John Brunner Read online

  WORLDHOLD: ZYGRA

  Kynance Foy was young, beautiful, intelligent and highly trained in both qua-space physics and business law when she left Earth to seek her fortune in the interstellar outworlds. But she found that the further she got from Earth, the tougher became the competition from the environment-hardened populations of these young worlds . . . and by the time she reached the planet Nefertiti, she was facing poverty.

  Then, unexpectedly, a wonderful opportunity opened up for her: the job of Planetary Supervisor of the fabulously wealthy world called Zygra, where exotic pelts costing a million credits each were grown. The salary was huge, and at the end of the year's tour of duty she would be transported free of charge back to Earth, where she would be a very wealthy young woman.

  There had to be a catch to it, she thought as she signed the contract. And, of course, there was.

  Turn this book over for second complete novel

  JOHN BRUNNER

  is the author of these outsanding Ace novels:

  TIMES WITHOUT NUMBER (F-161)

  LISTEN! THE STARS! (F-215)

  THE SPACE-TIME JUGGLER (F-227)

  THE ASTRONAUTS MUST NOT LAND (F-227)

  THE RITES OF OHE (F-242)

  CASTAWAYS' WORLD (F-242)

  TO CONQUER CHAOS (F-277)

  ENDLESS SHADOW (F-299)

  THE REPAIRMEN OF CYCLOPS (M-115)

  ENIGMA FROM TANTALUS (M-115)

  THE ALTAR ON ASCONEL (M-123)

  THE DAY OF THE STAR CITIES (F-361)

  ?4Plcuwt

  by

  JOHN BRUNNER

  ACE BOOKS, INC. 1120 Avenue of the Americas New York, N.Y. 10036

  A PLANET OF YOUR OWN

  Copyright ©, 1966, by John Brunner All Rights Reserved

  Cover art by Jack Gaughan.

  THE BEASTS OF KOHL

  Copyright ©, 1966, by Ace Books, Inc.

  Printed in U.S.A.

  I

  THERE WAS one item on display in the enormous window: a zygra pelt. Kynance Foy stood and looked at it. There were a lot of other women doing the same thing.

  But she was the only one who was gritting her teeth.

  It wasn't the first time in her life she'd been the odd one out, so that figured. For example—and the most glaring example—she hadn't had to leave Earth, which marked her off immediately even on a comparatively highly populated out-world like Nefertiti. The massive "encouraged emigration" of the Dictatrix period had lowered the premium on wanderlust at home; it was a full generation since Nefertiti had declared itself independent and set quotas for Earthside immigrants, and then found them superfluous because the demand wasn't there.

  For the umpteenth time Kynance read the discreet hand-lettered price tag attached to one corner of the stand on which the zygra pelt was draped. It read: One million credits. No other price had ever been asked for the pelts.

  Okay, Kynance told herself sourly. I was naive ....

  She had never confessed it even to her closest friends, but one of the things she had planned to bring back when she returned to astonish those who had mocked was—a zygra pelt. She had pictured herself emerging from the exit of the starship wearing it: not elegantly, but casually, tossed around her, her body molded by it into insurpassable perfection, yet her pose implying that she had had it so long she was becoming faintly bored with the attention she attracted.

  And at this moment she did not even possess the price of a square meal.

  Other plans, other ambitions, had been shed one by one as she had doggedly worked her way towards Nefertiti, reasoning that the closer one came to the source the cheaper the pelts might become. Not so; only the cost of interstellar freight shrank, while the asking price remained steady at one million.

  She stood watching the pelt's shifts of sheen and texture, wondering what exotic perfumes it had been trained to secrete—what, for instance, matched that liquid rainbow phase when the pelt seemed to run in endless streams of pure color?—and cursing her own stupidity.

  Yet . . .

  Could I have known better?

