C. J. Cherryh - Merchanters Luck

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MERCHANTER'S LUCK
A UNION ALLIANCE NOVEL
Editorial Reviews
Ingram
The fateful meeting between the owner of a tramp star-freighter that flies the Union
planets under false papers and fake names and a proud but junior member of a powerful
starship-owning family leads to a record-breaking race to Downbelow Station--and a
terrifying showdown at a deadly destination off the cosmic charts.
Customer Reviews
As Always--Hard to Put Down, August 19, 2002
Reviewer
:
C.J. Cherryh is one of the best sci-fi writers of the last twenty years. I won't say the
best sci-fi writer ever because such extreme generalizations open one up to refutations on
a not inconsiderable scale. Suffice it to say she never fails to impress. Her combination of
strong, compassionate characterization and hard sci-fi marks her as one of the greats. Her
well-imagined future is a remarkable achievement, being a grab-bag of military, political,
sociological issues with some villains but mostly flawed individuals trying to survive in a
grimy but not unhopeful universe.
On to the novel! Merchanter is a short read. In a way, it is more a novella than a
novel. The characterizations are much sparser than in such novels as Cyteen and Invader.
The plot is relatively simplistic, moves quickly and is elegantly constructed. Typical for
C.J. Cherryh, the reader's interest is caught and held by the slow, manipulative
maneuverings within a tight plot. Also typical for C.J. Cherryh, Merchanter ends
abruptly, leaving the reader wanting more. Occasionally, such Cherryh endings are anti-
climatic, but in this particular case, it is exactly right.
Recommendation: Buy it.
Heartwrenching novel, June 1, 2001
Reviewer
:
This book screams loneliness at you. The story is about a young boy who's struggling
to come to terms with the loss of his family. He's the only survivor of his family since
they were killed in a pirate attack on the ship that is their home and his brother later in an
EVA accident. His only company is his brother's recorded instructions on how to fly the
ship.
His journey to learn to trust other people and to come to terms with the tragedy in his
life is truly heartwrenching and will leave you with a melancholy ache and a good feeling
of hope despite it all. I highly recommend this book.
Caroline J. Cherryh
Contents
Chapter I
Chapter II
Chapter III
Chapter IV
Chapter V
Chapter VI
Chapter VII
Chapter VIII
Chapter IX
Chapter X
Chapter XI
Chapter XII
Chapter XIII
Chapter XIV
Chapter XV
Chapter XVI
Chapter XVII
Chapter XVIII
Chapter I
Their names were Sandor and Allison… Kreja and Reilly respectively. Reilly meant
something in the offices and bars of Viking Station: it meant the merchanters of the great
ship Dublin Again, based at Fargone, respectable haulers on a loop that included all the
circle of Union stars, Mariner and Russell's, Esperance and Paradise, Wyatt's and Cyteen,
Fargone and Voyager and back to Viking. It was a Name among merchanters, and a
power to be considered, wherever it went.
Kreja meant nothing at Viking, having flourished only at distant Pan-paris and
Esperance in its day: at Mariner, under an alias, it meant a bad debt, and the same at
Russell's. The Kreja ship was currently named Lucy, and she was supposedly based at
Wyatt's, which was as far away as possible and almost farther away than reasonable for
such a small and aged freighter, claiming to run margin cargo for a Wyatt's combine.
Customs always searched her, though she called here regularly. Small, star-capable ships
on which the crew was not related by blood, on which in fact there were only two
haggard men, and one not the same as at last docking… such ships were not comfortably
received at station docks, and received careful scrutiny.
Lucy was a freighter by statement, a long-hauler which ran smallish consignments
independent of its combine's close direction, since the combine had no offices on Viking.
She was a passenger carrier when anyone would trust her—no one did, though the
display boards carried her offer. She took merchanter transfers if she could get them.
That was how Sandor Kreja lost his crew at Viking, because the crew, one old and
limping sot who was paying work for his passage, found his own ship in port and headed
for it without a by-your-leave. The old man had only signed as far as Viking; he had been
left behind at Voyager for a stay in hospital, and he was simply interested in catching his
own ship again and rejoining his family: that was the deal.
