CHAPTER
SIX
In the morning, the maglev train took them to Arrowhawk.
The train line skirted a body of water that Sunitha told them all, proudly, was really an enormous freshwater lake even though it was named the Bridger Sea, ran through the deep valleys of a tall range of mountains called the Tenzings, crossed a plain of tall grasses dotted with burly, rectangular quadrupeds, and eventually climbed into a low, gnarled range of hills. These mountains, identified by Factor Doctor as the Mallories, were rocky, abounding in cliffs, and visibly very wet; out the windows of the train car, John saw waterfalls, streams, bogs, and ten thousand little lakes. The runoff from the network of fresh water collected in rivers; at first, he saw rivers that drained off the east side of the mountain range, but by the time the train came to its final stop, they had crossed the spine of the mountains and seen rivers flowing westward.
As they rode, John paced and tried not to bend his wrists. Sunitha lectured, informing them that Sarovar Alpha, uniquely among the planets of Sarovar System, was extremely Earth-like in its physical characteristics. An axial tilt of approximately twenty degrees gave the planet two hemispheres with distinct seasons, size and gravity and atmosphere were all virtually identical to Earth’s, and even the planet’s year consisted of almost exactly three hundred sixty days of twenty-four and a half Earth hours. The most noticeable difference was that Sarovar Alpha had two moons.
“A person might be kidnapped on Earth and wake up on Sarovar and not realize she had been moved,” she observed triumphantly.
“If she were kept sedated for six months,” Ruth said.
“Five,” John murmured.
Ellie then announced, looking up from her multitool, that the creature that had tried to eat her the day before was called Hausman’s Bear, and it wasn’t really a bear at all, and it supposedly didn’t eat humans, but it did eat fish and other small animals, and how much different was she, really, from a fish?
Ani then climbed onto the seat beside Ellie and laid her head on the girl’s lap.
In breaks in the conversation, John continued to try to teach himself Sedjem. Languages were not his strength, but he could remember some twenty-odd words, to Sunitha’s robust quizzing.
The train guideway ran high above the ground, on thick pylons, no doubt to protect it from interference by random animals. The only sign that they were approaching the post was the appearance of a handful of gravel roads, and then the train pulled to a stop.
Arrowhawk’s maglev station squatted fifteen meters above the ground, atop the tallest building in Arrowhawk Post, with the other rooftops of Arrowhawk visible beneath it. The station itself was covered by its own sturdy roof of opaque plastic slabs epoxied together. The train stopped, doors opened on both sides of the car, and Ruth led the family out the right-hand door onto the platform.
The left-hand door exited into space that was stacked high with crates. John lingered behind his family for a moment to watch as men in blue jumpsuits and coveralls went to work; the seats in the train cars flipped up and snapped into place against the walls, freeing up most of the interior of the train into a space big enough to hold two groundcars, and then the men began loading in the crates.
There was no one on the platform to meet them. Ruth stood looking left and right, lips pursed and concern on her face.
John called back to the men loading the train. “I’m looking for Audit Chief Keckley!”
One of them came bounding out of the car. He was broad-shouldered and narrow-hipped, with the build of a natural athlete. He had a thick mustache and a strong jaw, and he pointed at a staircase that descended into the largest building beneath the platform.
“Audit chief’s office is down there, mar! Two flights down. If you don’t see Keckley at his desk, he may be out taking his afternoon nap.” The man mimed drinking from a bottle. “I’m Jefferson! Are you a new trader?”
Was Jefferson a first name or a last name? John split the difference and gave both. “John Abbott. I’m technically a factor. Really, I’m an accountant.”
“Ah yes, we heard you were coming. Keckley’s your man. But hey, a factor . . . that means you should be looking for a trader to work with.”
It seemed unlikely that Jefferson could offer him better terms than English had, but John didn’t want to alienate anyone. “Yeah,” he said.
