From Chapter One: Duncan Trushenko and his father own and operate a large intergalactic grading company, headquartered on a tax-free but very backward planet called Kruegger's World.
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Duncan smiled to himself but was careful not to let his
amusement show. His father had been curious about his breakup with Emily
Pulaski since it happened, but Duncan had no
intention of satisfying that curiosity, especially as his father had been right
in his assessment of Emily’s intentions. “If you disliked her so much,” he said
instead, “why did you hire her?”
“I didn’t dislike her,” Vladimir
said. “When it came to navigating the seas of interstellar trade regulations, she
had excellent skills. I’m happy you seem to have learned a lot of them from
her. I just didn’t want you to marry her.”
“You can’t have it both ways, Dad. Either you want me to get
married or you don’t.”
“Don’t be silly,” Vladimir
said irritably. “Marrying the wrong person is worse than not getting married at
all.”
Duncan didn’t know what to say.
His parents had lived apart ever since he was a baby; the few occasions they
had been together for any length of time had resulted in epic quarrels. Another
awkward silence ensued.
“I’m sorry, Duncan,” his
father said. “I wasn’t trying to cast any aspersions on your mother.”
Duncan put his glass down. “I
know, Dad. Why all this eagerness to fix me up with someone? I thought that was
Mom’s job.”
“Well,” Vladimir said,
sounding oddly hesitant, “Your mother and I both want you to find someone—get
married, have a family of your own. If nothing else, I’d like to think that
someday there’ll be someone for you to pass Cameron Trushenko on to. It’ll all
be yours someday. I won’t live forever, you know.”
Duncan grinned openly. “You’re
not giving me the ‘I’m getting old’ speech, are you? You look pretty hale for
that. Naomi must be taking good care of you.”
“She is, she is.” Vladimir’s face lit with affection. “I can’t
tell you what a change it makes in your outlook to have someone who cares about
you in that way. It’s meant a world of difference to me to have her with me.”
Almost the only good thing about his parents’ intense dislike
for each other was it took away any guilt he might have felt for being pleased
when one of them found consolation elsewhere. “Good. I’m glad you’re happy.”
“The thing is,” Vladimir went
on, “poor Naomi had no one to keep her company. I mean, she looks after the
house for me, but really, she had no close friends, nothing to occupy her
leisure time. And sometimes I get tied up for days on end.”
Duncan frowned. What was the old man leading up to? “I know
you’re busy. Cameron Trushenko is a major concern. Why don’t you just hire more
help?”
“Well,” Vladimir said, a
nervous edge creeping into his voice, “the thing is, Naomi wanted more than
just to have me free up some time. She needed a friend—a woman friend.”
Duncan sat up straighter. “What’s
going on, Dad? Are you trying to tell me something?”
Vladimir glanced at the window
to the courtyard. He seemed almost reluctant to meet Duncan’s
eyes. “Well, yes, I am, son.”
“Son?” Duncan moved to the
edge of his chair in alarm. “Son? You never call me ‘son’ unless something’s
wrong. The last time you called me ‘son,’ we had just lost three million
credits.”
Vladimir looked almost
relieved at the accusation. “Oh, it’s nothing like that. It’s just that, as I
said, Naomi needed someone, and the people on this world are so stuffy. There
are off-worlders, and there are natives and the two just don’t mix. There was
no one Naomi was comfortable making friends with, no one who didn’t look down
her nose at her. And native women almost never leave their homes. They don’t
need friends, because they all have hordes of relations. And then I found out
you were coming home, and I knew you’d broken up with Emily a while ago. It
seemed like a perfect solution to both problems.”
“What did?” Duncan said, more
mystified than ever.
“Well,” Vladimir said, still
apparently finding it difficult to come to the point, “the thing is, son—Duncan, I sort of—well, I bought a woman for you.”
Duncan’s mouth dropped open. He
must have heard his father wrong. “You did what?”
“I bought a woman for you.”
No, he had heard right. But the idea was
incredible. “You bought a woman for me? You bought a sentient being?”
“Now, Duncan—”
The more he thought about it, the angrier it made him. “You
thought I’d want some down-trodden, complacent, hapless little female to make
use of in my free time? You thought I’d take advantage of a woman like that?”
“Well,” Vladimir said, “no,
not really. Actually, I just needed someone to keep Naomi company, but there’s
no way I could get someone on those terms. And besides,” he added as an
afterthought, “she’s not little.”
“What?” Duncan jumped to his
feet. The old man had gone crazy. There was no other explanation. “I don’t give
a damn how tall she is! You just send her back where she came from, Dad. I won’t
have any part of this.”
