Trade Secret (eARC) (3 page)

The trader's eyes were large. Jerhri'd not meant to threaten, but now he could see the man before him losing composure. Surely, then, he was a desperate man, even more desperate than Jethri.

The man's hands were shaking, but he was already reopening his portfolio. "Done."

As the transaction settled, it turned out that the Terran coins broke to fifteen rather than ten kais, which Jethri allowed without hesitation. Now his urge was to be away from this man and his ragged breathing . . .

The trader gone, Jethri slammed the sign onto the table, tucked his haul into his cloak's storage pockets. He realized he was shivering now, and wondered what he'd done to suddenly feel so cold.

Those kajhets! Not toys, not toys, not toys. Paitor would have perhaps denounced the man, and perhaps Grig would have bought it all . . .

It would not do to dine, even alone, while still so unsettled.

Succor was to hand after a dizzying riot of panic, which he knew he must not succumb to, and then a reminder that some called trade "the quiet war."

With the aid of one of Pen Rel's warrior tricks of centering, he let the hard floor be his base, let the world of breathing be his focus, closed his eyes for a moment to visualize the coming reality of the big ring, firmly on his hand, and he a trader of competence, and hurried for his break. With luck, tomorrow he'd sleep on
Elthoria
!

Clan Ixin's Tradeship
Elthoria
, in Jump

Jethri settled himself at his personal desk, breakfast a comfortable fullness. His standard-G weight was easy on him these days, even if that meant his attempted left-side braid tickled his forehead when he moved his head.

As he was no pilot, the longer trader-style hair was something he'd been reaching for ever since his ship-cut, lovingly fashioned by Dyk into Jethri's signature hairsculpt, had been denounced during his first planetside training. Planetdwellers, he was informed, were often put off by the shave-head designs of shipfolk.

He swiped the growing hair back carelessly, the triple topaz of his ring catching light that the crystal let through. He leaned on his left-side armrest despite his best effort to break the habit. Maybe all right-handed loopers did it, but his time at stinks patrol had shown him that his relatives on
Gobelyn's Market
surely had the habit and he'd been busily trying to erase such Terran tendencies in favor of Liaden--or at least Liaden ship-style--balance. Maybe if he could sit straight the lengthening hair wouldn't tickle so much.

Around him the room was both cabin and office, his bed hidden now by the drop down research screen. His chair was a hybrid, an oversized trade-deck extra fitted with the normal connections for a working trader as well as a student's amplified speakers and note takers. All in all, it was the best study spot he'd ever had, though at times he missed the social contact of the library and took sessions there or in the staff room.

Despite the ship dropping out--and then back in--to Jump, yesterday had been one of those social contact days, spent between the library, the staff room, the cafeteria, and the exercise courts where he struggled with the intricacies of
menfri'at
, the Liaden martial arts the arms master worked hard to teach him, as well as with the weight machines and other exercise devices, since he'd been needing to be "world-worthy" as Pen Rel put it--a level of planetary physical readiness many spacers lost over time. He was to be dealing with traders and social necessities and ought not appear--or be!--as weak as an elder if it could be avoided.

Being on rush-learning, there were some ordinary things he did not do on his social days yet--like join in ship committee event planning--which had taken his hoped-for lunch with Gaenor off the schedule since she was, of course, much involved in such. They still copracticed their Liaden and Terran together, but walking the ship at odd moments, throwing words and ideas at each other as they talked was even more a part of that duty than it had been; certainly it would be good to have some quiet time together once in a while.

Yesterday was day three of his five-day regime, and the fact that
Elthoria
had "stopped" at a star they'd barely seen mattered little. Khat would have called what they did a skate-by--the primary was so distant from the pickup point that its light took several Standard Hours to get there--and what they did was all piloting: drop off two pods of supplies and equipment and pick up two pods of compressed and freeze-dried seaweed. None of this had impinged on his duties or schedule other than to inform his current search for the rules of delivery with a little more poignancy since there'd been threat of a glitch that might have delayed them for days.

Some few of
Elthoria
's crew had taken advantage of the two, brief, late-night orbits around Thringar Six to claim a world by going to the observation deck and eyeballing it through the ports . . . but he never claimed a world he hadn't at least landed on, else he'd have as many as anyone on the ship--captain included--but yes, starting a tour when he was just starting to breathe gave him leverage over folks who'd grown up planet side in good Liaden homes!

