"Saw lots of blasters, here and there. Never shot before, though." The vnorpt"s eyes were all focused on the blaster. Hand couldn"t read its expression, but thought it was wary, worried that she"d shoot it again.

"Really? What"d it feel like?"

"Hot," the vnoipt said. "Stings. Like poke in eye with sharp stick. Very sharp stick. Very hard poke."

"Does it still hurt?" Al had a vial of something out, and was pouring the entire contents into the pitcher of beer.

"Some."

"So does my b.u.t.t," Hand said.

The four stalked eyes all seemed to stretch toward her, and she could hear the creature"s surprise. "Just from fall on floor? In this gravity?"

Hand nodded. "We aren"t built anywhere near as tough as you." Al"s vial was out of sight again. She put the blaster back in its holster.

"Sorry," the vnorpt said. "Was accident. Truly."

"Here"s your beer," Al said.

He and Hand watched as the vnorpt downed the entire five or six liters of lager in a single gulp. Then Hand asked Al, "So when do you think Mickey will show up?"

Al shrugged. "Could be any minute now, Captain Hand. Ought to be here in ten minutes, fifteen at the outside."

"Then I"ll wait," Hand said. She looked the vnorpt up and down and sipped her own beer. "Say, wouldyou be interested in renting a cargo lifter, later tonight?"

"I might be, at that." He glanced up at the vnorpt.

The vnorpt dropped the pitcher on the bar, and smacked its lips. "Better and better!" it said.

Hand blinked, and asked the vnorpt, "So what brings you to Daedalus?"

She and the vnorpt made small talk for the next twenty minutes, while Al grew steadily more upset, glancing constantly at the clock on the wall. The sun set as they chat-ted, and the glaring white of a Daedalus day gave way to the multicolored glare of the port"s neon-enhanced night.

The other human customers had all managed to slip out by the end of that time, and the waitress vanished into the back room and stayed there. Various potential customers and curiosity-seekers looked in, but once they saw the vnorpt they hesitated, then withdrew-no one but Al, Hand, and the vnorpt remained in the bar.

At last Hand said to Al, "Mickey"s late. Got any way to give him another call, maybe?"

Al looked up at the vnorpt and shrugged hopelessly. "I used all I had last time," he said.

"Got something you can subst.i.tute?" She looked up at the vnorpt. "Maybe something appropriate for a toast in Barnstable"s memory? After all, accidents happen. Even fatal ones."

Al looked at her. "You think so?"

"I think that vnorpt are big and tough enough that yeah, they do." She looked Al straight in the eye.

He knew what she was saying-she was advising him to go ahead and poison a paying customer, on the theory that it probably wouldn"t kill something as monstrous as a vnorpt.

Of course, if she was wrong, they might be guilty of conspiracy to commit murder and treaty violations, but at this point Hand no longer cared. She wanted the vnorpt out of the bar. She wanted to be able to smell something again; her nose had long ago shut down in protest at the vnorpt"s stench. She wanted other customers to come in here, so she could find some decent company to drink with and maybe take back to her ship.

"Let me see what"s in the back room," Al said.

Hand kept the vnorpt occupied for the next several min-utes; at last Al reemerged with a box. The vnorpt didn"t notice.

"Want another beer?" Al asked.

"Yes!" the vnorpt said.

A moment later it gulped down another pitcher. Then it hesitated, and said, "Urn."

"Is something wrong?" Hand asked.

"Didn"t taste right that time."

"Maybe you"ve had enough, then," Hand suggested. "You wouldn"t want to get really drunk, would you?""Wouldn"t," the vnorpt agreed. It pulled in its eyestalks and folded its feeding claws, while dropping the pitcher to the bar. "Feel bad all of a sudden."

"You"ve just had too much to drink," Hand said. "It hits all of a sudden like that, sometimes. Get some fresh air, walk it off, and in an hour you"ll be fine."

"Beer does this?"

"If you drink too much, yeah."

It started to say something, then belched instead. "Um," it said. "Oops."

"Fresh air helps a lot," Hand said cheerfully.

It dropped its four hands to the floor, then lifted itself up. "Fresh air," it rumbled. It picked its credit chit off the bar, then turned and staggered toward the big service door.

Hand watched it go, then turned and hissed at Al, "What did you give it?"

"The first mickey was chloral hydrate," he said. "A lot of chloral hydrate."

"Yeah, but it just shook that right off," Hand said. "What did you give it the second time?"

