Ties Of Blood And Silver Part 1

TIES OF BLOOD AND SILVER.

By Joel Rosenberg.

Acknowledgments.

I'd like to thank the people who helped me both with and through this one.

During the writing and the rewriting, Harry F. Leonard and Mary Kittredge gave me much valuable criticism-as did my editor, Sheila Gilbert, who still knows how to make something better. Any flaws in the work are mine;, many virtues are theirs.

I'm also grateful to Cherry Weiner, my agent for this work, as well as Kevin O'Donnell, Jr., Mark J.

McGarry, Irene and Ken Herman-the best in-laws on the planet-and, most particularly, my wife, Felicia. Many thanks, folks; your advice and support are always appreciated.

Extract from Delavesta's Revised Pocket Encyclopedia of the Thousand Worlds, Earth-Normal Edition (New American Library, 2519; LOTW Call #NSR2404098.1):

Quikref: OROGA.

Ma.s.s: 6.537e31 grams (1.094 x Earth's) Density: 5.968 g/cc (1.081 x Earth's) Radius: 6.395e8 cm (1.004 x Earth's) Surface gravity: 1064.415 cm/sec2 (1.085 X Earth's) Escape velocity: 11.77 km/sec Year: 142.045 Earth days/ 113.55 local days Sidereal day: 29.942 hours.

Oroga is the sole habitable planet of Kaufman's Other Star (Freusen Durchmusterung Catalog #4322210351.093), a red Kl star with a luminosity of .252, ma.s.s of .725, and radius of .78 relative to Sol...

Oroga's mean orbital radius is 7.176el2 centimeters-approximately .48 astronomical units. While the diameter of the primary is roughly three-quarters that of Sol, its apparent size is much greater from the surface of Oroga than Sol's is from Earth: Kaufman's Other Star occupies almost nine-tenths of a degree of the sky, appearing to be roughly three times the size that Sol does from the surface of Earth.

The planet's...o...b..t is almost perfectly circular; the eccentricity is only 0.00059... Combined with its low inclination of 5 degrees, this makes Oroga virtually seasonless.

The atmosphere is breathable without either prosthetic aids or surgical modification... it is slightly richer in oxygen than Earth's (26%), poorer in nitrogen (72%), and richer in carbon dioxide (.035%); it contains large but not unhealthful quant.i.ties of argon, xenon, neon, and sulfur oxides...

The planet is 73% seas... Of the three major land ma.s.ses, only a small portion of the most northern has been settled by humans. The remainder are populated by t'Tant, the native quasi-sapient (see Appendix for qualification)... Since the t'Tant have no established civilization, population estimates of the native lifeform are based on orbital photo sampling... Estimates range from less than one billion to more than 1.5 billion.

The majority of the human population lives either in or within one thousand kilometers of Oroga's single city, Elwere, although there are agricultural townships scattered throughout the inhabited continent. While the last official census gives the population as 259,276, it counted only citizens, those who actually reside in Elwere; residents of the areas immediately surrounding Elwere-Middle City and Lower City in the local parlance-are not legally citizens of Oroga... nor are the workers of the valda and food plantations...

The actual human population of Oroga is believed to be approximately four million. There is a transitory schrift population, almost exclusively members of the metal-and-jewel-worker's schtann, who provide handcrafted jewelry for the Elwereans. There are believed to be no other permanent sapient residents...

Elwere is a robust and successful trader in the Thousand Worlds marketplace, importing large quant.i.ties of electronics gear, medicines, plastics, luxury foodstuffs... artwork, and building materials-the latter due to political considerations as opposed to lack of resources, in view of the great quant.i.ty of untapped ore deposits... Simply, the Elwereans prefer to have as small a local manufacturing base as is possible, with most building done by work-contracted nonresidents. They can afford to indulge this preference...

While there is some export of local silver... the Orogan economy is supported by the export of valda oil, the product of the beans of the valda plant (Xenocamellia neuvo valda). Treated valda oil is a superb local and topical anesthetic for humans, preventing free (pain) nerve endings from activating; valda oil has no known deleterious side effect.

Attempts to grow the valda plant offworld have been invariably unsuccessful, because of the plant's para-symbiotic dependence on a large variety of local micro-and macroorganisms... Attempts to manufacture valda oil via recombinant technologies have proved financially uncompet.i.tive with the natural product...

Due to the characteristic desire of the Elwereans for privacy in virtually all matters, Oroga's trade surplus is not generally known, but is believed to be in excess of one billion Thousand Worlds Credit Units perEarth year, perhaps greatly so.

