Trader's World Read online

  The last person in was a tall youth, fair haired and thick limbed. The eight o'clock siren was ringing out across Pico Island when he reached the gentler entrance slope. He sprinted the final thirty yards and arrived gasping, face gleaming with rainwater. Two others were waiting for him at the door as the siren ceased.

  "We thought you weren't going to make it." The speaker was a pink-cheeked young woman, a blond teenager plump in her arms and legs. "Come on, Cesar, hurry up. Me and Jake saved you a place."

  "Why'd you leave it so late?" asked the dark-skinned, angry-looking youth leading the way in front of her. "Today's the worst day—you could lose points before you've even started."

  Cesar Famares had run half a mile uphill in less than three minutes. He was too winded to reply. He allowed himself to be steered through the long ranks of desks to his place, then leaned forward across the desk, panting hard and dripping water from his hair onto the smooth gray surface. "Tell you later, Jake," he said at last. "Found out a lot from my brother. Bad news."

  "Are we going to be assigned to separate groups?" the girl asked.

  "No. Worse than that, Melly."

  "I don't see how anything could be—"

  The girl received a hard nudge from the other youth before she could finish the sentence. "Melinda! Shhh." She dropped into her chair and spun around to face the front of the classroom.

  A tall, broad man wearing the sleeveless tunic of a senior instructor had appeared from the inner classroom and was standing in front of the central control panel. By his side, dominating the room, was a great Earth-globe. It was nearly six feet across and slowly rotating. Every five minutes the continents swept by, each one marked by bright points of illumination on the surface of the sphere.

  For a couple of minutes the man did not speak. As his gaze ran along the ranks of trainees, the sound level in the room gradually faded. He waited until all the coughs and shuffling of feet had ended.

  "Good morning," he said at last. "And welcome to the Azores' training camp. You are going to see a lot of me in the next couple of years—if you're lucky—so let me introduce myself. My name is Lyle Connery. I will be the main instructor for this group, until you either qualify for Final Trial, or flunk out. Previous statistics show you have about a fifty-fifty chance of making it. I'm going to talk to you for one hour or so now, and then we'll have a short break. When that break time comes, I want you all to get up from your seats and take a look at the side walls of this room." He lifted a muscular arm and waved to left and right. "You'll find pictures there of the most successful Traders in our history. And when the going here gets rough—and you have my word for it, it's going to get rough—I have one piece of advice for all of you to fix in your heads. Just remember, everyone on those walls, including the Master Traders, was once sitting right where you are. They didn't know any more about being a Trader than you do."

  He stared at the ranks of young people in front of him and allowed himself a trace of a smile. "Or maybe they knew a bit less, and maybe that helped. When I was in your shoes, ten years ago, I found it wasn't the things I didn't know that got in my way. It was all the things I knew about the Traders and the regions that weren't so. I'm sure that some of you have brothers and sisters and parents who've been through this course." To Cesar Famares, Jake Kallario, and Melinda Turak, Connery's eyes seemed to pick them out and focus on them exclusively. "I'm sure they've told you all sorts of things, and you've picked up all sorts of others from the rumor mills on your way here. Well, early on we're going to unlearn most of what you think you know. First, though, we'll have a roll call. There are forty-four of you. If you want to know how good a Trader you are—today, without training—then try to remember everyone's name as you hear it. I know, it sounds impossible. But you'll have to be able to do that—and a lot more—before you'll pass Trader training." He pointed. "From the far right. First name, last name."

  The roll call got off to a shaky-voiced start, then passed smoothly along the rows of desks. Except for the person speaking, the room was silent with total concentration. Some people were scribbling notes, others mouthed each name as it was given.

  "Judith Brindel."

  "Simone Agnus."

  "Brendan Lausanne."

  The names rolled on, until they finally reached the front row.

  "Tomas Liviano."

  "Carlos Oyonarte."

  "Mikal Asparian."