"Rat poison," Al said, holding up the empty box. "A full kilogram."

"A kilo of a.r.s.enic?"

"Hey, it worked, didn"t it?"

"Al, that much might even kill a vnorpt!"

"Wouldn"t bother me if it did," Al replied defensively. "It ate Barnstable, and chased away my entire clientele and most of my staff! It stank up the place-I"ll have to put the recirculators on emergency overload to get the smell out. It was self-defense!"

Just then they heard a sound unlike anything either of them had ever heard before, coming from just outside the service door-a deep tearing gurgle, followed by splashing.

It seemed to go on forever, but Hand knew it wasn"t really more than a minute or two.

After it ceased, there were several seconds of silence. Then the vnorpt called in, "Feel much better now.

Go home, sleep it off."

Neither Al nor Hand replied; they were both overcome by the incredible new reek that had managed to penetrate even their overwhelmed noses. They stood, gagging, as the vnorpt staggered away down the street.

At last Hand managed to gasp, "Better get those recirculators pumping."

Al nodded, still unable to speak. A moment later the hum of the vent-fans climbed into audibility, and the air stirred.

Unfortunately, it stirred in the wrong direction, sucking air in through the service door, which meant it carried that unbelievable new stench.

"I didn"t know anything could smell worse than vnorpt," Hand muttered. "But it figures that if anythingcould, it would be vnorpt vomit."

"I"m ruined," Al gasped. "The bar"ll stink for weeks! They"ll probably ticket me for a public health hazard."

"Drastic measures are called for," Hand said, pulling out her blaster.

"What are you..."

She ignored Al as she marched across the barroom floor and looked out the service door.

Sure enough, an immense puddle filled several square meters of the street there; only the raised threshold had kept the dozens of liters of yellowish fluid from spilling into the Busted Fin.

"I hope this works," Hand said, as she fired her blaster into the center of the pool.

And with that, Hand discovered an even worse smell, one that made her senses swim and the world fade away as she tottered on the verge of fainting-the scent of burning vnorpt vomit.

Hand didn"t falter; she kept firing, waving the blaster back and forth.

And at last the smell faded, and she found herself firing an almost-discharged blaster at empty, entirely-harmless plastic pavement.

Slowly, as the fresh evening air began to clear her mind, she slipped the blaster back into its holster and looked around thoughtfully.

The quant.i.ty just a single vnorpt had consumed was truly astonishing. An entire planet of vnorpt would be a huge market.

"You know," she said to no one in particular, "I see an opportunity here for an enterprising trader. Like me."

Then she turned and went back inside, headed for a barstool.

Selling a few shiploads of beer to the vnorpt might make her rich, but it could wait. Right now, she wanted a drink. Whiskey, maybe, or gin.

But not beer.

THE SILVER FLAME.

by Josepha Sherman

Josephs Sherman is a fantasy writer and folklorist whose latest novels are Highlander. The Captive Soul and Son of Darkness. Her most recent folklore volume is Merlin"s Kin: World Tales of the Hero Magicians. Her short fiction has appeared in numerous anthologies, including Battle Magic, Dinosaur Fantastic, Black Cats and Broken Mirrors, and The Shimmering Door. She lives in Riverdale, New York.

A I brought The Dart out of hypers.p.a.ce and into the Stataka system, I called up a visual on my ship"s screen. I already knew details of the planet"s gravity (a touch less than Human standard) and atmosphere (quite breathable). Now I could see what the computer had already told me: Stataka really did look absolutely... well... mundane, the standard cla.s.sification of water-and-land planet supporting oxygen-breathing life. In this case, that life was a slender, gray-skinned biped race, vaguely like my ownspecies, Human, in having two eyes, ears, and so on. So, locals plus whatever s.p.a.ce travelers might have put into Stataka"s one public port.

Ordinary? Maybe, but I didn"t have any complaints about a lack of drama. The latest overhaul of The Dart"s hyer-drive engines hadn"t been cheap, and incoming cash was going to be very welcome.

As The Dart sliced down through Stataka"s atmosphere, I could see the gray buildings and bright lights of Kartaka, the city that sprawled around the s.p.a.ceport. Kartaka had quite a reputation as a wide-open trading city. And yes, there was a quite a bit of illicit business taking place down there, if Alliance reports were accurate.

