Jennifer was relieved to descend to the relative quiet of the forest floor. She took out her stunner; she knew Gazar hadn't warned her just for politeness' sake. The ground featured not just the usual assortment of large mammaloid carnivores, but also poisonous lizardy things that struck from ambush out of piles of leaves. The thick boots she wore to protect herself against them were one more reason not to use the locals' routes up and down trees.
Being under those trees, Jennifer discovered, had other risks she hadn't thought of. Something whistled past her face, so close she could feel the breeze it raised, and smacked to earth just in front of her feet. She sprang back in alarm. Without her willing it, her finger went to the stunner's firing button.
But, she saw, it was only one of the big, knobby, hard-skinned fruits that fell from the Atheters' trees. As she looked around, she saw two or three more similar fruits and a couple of scraggly saplings that were not doing at all well as they tried to grow in the gloom cast by their elder relatives.
"A stupid seed," she muttered. Then she shivered. Stupid the seed certainly was, but had it fallen in a spot half a meter different, it would have smashed her skull. As she walked on, she cocked her head to look up every so often. Not just seeds fell from the Atheters' tree, but also rubbish the locals threw out.
After a few hundred meters, she emerged from the forest into a large clearing, almost big enough to be an independent patch of plain. In the middle of it, sunset gleamed off the metallic bulk of Pacific Overtures. Jennifer blinked; after forest twilight, the crimson sun-reflections from the ship were dazzling.
She hurried toward it. Less than a hundred meters away, she stumbled over something and nearly fell. As she caught herself, she saw she'd tripped on a stump completely overgrown by grass and low bushes. It had been a big tree once; now it was just a menace to navigation.
She sighed with animal pleasure the moment she got inside Pacific Overtures. After the humid heat of the jungle, conditioned air was a blessing. She shook back her long, blond hair, frowned at how heavy and limp with sweat it was. As she had before, she thought about cutting it short. But it helped the Atheters tell her apart from the other humans on Pacific Overtures, so she supposed it was worth the bother.
She was into the common room before she realized how much like a trader she was starting to think. Annoyed, she kicked at the carpet.
The scuffing noise made Sam Watson look up from the spice cones he was grading. His eyes lingered. That annoyed Jennifer all over again; hot, grubby, and none too clean, she felt anything but attractive. Men, though, usually seemed to think otherwise.
The once-over ended soon enough not to be offensive. "How'd you do?" Watson asked. "Get anything interesting?"
"As a matter of fact, I did." She took the ivory figurine from her beltpouch and set it on the table in front of him. "Have you ever seen anything like this before?"
He reached for it, then paused. "May I?" At her nod, he picked it up. He was a medium-sized, medium-brown man in his mid-thirties, five or six years older than Jennifer. She suspected he wore his bristly handlebar mustache for the same reason she kept her hair long: to give aliens something by which to recognize him. She couldn't think of any other reason for him to want a black caterpillar in the middle of his face.
The caterpillar twitched as he pursed his lips. "Can't say as I have," he said slowly. "That's an old, old style of carving."
"I thought so, too, though I hadn't seen it before," she nodded. "Gazar?the merchant I got it from?says the animal whose ivory it comes from is a thousand years extinct."
"I wouldn't be surprised, though I've never met a merchant, human or otherwise, who wouldn't stretch things for the sake of profit. Still, it's a pretty piece." He handed it back to her. "If it really is as old and rare as all that, it might even be museum quality."
"Do you think so?" Jennifer felt her pulse race, as if Watson had said a magic word. In a way, he had. Private collectors had only private wealth with which to buy. Museums could draw on the resources of whole planets. If they started bidding against one another, they could make a trader rich for life.
"Might be, I said." Watson jabbed a rueful thumb at his spice cones. "One thing certain?none of these is. Some will help make prime Athet brandy, some good brandy, and the rest rotgut. They'll all turn a profit, but no big deal."
"I suppose not." Jennifer daydreamed about what she could do with a really big profit. Heading the list, as always, was setting up?and then occupying?an endowed chair. She smiled, imagining the Jennifer Logan Endowed Chair for the Study of Middle English Science Fiction?maybe even of Middle English Literature, for her interests had broadened since she left the university. "But I'd need to find the omphoths' graveyard for that," she murmured.
Watson scratched his head. "The which? For what?"
"Never mind, Sam." Jennifer felt herself flushing. After so many years of ancient literature, she often found herself speaking a foreign language even when she used perfectly good Spanglish.
"All right." Watson shrugged. He was a pragmatic type who did not waste his time worrying about what was of no immediate use to him. That made him narrow, but within his limits acute. "Now that we know your ivory exists, we'll have to see if we can get more. Don't forget to tell Master Rodriguez about it."
"I won't. When do you suppose she'll be back?"
Watson shrugged again. "She's got some sort of complicated deal brewing with the treelords, so she may be gone days yet. Who can say?" He gave a wry chuckle. "Whatever she's up to, it's a lot bigger than the trinket exchange level we humble journeymen operate at."
"I suppose so." Jennifer still had mixed feelings about her rank. If she hadn't made journeyman at the end of her first run, she wouldn't have had anything to fall back on when her try at a real job went up in smoke. Maybe she would have tried again instead of signing up for another trip.
Watson, she knew, would have told her it was much too late to worry about such things now. He would have been right, too. That didn't stop her.
Now he glanced longingly back toward his spice cones. "I'd better finish these, so I can see exactly what I've got. Congratulations on the ivory. I'm most sincerely jealous."
She smiled. "Thanks." She headed on to her own cubicle and shut the door behind her. The figurine went into her strongbox. She walked down the hall to take a fast shower. Then she did what she did during most of her free time: she got out her reader and went from modern times back to the days before English changed to Spanglish. She might not be teaching the ancient literature, but she still loved it.
This new tale wasn't science fiction but, she discovered as she read, it did show respect for rational thought. She laughed a little, quietly, at a pleasant coincidence between past and present. Even across a gap of a thousand years, such things turned up now and again. They only made her enjoy her reading more.
Master Merchant Celia Rodriguez called a crew's meeting two afternoons later. Jennifer made sure she was in the common room at the appointed time; Master Rodriguez's tongue could degauss computer chips when she got annoyed. The other five merchants who made up the rest of Pacific Overtures' crew were equally punctual, no doubt for the same reason.
Jennifer loathed meetings, feeling they wasted time in which she could be doing something useful instead. Sitting through a great many of them had only made that feeling stronger. She got ready to look interested while she thought about her ancient scientific detective.
Celia Rodriguez's first words, though, made her sit up and take notice. "The civilization in this whole tract of forest is in deep trouble." Master Rodriguez's take-it-or-leave-it delivery was a good match for her looks: she was about fifty, heavyset, with blunt features and iron-gray hair she wore short. She badly intimidated Jennifer. Most loud, self-assured people intimidated Jennifer.