making that a reality. He hoped that his special senses would keep him safe.
When he stepped out of the tailor’s shop, however, he found that no one seemed to notice. He hardly resembled the tall, rugged natives, but he could pass as a member of some mutant branch of the race. Encouraged by the fact that he was completely ignored, he started down the street to his right. The morning air was chill enough to be comfortable, although he wondered how he would be able to endure the heated shops. If he did give himself away, he reflected, it would be from passing out from the heat.
Once again he did not make it very far. Two doors down from the tailor, in a corner shop, was an art gallery. Being a casual artist himself, he stepped inside for a quick look. He paused at the door as a blast of hot air struck him. At least there was no one in the front of the shop, although he could hear voices in the back. He looked about briefly but soon decided that most of what he saw was just tourist fodder and investments for healthy collectors, and he was not particularly impressed.
He was about to leave when something curious caught his eyes. It was a landscape much like any other, a deep glacial valley with a high, rocky peak in the background. It was definitely a painting, not a photograph. But as he watched, much to his surprise, a dark band of clouds began to rise behind the mountains, sweeping over the ridge to obscure it behind a white veil of falling snow.
“Like it, do you?”
Velmeran nearly jumped out of his new clothes at the sound of a voice immediately behind him. A human girl stood there, watching him with the same expectant stare the tailor had employed when anticipating a sale. Dressed in a stylized version of the local costume, she was small and slim, slightly taller than himself with a slender, bony build that was best described as lean and gawky. She was definitely not a child of the highlands but, curiously enough, of Trader stock. A small nose and large eyes peered out beneath a long, full mane of brown hair. From a distance, she might have passed for another Kelvessan in disguise.
“Have you ever seen the like of this?” she continued. She might look like a Trader, but she spoke with the thick, rolling local brogue. “All the rage, it is, in the inner worlds. The frame, you see, is actually a flat-screen monitor. Down here is the computer and disk drive that runs it. The artist assembles the work from a fixed feature, the subject itself, and a series of variables. The variables exist in groups; in this case time of day, season of the year, and weather. You can set it to run in sequence, or the computer selects variables at random. And with multiple drives, you can also alternate several different works over a period of time. The hard microdisks will last forever.”
“And you sell the disks as you would prints?” he asked.
“Exactly so. You put out, say, fifty to a thousand disks of each work, each one with a certificate of authenticity. So what do you think?”
Velmeran shrugged. “It is very interesting, but still just a toy.”
“Sure, but it is!” the girl declared, laughing. “But collectors are paying a lot for these toys just now. But then, that’s all art has ever been to most collectors anyway.”
Velmeran laughed at the obvious scorn in her voice. “You must be the artist.”
“And you obviously are not a collector,” she said in return, and nodded politely. “Lenna Makayen.”
“Er… Rachmaninoff. Sergei Rachmaninoff.” Unprepared for that question, he had to think fast… and he could have done better.”
“So, what brings you to a place like this, anyway?”
“Business, of course.”
“Business?” she asked. “You’re not a wool merchant, that’s for certain. What other kind of business would bring you to this hole?”
“I am in… salvage and redistribution, you might say,” he replied cautiously. “I am just passing through… on business.”
“And how long will you be here, do you suppose?”
“Now that I cannot say. I will just have to wait and see.”
“Wait and see when the Starwolves are ready to move on?” Lenna asked sharply. “Salvage and redistribution indeed! You manage their loot for them, don’t you? You’re a Trader, aren’t you?”
Velmeran smiled. “How did you guess?”
“My mother was of the Traders,” she explained proudly. “I’ve got her looks. And you look like me, only more so, if you take my meaning. Traders are small and tough, with big eyes and small noses. You stand about five feet tall, as they say locally, about a hundred and fifty meters tall, and I’m not two centimeters taller. Not quite human, they say. So, what will you be doing until the Starwolves move off again?”
“I do not really know,” he admitted. “Just waiting.”
“Then you can wait with me,” Lenna said decisively. “My buyer has been in port, and he payed me a small fortune, so I was going to celebrate. Come along and I’ll buy you a beer.”
They were outside and marching down the street at a furious pace before Velmeran knew what was going on. Lenna’s energy and enthusiasm was a bit overpowering for a sedate Kelvessan; she made even the extroverted Consherra seem quiet and shy. Still, Velmeran thought that he might go along with it. There was something of a challenge to it; he wondered how long he could keep up this game without giving himself away. He also wondered what Lenna’s reaction would be to discovering that she was flirting so energetically with a Starwolf.
“You would be hard-pressed to entertain yourself two days in this place, much less two weeks,” Lenna continued briskly. “You need someone to show you around. What do you say?”
“I might agree,” Velmeran replied. “If you tell me what happened to your accent.”
“Ah, but my local tongue’s just to show my clients,” she said, the accent back and thicker than ever. “Said I was of Trader stock. Born and bred on a freighter, so I was. But I’ve lived here half of my twenty-five years.”
He resorted to a fairly standard question. “Do you enjoy your work?”
“The truth is, I fly a freight shuttle for the Trade Association, and I love flying too well to give it up. I’d leave here in an instant to go back to the Traders, but that isn’t likely.”
“Why not?”
“No formal training,” she said bitterly. “My father saw to that.”
Before Velmeran could question that, Lenna directed him into a small restaurant, hardly more than an indoor cafe, and sat him at a table by the front window while she went to get drinks for the two of them.
“My father was local,” she began as she sat down. “But he had no land and no herd, and there’s not much else you can do in this place. But our treaty allows us to hire on in their military as civilian technicians. Got his training that way, in drive mechanics. He stayed with them four years, then came back here, married, and had a son. But the money he’d saved soon ran out and his first wife left him. Then it happened that an independent freighter came in and got stranded at port for want of repairs her crew could not do, so he fixed her up. Being Kanian, he could take G’s better than most, so they gave him a contract. Soon it looked like he was settled in to stay.
“Then, one day, their ship was rammed by a tender as they were coming in to station. Damage was slight, but my mother was gone. And my father was very bitter about it. He flew back here and did his best to forget about space… which was hard enough with me around, looking like a Trader. I was too young to understand, and it seemed to me like he brought me here just to make me miserable. Especially once my older brother came to live with us.”
“You could get the training you needed, just like your father did,” he suggested hopefully.
Lenna shook her head sadly. “You have to be twenty-one to get Union training, but you can’t travel off-world without parental permission until you are twenty-one. Naturally, my father wouldn’t sign. I did get flight training locally, enough to convince the Trade Association to hire me on as an apprentice for a year until the old pilot retired.”
“Surely your father’s old texts…?”
“Do you really think my father kept his books?” she asked. “I was able to get the texts for helm and navigation, and I taught myself. I know enough to get a ship from here to there. I’m certainly ready for an apprenticeship on a Trader.”
Velmeran pointedly refused to answer that, for he knew only too well what she was asking him. She thought him to be a Trader; in his rich dress and manner, perhaps a senior officer or even a Captain. She was desperate, and she hoped that he would give her what she wanted. And Velmeran felt guilty, since there was little he could do to help her.