  Oh, maybe. Her brash confidence, though, hadn't lacked evidence to support it. She had been fresh out of college with a brilliant record; she had deliberately changed her major to qua-space physics and her minor to interstellar commerce when she had made up her mind, but before that she had been well grounded in the unfeminine combination of business law and practical engineering—the latter by accident, merely to get even with a sneering boyfriend who had once offered to fix her skycar.

  This, moreover, was not her only equipment. She was exactly five and a half feet tall; she was exotically gorgeous, having inherited dark eyes and sinuous grace from a Dutch ancestor who had fallen from grace in Java in the company of a temple dancer, and hair of a curious iron-gray shade traceable only to a colony of Cornish tin-miners totaling some five hundred persons in a multi-billion galactic population, against which her tanned skin burned like new copper.

  There had been no risk—so she had argued—of her ever being stranded. If the worst came to the worst, and neither qua-space physics nor her encyclopedic knowledge of interstellar commerce could secure her employment, she could always . . .

  Well, she had never phrased the idea clearly to herself, but it had involved some romantically handsome young starship officer willing to hazard his career for the sake of her company on a trip to some more promising planet, a crotchety captain won over by her dazzling personality, and delivery with unsolicited testimonials to an entrepreneur in need of a private secretary when they arrived.

  She had begun to suspect she had made the wrong decision on the first stop out from Earth, when she had still had the cash to go home. What she had overlooked was that during the miserable régime of the Dictatrix incredible numbers of non-pioneer types had been—in the official terminology of the day—"encouraged" to emigrate, chief among them intractable intellectuals doubtful of the universal benefits Her Magnificence had supposedly been bestowing. Consequently the outworlds had been colonized, forcibly, by a swarm of brilliant and very angry men and women. Having nothing left but the desire to get even, they had buckled down and made the best of what they had. Not for this breed of colonist was the broad axe or the draft-ox or the log-cabin; they were used to lasers, vidding and mutable furniture, they knew the necessary techniques, and with the determination of fanatics they had set out not merely to provide such luxuries for themselves but to ensure that if the same fate overtook their children or their children's children the youngsters would be able to repeat the process.

  Which was not to imply that there were absolutely no openings on such old-settled worlds as Ge and New Medina for moderately talented young women; had this been the case she would have turned around despite the scorn she would have faced from her friends on retreating to Earth. Instead, she found temporary work; saved up; moved on, convincing herself that things would be different further out.

  They were. By her third or fourth stopover, she had been encountering sea-harvesters supervised by ten-year-olds, each responsible for two thousand tons of protein-rich food a week and a mainstay of the planetary economy, and reading bulletin boards at spaceports bearing blanket warnings—to save the labor of writing the words on every single advertisement— that no one lacking a Scholar degree in the relevant subjects need bother to apply.

  And even her asset of last resort, her appearance, had failed her. What she hadn't reckoned with—or had omitted to find out—was that once they had been clear of Earth, and the traditional association of appearance with regional origins, the emigrants whether forced or voluntary had become satisfied to be human beings rather than Europeans or Africans or Asians. By the time a couple of generations had slipped away, the mixing of the gene-pool had a
lready been producing types which made the concept "exotic" seem irrelevant: Swedish and Quechua, Chukchi and Matabele, the wildest extremes of physique met in a mad succession of paradoxes. Then, released from Earthside attachment to local types, the more prosperous girls had started to experiment, drawing on some of the finest talents in biology and surgery. Within ten yards of where Kynance was standing, there were: a Negress with silver hair and blood-red irises, a miniaturized Celtic redhead no higher than her elbow and very nicely stacked, and a shimmering golden girl with slanted eyes and the quiet hypnotic movements of a trained geisha. Any of the three would have monopolized a roomful of sophisticated Earth-men.

  On Druid, somebody had asked Kynance to marry him. On Quetzal someone else had asked her to act as hostess for him and be his acknowledged mistress. On Loki a third man had suggested, in a rather bored manner, that she become his son's mistress, the son being aged sixteen and due to submit his scholar's thesis in cybernetics.

  And on Nefertiti she would have been grateful for even that much attention.

