Warlock by Andre Norton

But she was feminine enough to devote several seconds making sure the coverall fitted as well as she could manage and that she made the best appearance possible under the circumstances. Then, a little warily, she tried the door, found it open, and stepped out onto the level landing.

The captain was already on the ladder; only his head and shoulders were in sight. He beckoned impatiently to her. She followed him down for three levels until they came to the open hatch from which sprang the door ramp.

Outside was a glare of sunlight which made Charis blink and raise her hands to shield her eyes. The captain caught her elbow and steered her ahead into a harsh warmth, desert-like in its baking heat. And as her eyes adjusted she saw that they had indeed set down in a wasteland.

Sand, which was a uniform red outside the glassy slag left by the thruster blast, lapped out to the foot of a range of small hills, the outline of which shimmered in heat waves. There was no sign of any building, no look of a port, save for the countless slag scars which pecked and pitted the surface of the desert sand, evidence of many landings and take-offs.

There were ships—two, three, a fourth farther away. And all of them, Charis saw, were of the same type as the one she had just left, second- and third-class traders. This seemed to be a rendezvous for fringe merchants.

The captain’s hold on her arm left Charis no time to examine her surroundings more closely; he was pulling rather than guiding her to the next ship, a twin to his own. And a man, with an officer’s winged cap but no uniform except nondescript coveralls, stood waiting for them at the foot of the ramp.

He stared at Charis intently as she and the captain approached. But the stare was impersonal, as if she were not a woman or even a human being at all, but a new tool of which the stranger was not quite sure.

“Here she is.” The captain brought Charis to a stop before the strange officer.

His stare held for a moment and then he nodded and turned to go up the ramp. The other two followed. Once inside the ship, Charis, sandwiched between the two men, climbed the core ladder up to the level of the commander’s cabin. There he signaled for her to sit at a swing-down desk, pushed a reader before her.

What followed was, Charis discovered, an examination into her ability to keep accounts, her knowledge of X-tee contact procedures, and the like. In some fields she was very ignorant, but in others she appeared to satisfy her questioner.

“She’ll do.” The stranger was very sparing of words.

Do for what? The question was on the tip of Charis’s tongue when the stranger saw fit to enlighten her.

“I’m Jagan, Free Trader, and I’ve a temporary permit for a world named Warlock. Heard of it?”

Charis shook her head. There were too many worlds; one could never keep up with their listing.

“Probably not—back of beyond,” Jagan had already added. “Well, the natives have an unusual system. Their females rule, make all off-world contacts; and they don’t like to deal with males, even strangers like us. So we have to have a woman to palaver with them. You know some X-tee stuff and you’ve enough education to keep the books. We’ll put you at the post, and then they’ll trade. I’m buying your contract, and that’s that. Got it, girl?”

He did not wait for her to answer, but waved her away from the desk. She backed against the cabin wall and watched him thumbprint the document which transferred her future into his keeping.

Warlock—another world—unsettled by human beings except at a trading post. Charis considered the situation. Such trading posts were visited at intervals by officials. She might have a chance to plead her case before such an inspector.

Warlock— She began to wonder about that planet and what might await her there.

III

“It’s simple. You discover what they want and give it to them for as near your price as you can get.” Jagan sat at the wall desk, Charis on a second pull-seat by the wall. But the captain was not looking at her; he was staring at the cabin wall as if the answer to some dilemma was scratched there as deeply as a blaster ray could burn it. “They have what we want. Look here—” He pulled out a strip of material as long as Charis’s forearm and as wide as her palm.

It was fabric of some type, a pleasant green color with an odd shimmer to its surface. And it slipped through her fingers with a caressing softness. Also, she discovered, it could be creased and folded into an amazingly small compass, yet would shake out completely unwrinkled.

“That’s waterproof,” Jagan said. “They make it. Of what we don’t know.”

“For their clothing?” Charis was entranced. This had the soft beauty of the fabulously expensive Askra spider silk.

“No, this fabric is used commonly to package things—bags and such. The Warlockians don’t wear clothing. They live in the sea as far as we know. And that’s the only thing we’ve been able to trade out of them so far. We can’t get to them—” He scowled, flipping record tapes about the top of the desk. “This is our chance, the big one, the one every trader dreams of having someday—a permit on a newly opened world. Make this spin right and it means—” His voice trailed off, but Charis understood him.

Trading empires, fortunes, were made from just such chances. To get at the first trade of a new world was a dream of good luck. But she was still puzzled as to how Jagan had achieved the permit for Warlock. Surely one of the big Companies would have made contact with Survey and bid in the rights to establish the first post. Such plums were not for the fringe men. But it was hardly tactful under the circumstances to ask Jagan how he had accomplished the nigh to impossible.

She had been spending a certain period of each ship’s day with Jagan, going over the tapes he considered necessary for her briefing. And Charis had, after her first instruction hour, realized that to Jagan she was not a person at all, but a key with which he might unlock the mysteriously shut door of Warlockian trade. Oddly enough, while the captain supplied her with a wealth of information about his goods, the need for certain prices and profits, the mechanics of trading with aliens, he seemed to have very little to say about the natives themselves, save that they were strongly matriarchal in their beliefs, holding males in contempt. And they had been wary of the post after a first curious interest in it.

Jagan was singularly evasive over why the first contact had failed so thoroughly. And Charis, treading warily, dared not ask too many questions. This was like forsaking a well-worn road for a wilderness. She still had a little knowledge to guide her, but she had to pick a new path, using all her intuition.

“They have something else.” Jagan came out of the thoughtful silence into which he had retreated. “It’s a tool, a power. They travel by it.” He rubbed one hand across his square chin and looked at Charis oddly as if daring her to take his words lightly. “They can vanish!”

“Vanish?” She tried to be encouraging. Every bit of information she could gain she must have.

“I saw it.” His voice sank to a mumble. “She was right there—” one finger stabbed at the corner of the cabin, “and then—” He shook his head. “Just—just gone! They work it some way. Get us the secret of how they do that and we won’t need anything else.”

Charis knew that Jagan believed in the truth of what he had seen. And aliens had secrets. She was beginning to look forward to Warlock more than for just a chance of being free of this spacer.

But when they did planet, she was not so certain once again. The sky of mid-afternoon was amber, pure gold in places. The ship had set down among rough cliffs of red and black which shelved or broke abruptly to the green sea. Except for that sea and the sky, Warlock appeared a somber world of dark earth, a world which, to Charis, repelled rather than invited the coming of her species.

On Demeter the foliage had been a light, bright green, with hints of yellow along stem or leaf edge. Here it held a purple overcast, as if it were eternally night-shadowed even in the full sun of day.

Charis had welcomed and fiercely longed for the fresh air of the open, untainted by spacer use. But after her first tasting of that pleasure, she was more aware of a chill, a certain repulsion. Yet the breeze from the sea was no more than fresh; the few odors it bore, while perhaps strange, were not offensive in any way.