“Well, I’m not going to pressure you, but what you need to understand up front is that it can be hard to actually get your product shipped, if you’re just a trader. Too many Company bigwigs and buyers are trying to ship, and not only do they get priority, they also bribe the captains or the stevedores when they have to. Some of these guys—like Rock over there, that’s the long-haired guy stumping around like a pirate and talking to himself—don’t even try to ship. Rock is just piling up a hoard of Weave, and he’ll take it with him when he goes.”
“If he doesn’t ship, why is he here? At the train, I mean?”
Jefferson grinned. “On shipping day, it’s all hands on deck at Company House. Unless you’re out on a wat. The Company’s Weave still has to ship, after all.”
“Huh.”
“Rock’s is not a crazy strategy. When a guy’s going home, he knows he can actually get on the ship, and even if he can’t get any space in the cargo hold, he can at least fill his quarters with Weave to sell.”
“But then he can’t grow his capital in the meantime,” John said. “He can’t sell and reinvest, he’s just sinking his salary into the asset. He can’t make as much.”
Jefferson nodded. “There is the so-called country trade. He could be trading his Weave with other traders on the planet, for gemstones or whatever. And of course, Rock gets all his food and drink from the commissary here, so he’s not eating up his capital.”
And Rock didn’t have jewelry to buy back out of pawn.
“Now me,” Jefferson continued, “I have a different approach. I have a cousin who’s a buyer, and will give me a better price than any of the other buyers at Central Transit. Is it as good as Earth dollars? No, because he needs to make his cut, too. But then he takes the risk, I get paid earlier, and, like you say, I take that capital and reinvest it.”
John nodded. “How long does it take you to get paid?”
“I get paid within the week, mar.”
At that speed, John might make profit enough to buy back the jewels and capitalize the business faster with Jefferson than with English. “And you need a cut, too.”
“Three percent,” Jefferson said. “Five if I do the purchasing for you.”
“Stop talking about me!” Rock bellowed.
John had other questions, but he didn’t want to ask them of Jefferson, or at least, not yet. What did the traders actually give to the Weavers—what did the Company give them, for that matter? If he signed up to trade through Jefferson, then it would be in the man’s interest to show John the ropes. Until then, John was, at least theoretically, the competition, and John didn’t want to push the relationship too hard, too fast.
“Thanks,” he said.
The stairs took John and his family down two flights. At the first landing was a single door labeled Comms, with a bright yellow fire extinguisher bracketed to the wall beside it. At the second were two doors, with signs that read Audit and Medical, with an extinguisher bracketed between them.
Ruth hesitated outside Medical, but then she and the girls followed John into Audit.
Inside Audit was a room with three desks: the largest was relatively neat, bearing short stacks of paper and a couple of ledgers; the second desk was a chaotic mess that could have been generated by the detonation of a bomb, behind which sat a spherical man in blue and buff with three strands of hair pasted to his skull; the smallest desk was empty.
The spherical man looked up. “John Sanjay Abbott.”
“Three for three,” John said. “How could you tell? My erect, manly posture, and the keen light of intelligence in my eyes?”
“Bug eyes and elephant ears, I saw your photo.” The rotund man pointed at Ruth. “But also, you have a wife and kids. Precious few Company employees bring a wife out here from Earth, and fewer bring kids. My name’s DeBoe. I’m the other auditor.”
“Pleased to meet you. If they don’t bring wives, what do they . . . how do they . . . socialize?” John asked, bending his fingers back.
“Oh, here at the post, there are other ways . . .” DeBoe coughed and blushed. “There are children present.”
“Understood.”
“If there aren’t other children, then there aren’t really teachers,” Ruth said, “as we had imagined there would be.”
“There are children,” DeBoe said. “Just not very many, and the post itself doesn’t provide schooling. But there’s a teacher, and . . . I need to check this, don’t hold me to it, but I think there’s a monthly child benefit paid by the Company that’s meant to cover the costs of schooling.”
“I have Factor Doctor.” Sunitha clutched her multitool to her chest.
DeBoe looked baffled.
“It’s the docent program,” John explained. “The encyclopedia avatar.”