  Confronted with the symbol of her empty ambitions, she admitted the truth to herself at last. She was scared.

  Well, gawking at the zygra pelt wasn't solving the problem of hunger. She started to move away.

  At that moment, a soft voice emanated from the air. It came over a biaxial interference speaker, so for practical purposes the statement was exact. She stopped dead.

  "The Zygra Company draws your attention to a vacancy occurring shortly in its staff. Limited service contract, generous remuneration, comfortable working conditions, previous experience not necessary, standard repatriation clause. Apply at this office, inquiring for Executive Shuster."

  The message was repeated twice. Kynance stood in a daze, waiting for the rush to begin. There was no rush. The only reaction was the sound of an occasional sarcastic laugh as people who had been gazing at the pelt were disturbed and decided to wander on.

  No. Ridiculous. Impossible. She must have dreamed it. Not enough food and too much worry had conspired to make her mind play a trick.

  Nonetheless she was on her way to the entrance of the Zygra Building. She hadn't made a conscious decision—she was following a tropism as automatic as that of a thirsty man spotting an oasis across the desert. She did wonder why one or two people she jostled looked pityingly at her eagerness, but that was afterwards.

  EXECUTIVE SHUSTER was a vain man of early middle age. It was obvious he was vain—his expensive clothes were meant to look expensive, his fastidiously arranged office was a frame for him, and his manner as he looked her over implied that he hoped she would instantly fall on her knees.

  Kynance did nothing of the sort. Right now she had room in her head for precisely one thought, and she uttered it.

  "You're offering a job. What is it?"

  Shuster looked her over a second time, shrugged, and put on a practiced artificial smile. "I must say that it's seldom I have the pleasure of interviewing such an attractive candidate for one of our posts—"

  "What's the job?"

  Shuster blinked. He retreated to Position Two: superior knowledgeability. "I can tell by your accent you're not Nef-ertitian—oh, do sit down, won't you? And would you care for a drink?"

  Kynance stayed put. Not that she cared what the job was —she'd have accepted the chance to be junior dish washer on an interstellar tramp providing the contract carried the standard repatriation clause. That was the bait which had brought her into this room—not the prospect of getting on the inside of the Zygra Company itself. She would have traded every pelt in the galaxy for a berth on a ship bound for home.

  The repatriation clause was one of the few attempts made by Earth's current government to impose a decree on the unruly outworlds, and the only attempt to have succeeded. Following the Dictatrix period, everyone in the galaxy was shy of absolute decrees. But there was enough mobility among the outworlds themselves to generate support for the concept of compulsory repatriation, so even the greediest entrepreneurs had had to succumb and write in the clause.

  It stated simply that if the place of work was on another planet than the world where the laborer was engaged, compliance with the conditions of employment entitled the employee to repatriation at the expense of the company . . . whether or not the planet of origin was the one where the worker had been hired.

  Prior to this, some of the less scrupulous companies had forcibly colonized profitable outworlds by methods even less polite than the Dictatrix's: luring workers into their net with temptingly high salaries, then, abandoning them light-years from any place where they could spend their earnings.

  To Kynance, this was salvation—if she got the job.

  "I would not care for a drink," she said. "All I want is a plain answer."

  Sinister retreated to Position Umpteen, sighed, and gestured at his desketary. "The contract is a very long and detailed one," he murmured with a last attempt at regaining lost ground. "I do think you should sit down while we discuss it."

  With the mobile bulk of the desketary to help him, he outnumbered Kynance. She was forced to accept a seat on a two-thin-person lounge along the window wall, where Shuster joined her. He then maneuvered the desketary so that she couldn't run away across the room, and rubbed his shoulder against hers.

  When he gets to the knee-mauling stage, Kynance promised herself, I'll—I'll think about it.

  She was that desperate, and hadn't realized it before.

  "The post," Shuster was saying urbanely, "isn't such a demanding one really. It's a shame, in fact, that so lovely a girl-"

  "Executive, unless you're stupid you've already figured out what interests me about the job," Kynance snapped.