  Cesar Famares gave a little grunt at that name and nudged Melinda Turak below desk level. She raised her eyebrows at him. He shook his head.

  "Tell you later." He breathed the words so she could only just hear him. But Melinda thought she also picked up an increased interest on the part of the instructor when that one name was given.

  The youth in question was two rows in front of her and four seats to her left. She stared at him. He was certainly not promising in appearance. Judged in sitting position he was below average height, with a thin face and a long, stringy neck. She could see only a rear half profile, but his nose looked flat and his browridges prominent. His skin was sallow, almost yellowish. And the hair! It was dark and lank, cut in the farthest thing from Trader fashion that she could imagine. He wore a dark long-sleeved shirt of some coarse-grained material, an outfit that neither Jake nor Cesar—nor anyone who was anyone in the Trader families—would be seen dead in.

  And yet he was an Asparian—a top Trader family! That didn't make much sense. Melinda looked again at Cesar Famares, but he was staring toward the front of the classroom. The roll call was ending.

  "Good." Lyle Connery was leaning against the front wall, bare arms crossed. "Anyone here think they remember everyone's name?"

  The trainees looked at each other. No one spoke.

  "Very good." Connery nodded. "Chances are, a few of you could make a fair shot at most names, even before you've been trained—you were pretty well screened before you got here, and you're supposed to be smart. But if you could name names, you all had the sense to keep quiet about it. You're going to find that advice in the Traders' Rule Book: 'Always know more than you reveal.' Now, I don't want you to apply that rule right now, so let's have some honest answers. How many of you have already seen a Traders' Rule Book?"

  The trainees were looking around at one another. After a few seconds Cesar Famares lifted his hand. His two friends did the same, and finally twenty or so hands were raised.

  Connery nodded. "All right. So you people are going to have a little advantage—for a few days. The rest of you, you'll find a stack of Rule Books waiting for you on the table by the window at the back of the room. I want each of you to take one. And I want everyone word perfect on every rule one week from today. You won't understand many of them, that comes later—for some of them, a lot later. But if you learn nothing else in the next seven days, I want you to learn those rules. You'll hear a lot about an informal book of rules, too—find out about that for yourselves. That's going to be free-time work, for your evenings. Now, let's do a little classwork."

  He turned to the slowly rotating globe and tapped a continent of the southern hemisphere. "You're all supposed to come here with some idea of geography. So I assume you all recognize this region. Know what the people from this part of the world are called by the Traders?"

  There were a few chuckles, and lots of knowing grins. A number of the trainees had been told by their relatives how training began. No one spoke. Finally Connery pointed at a woman two seats in front of Cesar Famares. Cesar recognized her from earlier school days—she was from a family distantly related to his own.

  "If no one wants to talk, I'll have to find a volunteer. You—Valeria Constantin. Do you know the answer?"

  "Yes, sir."

  "Well?"

  "The Traders call them Greasers, sir."

  "Quite right. We call them Greasers." Connery shook his head. "And I'm afraid we'll probably continue to call them Greasers. But here's your first piece of unlearning. You're going to hear that name, Greasers, a thousand times, all o
ver this camp. You'll even hear it from me. But it's Trader talk, and you have to train yourselves not to say it to non-Traders. If you ever use 'Greaserland' when you are talking with a member of the Unified Empire, you won't be a Trader there for long. Not only that, you'll be lucky if you escape with your lights intact. Get it? Not Greaserland—the Unified Empire. Not Chill Central—Cap City. And not the Darklands—they call it the Heart of the World. Call them what I tell you to call them—and not what I may call them myself, or you hear 'em called in other regions."

  He turned again to the globe, which had rolled on around its axis through a slow sixty degrees. "All right, let's try another one. What do Traders call the people who live here?" He tapped the globe and pointed to a startled youth in the back row. "You, Ferenc Skassy, how'd you like to give me an answer on that?"

