John Brunner

WORLDHOLD:
ZYGRA

Kynance
Foy was young, beautiful, intelligent and
highly trained in both qua-space physics and business law when she left Earth
to seek her fortune in the interstellar
outworlds
.
But she found that the further she got from Earth, the tougher became the
competition from the environment-hardened populations of these young worlds . .
. and by the time she reached the planet Nefertiti, she was facing poverty.

Then, unexpectedly, a wonderful opportunity
opened up for her: the job of Planetary Supervisor of the fabulously wealthy
world called
Zygra
, where exotic pelts costing a
million credits each were grown. The salary was huge, and at the end of the
year's tour of duty she would be transported free of charge back to Earth,
where she would be a very wealthy young woman.

There had to be a catch to it, she thought as
she signed the contract. And, of course, there was.

Turn
this book over for second complete novel

JOHN
BRUNNER

is
the author of these
outsanding
Ace novels:

TIMES WITHOUT NUMBER (F-161)

LISTEN! THE STARS! (F-215)

THE SPACE-TIME JUGGLER (F-227)

THE ASTRONAUTS MUST NOT LAND (F-227)

THE RITES OF OHE (F-242)

CASTAWAYS' WORLD (F-242)

TO CONQUER CHAOS (F-277)

ENDLESS SHADOW (F-299)

THE REPAIRMEN OF CYCLOPS (M-115)

ENIGMA FROM TANTALUS (M-115)

THE ALTAR ON ASCONEL (M-123)

THE DAY OF THE STAR CITIES (F-361)

_?4
Plcuwt

by

JOHN
BRUNNER

ACE
BOOKS, INC. 1120 Avenue of the Americas New York, N.Y. 10036

a planet of your own

Copyright
©, 1966, by John Brunner All Rights Reserved

Cover
art by Jack
Gaughan
.

the beasts of kohl

Copyright ©, 1966, by Ace Books, Inc.

Printed
in U.S.A.

I

T
here
was
one item on display
in the enormous window: a
zygra
pelt.
Kynance
Foy stood and looked at it. There were a lot of
other women doing the same thing.

But she was the only one
who was gritting her teeth.

It
wasn't the first time in her life she'd been the odd one out, so that figured.
For example—and the most glaring example—she hadn't
had
to leave Earth, which marked her off immediately even on a comparatively
highly populated out-world like Nefertiti. The massive "encouraged
emigration" of the Dictatrix period had lowered the premium on wanderlust
at home; it was a full generation since Nefertiti had declared
itself
independent and set quotas for
Earthside
immigrants, and then found them superfluous because the demand wasn't there.

For
the umpteenth time
Kynance
read the discreet
hand-lettered price tag attached to one corner of the stand on which the
zygra
pelt was draped. It read:
One million credits.
No other price had ever been asked for the
pelts.

Okay,
Kynance
told herself sourly.
I was
naive
....

She
had never confessed it even to her closest friends, but one of the things she
had planned to bring back when she returned to astonish those who had mocked
was—a
zygra
pelt. She had pictured herself emerging
from the exit of the starship wearing it: not elegantly, but casually, tossed
around her, her body molded by it into
insurpassable
perfection, yet her pose implying that she had had it so long she was becoming
faintly bored with the attention she attracted.

And
at this moment she did not even possess the price of a square meal.

Other plans, other ambitions, had been shed
one by one as she had doggedly worked her way towards Nefertiti, reasoning that
the closer one came to the source the cheaper the pelts might become. Not so;
only the cost of interstellar freight shrank, while the asking price remained
steady at one million.

She
stood watching the pelt's shifts of sheen and texture, wondering what exotic
perfumes it had been trained to secrete—what, for instance, matched that
liquid rainbow phase when the pelt seemed to run in endless streams of pure
color?—and cursing her own stupidity.

Yet
. . .

Could I have known better?

Oh,
maybe. Her brash confidence, though, hadn't lacked evidence to support it. She
had been fresh out of college with a brilliant record; she had deliberately
changed her major to qua-space physics and her minor to interstellar commerce
when she had made up her mind, but before that she had been well grounded in
the unfeminine combination of business law and practical engineering—the
latter by accident, merely to get even with a sneering boyfriend who had once
offered to fix her
skycar
.

This,
moreover, was not her only equipment. She was exactly five and a half feet
tall; she was exotically gorgeous, having inherited dark eyes and sinuous grace
from a Dutch ancestor who had fallen from grace in Java in the company of a
temple dancer, and hair of a curious iron-gray shade traceable only to a
colony of Cornish tin-miners totaling some five hundred persons in a
multi-billion galactic population, against which her tanned skin burned like
new copper.

