A man came in off the street. “Master Orliand!” she hailed him. “What on earth?” The spinning died away.

  “I thought…I hoped I might find you awake,” the scholar said. Breath smoked ragged with each word. “I am pushing matters, true, but—well, every moment’s delay is a moment additional before I can seek out a, a certain lady and— Could we talk, my dear?”

  “Of course, old friend.” Lona rose. “Let me put this stuff aside and clean my hands, then I’ll fetch us a bite of food and—But—what do you want?

  “Your property,” said Jans. “I can give you an excellent price.”

  Again by herself, for her visitor had staggered off to his bed, Lona stood in her home and looked down at the coin. It covered her hand; its weight felt like the weight of the world; strange glimmers and glistens rippled across the profile upon it. Silence pressed inward. Wicks guttered low.

  So, she thought, now she had sold everything. Jans would not force her to leave unduly fast, but leave she must. Why had she done it—and in such haste, too?

  Well, four hundred aureates was no mean sum of cash. No longer was she bound to the shop which had bound her father to itself. She could fare elsewhere, to opportunities in Croy, for example; or, of course, this was a dowry which could buy her a desirable match. Yes, a good, steady younger son of a nobleman or merchant, who would make cautious investments and—

  “And hell take him!” she screamed, grabbed the coin to her, and fled.

  Arvel tried for a long while to sleep. Finally he lost patience, dressed in the dark, and fumbled his way downstairs. Lamps still burned along the street, but their glow was pale underneath a sinking moon and lightening sky, pale as the last stars. Dew shimmered on cobbles. Shadows made mysterious the carvings upon timbers, the arcades and alleys around him.

  He would go to the farmers’ market, he decided, break his fast; and search for a horse. When was done, the shops would be open wherein could obtain the rest of his equipage. By I he could be on the road to Croy and his destiny. The prospect was oddly desolate.

  However, no doubt he would meet another girl somewhere, and—

  A small, sturdy figure rounded a corner stopped for an instant, and sped toward him. “Oh, Arvel!” Echoes gave back Lona’s cry, over and over. Light went liquid across the disc she carried. “See what I have for you! Our passage to the New Lands!”

  “But—but how in creation did you get hold of that?” he called. Bewilderment rocked him. “I thought you—you and I—”

  “I’ve sold out!” she jubilated as she ran. “We can go!”

  She caromed against him, and he wasted no further time upon thought.

  When they came up for air, he mumbled, “I already have the price of our migration, dear darling. But that you should offer me this, out of your love, why, that’s worth more than, than all the rest of the world, and heaven thrown in.”

  She crowed for joy and nestled close. Again he gathered her to him. In her left hand, behind his shoulder, she gripped the fairy gold. The sun came over a rooftop, and smote. Suddenly she held nothing. A few dead leaves blew away upon the dawn breeze, with a sound like dry laughter.

  The Master Key

  Once upon a time there was a king who set himself above the foreign merchants. What he did is of no account now; it was long ago and on another planet, and besides, the wench is dead. Harry Stenvik and I hung him by the seat of his trousers from his tallest minaret, in sight of all the people, and the name of the Polesotechnic League was great in the land. Then we made inroads on the stock-in-trade of the Solar Spice & Liquors Company factor and swore undying brotherhood.

  Now there are those who maintain that Nicholas van Rijn has a cryogenic computer in that space used by the ordinary Terran for storing his heart. This may be so. But he does not forget a good workman. And I know no reason why he should have invited me to dinner except that Harry would be there, and—this being the briefest of business trips to Earth for me—we would probably have no other chance of meeting.

  The flitter set me off atop the Winged Cross, where Van Rijn keeps what he honestly believes is a modest little penthouse apartment. A summer’s dusk softened the mass of lesser buildings that stretched to the horizon and beyond; Venus had wakened in the west and Chicago Integrate was opening multitudinous lights. This high up, only a low machine throb reached my ears. I walked along roses and jasmine to the door. When it scanned me and dilated, Harry was waiting. We fell into each other’s arms and praised God with many loud violations of His third commandment.

  Afterward we stood apart and looked. “You haven’t changed much,” he lied. “Mean and ugly as ever. Methane in the air must agree with you.”

