John Brunner (3 page)

Somewhat
to her surprise, it was by no means the most
weasely
she had seen. It was long, but it was explicit. All but a handful of its
clauses were patterned on a hopeful standard form laid down by Earth's
government in the aftermath of the Dictatrix period, and consequently weighted
heavily against arbitrary conditions.

So
the trap is in the non-standard clauses . . .

Her
instinct in similar situations before had been to get an independent
evaluation, preferably from a computer programmed by a reformed confidence
trickster with a deep knowledge of human deceit. Now, lacking even the price of
a meal, she had to rely on her own judgment.

I
wish my eyes wouldn't keep drifting back to the repatriation bit!

She
said, without looking up, "When does the contract take force?"

"On
signature," Shuster said. His tone suggested he was enjoying a private and
rather cruel joke. "The commencement of actual work is according to the
schedule you've read, and the basic term is one
Nefertitian
year. Option to renew must be signified in advance but not less than one month
before due date of repatriation."

She pounced. "In other words, I start
work less than one month from now?"

"Ah—not exactly."
But Shuster didn't seem put out. "The previous incumbent is due to leave
in two months' time, but you understand we must insure ourselves against the
contingency you've already mentioned: the risk of leaving
Zygra
without a legal occupant acting for the company. Also, there is a short period
of training, environmental familiarization, and so forth. Customarily we
advertise ahead of the due date."

"But
I become an employee immediately when I validate the contract?"

"If
I were in your place I wouldn't jump right into it," Shuster said
insinuatingly. "Why don't you consider—?"

None
of his alternative proposals was apt to contain a repatriation clause.
Kynance
shuddered as imperceptibly as possible and went on
examining the form.

One
wouldn't expect the
Zygra
Company to be tenderhearted,
but even so the schedule was stark. In this sector stars were marginally hotter
than Sol, so habitable planets orbited a little further out; like Nefertiti,
Zygra
had a year longer than Earth's. Once in the course of
that year the company landed a ship, which stayed about a week at the time
when the harvest was ripe. (That was awe-inspiring, in a way: one ship per
year, and its cargo paid for
everything
several
times
overl
) The "incumbent," to borrow
Shuster's term, was delivered on one visit, picked up on the next. If he
were
injured or fell sick, the policy was straightforward
and indeed spelled out: he or she was kept alive by prosthetic devices so
thai
when the next ship landed continuity in the legal
sense was established. After that it was presumably a matter of chance whether
or not you died on the way home —the company wouldn't be bothered.

Might sue for your injuries . . . ? No,
forbidden as an
ex
post facto
breach
of contract. Arguable, might not stand in a court, but a helpless cripple up
against the
Zygra
Company would be ill advised to
find out. Of course, some rival firm might finance a claim, but to what
purpose? They'd settle with the offer of an undernourished surplus-to-requirement
pelt, and the owner would become instantly rich.

Stick to the point, woman!
Kynance
adjured herself.

There were a good many ways to break the
contract and render it void, but try as she might she couldn't imagine herself
throwing away the chance of repatriation for any of the conceivable reasons,
and as for the inconceivable ones, it must purely be legal excess of caution
that put them in. For example, this non-standard clause mortared into the middle
of half a dozen stock items:

"It
shall he absolute and agreed grounds to void this contract if the signatory
B"—
the
employee—
"shall
at any time during his/her term of employment herein specified reveal, divulge,
indicate or in any fashion whatsoever communicate to a person not an employee
of the signatory
A"—the
Zygra
Company—
"any information relevant to the production, training,
conditioning or other process of manufacture of the product known as
Zygra
pelts; or shall signal or shall attempt to signal or
in any way establish communication from the place of employment to or with any
person not an employee of the signatory A on any subject whatsoever whether or
not concerned with the business of the said signatory
A."

The
place of employment was defined as
"the surface of the planet
Zygra
or any place
or places whatsoever in the absolute discretion of the signatory A defined as a
place or places where the business of the signatory A is carried on."

Was
that the hole? Did it imply that the contract was void if, prior to the year's
end, she told a
spacelines
booking clerk she had been
working on
Zygra
? It might, but even a year's
isolation wasn't going to lower her determination to go home! She could keep
her mouth shut as long as she had to, and not even the
Zygra
Company could compel her to keep quiet once the year was over.

