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Why six hundred years?
Orbits, the pilot said. Tran has two main suns. Both a little bigger and a
little hotter than Sol. Planet s farther away from either of them, so it s not
as warm.
Reasonable climate, actually. But even with both suns, surinomaz won t grow
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properly. It s only a weed until the third sun comes close, but then fora
short time it s the best stuff in the galaxy.
But what is surinomaz?
Ever hear of Acapulco Gold? the pilot asked.
Marijuana you mean drugs?
In away. Look, back on Earth, you ve just discov-ered endogenous morphiates.
Know what I m talk-ing about? No? Well, it turns out that the brain
man-ufactures its own painkillers and euphoric drugs. Chemicals similar to
morphines. Enough of them in your system, and you have a natural high.
Surinomaz makes the same stuff, only by the barrel-ful. It has about the same
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effect on
Shalnuksis as on humans, and they use it about the same way that
Americans use alcohol. And Tran Natural gets a premium price, like Talisker
scotch, or the rarer wines.
Gwen stared at him.
I see you don t approve, Les said. Look, what is it to me if the
Shalnuksis use drugs? Or to you?
But there has to be more, she thought. There has to be. Or is it that I can t
accept being in love with a drug dealer? Isn t all this illegal? Gwen asked.
Les shrugged. The drug traffic isn t precisely legal, but no one really
cares.
Keeping Tran a secret now, that s highly illegal.
But the crop is important to you, Gwen said.
The pilot was very serious now. More important than you can guess that the
mercenaries succeed.
Then you should stay and help them, she said. Can t. The ship s too
vulnerable. And this trip has to be kept secret, which means the ship must
return as quickly as possible
And then, as he always did, he changed the sub-ject.
The computer s files on Tran were sketchy. As nearly as Gwen could tell, the
planet had never been visited except to obtain a harvest, and there had never
been any systematic studies made. No one had been sufficiently curious. There
were only groups of traders who had brought mercenary sol-diers from Earth
with instructions to seize a par-ticular area and cultivate surinomaz, harvest
it, and sell the product to ships that would come later.
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That had begun in Indo-European times, as Gwen had deduced from the language.
She was pleased to find confirmation in the computer s records. The first
humans had been sent to Tran because a dom-inant life-formS, centauroid
(vaguely similar to the Greek centaur of legend, but the intelligent and
un-related centauroids she d seen in other pictures were far more so) and
about as intelligent as a chim-panzee, could not be trained to do cultivation.
She could not find out why humans had been chosen, or why, once they had
decided on humans, they had brought a band of Achaean warriors and their
slaves instead of planting a high-technology colony.
The original expedition had been expensive. In addition to the Achaeans, the
Shalnuksi traders had brought a variety of Earth plants and animals,
scat-tering seeds broadside on the planet and returning years later with more
animals and insects. There had been no scientific rationale to what they had
brought, no attempt at a balanced ecology. It was instant natural selection;
adapt or die.
The records didn t say so, but Gwen wondered if one of the reasons that
surinomaz had become in-creasingly difficult to cultivate might be the
com-petition from Earth plants, animals, and insects. Tran s native life forms
used levoamino acids and dextro sugars, like Earth s, and thus competed for
many of the same nutrients.
Trans s history and evolution was dominated by its suns. The two major suns
together gave it at best only a bit more than 90 percent of what Earth
re-ceives from Sol; Tran was normally a cold world, with only the regions near
the equator comfortable for humans. But then came the cyclic approach of the
third star; for
20 years out of each 600, Tran received nearly 20 percent more sunlight, a
com-bined total of 10 percent more illumination than Earth ever got.
In those times of burning, ice caps melted. Weather became enormously
variable, cycles of drought and rainstorms alternating nearly every-where. The
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