  "The repatriation clause? Oh, it's there, in full." Shuster smiled and moved a little closer. "Though strictly in confidence—"

  "If you don't give girls straight answers," Kynance purred with malice, "don't you expect them to misunderstand you?"

  The trap worked fine. Shuster diminished the pressure of his shoulder against hers by at least ten per cent and spoke in a voice as mechanical as a desketary's.

  "Supervisor of Zygra for a term of one year at a salary of a hundred thousand credits."

  Supervisor of Zygra—?

  There was a long silence. At last Kynance said in a thin voice, "You can't possibly mean the planet Zygra? You must mean a farm, or a plantation, or—or something!"

  Shuster curled his lips into a pleased grin. "Of course, coming as you do from Ge, you wouldn't know much about zygra pelt production, would you? So—"

  "Your announcement said no experience was necessary. And I'm from Earth, not Ge."

  She bit her tongue, fractionally too late, seeing in imagination her chance of the post vanishing into vacuum. With repatriation involved, logically the Zygra Company would prefer to hire someone from Nefertiti, where it had its registered headquarters, or from some nearer world than Earth at least—some world convenient for its own ships. For the sake of a gibe at this horrible stranger she had sacrificed . . .

  But what was he saying?

  Unperturbed, Shuster was continuing in the same tone. "But you must have spent some time on Ge, at least? I could have sworn I detected it in your accent. Well, let's set the record straight, shall we? Central Computing, please," he added to the desketary. "Category application for employment, subcategory supervisor of Zygra, candidate Foy, Kynance, new reference number."

  He sat back, contriving to restore the pressure on her. "By the way, I did mean supervisor of the planet Zygra," he concluded, and enjoyed the impact of the words.

  That definitely settled the matter, Kynance decided bitterly. For the task of supervising the unique, jealously guarded home of the pelts, they would never pick-Hang on, though! Why was the job described in these terms anyway? The demand for pelts implied a massive installation at the point of origin—a staff of hundreds, more likely thousands—breeding, training, a million-and-one subsidiary tasks ....

  She frowned and
rubbed her forehead in a frantic attempt to remember what little she had ever known about the production of Zygra pelts. Something about the planet being unfit for colonization . . . ?

  "How are the things raised?" she asked, surrendering.

  "Hmmm? Oh!" Shuster leaned confidentially close. "The term 'pelt' is a misnomer, and it's no breach of company secrecy to say so nowadays, although when they were first being imported to civilized worlds the admission would have been an automatic breach of an employee's contract, since it was thought advisable to mislead purchasers and possible rivals by making them think it was the skin of an animal. Actually, the pelts are entire lifeforms in themselves, and insofar as they're related to anything we know they're a kind of moss. So I suppose 'plantation' is as good a term as any for the place where they grow!" He laughed and jabbed her in the ribs.

  "—Though it's impossible to grow anything else there, I tell you frankly. Zygra is a sort of . . . how how shall I describe it?"

  "You've been there yourself?" Kynance suggested, trying to wriggle away and finding her progress firmly blocked by the end of the narrow lounge.

  "Naturally I've been there," Shuster said loftily. "In actual fact, the supervisor of Zygra is responsible to me, so one of the duties which I undertake is ensuring that the terms of the contract are strictly adhered to. Of course this involves direct inspection and . . ."

  He ran on at some length, to make sure she didn't miss the point. In essence, he was saying: It pays to be nice to me.

  "You were telling me about Zygra," she murmured finally.

  "Oh yes! A sort of vegetable stew is as near as one can come to describing it, I think. Marshland, a few patches of open water, much smaller than oceans on planets which have satellites, and—plants. I believe the parasitism extends to the fourteenth degree; in other words, there are some highlyevolved forms, including the pelts, which can't absorb nutriment until it's been processed by an ecological chain fourteen units long. They remain plants rather than animals, you understand."