Near as he could understand, Thringar Six was a biggish mush of a semihabitable planet with a few thousand workers and a bunch of sea grass and not much else, all around a biggish star that was going to go nova sometime in the next few million years. He hadn't been needed at the trade desk for that, nor in the control room, and he'd slept through the Jump out two hours before his rising time.

So today was a physical rest day, but as busy or busier, on the whole, for today he was his own boss, and a tough one, having waked before the subtle morning shift chime, and been in the breakfast lounge before the tea changed from night-strong to ordinary.

Study and thought, that was the day's job today. The topic was contracts, and he'd been in the same line of study for some while now, since he wouldn't always be able to access the sharp memory of Norn ven'Deelin while he was away from the ship, and he'd be liable for what mistakes he brought back with his name signed in agreement--and both she and the clan--would have to back him up.

Contracts were pretty important. After all it had been a fraudulent contract--in the form of a fake Liaden Master Trader's card vouchsafed as firm commitment on a short-term deal--that had brought Jethri to this Liaden tradeship in the first place.

Contract terminology, now, that was difficult stuff, with the caveat that most of it he was dealing with was Liaden to begin with, and defined over the generations by both force of custom and the sharp eyes and minds of the
qe'andra
.

Words were not to be played idly in the game of trade, and since he was studying to be a specialist like none before him, intensive lessons in Liaden were backed up by heavy reading and study in Terran as well. Who knew there were so many business-essential words that shipfolk never used, never spoke, never even thought?

Birthright
.

Jethri'd come across the term most recently in a contract from a Terran world, one allowing heirs and assigns certain rights and duties . . . and now he'd set the search going in the Liaden-centered computer, trying to see what the comparisons were. Being born to a family was enough to guarantee all kinds of things on some worlds--Terran worlds, especially--and aboard some ships, but in Liaden space, it was the delm who ultimately determined what a person owned or could own, down to being denied any part in a clan.

Well, there--he needed to know, as a trader, how often such things might be encountered. He . . . well, as a Terran spacer he'd inherited some stuff from his father and he'd owned some stuff on his own as a kid, things given him by his father.

That must have been birthright, because not even the ship's captain--his mother--would deny it to him now. A couple pieces of jewelry, some fractins all collected now by the Scout, a book--his "logbook" where as a child he'd sat beside his father, Arin Gobelyn, whole shifts at a time, creating routes and manifests for trips he'd make when he was a pilot or Combine trader on the Market.

He sighed, for he was still no pilot, and his mother had stolen the book away when his father died, and hid it, and so pre-told the true tale that he was never to be welcome as full-fledged crew there on
Gobelyn's Market
, name or no, birthright or not.

The family stuff, personal family stuff, he tried to shove that back into the receding mental cubby that was Jethri Gobelyn, since here on
Elthoria
he was Jethri the trader, son of the trader, ven'Deelin the family name, Ixin the clan.

Study and thought, that was the day, and that was fine.

In fact, the day was going well, which was what he'd come to expect when it came to dealing with tradeship
Elthoria
. Very few things caused a stir, very rare was a raised voice or a ruffled demeanor, very unusual indeed was there anything deemed urgent.

Jethri admired this stability in a ship, having come from a ship which aspired to ordinary but whose days had been punctuated by angry outbursts and whimsical orders, and an overdose of what his cousin Dyk had labeled "Jethri do."

There was, of course, quite a difference between the driving forces behind the ship
Elthoria
and the ship
Gobelyn's Market
. On the
Market
the driving force was the captain, who'd also been his mother until bare months before when he'd discovered the awkward truth. On
Elthoria.
the driving force was Norn ven'Deelin, who had been his rescue as a Master Trader and had become his new mother, and behind her was a clan at least as old and as proud as the Gobelyns.

Even granting different base cultures, which Jethri was more than willing to do, the ships were more different than many of his current crew mates would imagine, for they--everyone besides him, that is--had someplace to call home that was not
Elthoria
. Not just a posting or a position or a job or a berth, but a
home
, a planetside building, mostly with roof and windows and a view at least of the underside of a sky.

As for Jethri, he'd grown up on
Gobelyn's Market
--it had been his home until the strange series of events that had brought him to Trader ven'Deelin's office in what was to him, just another port. By then Iza had already given notice that his home ship couldn't house him any longer. He'd become too much an extra hand, too much a reminder of agreements and perhaps even of passion that had passed years before with the death of his father, Arin.