One final time she leafed through the
contract; then she reached out abruptly and moistened her thumb on the desk-
etary's
validation pad. Her hand poised over the form. And
still she hesitated.

"How many other applicants have there
been for this post?" she asked abruptly.

Shuster had forgotten to cancel his circuit
to the firm's computers; blindly, acting on his authorization, the voice ran
out:

"No other candidate has—"

"Shut
up!"
Shuster
roared, and this time he was quick enough to activate the canceling mechanisms.
Kynance
looked at him and said nothing.

"Ah
. . ." He ran his finger around the collar of his tunic.
"I
could tell something was bothering you, and
I'm not surprised. Of course, there's the point that we've just begun to
advertise the post—"

Kynance
tapped the form stonily; according to the
schedule incorporated in it, the harvesting ship was due to call in less than
seven weeks.

"Moreover,
even at the salary we offer, there are few people who are willing to accept a
year's absolute isolation." Shuster was recovering again—he bounced back
fast and always to the same orbit. Now he was sliding his arm behind her,
fingers groping for the bare skin under her nape-hair. "But in strict and
total confidence there is something which holds people back from applying, even
people like yourself who are lonely on Nefertiti and have few friends
..."
The fingers slithered down her
shoulder; the other hand fumbled around her waist and upwards.
Kynance
waited, frozen.

"If
you take my advice," Shuster whispered, "I think you'll find it pays
in the long run, and it's much more fun than sitting for a year watching
machines look after a lot of moss-beautiful moss, but just moss in the last
analysis. Look, before you validate the contract shall we—?"

I know what the reason is why people don't
apply in droves. The
word's
gotten around that they
have to get past you.

Kynance
made four precisely timed movements. The
first slid her out from the grip on her shoulder; the second detached the hand
trespassing on her breast; the third stabbed her thumb hard on the validation
box of the contract; and the fourth slapped Shuster resoundingly on the cheek.

For
long seconds he didn't react. Then, the mark burning
redly
on his pale skin, he took the contract and entered the firm's validation also,
making the gesture a completed vocabulary of abuse.

Finally he spoke between clenched teeth:

"And I hope you
rot."

Ill

I
f,
in that moment
,
anyone had told
Kynance
only a few more days would
pass before she found herself wishing for another sight of Shuster, she would
have thought the speaker crazy. Yet that was how it turned out.

There
was something absolutely terrifying for an Earth-
sider
in the impersonal, almost machinelike way the
Zygra
Company accepted its new employee. Of course,
outworlders
were accustomed to this method of treatment—people whose family tradition
embraced the concept of taming a whole planet with less than a thousand
responsible adults, or home-
steading
half a continent
with servos jury-rigged out of spaceship scrap, would probably prefer
emotionless mechanical supervision to the unpredictability of human beings.

Kynance's
previous jobs since leaving Earth, though,
had been with small entrepreneurial undertakings, or with private individuals.
These were flexible enough to put up with the nonstandard human material she
represented. Firms in the middle brackets had their sights fixed on expansion;
they needed
outworlders
who fitted their preset
requirements and had no slack available to make adjustments for strangers.

A
firm as huge as the
Zygra
Company, by contrast simply
took it for granted that its employees did fit, and if they didn't actually do
so the company ignored the fact.

Superficially
she had no cause to complain about the way she was treated. Once instructed
that she was working for the company, the computers accorded her strictly what
she was entitled to. She was given an advance against salary, a bedroom in a
subsidiary wing of the headquarters building, and a schedule for her training
program; she was medically examined and cured of a minor sinus infection which
had been bothering her since Loki; she was automatically interrogated under flicker-stimulation
to make certain she wasn't a spy for some rival organization—but that she had
anticipated, and could hardly resent.

What
wore her down, though, was the way in which the
Zygra
Company reflected the sparse population of all the out-worlds in microcosmic
form. Days of empty corridors, empty elevators, blankly closed doors of
offices, testified to the efficiency with which human resources were
exploited. No time wasted in going from place to place around the building,
nor
in casual chatting. That habit would come back in
another generation or two; right now, there was still a shortage of manpower,
so that the
Zygra
Company, which owned the whole of a
planet, had fewer staff members at its headquarters than aboard one of its
interstellar freighters.