  “Ammonia, where I’ve been of late,” I corrected him. “S.O.P.: occasional bullets and endless dickering. You’re disgustingly sleek and contented. How’s Sigrid?” As it must to all men, domesticity had come to him. In his case it lasted, and he had built a house on the cliffs above Hardanger Fjord and raised mastiffs and sons. Myself—but that also is irrelevant.

  “Fine. She sends her love and a box of her own cookies. Next time you must wangle a longer stay and come see us.”

  “The boys?”

  “Same.” The soft Norse accent roughened the least bit. “Per’s had his troubles, but they are mending. He’s here tonight.”

  “Well, great.” The last I’d heard of Harry’s oldest son, he was an apprentice aboard one of Van Rijn’s ships, somewhere in the Hercules region. But that was several years ago, and you can rise fast in the League if you survive. “I imagine he has master’s rank by now.”

  “Yes, quite newly. Plus an artificial femur and a story to tell. Come, let’s join them.”

  Hm, I thought, so Old Nick was economizing on his bird-killing stones again. He had enough anecdotes of his own that he didn’t need to collect them, unless they had some special use to him. A gesture of kindness might as well be thrown into the interview.

  We passed through the foyer and crossed a few light-years of trollcat rug to the far end of the living room. Three men sat by the viewer wall, at the moment transparent to sky and city. Only one of them rose. He had been seated a little to one side, in a tigery kind of relaxed alertness—a stranger to me, dark and lean, with a blaster that had seen considerable service at his hip.

  Nicholas van Rijn wallowed his bulk deeper into his lounger, hoisted a beer stein and roared, “Ha! Welcome to you, Captain, and you will maybe have a small drink like me before dinner?” After which he tugged his goatee and muttered, “Gabriel will tootle before I get your bepestered Anglic through this poor old noggin. I think I have just called myself a small drink.”

  I bowed to him as is fitting to a merchant prince, turned, and gave Per Stenvik my hand. “Excuse my staying put,” he said. His face was still pale and gaunt; health was coming back, but youth never would. “I got a trifle clobbered.”

  “So I heard,” I answered. “Don’t worry, it’ll heal up. I hate to think how much of me is replacement by now, but as long as the important parts are left…”

  “Oh, yes, I’ll be okay. Thanks to Manuel. Uh, Manuel Felipe Gómez y Palomares of Nuevo México. My ensign.”

  I introduced myself with great formality, according to what I knew of customs of those poor and haughty colonists from the far side of Arcturus. His courtesy was equal, before he turned to make sure the blanket was secure around Per’s legs. Nor did he go back to his seat and his glass of claret before Harry and I lowered ourselves. A human servant—male, in this one Van Rijn establishment—brought us our orders, akvavit for Harry and a martini for me. Per fiddled with a glass of Ansan vermouth.

  “How long will you be home?” I asked him after the small talk had gone by.

  “As long as needful,” Harry said quickly.

  “No more, though,” Van Rijn said with equal speed. “Not one millimoment more can he loaf than nature must have; and he is young and strong.”

  “Pardon, señor,” Manuel said—how softly and deferentially, and with what a clang of colliding stares. “I would not gainsay my superiors. But my duty is to know how it is with my captain, and the doctors are fools. He shall rest not less than till the Day of the Dead; and then surely, with the Nativity so near, the señor will not deny him the holidays at home?”

  Van Rijn threw up his hands. “Everyone, they call me apocalyptic beast,” he wailed, “and I am only a poor lonely old man in a sea of grievances, trying so hard to keep awash. One good boy with promises I find, I watch him from before his pants dry out for I know his breed. I give him costly schooling in hopes he does not turn out another curdlebrain, and no sooner does he not but he is in the locker and my fine new planet gets thrown to the wolves!”

  “Lord help the wolves,” Per grinned. “Don’t worry, sir, I’m as anxious to get back as you are.”

  “Hoy, hoy, I am not going. I am too old and fat. Ah, you think you have troubles now, but wait till time has gnawed you down to a poor old wheezer like me who has not even any pleasures left. Abdul! Abdul, you jellylegs, bring drink, you want we should dry up and puff away?…What, only me ready for a refill?”