Careful investment of the trade surplus by the Cortes Generale, the Elwerean parliament, may add significantly to that sum...

CHAPTER ONE:.

"We have to..."

"Anything, David?" Little Marie looked up at me, shuffling her bare feet on the sand. Idly, she picked up a small pebble with her toes, then flipped it waist-high, catching it in a chubby hand.

Marie was better at most manipulations than I was. Put it down to inborn talent; I'd had ten more years to work on my skills. One-Hand said that the difference between the two of us was a strong point in favor of heredity over environment.

Whatever that meant. I guess he was talking about my Elwerie father. He didn't know who my mother was. Some lower, of course. We didn't know who either of Marie's parents were, except that they must have been lowers, too.

She let the pebble drop to the ground. "Did you get anything at all?"

I shrugged. "Just a little. Too d.a.m.n little." I patted my tunic just above the waist, where I'd stashed the purse I'd lifted off the tipsy Randian trader coming out of Alfreda's House of Pleasures. "I got a few pesos, a ten-credit tweecie chit."

I didn't tell her about the Firestone ring I'd twisted off his finger. I don't know exactly why; I could have trusted Marie. But I was going to add the ring to my cache, and I'd kept that secret, even from her. The ring and the pieces there were just too Fine to give to One-Hand. Dammit, the ring was so pretty. I couldn't bear the thought of seeing it broken up, the gold melted down, the stone sold separately.

No one in the market paid the two of us any attention. A couple of ragged children weren't unusual in the Lower City markets; we were unnoticeable among the endless rows of ramshackle stalls huddled up against the rainbow walls of Elwere like moss on a tree.

But just because I wasn't noticed, that didn't mean I wasn't noticing. When you're lifting, your eyes are as important as your hands.

Away from the walls, at a stall set up next to the fountain in the center of the square, an overfed merchant haggled with a mannafruit vendor.

G.o.ddam talkative buzhes. They had been going at it since before I'd made my last run. The two could have been arguing about any quant.i.ty, from the squeezings of a single fruit to several tonnes. When money was tight in Lower City, every negotiation was protracted.

But maybe, though...

I nudged her. "See Arno's stall?"

Marie shot a quick glance without turning her head. "He hasn't taken his hand off his pouch for an hour. It isn't fair."I shook my head and tried to smile tolerantly. "Fair doesn't have anything to do with it. I wish you'd forget you ever heard that word." I glanced down at my left hand, the thumb still swollen and purple from One-Hand's last fit of anger. "And we'd better keep looking, or we're not going to make Carlos' quota today."

"But if we can't make quota-"

"We have to make quota."

Across the hot sand of the square, an Elwerie walked through the crowd. He was a youngish one, maybe forty or so-just about my age, perhaps. It was hard to tell; they don't leave Elwere without wearing their masks, and their defensive harnesses mask their normal posture.

But we didn't bother Elweries. n.o.body bothered Elweries. Their harnesses' circuits could detect an attempted lift as easily as a potential attack, and the twin autoguns mounted on the harnesses' shoulder pads would treat a lift the same way. You can't argue with or distract a barrage of two-centimeter silcohalcoid projectiles.

While the Elwerie made his way through the crowd, a t'Tant fluttered by overhead. Several of the children around us stopped their endless game of tag long enough to pick up rocks and throw them skyward.

Not that the rocks came close to the low-flying t'Tant; their ability to fly comes only partly from their leathery wings. The rest comes from a levitating ability that was strong enough to fling the rocks back at the t'Tant's would-be tormentors.

One stone went astray. It came near enough to me to trigger my reflexes; I caught it with my left hand.

My bruised left hand.

"d.a.m.n." And d.a.m.n One-Hand, too.

I shrugged. It was daytime; it wouldn't be dark for a few hours. T'Tant, while gentle, clownish, and distant in the light, turn savage in the dark.

Over at the foot of Joy Street, a schrift walked into the market. People moved quickly out of its way. It was a huge creature, easily twice my height, its gray skin hanging loosely on its ma.s.sive frame.

Schrift always looked strange to me; their proportions are all wrong. Their forearms and lower legs are disproportionately long; the extra joints in their fingers make their hands look broken.

The schrift's head was almost featureless: no hair or protuberances, only holes for its ears, and twin slits of its nasal openings.

And the eyes. The eyes of a schrift always scared me. They glowed purply, even in the daylight. I wouldn't have ever wanted to see them in the dark. The mouth was a horror of teeth, rows and rows of finely pointed white needles.

"David!"