A
slight consolation was the fact that the training program was intensive.
Shuster had said the post was a sinecure; that might be true, but the company's
computers were of an economical turn, as she had already established, and no
one had told them not to take trouble. There was always the slight chance that
something might go wrong with the fabulous cybernetic devices on
Zygra
and some crucial decision might land in the lap of
the single human occupant of the planet. In that case, the computers apparently
reasoned, said human occupant must be equipped with the fullest possible knowledge
of the situation.

So .
. .

Head
ringing, she struggled to absorb everything she was told or shown. A real pelt
was an essential part of the instructional environment; after a week, she had
forgotten its cash value and liked it solely because it was another living
thing in this otherwise mechanical setting.

She would have welcomed
even Shuster's company.

Zygra
: a vegetable stew.
A
planet fractionally smaller than Earth, with a virtually uniform warm damp
climate and no satellite large enough to generate sizable tides.
Solar
attraction created sluggish surges in its universal
marshes—swamps-everglades—whatever one cared to call them. But any term you
applied was slightly wrong, for
Zygra
remained
uniquely itself.

Since
the atmosphere was breathable and there were no organisms capable of infecting
human tissue and equally there were no animals, hence no hostile species to
exterminate, it would certainly have been a prize for colonization if it had
had any dry land at all. However, over ninety-nine percent of the
surface
a human being either swam, or sank to his waist in
mud, or required artificial life-support systems.
Ky-nance
began to catch on to some of the reasons why nobody had ever seriously tried to
take possession of the planet away from the
Zygra
Company when she learned that the annual cost of maintaining the supervisor in
reasonable comfort was equivalent to two pelts—about two million credits.

Another
hundred thousand in salary atop that seemed almost negligible.

Apart
from swamp, there were two other notable features of the surface. First, and
natural, the vegetation: a complex as elaborate as any known on an Earthlike
world, extending as Shuster had said over ecological chains fourteen units in
length, climaxing in the pelts. In their home environment they frequented
certain mat-like rafts of another plant, on which parasitized the intervening
members of the chain. Their incredible changeability, their flexibility and
their scent-secretions seemed to be a kind of evolutionary luxury; no one had
assigned them with any certainty to
adaptational
measures. At the season of maximal solar tide, their glory reached optimum;
then
came
the harvest, when they were shock-conditioned
into a permanent state of excitation and coated on their underside with a solid
solution of concentrated nutriment. Those so provisioned would last twenty to
thirty years regardless of how they were used—tears repaired themselves; the
shimmer and odor continued unabated until old age set in.

No
wonder the pelts were the most sought-after objects in the galaxy.

The
second feature of
Zygra
was artificial and recent. It
was the automated harvesting and breeding system Shuster had mentioned. As he
had said, it was defended against interference. Orbital
guardposts
would challenge and destroy any ship emerging from qua-space without the
correct recognition-signals, even if the ship was in distress—for there was
only one place on
Zygra
a ship could set down without
sinking instantly into the swamps, and that was the company's own main
station, floating around the planet as the pelts migrated from raft to raft of
their indispensable weed.

From
the main station, scores upon scores of wholly automatic substances fanned
out, herding the pelts, selecting and tagging those which displayed the most
remarkable variations, culling drab ones,
crossfertilizing
sports with known strains to produce extra-gorgeous lines, prodding, poking,
exciting and in every way directing their fate.

Also
there were factories distilling and concentrating the ingredients for the solid
nourishment with which the export pelts had to be coated, telescoping five or
six years of natural processing into as many months: extract of
yardweed
fed to
blockweeds
,
extract of
blockweed
fed to
dinglybells
,
extract of
dinglybell
fed to
Zygran
bladderwrack
, extract of
bladderwrack
fed to
pseudosponge
. . .

Gelatinized, fortified,
sprayed on and allowed to dry.

"I think,"
Kynance
said very softly to
herself
, "that I won't go
crazy, even if I am alone on the planet. I think it's going to be rather
interesting."