There
had been no risk—so she had argued—of her ever being stranded. If the worst
came to the worst, and neither qua-space physics nor her encyclopedic knowledge
of interstellar commerce could secure her employment, she could always . . .

Well, she had never phrased the idea clearly
to herself, but it had involved some romantically handsome young starship
officer willing to hazard his career for the sake of her company on a trip to
some more promising planet, a crotchety captain won over by her dazzling
personality, and delivery with unsolicited testimonials to an entrepreneur in
need of a private secretary when they arrived.

She
had begun to suspect she had made the wrong decision on the first stop out from
Earth, when she had still had the cash to go home. What she had overlooked was
that during the miserable
régime
of the Dictatrix incredible numbers of
non-pioneer types had been—in the official terminology of the
day—"encouraged" to emigrate, chief among them intractable
intellectuals doubtful of the universal benefits Her Magnificence had
supposedly been bestowing. Consequently the
outworlds
had been colonized, forcibly, by a swarm of brilliant and
very
angry men and women. Having nothing left but the desire to get even,
they had buckled down and made the best of what they had. Not for this breed of
colonist was the broad axe or the draft-ox or the log-cabin; they were used to
lasers,
vidding
and mutable furniture, they knew the
necessary techniques, and with the determination of fanatics they had set out
not merely to provide such luxuries for themselves but to ensure that if the
same fate overtook their children or their children's children the youngsters
would be able to repeat the process.

Which was not to imply that there were absolutely no openings on such
old-settled worlds as
Ge
and New Medina for
moderately talented young women; had this been the case she would have turned
around despite the scorn she would have faced from her friends on retreating to
Earth.
Instead, she found temporary work; saved up; moved on, convincing herself
that things
would be different further out.

They
were. By her third or fourth stopover, she had been encountering sea-harvesters
supervised by ten-year-olds, each responsible for two thousand tons of
protein-rich food a week and a mainstay of the planetary economy, and reading
bulletin boards at spaceports bearing blanket warnings—to save the labor of
writing the words on every single advertisement— that no one lacking a Scholar
degree in the relevant subjects need bother to apply.

And
even her asset of last resort, her appearance, had failed her. What she hadn't
reckoned with—or had omitted to find out—was that once they had been clear of
Earth, and the traditional association of appearance with regional origins, the
emigrants whether forced or voluntary had become satisfied to be human beings
rather than Europeans or Africans or Asians. By the time a couple of
generations had slipped away, the mixing of the gene-pool had already been
producing types which made the concept "exotic" seem irrelevant:
Swedish and Quechua, Chukchi and
Matabele
, the
wildest extremes of physique met in a mad succession of paradoxes. Then,
released from
Earthside
attachment to local types,
the more prosperous girls had started to experiment, drawing on some of the
finest talents in biology and surgery. Within ten yards of where
Kynance
was standing, there were: a
Negress
with silver hair and blood-red irises, a miniaturized Celtic redhead no higher
than her elbow and very nicely stacked, and a shimmering golden girl with
slanted eyes and the quiet hypnotic movements of a trained geisha. Any of the
three would have monopolized a roomful of sophisticated Earth-men.

On Druid, somebody had asked
Kynance
to marry him. On Quetzal someone else had asked her
to act as hostess for him and be his acknowledged mistress. On Loki a third man
had suggested, in a rather bored manner, that she become his son's mistress,
the son being aged sixteen and due to submit his scholar's thesis in
cybernetics.

And on Nefertiti she would have been grateful
for even that much attention.

Confronted
with the symbol of her empty ambitions, she admitted the truth to herself at
last. She was
scared.

Well,
gawking at the
zygra
pelt wasn't solving the problem
of hunger. She started to move away.

At
that moment, a soft voice emanated from the air. It came over a biaxial
interference speaker, so for practical purposes the statement was exact. She
stopped dead.

"The
Zygra
Company draws your attention to a vacancy
occurring shortly in its staff.
Limited service contract, generous
remuneration, comfortable working conditions, previous experience
not
necessary,
standard repatriation clause.
Apply at this office, inquiring for
Executive Shuster."

The
message was repeated twice.
Kynance
stood in a daze,
waiting for the rush to begin. There was no rush. The only reaction was the
sound of an occasional sarcastic laugh as people who had been gazing at the
pelt were disturbed and decided to wander on.

No.
Ridiculous.
Impossible.
She must
have dreamed it. Not enough food and too much worry had conspired to make her
mind play a trick.

Nonetheless
she was on her way to the entrance of the
Zygra
Building. She hadn't made a conscious decision—she was following a tropism as
automatic as that of a thirsty man spotting an oasis across the desert. She did
wonder why one or two people she jostled looked pityingly at her eagerness, but
that was afterwards.