It made Sandor nervous, that departure, as all such departures did. The old man had
been more curious than most, had nosed about contrary to orders, had been into
everything—lied, with epic distortion, about where his Daisy had been, lied about deals
they had made and what they had done in the wars and what he had done in dockside
sleepovers, entertaining as it was. His departure left Sandor solo on Lucy, which he had
been before and had no wish to try more often than he had to, running a freighter blind
tired. But more, the old man left him with a nagging worry that he might have turned up
something, and that his considerable talent for storytelling might spread tales in
stationside bars that Lucy had peculiarities. Viking had tightened up since Lucy's last
docking: warships had pulled in and rumors surmised pirate trouble. They were nervous
times; and a little talk in the wrong places could get back to station offices. It might,
Sandor thought, be time to move on.
But he had conned his way onto the loading schedule, which meant they were going to
fill his tanks and he was going to get cargo if he could only subdue his nervousness and
keep from rousing suspicions this trip round. Forged papers labeled him and Lucy as
Wyatt's Star Combine, which had a minor interest-bearing account at Voyager and
Viking, outside its territories, a fund meant for emergency use if ever one of its ships
should have to divert over from regular WSC ports. It was his seventh call here on the
same faked papers—in fact he foresaw the time when the stamp sheets in the book would
be filled and station would have to renew his papers with the real thing, a threshold he
had crossed before, and which made life for a time much more secure… until some
needed repair ran him over his margin and the questions got sharp and closer.
He was not a pirate: Lucy was too small for piracy and her smallish armament was a
joke. He was, in his own reckoning, not even completely a thief, because he skimmed
enough to keep him going, but nothing on a large scale. He delivered his cargoes where
they belonged and let the money right back into WSC accounts. He made a very little
profit, to be sure, and that little profit could be tipped right into the loss column if Lucy
got stalled at dock without cargo, if Lucy needed some major repair. It was the reason
why no combine would accept her honest application. She was small and carried small
cargoes, across the too-large distances the bigger ships could cross much more quickly.
She had gone into the red now and again at Viking, losses that would have broken an
independent, without the forged papers to draw credit on. But all a big company like
WSC would notice when the accounts cycled round at year's end was that the main fund
had neither increased nor decreased. As long as Lucy paid back what she took out by
year's end, the excess could stay in her illicit working account, to cushion her future ups
and downs of profit. WSC spread over light-years and timelag. Alarms only rang down
the system at audit time… and Sandor had no desire at all to go beyond small pilferage,
no ambition to reach for profits that might get him caught. He was twenty-seven and
impossibly rich, in terms of being sole remaining heir to a star-freighter, however small,
which had been a legitimate trader once, before the Company War created pirates, and
pirates stopped and looted her, and left her a stripped shell mostly filled with dead. Now
Lucy survived as best she could, on her owner's ingenuity, under a multitude of names
and numbers and a succession of faked papers. Now selling out was impossible: his
scams would catch up with him and eat away even the thirty of silver he would get for his
ship. Worse, he would have to sit on station and watch her come and go in the hands of
some local combine—or see her junked, because she was a hundred and fifty years old,
and her parts might be more valuable than her service.
He kept her going. She was his, in a way no stationer-run combine could understand.
He had been born on her, had grown up on her, had no idea what the universe would be
like without the ship around him and he never meant to find out. The day he lost Lucy
(and it could happen any day, with one of the station officers running up with attachment
warrants from somewhere, or with some sharp-eyed dockmaster or customs agent taking
a notion to run a test on his forged papers) on that day he figured they would have to kill
him; but they would take him in whole if they could, because station law was relentlessly
humane and Union took as dim a view of shootings on dockside as they did of pilferage.
They would put him in the tank and alter his mind so that he could be happy scrubbing
floors and drawing a stationside living, a model Union citizen.
Stations scared him spitless.
And that talkative old man who had gone back to his ship scared him.
But he had it figured out a long time ago that the worst thing he could do for himself
was to look scared, and the quickest way to rouse suspicions was to act defensive or to
stay holed up in Lucy's safety during dockings, when any normal merchanter would use
the chance to go out bar-hopping dockside, up the long curve of taverns and sleepovers
on the docks.
