Andre Norton - Derelict For Trade

outside, they wouldn’t be able to run up to jump speed before the defense guns could blast them into atoms.

Which was probably just what Flindyk was hoping for.

Jellico gripped the ladder so hard his knuckles went white, but when he spoke again, his voice was utterly emotionless. "I will not stand by and permit that scum to annihilate one of my crew." He turned his head, pinioning Dane with his cold, hard gaze. "You did not provoke this."

It wasn’t even a question.

Dane knew that if he had, he would have been given at least a fair hearing, but nevertheless he was glad to be able to shake his head. "Came up behind me. I didn’t even know he was there until he started spouting the ritual challenge at me."

"He what?" came a new voice.

Everyone looked up—or what they were used to thinking of as up when they were dirtside—to see Ali Kamil hanging by his knees from the ladder to the next level, floating with his arms wide, a curious grin on his handsome face.

"Thorson," he said, "how about some details? What exactly happened?"

Dane shrugged, repressing a spurt of annoyance at Ali’s drawling assumption of superiority—as though he had all the answers. He’d do that before a firing squad, Dane thought with a faint return of his old amusement. Out loud, he said only, "Nothing to report. Rip and I checked the mail drop, found nothing, started out, saw no one. Suddenly this Shver is behind me—I feel a bump on my arm, and he starts in with the challenge. His brethren were with him, and they hemmed us in, or we would have tried to get away, and hang ’honor.’ "

"I don’t see much honor in one of those two-ton heavyweights taking on a human who can barely walk in their cursed heavy gee," Stotz said sourly from his perch in the ladder well to the lower level.

"It’s a frame-up," Tau said, frowning. "We all know it. Why should Dane have to go out there at all?"

"Because it’s a legal requirement," Ali said from above. "Same as being arrested."

Looking quickly from Stotz to Ali, Dane felt his sense of up and down shift; suddenly they were at either end of a room, and he was lying on the floor. Vertigo tugged at his guts, and he had to lean against the wall and force himself to orient again.

"So what do we do?" Rip asked from his doorway. "We can’t let Dane go back there and get murdered."

"If you all will grant me a few moments"—Ali’s drawl was more pronounced than ever—"I believe a solution is possible." He waved his arms grandiloquently.

Wilcox made an impatient movement copying Ali, and said, "Well, enlighten us!"

The others laughed—except for Van Ryke, who sighed, looking up at Kamil as though at an erring child. He was about to speak when Jellico said suddenly, "Get down here, Kamil. Or at least orient yourself the same way so that smart mouth of yours is below your eyes, where it belongs."

Ali grinned and with a careless flick of his feet loosed himself from the ladder and floated gently to the deckplates in the midst of the little group.

"Here," Van Ryke said, opening his door. "We’ll have another meter of space if we step this way."

They moved to his cabin, some going in and some standing just outside. Ali perched on one of the cargo master’s tape storage bins, crossing his legs. "Now, Viking," he said instructively, "begin again, from the point at which your challenger touched you—or, more correctly, forced you to touch him, however inadvertent it was. What exactly happened?"

Dane shook his head. "I felt a pressure on my right arm. Turned, saw that big long knife that the Shver citizens wear. He’d bumped against me with that knife—"

"Bumped against you, or hit you with it?" Ali asked, his posture still relaxed but his gaze intent.

"Made it so that I hit him."

"Was it still in its sheath, or out?"

"Sheath, I think," Dane said, after a moment’s thought.

Rip nodded corroboration. "I would have remembered if it’d been out, with that serrated edge—"

Ali waved this away with an airy, impatient gesture.

"Dane, my innocent," he said, "a new lesson I am about to follow myself." He raised a long forefinger.

"Cough it out, Kamil," Steen said with a pained look. "Quit the playacting."

"What is it," Ali addressed the air in patently fake sorrow, "about navigators that makes them so distrustful of their fellow beings—particularly the very engineers who propel the ships they guide?"

"We’ll debate philosophical etiquette later," Wilcox said with a grim smile. "Get on with your solution, or are you just gassing?"

"Not at all," Ali said, becoming slightly more serious. "When we first got here, I downloaded what I could find about dueling, as I thought—things being what they were— if any of us were to be challenged, it would probably be yours truly. I felt I owed it to my crewmates to be prepared for any contingency. When I found myself confined to quarters, I pursued it further, this time out of interest. Our friends the Shver are a very interesting culture. Within the context of their militancy, they can actually be quite subtle."

While Steen and Ali had been talking, Van Ryke had called up some files on his computer. Jellico divided his time between scanning those and watching the talk. Now he gave a faint nod.

Ali grinned. "I can save you the search—what’s going on is this. Deliberately crossing into another Shver’s personal space is a dueling offense—as would be expected from even those used to a heavy world. Gravity is gravity, and stopping, starting, and especially falling are no light matter—"

Rip groaned. Van Ryke coughed, hiding a laugh.

Ali continued as if sublimely unaware of the reaction to his pun. "—so they are careful to stay out of one another’s personal space unless they have to fight for some political or social or familial reason that cannot be aired in public. Hitting someone with the shauv knife is the usual means of challenging someone for reasons that the challenger cannot, or does not, want to explain."

"Ah," Van Ryke said. "Now I think I see. Go on, my boy."

Ali nodded. "Now, there are further refinements. To hit someone means something different from permitting oneself to be hit, if you see what I mean. Hitting someone means you have a legitimate grief. To permit oneself to be hit is a little more mysterious; it can mean that the challenger has been forced into the duel."

Dane nodded slowly, faint hope entering his tired brain for the first time since that dreadful trip to the mail drop. "I see, and there’s also the sheathed blade and the bare blade, which I do remember reading."

"Right," Ali said. "Hits with bared blade mean to the death, no questions asked."

"I thought all duels were to the death," Rip said.

"Well, technically they are," Ali said. "Here’s where the Shver get subtle. Let’s suppose that someone is forced by the clan to challenge someone else to a duel, someone the individual has no quarrel with. He lets the person know in much the manner that Dane received his challenge, and this guides the combatants in their choice of weapons. If the fight is declared satisfactory to the challenger, whether there’s a death or not, then the insult can be declared dead, and they leave the best of friends."

Rip sighed. "Except these guys can choose their own weapons before the duel. At least that’s what Dane told me while we were coming back up here. Though blasters and fire weapons that could breach the habitat walls are forbidden, anything else goes, right?"

"Right," Ali said, grinning.

"Then that oversized elephant can show up with a twelve-foot-long

force blade big enough to take on an entire Patrol platoon if he wants, and Dane can’t do a thing about it—and the only weapons we have to choose from are sleeprods and. and. Frank’s ultrasonic feedle pipe!"