John Brunner Read online

  Dim facts were beginning to seep up from Kynance's memory—not dim merely because she had never studied the subject seriously, but also because as a matter of policy the Zygra Company shrouded its operations in mystery. Not even the Dictatrix had dared to monkey with so powerful and wealthy an organization.

  Come to think of it, it was a wonder that they'd agreed to repatriation clauses. They, and they alone, might have managed to stand up against the general trend.

  A little faintly, she said, "Look, I'm sorry if I'm being silly, but the impression I get is that this job involves being the only person on Zygra."

  "That is correct." He eyed her calculatingly. "So if you wish to reconsider the application I'll find it perfectly understandable. To be alone on a strange planet is bad enough when there are millions of people there already, as I'm sure you've found out. So why don't I take you around a bit and introduce you to some of my friends, get you over the worst of it? Believe me, I know how difficult it is to—"

  "Repatriation clause," Kynance muttered between clenched teeth, too faintly for Shuster to hear her. He was edging even closer now, a feat she would have thought impossible. Aloud and with a flashing smile, she said, "Then how is the—the plantation run?"

  "Automated," Shuster sighed. "The most complete and elaborate system of automation, and I may add the most thoroughly defended against interference, in the entire galaxy. The supervisor's post pretty much of a sinecure."

  She turned it over in her mind. A sinecure for which the all-powerful Zygra Company pays this vast salary? There must be a catch, but I'm damned if I can see what— Oh, this matter of being the only person on the planet!

  "Let me get this completely right," she said. "The supervisor is alone on the planet?"

  "The supervisor of Zygra," Shuster said patiently, "is the only employee of the Zygra Company whose place of employment is on Zygra itself."

  "Claim-jumping," Kynance said.

  "What?"

  "Claim-jumping. Automated equipment in operation doesn't constitute possession of an astral body: Government and People of the United States versus Government and People of the Soviet Union, International Court of Justice, 1971. You have to maintain at least the fiction of human habitation, or anybody else could step in and occupy Zygra."

  Shuster, she was delighted to see, blanched. He said, "You— you've studied law?"

  "Of course."

  "Well, then ..." Shuster rubbed his chin and withdrew a few millimeters.

  You look as if you've forgotten something, buster. And you have: you shotdd have exploited this perfect opportunity to find out all about me.

  Absolutely correct. Shuster's next step was to reach for the controls of the desketary.

  "There is the slight additional point to consider, isn't there?" he muttered. "I mean, not only whether the job suits you, but whether you suit the job. Uh—Central Computing!"

  "Waiting," said the desketary rather sullenly.

  "Applicant Foy, Kynance. Personal and career details follow."

  "I am twenty-five years old," Kynance began clearly, and went ahead from there, visualizing a standard application form in her mind's eye. Halfway through her college courses the idea struck her that Shuster was getting nervous; she went on with as much detail as she could muster, hoping she was on the right track, and found she was when the desketary finally started to ring an interruption bell.

  "Further information superfluous," the mechanical voice grunted.

  "Shut up!" Shuster rapped, but the machine finished what it had to say anyhow.

  "Applicant's qualifications*'greatly in excess of stipulated minimum!"

  There must be a catch in it. Must be, must be! Maybe it's in the contract itself.

  It was Shuster's turn to detect worry. He recovered fast from his annoyance at what the desketary had revealed—or rather, the company's economically-minded computers, determined not to waste time on questions to which the answer was known.

  "That's fine, then, isn't it?" he said. "So—but I see you're not happy."

  "Show me the contract, please," Kynance said, and waited for the desketary to issue a copy of it.

  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 re
levant 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

  IF, 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 f
requented 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 . . .