  “Do you really want to see that Helheim again?” Harry asked, with a stiff glance at Van Rijn.

  “Judas, yes,” Per said. “It’s just waiting for the right man. A whole world, Dad! Don’t you remember?”

  Harry looked through the wall and nodded. I made haste to intrude on his silence. “What were you there after, Per?”

  “Everything,” the young man said. “I told you it’s an entire planet. Not one percent of the land surface has been mapped.”

  “Huh? Not even from orbit?”

  Manuel’s expression showed me what they thought of orbital maps.

  “But for a starter, what attracted us in the first place, furs and herbs,” Per said. Wordlessly, Manuel took a little box from his pocket, opened it, and handed it to me. A bluish-green powder of leaves lay within. I tasted. There was a sweet-sour flavor with wild overtones, and the odor went to the oldest, deepest part of my brain and roused memories I had not known were lost.

  “The chemicals we have not yet understood and synthesized,” Van Rijn rumbled around the cigar he was lighting. “Bah! What do my chemists do all day but play happy fun games in the lab alcohol? And the furs, ja, I have Lupescu of the Peltery volcanomaking that he must buy them from me. He is even stooping to spies, him, he has the ethics of a paranoid weasel. Fifteen thousand he spent last month alone, trying to find where that planet is.”

  “How do you know how much he spent?” Harry asked blandly.

  Van Rijn managed to look smug and hurt at the same time.

  Per said with care, “I’d better not mention the coordinates myself. It’s out Pegasus way. A G-nine dwarf star, about half as luminous as Sol. Eight planets, one of them terrestroid. Brander came upon it in the course of a survey, thought it looked interesting, and settled down to learn more. He’d really only time to tape the language of the locality where he was camped, and do the basic-basic planetography and bionics. But he did find out about the furs and herbs. So I was sent to establish a trading post.”

  “His first command,” Harry said, unnecessarily on anyone’s account but his own.

  “Trouble with the natives, eh?” I asked.

  “Trouble is not the word,” Van Rijn said. “The word is not for polite ears.” He dove into his beer stein and came up snorting. “After all I have done for them, the saints keep on booting me in the soul like this.”

  “But we seem to have it licked,” Per said.

  “Ah. You think so?” Van Rijn waggled a hairy forefinger at him. “That is what we should like to be more sure of, boy, before we send out and maybe lose some expensive ships.”

  “Y algunos hombres buenos,” Manuel muttered, so low he could scarcely be heard. One hand dropped to the butt of his gun.

  “I have been reading the reports from Brander’s people,” Van Rijn said. “Also your own. I think maybe I see a pattern. When you have been swindling on so many planets like me, new captain, you will have analogues at your digits for much that is new…Ah, pox and pity it is to get jaded!” He puffed a smoke ring that settled around Per’s bright locks. “Still, you are never sure. I think sometimes God likes a little practical joke on us poor mortals, when we get too cockish. So I jump on no conclusions before I have heard from your own teeth how it was. Reports, even on visitape, they have no more flavor than what my competition sells. In you I live again the fighting and merrylarks, everything that is now so far behind me in my doting.”

  This from the single-handed conqueror of Borthu, Diomedes, and t’Kela!

  “Well—” Per blushed and fumbled with his glass. “There really isn’t a lot to tell, you know. I mean, each of you freemen has been through so much more than—uh—one silly episode…”

  Harry gestured at the blanketed legs. “Nothing silly there,” he said.

  Per’s lips tightened. “I’m sorry. You’re right. Men died.”

  Chiefly because it is not good to dwell overly long on those lost from a command of one’s own, I said, “What’s the planet like? ‘Terrestroid’ is a joke. They sit in an Earthside office and call it that if you can breathe the air.”

  “And not fall flat in an oof from the gravity for at least half an hour, and not hope the whole year round you have no brass-monkey ancestors.” Van Rijn’s nod sent the black ringlets swirling around his shoulder.

  “I generally got assigned to places where the brass monkeys melted,” Harry complained.