  "Er—I've usually heard them called 'Strines,' sir."

  "Very good. And what do they call themselves?"

  The boy hesitated, then shook his head. "I don't know."

  "Any offers?" Connery waited a few moments, then shrugged. "All right, so it was a trick question. They call themselves Strines, too—the only group that are pleased with their own nickname. You're safe enough with that one. Just a couple more questions, then we'll make a systematic review of your training for the next few months. Look at this. There's a big blank area on the globe here, northwest of the Strine territories. No Trader lights showing, which means we have no negotiations going on there at the moment. Who lives there?"

  He pointed at a redheaded girl in the middle of the room, who blushed. "Nobody," she said. "That's all part of the Lostlands."

  "It is. But that doesn't mean nobody lives there. Anyone else want to answer the question? Speak up, don't wait for me to point at you."

  Half a dozen voices spoke at once.

  "The Hives."

  "Hivers."

  "Hiver colonies."

  "Quite right. They're wild, and they're all independent, and they're not an organized power group with their own full weapons arsenal; but they're real enough, and someday you might have to go and negotiate with them. We can't afford to neglect them. Here's another question for you. There's an old story that the Hivers practice a secret ritual for prolonging life, and some of them are a couple of hundred years old. True or false?"

  "False, sir." There was a chorus of answers this time, from many more of the audience. "It's false."

  Connery shook his head. "Sorry, that was another trick question. The best answer for a Trader was no answer. You see, I asked you two different questions at once, something that will happen to you all the time in negotiations. It's a Traders' Rule, anything can be a negotiation technique. Question one was: Do the Hivers practice a ritualistic form of life prolongation? Answer: Yes, that's quite true. We don't know if it works or not, but there's some pretty persuasive evidence that it may. Question two: Are some of the Hivers a couple of hundred years old? Answer: No, of course that's false—it couldn't possibly be true, they've only been using the rituals since the Lostlands war, and that's less than fifty years."

  He pressed the control panel, and the globe silently moved back into a broad recess in the wall. "You'll learn. Before you're through here the right answers to questions like this will be second nature. We're going to take a break now, but before we do it, let's talk one more piece of geography. Here's where we are now." A touch of the control panel brought a map into position on the display screen. "No surprise. This is Pico Island. We're right here, on the southwest side of the mountain. If you go up to the top of Mount Pico—try it this afternoon, if you like, after the classes are through—and look northeast, you'll see this other island, St. George."

  A long, thin island, twenty miles in length but only three or four across, was highlighted on the screen.

  "Now so far as you are concerned, that island isn't going to be 'St. George' for the next few months. I don't want you even to think of the name. It's going to be the Great Republic—I'll bet my uniform some of you were calling it Yankeeland until today. Don't do it. The natives there hate to be called Yankees, even more than the Unified Empire people object to Greaserland. We'll be making a field trip to that island in a month or two. The whole place is a simulated Great Republic environment: language, people, manners, morals, and lifestyle. The only thing we can't do much about is the climate. When you're ready for it, you'll be going over there solo, for practice negotiations in a Great Republic community."

  The pattern of highlights was moving again, drifting up the display screen. "Same over the whole group of islands," Connery said. "Here's Cap City—Chill Central, if you've been muddying up your mind with Trader slang. You won't find snow and ice there, the way you would at the South Pole, but you'll see most of the other things that the Cap Federation pride themselves on. And over there is the Economic Community, and way up to the north you've got a simulated Lostland. Before you are done you're going to visit and negotiate in every one of them. You're not likely to die in those simulation areas, but you can easily fail, and for a lot of you that will seem almost as bad when it happens. One failure in the simulations, and you're out. It sounds harsh, but it's not. Because after the simulations you'll be going on to real test missions. And you can die very easily there, with a single, small failure. Any questions?"

  A hand was raised over on the right, a thickset youth with bright, fair hair and a ruddy complexion. "What about the Chips—the Chipponese, sir? How do you simulate their environment?"