But from everything I"d been able to learn, Sei Sisar, the art dealer with whom I was dealing, had a reputation for honesty. The three-way contract to which I"d agreed, along with Sei Sisar and the Kuurae, was basic enough: Sharra Kinsarin-me-owner, captain, and one-woman crew of The Dart, to receive one religious artifact from art dealer Sei Sisar, and transport it back to its rightful homeworld of Kuuraet.

Sei Sisar was footing half the bill to get the artifact home again, and the Kuurae were footing the other half.

Nothing unusual there: Reputable art dealers, once they realize they are holding stolen artifacts, do tend to return the things to their owners, since they want to keep their names clean. They return artifacts often enough for me to make a nice profit out of it.

Who am I? Nothing special to look at: Human, youngish, female, olive skin, and short dark hair. What I am is an art courier licensed in all one hundred and forty-three of the Alliance worlds and a few others-including provisional member worlds like Kuuraet-specializing in any objects too small and valuable to risk losing on one of the big ships. I"ll add that I have another edge over the big guys: my little swept-winged Dart is swifter than most of them. I also, not incidentally in my line of work, have an implant that lets my brain adapt quickly to new languages.

Why me, though, and not a Kuurae emissary? Simple answer: The Kuurae are one of those races who don"t like s.p.a.ce travel. I mean, they really, really don"t. The vastness terrifies them.

I brought my ship down through the layers of atmo-sphere, and a maze of other ships taking off or landing, to a waiting berth.

Sure enough, the ground crew insisted on bribes, but in such a good-natured way that I couldn"t get angry. Besides, if things went according to contract, Sei Sisar would be covering this expense, too.

We settled on a price that included keeping The Dart ready for takeoff, and I set off to find my current employer. Daylight on this side of the planet, conveniently, which meant that I could get the artifact from Sei Sisar without any other delays. It would have made my life easier if someone had been waiting at the port with the object to be transported: signature, payment, refueling, and away. But Sei Sisar had insisted he was too busy for anything like that. Since I legally had to accept the artifact from him and only him, I was to meet him at his office, which he swore wasn"t that far from the s.p.a.ceport.

So be it. I fought my way through the crowds of embarking or disembarking travelers, fought my way into an empty groundcar, and gave it the proper coordinates, trying not to wince at the amount of credits it wanted for that relatively short ride. Should have walked-no, on second thought, this warehouse region wasn"t exactly the place for a solitary stroll, even if I had included, as I always did when planning to carry art, my sidearm. Too bad Sei Sisar hadn"t told me to meet him in his shop downtown; more people meant less of a chance of some would-be robber following me.

As the car made its efficient robotic way through row after row of dull gray warehouses and theoccasional flurry of pallet-unloading activity, I glanced one more time at the little image I"d downloaded.

The Kurrae artifact"s name translated to the "Silver Flame," though there wasn"t anything flamelike about the tranquil, cross-legged, beautifully carved statue. It was a female Kurrae, thin and delicate as all her kind, vaguely humanoid, a.s.suming that Humans had knife-sharp cheekbones, huge eyes, and faint scaling, and worked from what looked like pure white stone. A saint figure? No one knew too much about Kuurae religious beliefs.

"We are .456 kilometers from the given coordinates," the flat AI voice told me suddenly. "I can proceed no closer."

I looked up in surprise-surprise that quickly turned to alarm. "Oh... d.a.m.n."

What had been Sei Sisar"s office was now a blackened ruin, still smoking faintly. Leaving the groundcar, I got as close as harried officials would let me. A fire, they told me unnecessarily. No survivors. No cause yet, though there were hints that it had been too hot to be natural, and maybe that there were some suspicious residues as well.

Well, as I"ve said, a lot of illicit business takes place in this city. Presumably someone had gotten annoyed at Sei Sisar for being too honest once too often.

No Sei Sisar. That meant no artifact. And no payment. Swearing under my breath and reminding myself that the late Sei Sisar had just had a rougher time of it, I turned back to the waiting groundcar- Which was no longer waiting. Of course not, curse it! In my shock over the fire, I"d neglected to tell the thing to stay put. And I doubted I"d find another car so easily in this area.

All right. Start walking. You can find the s.p.a.ceport again easily enough. Pretend you belong here, even though you don"t look like a local.

h.e.l.l with trying to fit in. I"d just radiate my best "mess with me and die" expression and keep one hand on my sidearm. That worked on a good many worlds.

But as I strode defiantly along, a sudden whisper made me start.

"Captain Kinsarin! Please!"