DeBoe chuckled. “Ah, good, and he’s a factor. That must be the Company skin. I have keys for you, and the address of your new home.” He held up a jangling ring of keys and a card with writing scrawled on it. “Most of those are to your house. The two that don’t match are to this building and the warehouse.”
“Keys.” John took the keys and smiled. “I haven’t seen physical keys for a long time.”
“Get used to it. The power is not one hundred percent reliable here, so we use old tech to do some things. Including our bookkeeping.” He pointed at the messiest desk, with its ledgers. “If you came imagining this would look like a space station, we’re going to disappoint you. Arrowhawk Post looks more like something out of The Last of the Mohicans.”
John paced over to the messy desk to cast an eye over the books. “With six-armed, circular Hurons.”
“The good news is, the Weavers want to trade. And also, if you hear any whispering about some dreaded white Weaver, it’s drunk nonsense.”
“Captain Ahab.” John grinned.
DeBoe nodded. “But there are other things out there in the mountains, and we don’t have names for half of them.”
“We saw a bear with six arms.” Ellie’s voice was solemn and her eyes were wide open and round.
“We don’t have names for sixty percent of them,” Sunitha said crisply.
DeBoe shrugged. “If you said eighty percent, I’d have to believe you. Might be ninety percent. How do you know for sure, until you’ve actually cataloged every species?”
“How do we buy?” John asked. The girls were fidgeting, but Ruth was interested in the answer to this question, too, so he let the girls fidget.
“Well, it’s like any other business,” DeBoe said. “You can invest money or you can invest sweat. If you invest all the money and all the sweat, you take all the return.”
“That sounds like first-day lecture notes.” John grinned and folded his fingers back. “Let’s say I wanted to invest all the money and all the sweat, what would I actually do?”
“You’d get good at Sedjem. Weavers don’t talk much, but when they do, they Sedjem. You’d go with traders to the known and regular markets. You might go out into the forest looking for new Weavers—some people have scored big by taking caravans of trade goods as far as the coast to find new markets. You’d buy trade goods from the Company warehouse—at a markup, but it’s reasonable—and you’d sell them at those markets. Then you’d ship them by maglev to Central Transit, and you’d bid in the auction for cargo space on the next starship. You’d have a buyer arranged in advance, or you’d have an agent at the Earth-end to sell for you.”
“Otherwise, the Company has a seller at the Earth end?” John asked.
DeBoe nodded. “And then he takes a cut.”
“This is complicated,” Sunitha said.
“This is boring.” Ellie slumped her shoulders and bugged out her eyes. “Daddy, stop talking.”
Sunitha was right. John was seeing that his dream of a quick fortune was mutating into a plan of grinding out a fortune over time, hopefully beginning with quick sales to a buyer at Central Transit to buy the jewelry out of pawn and amass a little capital, and then somehow arranging his own agent, Earthside, for the longer term.
“Sorry,” DeBoe said. “The harshest light is sometimes what allows you to see best.”
“Yes,” Ruth said, “if it doesn’t give you a migraine.”
They descended another flight of stairs to the ground. Three sets of doors led back into the building, one labeled Executive, the second Warehouse, and the third Security. The door into Security was open and two men glared at John wordlessly. Both were balding and wore spectacles. One had oversized shoulders and the other oversized forearms and they both had short legs, as if the anatomy of a gorilla had been divided between them. A fourth set of doors let John and his family outside.
The streets of Arrowhawk Post were paved with gravel. All around the base of the train station was heaped up the ramshackle, three-story building through which they had descended; turning and looking back, John saw the words Company House nailed over the door in iron letters. Attached to the side of Company House, and hunkered beneath the maglev line, was a large, windowless building that must be the warehouse.
Most of the other buildings John could see were one story tall, though a few had two stories. Groundcars and cycles crept along the roads, not in large enough numbers to create what John thought of as hazardous traffic, but enough to make it necessary to look both ways before crossing the street. Pivoting to look in all directions, he could see tall gray slabs of plastic standing like a wall all around the post. Beyond, not far away, he saw a cluster of rocky peaks to the north of the post, and another line of mountains to the south. He thought they were all part of the Mallory Mountains, and Arrowhawk sat in something like a wide pass or valley.