Technically, of course, he had a home now--which would be the distant Clan Ixin clanhouse he'd yet to enter, but inside, in his thoughts, he couldn't call it home anymore than he could call himself Liaden, though his demeanor, his clothes, his title, and his tradering all screamed Liaden to unknowing dirtsiders who met him in the rounds of business.

But there, his mother was not his mother, his ship was not his home, his clan was not his family . . . and only some of his family was family by blood and genes.

What had he got from being born? Birthright?

What was that exactly? The blood and genes of his father, and a few odd ends that had belonged to his father, and that in the aftermath of his father's death had, in a roundabout way, been ceded to him.

Oh, the other thing that might be his birthright as Jethri Gobelyn? His father's relatives. They were still relatives as Terrans saw relations, and when thought on properly, they were something strange. What that meant for him, well, that was something Jethri, trader and changeling, would have to decide.

He waved his hands at the keyboard, bringing his research screens to life, and lighting the reminders pad.

He grimaced, then worked to erase that unfortunate expression from his face.

Liadens rarely showed what they thought in their faces if they could avoid it, and he thought it one of the reasons that adult Terrans looked older than adult Liadens. Frown lines, and smile lines, too, were far less obvious on a Liaden face. To Liadens, most expressions were unfortunate, unless shared with a family member or a special, rare intimate.

His manners tutor worked with him diligently on such points, and with a deep breath he relaxed both his face and his shoulders, lifting his elbow from the resting place that would, he knew, have a lasting impression from his time on the ship. He'd seen armrests on the
Market
marked with sweat and wear of decades, and had more than once as a child been accused of shirking his duties because of that Terran habit.

Still, the reason for the grimace was not as easy to disappear from in front of his eyes as his face was to set bland: overdue correspondence, necessary action.

He reviewed the list, knowing he was being hard on himself. Not all of the list was overdue, for many of items were voluntary. It was just that in the flow of his days, he'd not had time to focus on letters to Meicha and Miandra, nor to decide why he felt guilty about having more to say to one than the other, twin empaths that they were. Twins he'd known about before meeting the girls, but empath had been something new. Then there'd been the discovery that, twins or not, the girls were hardly interchangeable. Even with them knowing what he was thinking and knowing what each other was doing, they weren't the same person and had different goals . . .

Letters would be hard--he sometimes wished there was some way he could just hold hands with both of them and let them know that way what he felt.

Nor had he managed to work out what he wanted to say to Khat in a letter to her that might be as well said in a broadcast letter to the whole of the
Market
, but he felt that he had some slight reticence to share some things with the crew entire, as he had some things more personal, more intimate for Khat than the whole of the crew. For all that she'd taken on full adult status and certainly had cares of her own, she'd often been the easiest for him to talk to.

More pressing was the correspondence he owed to his single business partner, and that had been more getting difficult as the distance between them and the time between infoshares had grown. In hopeful theory--if the minute details could be worked out, if the language could be made dense enough and stealthy enough and, face it, Liaden-tricky enough--Tan Sim might soon be employed as an associate trader on
Elthoria.

It was a bold idea, given the enmity between Ixin and Rinork, and it had been Jethri's innocent question about the propriety of him, an apprentice trader, hiring Tan Sim, a full trader, as an assistant that had begun the entire project. His mother had smiled at the idea at first, seeing it both an amusing and a confounding idea since it would of course be a Balance game of sorts, a winning of
melant'i
for both Jethri and Ixin, if Rinork's best young trader could be willfully brought to serve with Jethri at Jethri's behest.

Ixin's needs were not simple in the situation, though, since a straight buyout from Rinork was unlikely, given the spite that had placed Tan Sim under the contract carrying him away from
Wynhael,
Rinork, and Rinork-to-be.

The point of that contract had been to punish Tan Sim for his insolence, to place him in an isolated position on a ship not of Rinork where Rinork could still publicly claim he'd been given responsibility and opportunity.

The sense Jethri'd made of the contract, and the one taken by Norn ven'Deelin as well, was that the lad was meant to fail miserably. The ship's route was such to make speculative trading difficult at best, and the ship's owner and captain one with little enough capital. Indeed, it appeared that Rinork's part was to sell the contract at an absurdly low price, place Tan Sim on a route with diminishing returns so that one might point to slow genes perhaps and his father's failure, and then to crush him by disallowing his escape from the contract.