"Don't even think about it." This schrift wore a ma.s.sive jewel-inlaid necklace. The gold alone must have weighed half a kilo. And then there were diamonds, and a gorgeous firestone-the firestone, all by itself, would have been worth tens of tweecie chits, hundreds of Elwere pesos.

"Marie, you never bother a schrift. Ever." Other than a gray hempcloth breechclout, the necklace wasthe schrift's only clothing. But why the breechclout? As I understood it, even other schrift wouldn't care what s.e.x it was-why bother? "Remember One-Hand saying that their reflexes are faster than ours?"

"Yes."

"He wasn't lying that time."

Confidently, she smiled up at me, c.o.c.king her head to one side to flip the hair out of her eyes. "I can take him, David. Honest."

"Listen to me, will you? You can't."

I had to stall, to keep her talking just for a few moments, until the schrift had made its way through the market, and had moved out of sight. Marie would have tried to take it on, more for my sake than for her own.

"It's an alien, little one. Not like us." I put out a hand and stroked the fine hair at the back of her neck. If she tried to run, I could grab her hair.

Maybe I had a half-sister, up in Elwere. Maybe not. But even if I did, even if I had been legitimate, and raised as an Elwerie, I couldn't have cared more about her than I did about little Marie. n.o.body else ever trusted me.

"And you can't distract it," I went on. "Its mind doesn't work the same way ours do. That thing"-I started to point my chin at it, but caught myself-"that thing could pick you up, bite your head off, and set your body down-all before you finished clipping through the chain around its neck. It's got a faster reaction time-so you leave schrift alone. Got it?"

She glared up at me with the petulance of a child who has been told no. "I'm hungry. Can we break for a while and get something to eat?"

I looked around the market. There really weren't any likely prospects. Too many of the people were as poor as we were, or worse. And it wasn't worth the risk of hitting on those who didn't have much; not only were they more likely to be on guard, but the payoff was so d.a.m.n low.

It was all because of the Elweries. They called themselves Elwereans, but they were just Elweries to us.

They had cut back on hiring lowers, both for work in the valda fields and in Elwere proper.

Add to that Amos van Ingstrand's increased standard bribe for work in Elwere, and the result was trouble in Lower City. Except for Joy Street, d.a.m.n near all the money in Lower City came from Elwere.

Too little money, of late.

I took a moment to total the day's take, added it to the likely profit from another run or two down Joy Street, and decided that I didn't like the sum. Not at all.

I patted the back of her head. "Carlos is going to beat us if we don't make quota." Which was true.

One-Hand accepted no excuses.

Marie frowned, then brightened. "It might be easier to work on a full stomach." She patted herself on the belly. "Really, it might."

I gave up. "It might, at that. Mannafruit?"

She nodded. "Big ones?""Sure."

Arno the mannafruit vendor and I had a standing deal: I didn't hit on his customers until the victim was well away from the stall, and he would sell me small quant.i.ties of mannafruit at cost.

We both cheated, of course; that's the way things worked in Lower City. I had no way of knowing what Arno's cost really was, and Arno didn't know about Marie. I had no intention of telling him.

"All right, little one. Meet me at the foot of Joy Street-we'll try to work some offworlders. But don't you start until I get there."

She nodded, her small face almost glowing as she smiled up at me. "I know I could take an offworlder or two, if I had a little food." She emptied a pitiful handful of coins from her inside pocket and dumped them in my hands. "Don't spend it all."

"Will you please get going?"

She left, scurrying across the sand-strewn stones like a lizard running for cover.

I kept my distance from the buzh at Arno's stall, going so far as to stand on the customer's left side, ignoring the purse on the other side of his robes.

Finally, Arno wiped his hand on his ap.r.o.n and stuck it at the buzh. "A fair deal. I'll deliver tonight."

As the merchant left, I moved over in front of Arno and rested my elbows on the counter, propping my chin in my palms. "Really, Arno-a fair deal?"

Arno nodded solemnly, wiping a few beads of sweat from his glistening scalp. "And a reasonable profit, David, considering the times. How is your business today?"

"Not good. I need a couple of fruit, but I'm a bit short of coin..."

Arno shook his head. "No credit. I'll sell to you at cost, but that's the best I can do. Business isn't all that good."

"But people still need to eat."

"True. I do manage to sell a fruit or two, here and there."

"Arno, you would sell your w-" I caught myself. Rumor had it that Arno had been forced to sell his last wife to a valda planter.

As the mannafruit vendor angrily belted his ap.r.o.n tighter around his waist, I kept my eyes off the box of fruit on the rough wooden counter, each juicy yellowish sphere half the size of my head.