  “Well, Cain isn’t too bad in the low latitudes,” Per said. His face relaxed, and his hands came alive in quick gestures that reminded me of his mother. “It’s about Earth-size, average orbital radius a little over one A.U. Denser atmosphere, though, by around fifteen percent, which makes for more greenhouse effect. Twenty-hour rotation period; no moons. Thirty-two degrees of axial tilt, which does rather complicate the seasons. But we were at fifteen-forty north, in fairly low hills, and it was summer. A nearby pool was frozen every morning, and snowbanks remained on the slopes—but really, not bad for the planet of a G-nine star.”

  “Did Brander name it Cain?” I asked.

  “Yes. I don’t know why. But it turned out appropriate. Too damned appropriate.” Again the bleakness. Manuel took his captain’s empty glass and glided off, to return in a moment with it filled. Per drank hurriedly.

  “Always there is trouble,” Van Rijn said. “You will learn.”

  “But the mission was going so well!” Per protested. “Even the language and the data seemed to…to flow into my head on the voyage out. In fact, the whole crew learned easily.” He turned to me. “There were twenty of us on the Miriam Knight. She’s a real beauty, Cheland-class transport, built for speed rather than capacity, you know. More wasn’t needed, when we were only supposed to erect the first post and get the idea of regular trade across to the autochthones. We had the usual line of goods, fabrics, tools, weapons, household stuff like scissors and meat grinders. Not much ornament, because Brander’s xenologists hadn’t been able to work out any consistent pattern for it. Individual Cainites seemed to dress and decorate themselves any way they pleased. In the Ulash area, at least, which of course was the only one we had any details on.”

  “And damn few there,” Harry murmured. “Also as usual.”

  “Agriculture?” I inquired.

  “Some primitive cultivation,” Per said. “Small plots scratched out of the forest, tended by the Lugals. In Ulash a little metallurgy has begun, copper, gold, silver, but even they are essentially neolithic. And essentially hunters—the Yildivans, that is—along with such Lugals as they employ to help. The food supply is mainly game. In fact, the better part of what farming is done is to supply fabric.”

  “What do they look like, these people?”

  “I’ve a picture here.” Per reached in his tunic and handed me a photograph. “That’s old Shivaru. Early in our acquaintance. He was probably scared of the camera but damned if he’d admit it. You’ll notice the Lugal he has with him is frankly in a blue funk.”

  I studied the image with an interest that grew. The background was harsh plutonic hillside, where grass of a pale yellowish turquoise grew between dark boulders. But on the right I glimpsed a densely wooded valley. The sky overhead was wan, and the orange sunlight distorted colors.

  Shivaru stood very straight and stiff, glaring into the lens. He was about two meters tall, Per said, his body build much like that of a long-legged, deep-chested man. Tawny, spotted fur covered him to the end of an elegant tail. The head was less anthropoid: a black ruff on top, slit-pupiled green eyes, round mobile ears, flat nose that looked feline even to the cilia around it, full-lipped mouth with protruding tushes at the corners, and jaw that tapered down to a V. He wore a sort of loincloth, gaudily dyed, and a necklace of raw semiprecious stones. His left hand clutched an obsidian-bladed battle-ax and there was a steel trade-knife in his belt.

  “They’re mammals, more or less,” Per said, “though with any number of differences in anatomy and chemistry, as you’d expect. They don’t sweat, however. There’s a complicated system of exo- and endothermic reactions in the blood to regulate temperature.”

  “Sweating is not so common on cold terrestroids,” Van Rijn remarked. “Always you find analogs to something you met before, if you look long enough. Evolution makes parallels.”

  “And skew lines,” I added. “Uh—Brander got some corpses to dissect, then?”

  “Well, not any Yildivans,” Per said. “But they sold him as many dead Lugals as he asked for, who’re obviously of the same genus.” He winced. “I hope to hell they didn’t kill the Lugals especially for that purpose.”

  My attention had gone to the creature that cowered behind Shivaru. It was a squat, short-shanked, brown-furred version of the other Cainite. Forehead and chin were poorly developed and the muzzle had not yet become a nose. The being was nude except for a heavy pack, a quiver of arrows, a bow, and two spears piled on its muscular back. I could see that the skin was rubbed naked and calloused by such burdens. “This is a Lugal?” I pointed.