He was smooth-faced and good-looking in a gaunt blond way that could be a stationer
accountant or banker bar-hopping—except that the gauntness was hunger and the eyes
showed it, so that he laughed a great deal when he was scouting the bars, to look as if he
were well-credited, and sometimes to get drinks on someone else. And this time—this
time, because his life depended on it…he aimed for more than a free drink or a meal on
some other combine's credit. He needed a crewman, someone, anyone with the right
touch of minor larceny who could be conned and cozened aboard and trusted not to talk
in the wrong quarters. This was flatly dangerous. Merchanter ships were family, all of the
same Name, born on a ship to die on that ship. Beached merchanters were beached only
for a single run, like the old man he had gotten from hospital; or if they were beached
permanently, it was because their own ships' families had thrown them out, or because
they had voluntarily quit their families, unable to live with them. Some of the latter were
quarrelsome and some were criminal; he was one man and he had to sleep sometimes…
which was why he had to have help on the ship at all. He scanned the comers of the bars
he traveled on the long green-zone dock of Viking, trying not to see the soldiers and the
police who were more frequent everywhere than usual, and looking constantly for
someone else as hungry as he was, knowing that they would be disguising their plight as
he disguised it, and knowing that if he picked the wrong one, with a shade too much
larceny in mind, that partner would simply cut his throat some watch in some lonely part
of the between, and take Lucy over for whatever purposes he had in mind.
It was the first day of this hunt on the docks, playing the part of honest merchanter
captain and nursing a handful of chits he had gotten on that faked combine account, that
he first saw Allison Reilly.
The story was there to be read: the shamrock and stars on her silver coveralls sleeve,
the patches of worlds visited, that compassed all known space, the lithe tall body with its
back to him at the bar and a flood of hair like a puff of space-itself in the dim neon light.
In his alcohol-fumed eyes that sweep of hip and long, leaning limbs put him
poignantly in mind of sleepovers and that other scanted need of his existence—a scam
much harder than visa forging and far more dangerous. In fact, his life had been
womanless, except for one very drunk insystem merchanter one night on Mariner when
he was living high and secure, which was how Mariner knew his name and laid in wait
for him. And another insystemer before that, who he had hoped would partner him for
good: she had lost him Esperance when it went bad. He was solitary, because the only
women for merchanters were other merchanters, who inevitably had relatives; and
merchanters in general were a danger to his existence far more serious than stations
posed. Stations sat fixed about their stars and rarely shared records on petty crime for the
same reasons the big combines rarely bothered with distant and minor accounts. But get
on the bad side of some merchanter family for any cause, and they would spread the word
and hunt him from star to star, spread warnings about him to every station and every
world humans touched, so that he would die; or so that some station would catch him
finally and bend his mind, which was the same to him. There were no more women; he
had sworn off such approaches.
But he dreamed, being twenty-seven and alone for almost all his days, in the long,
long night. And at that silver-coveralled vision in front of him, he forgot the tatter-
elbowed old man he had been trying to stalk, him with the vacant spot in the patches on
his sleeve, and forgot the short-hauler kid who was another and safer prospect. He stared
at that sleek back, and saw that fall of hair like a night in which stars could burn—and
saw at the same time that arm resting on the bar, patched with the Reilly shamrock, which
burned green in the green neon glare from the over-the-bar lighting, advising him that
among merchanters this was one of the foremost rank, a princess, a Name and a patch
which was credit wherever it liked, that walked wide and did as it pleased. Nothing like
Lucy had a prayer against Dublin Again, that great and modern wonder which meant
clean corridors and clean coveralls and credit piled in station accounts from Cyteen to
Pell. They were Dubliners with her, cousins or brothers, big, dark-haired men of varying
ages. He saw them in a fog beyond her, talking to her; and her arm lifted the glass and her
hair swung with the spark of the changing neon like red stars… she was turning on her
elbow to set the glass down, a second swirl of starry night.
Ah, he pleaded to God fuzzily, not wanting to see her face, because perhaps she was
not beautiful at all, and he could look away in time and make that beautiful back and
cloud of hair into his own drink-fogged dream to keep him company on the long
watches—as long as she had no face. But he was too paralyzed to move, and in that same
long motion she turned all the way around, shook back the living night from her face that
was all blue now in the changing neon lights.
He was caught then, because he forgot to laugh and forgot everything else he was
doing in that bar, stared with his mouth open and his eyes showing what they showed
when he was not laughing —he knew so, because she suddenly looked nettled. She stood
straight from the bar, which movement drew his eyes to the A. REILLY stitched over the
blue-lit silver of a breast, while she was looking him over and sizing him up for the
threadbare brown coveralls he wore and the undistinguished (and lying) E. STEVENS his
pocket bore, and the gaudy nymph with Lucy ribboned on his sleeve… the nymph was a
standard item in shops which sold such things. It decorated any number of ships and
sleeves, naked and girdled with stars and badly embroidered with the ribbon blank, to be
stitched in with any ship's name. Insystem haulers used such things. Miners did. He did,
because it was what he could afford.