A single drone drifted across the street a couple hundred meters from Company House.
The buildings included residences, a hair salon, a general store, and at least two bars.
An eight-wheeled all-terrain vehicle, body segmented into two compartments, rumbled past, grinding its way toward the gate.
John passed each member of his family a housekey. “Grijalva Street,” he said. “Is that Spanish?”
“Juan de Grijalva was a conquistador,” Sunitha said in her lecture voice. “He got killed by natives.”
“I see,” John said. “A good omen. There can’t be more than ten streets in this town, but let’s ask directions.”
The general store across from Company House had printed catalog pages stuck up in its street-facing window. The prices on all the items were scratched out in red ink, with new prices written in: a long-handled shovel was not twenty-five dollars, but fifty. John pushed open the clear plastic door to find a room stacked floor-to-ceiling with items of every description, and only a very small stock of each. There was a fan, a box of nails, the long-handled shovel, a barrel of hard biscuits.
A long-faced man with sleepy eyes stood behind a clear plastic counter. He wore green coveralls, and he labored over a stack of paper with a red pen and a multi. He looked up at John.
“You’re new,” he said.
“John Abbott.”
“Trader?”
“Accountant.”
“I don’t suppose you’ll need a calculator, the multitool will do that. Hmm. And you’ll need ledgers, but Keckley keeps a stack of those. How about food?”
“Animal crackers?” John suggested.
“I have a one-liter tube and a ten-liter tube.”
“I better start with one.”
“You get better pricing with ten. Twenty bucks.”
“Ten liters it is.” The girls would eat them. John spooled out a twenty-dollar bill. “I’m looking for Grijalva Street.”
“Back side of the block.” The shopkeeper handed over a clear plastic barrel full of animal crackers. John looked them over and was disappointed to see that they were all familiar Earth animals. “What number?”
John checked the card. “Seventeen.”
“Ah, one of the khats. I should have guessed. Back of the block, and that way.” He pointed with his left arm.
John emerged to find his daughters and Ani following a small creature down the street with great interest. The creature was the size of an insect, but it was furred. Despite its dimensions, it repeatedly looked up and hissed loudly; Ani batted it from side to side with her paws, a playful gesture that suggested she would soon eat the varmint.
“You know, we haven’t learned what might be poisonous here,” John said. “If Ani eats it. Or venomous, if it bites her.”
“You can’t take away her fun, Dad-setty.”
“I can trade her fun, though. Ani!” John whistled and held out a rhinoceros cracker. Ani took the cracker and followed him as he trooped around the block toward Grijalva Street. “We live in a khat,” he told the girls.
Sunitha frowned. “That’s a fortress.”
“Oh, good,” John said. “I hope it has cannons.”
Grijalva Street ended against the eastern stockade wall. The last two blocks of it were occupied by walled houses. Here there was almost no traffic, though there were a few groundcars parked in front of the houses. As he fumbled with the unfamiliarity of a metal key at the three-meter-tall gate for foot traffic, John looked over the top of the wall and saw the second story of a house. It was made of plastic, and prefabricated, but the manufacturers had colored and stressed the plastic to make it look like weathered stone.
“The whole house?” Ellie was suspicious. “I don’t have to share?”
“Of course, you have to share.” John opened the gate. “There are five of us here.”
The girls rushed inside, swarming first to a pond in the corner of the enclosure, then to a thick tree with many low branches, then to a bramble with fat berries hanging below the leaves, and finally up two steps to the broad porch and the front door. A second, wider gate through the khat’s enclosure led to a parking space beside the house, though there was no vehicle there.
Ruth threaded an arm through John’s elbow. For the first time in weeks, her muscles didn’t feel tensed and her voice sounded pleased. “Do you think it’s furnished?”