highly scented soap powder, the too strong perfume
of which made her sniff in fastidious disgust. There were several
lengths of cloth in bright colors; a small hand-sew kit; three
pairs of ornamented sandals in different sizes for a fitting
choice; a robe, which was too short and too wide, of a violent blue
with a flashy pattern of oblak birds painted on it.
Apparently the captain wished her to present a more feminine
appearance than she now made wearing the coveralls. Which was
logical considering her duties here—that she register as a
woman with the natives.
Suddenly Charis yielded to the desire to be just that
again—a woman. The colonists of Demeter had been a
puritanical sect with strong feelings concerning the wrongness of
frivolous feminine clothing. Suiting themselves outwardly as well
as they could to the people they must live among, all members of
the government party not generally in uniform had adapted to the
clumsy, drab clothing the sect believed fitting. Such colors as now
spilled across the cot had been denied Charis for almost two years.
While they were not the ones she would have chosen for herself, she
reached out to stroke their brightness with an odd lightening of
spirit.
There were no patterns by which to cut, but she thought she had
skill enough to put together a straight robe and skirt, a very
modified version of the colony clothing. The yellow went with the
green in not too glaring a combination. And one pair of sandals did
fit.
Charis set out the toilet articles on the table, piled the
material and the robe on the chair. Of course, they must have
brought her the least attractive and cheapest of their supplies.
But still—she remembered the strip of native material Jagan
had shown her. The color of that was far better than any of these
garish fabrics. Someone who used that regularly would not be
attracted by what she had here. Perhaps that was one of the points
which had defeated Jagan so far; his wares were not fitted to the
taste of his customers. But surely the captain was no amateur; he
would know that for himself.
No—definitely she would not combine the yellow with the
green after all. One color alone and, if there was not enough
material, Jagan would have to give her the run of his shelves to
make a better selection. If she was going to represent her race
before alien females, she must appear at her best.
Charis measured the length of green against her body. Another
modification of the cut she had planned might do it.
“Pretty—pretty—”
She swung around. That sibilant whisper was so startling that
Charis was badly shaken. The figure in the slit of the opened door
whipped through and drew the portal tight shut behind her as she
stood, facing Charis, her back to the door, her lips stretched in a
frightening caricature of a smile.