She stared a good long moment, and turned then and searched her pocket… her
crewmates had gone elsewhere, and she paused to glance at one who was himself making
slow stalk of a woman of another crew off in the dim corner. She tossed a chit down on
the water-circled counter and walked for the door alone, while Sandor stood there
watching that retreating back and that cloud of space-itself enter the forever day of the
open dock outside.
He called the bartender urgently and paid… no tip, at which the man scowled, but he
was used to that. He hurried, trying not to seem in haste, thinking of the woman's cousins
and not wanting to have them on his tail. His heart was pounding and his skin had that
hot-cold flush that was part raw lust and part stark panic, because what he was doing was
dangerous, with the docks as tense as they were, with police watching where they were
never invited by merchanters.
He had dreamed something in the lonely years, which was—he could no longer
remember whether the dream -was different from what he had seen standing alive in front
of him, because all those solitary fancies were murdered, done to cold pale death in that
collision, because he had seen the one bright vision of his life. He was going to hurt
forever—the more so if he could not find out in brighter light that her face had some
redeeming flaws, if he could not have her herself murder the image and his hopes at once
and give him back his common sense. You'll not have tried, kept hammering in his brain.
You'll never know. Another, dimmer self kept telling him that he was drunk, and yet
another self cursed him that he was going to lose everything he had. But the self that was
in control only advised him that he was lost out here in the glare of dock lights, that she
had gotten away into another bar or a shop somewhere close.
He looked about him, at the long upcurve of the dock which was curtained by section
arches and peopled with hundreds of passersby, battered with music and bright lights and
sounds of machinery. Tall metal skeletons of gantries ran skeins of umbilicals to the
various lighted caverns that were ship-accesses across the dock, but she surely had not
had time to reach one. He went right, instead, to the next bar up the row, looked about
him in the doorway of the dim, alcohol-musked interior, which drew attention he never
liked to have on him. He ducked out again and tried the next; and the third, which was
fancier—the kind of place where resident stationers might come, or military officers,
when they wanted a taste of the docks.
She was there… alone, half-perched on a barstool in the silver extravagance of the
place, a waft of the merchanter life stationers would come to this dockside bar to see, a
touch of something exotic and dangerous. And maybe a stationer was what she was
looking for, some manicured banker, some corporation man or someone she could run a
high scam on, for the kind of inside information the big ships got regularly and the likes
of Lucy never would. Or maybe she wanted the kind of fine liquor and world-grown
luxury a local might treat her to and some liked. He was daunted. He stood just inside the
doorway, finding himself in the kind of place he avoided, where drinks were three times
what they ought to be and he was as far as he could possibly be from doing what he had
come to do—which was to find some crewman in as desperate straits as he was.
She saw him. He stared back at her in that polished, overpriced place and felt like
running.
And then, because he had never liked running and because he was a degree soberer
than he had been a moment ago and insisted on suffering for his stupidity, he walked a
little closer with his hand in his pocket, feeling over the few chits he had left and wishing
they posted prices in this place.
She rested with her elbow on the bar, looking as if she belonged; and he had no cover
left, not with her recognizing him, a man with a no-Name patch on his sleeve and no way
to claim coincidence in being in this place. He had never felt so naked in his life, not even
in front of station police with faked papers.
"Buy you a drink?" he asked, the depth of his originality.
She was—maybe—-the middle range of twenty. She bar-hopped alone with that
shamrock on her sleeve, and she was safe to do that: no one rolled a Dubliner in a
sleepover and planned to live. It might be her plan to get very drunk and to take up with
whomever she fancied, if she fancied anyone; she might be hunting information, and she
might be eager to get rid of him, not to hamper her search with inconsequence. She was
dangerous, not alone to his pride and his dreams.
She motioned to the stool beside hers and he came and eased onto it with a vast
numbness in the middle of him and a cold sweat on his palms. He looked up nervously at
the barkeeper who arrived and looked narrowly at him. Your choice," Sandor said to A.
Reilly, and she lifted the glass she had mostly finished. Two," he managed to say then,
and the bartender went off.
摘要：

MERCHANTER'SLUCKAUNIONALLIANCENOVELEditorialReviewsIngramThefatefulmeetingbetweentheownerofatrampstar-freighterthatfliestheUnionplanetsunderfalsepapersandfakenamesandaproudbutjuniormemberofapowerfulstarship-owningfamilyleadstoarecord-breakingracetoDownbelowStation--andaterrifyingshowdownatadeadlydes...

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