“But, Duncan,” Vladimir said, his voice filled with righteous
indignation, “when I brought Naomi home, you didn’t act like this. You were
proud of me for stepping in.”
Duncan brushed aside this
argument with a wave of his hand. “That was different. Her husband had put her
up as his stake in a poker game. You kept her from ending up with some
gun-running scum.”
“Saronna’s father was desperate to sell her.” The indignation
in his father’s voice gave way to a virtuous note. “She’s twenty-two in
Standard years, and she’s never been married. A year ago her mother died, and
her father stopped looking for a husband for her and tried to sell her. None of
the hill men were interested, so he came into the city. You know very well
where she could have ended up if I hadn’t made him an offer.”
Duncan cringed. Just when he
thought Krueger’s World couldn’t get any worse, he found out he was wrong. “Her
own father?”
Vladimir nodded.
“All right,” Duncan said, “if
he needed the money so badly, let him keep it. Just send her home with no
strings attached.”
His father shook his head. “I can’t do that. If I did, they’d
assume she’d been unsatisfactory in some way. If they let her live, it would be
as a nameless drudge without any rights.”
“God!” Duncan clutched his
hair. “Why the hell did you have to move to this miserable, primitive hunk of
rock? What kind of place is this, where men sell their daughters to strangers?”
“It’s Krueger’s World.” Vladimir
almost snapped the words out, as if he were losing patience. “And you know as
well as I do why I moved Cameron Trushenko here. Krueger’s World is an ideal
location for interstellar trading, and when you add in the tax break from
operating outside of ThreeCon, we’re in much better shape than we were five
years ago. Even your mother approved the move. The combination of New Hong
Kong’s taxes and ThreeCon taxes was crippling us.”
Duncan turned away, unwilling
to concede the argument. “We’re doing really well now. My two percent of the
corporate profits certainly reflects that. Can’t we move back into the
civilized universe?”
“Not yet,” Vladimir said
firmly. “I don’t know how long it’ll be, either.”
Duncan shot him a skeptical
look. “Are you sure taxes and location are the only reason, Dad? It wouldn’t
have anything to do with Naomi, would it?”
Again Vladimir wouldn’t meet
his gaze. “I won’t deny that the thought that Naomi might not want to leave
this planet worries me. However, it’s a moot point for now. We can’t afford to
move, and that’s the truth.”
Duncan sighed. “All right, so
Cameron Trushenko stays here for a while longer. Is that any reason to go
around buying people?”
“Maybe it is,” Vladimir said. “So
long as we’re here, we might as well try to make things better for at least one
person when we get the chance. If I hadn’t bought Saronna, her father might be
walking the streets right now, looking for someone to buy her. As it is, she’s
safe and comfortable. I presume you don’t plan to rape her?”
Repulsed, Duncan put a good
deal of heat in his voice. “If that’s supposed to be a joke, it’s not very
funny.”
“I wasn’t joking at all. I brought her here, and I feel
responsible for her.”
“Then why didn’t you just buy her for yourself?” Duncan demanded. “Why did you have to bring me into it at
all?”
For the first time, guilt suffused Vladimir’s
expression. “Well, I thought about that, but Naomi got very jealous when I
mentioned it. She was much happier when I agreed we could find someone for you.”
Duncan snorted with disgust,
but Vladimir continued.
“Anyway, fortunately, I could tell Naomi that this woman
stirred no twinges of passion in me. She’s not homely or anything, but she’s
not in Naomi’s league.”
Somehow his father’s reasoning made Duncan
even angrier. “And what the hell am I supposed to do with her?”
“You don’t have to do anything,” Vladimir said, his voice as soothing as it had been sixteen
years before, when Duncan had broken his arm and cried all the way to the
doctor’s. “But it would be nice if you made friends with her. I’m sure she’s a
little scared. She may have been brought up to think this was all perfectly
natural, but still it can’t be easy to leave your home so suddenly and move
somewhere where you don’t know anyone.”
Duncan groaned and resumed his
chair. “Good god, Dad. When did you buy her?”
“This afternoon.”
Less than a day. Just his luck to arrive right as the old man
suddenly went crazy. “Damn! Do you mean if I’d gotten here last week, I could
have talked you out of this nonsense?”
“No, no. I waited until you were coming home, that’s all. Like
I said, Naomi was jealous until I told her Saronna was for you.”
Duncan groaned again and
covered his eyes. It just got worse and worse. “Will you listen to yourself,
Dad? You sound as if you were talking about a house pet. You’ve been here too
long, and that’s all there is to it.”
Saronna's Gift