  "Not very well, I'm afraid. We've set up one of the islands to use the Chipponese language and mimic the customs, but it hasn't been a great success. And of course, they live in zero gee or one-sixth gee, and we can't simulate that down here. You won't get much useful experience in advance for Chipponese negotiation—that's why negotiating up on the Geosynch Ring is such a challenge. And no Trader has ever yet been allowed as far as the Chipponese lunar settlements. Maybe one of you will be the first. Don't worry, though, it won't happen for quite a while. The Chipponese and the Lostlands only come when you're fully trained—if ever."

  He looked to the back of the room, where the windows were showing another bright spell. "All right, let's take that break now. Grab a copy of the Rule Book, have a look around the walls here, go outside if you want to. We'll start again in twenty minutes—and this time, you'll have to do more than just sit and be entertained by me."

  * * *

  While most of the other trainees went at once to the back of the room, Cesar Famares and his two friends stayed at their desks. They had seen the Rule Book long ago in a pirated copy from Cesar's brother; already they knew it by heart.

  "So where on earth is Cissy?" Jake Kallario asked. "First she didn't arrive two days ago, then she didn't come yesterday. She told me she had a few things to take care of back home, but if she's not careful she'll miss some of the real training. What's keeping her?"

  "That's part of the bad news," Cesar said. "Cissy won't be coming. She didn't make the final cut."

  "What!" Kallario was open-mouthed. "She said she had the whole thing fixed—that it was a certainty."

  "I know." Cesar bit at his thumbnail and shook his head. "I'm really sorry, Jake. I thought that you and Cissy were—well, you know. It seems there's less certainties here than we realized."

  "She can appeal it, can't she?" Melinda asked. "Sure she can. She'll get in later."

  Famares looked at her unhappily. "You know, Melly, my brother understands the Admin system here inside out. I asked Davy if there was any way Cissy could appeal, or get a second chance." He shook his head. "He said even if she tries again and makes it, the next batch will go to the Cook Islands training camp instead."

  "But that's terrible!" Melinda flopped back down into her seat. "They can't do that to us. We've been a team, all these years—ever since First Application. To break us up now, when we know each other so well—"

  "And we'll have to have a fourth person for the combined trials," Jake interrupted. "They're always perfo
rmed as a quartet. If we don't have Cissy, we might get some real loser."

  "That's another bit of bad news." Cesar Famares turned to face the back of the classroom and gestured unobtrusively toward the right wall. "We're not supposed to know them yet, but the preliminary groupings have already been decided, based on the test scores. The three of us will be together, just the way we expected. But we'll be getting him as partner."

  Melinda followed the jerky gesture of his arm. "Which one? The tall one, or the little one?"

  "The runt."

  Melinda looked, and recognized the ill-fitting jacket and untidy hair. "Him! Mikal Asparian. I noticed him at roll call."

  "So did I." Jake was staring with contempt at Asparian. "Don't joke me, Cesar—you mean we'll be working with him?"

  Melinda was taking a longer and closer look at their proposed partner. "Well, if we're stuck with him we'll have to make the best of it. He seems harmless enough. But he's a funny-looking bird, isn't he? Look at his hair! At least he's an Asparian—that's a good Trader family, not some dogsbody from a Pacific school. I wonder why we've never seen him around?"

  "That's the third piece of bad news." Cesar shook his head. "I was late getting here because I hung around while Davy ran a check on backgrounds. He's not an Asparian at all! He was given that name by Daddy-O, only four years ago."

  "By Daddy-O," Jake said. "Nobody gets their name from Daddy-O."

  "He did. Before that he was an outsider. A Hiver, would you believe?"

  "On our team? I won't stand for it."

  "Steady on, Jake." Melinda had seen the color rising in his face. "He can't help being what he is, can he?"

  "A Hiver! They don't even wash; he'll be a stinker, as well."