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finished, the Black Star, came in.
Trask was slightly incredulous at realizing that she bad spaced out from Gram
almost exactly two years after the Nemesis had departed. He still hadn't any
idea where Andray Dunnan was, or what he was doing, or how to find him.
The news of the Gram base on Tanith spread slowly, first by the scheduled
liners and tramp freighters that linked the Sword-Worlds, and then by trading
ships and outbound Space Vikings to the Old Federation. Two years and six
months after the Nemesis had come out of hyperspace to find Boake Valkanhayn
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and Garvan Spasso on Tanith, the first independent Space Viking came in, to
sell a cargo and get repairs. They bought his loot-he had been raiding some
planet rather above the level of Khepera and below that of Amaterasu-and
healed the wounds his ship had taken getting it. He had been dealing with the
Everrard family on Hoth, and professed himself much more satisfied with the
bargains he had gotten on Tanith and swore to return.
He had never even heard of Andray Dunnan or the Enterprise.
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It was a Gilgamesher that brought the first news.
He had first heard of Gilgameshers-the word was used indiscriminately for a
native of or a ship from Gilgameshon Gram, from Harkaman and Karffard and Vann
Larch and the others. Since coming to Tanith, he had heard about them from
every Space Viking, never in complimentary and rarely in printable terms.
Gilgamesh was rated, with reservations, as a civilized planet though not on a
level with Odin or Isis or Baldur or Marduk or Aton or any of the other worlds
which had maintained
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the culture of the Terran Federation uninterruptedly. Perhaps Gilgamesh
deserved more credit; its people had undergone two centuries of darkness and
pulled themselves out of it by their bootstraps. They had recovered all the
old techniques, up to and including the hyperdrive.
They didn't raid; they traded. They had religious objections to violence,
though they kept these within sensible limits, and were able and willing to
fight with fanatical ferocity in defense of their home planet. About a century
before, there had been a five-ship Viking raid on Gilgamesh; one ship had
returned and had been sold for scrap after reaching a friendly base. Their
ships went everywhere to trade, and wherever they traded a few of them usually
settled, and where they settled they made money, sending most of it home.
Their society seemed to be a loose theosocialism, and their religion an absurd
potpourri of most of the major monotheisms of the Federation period, plus
doctrinal and ritualistic innovations of their own. Aside from their
propensity for sharp trading, their bigoted refusal to regard anybody not of
their creed as more than half human, and the maze of dietary and other taboos
in which they hid from social contact with others, made them generally
disliked.
After their ship had gotten into orbit, three of them came down to do
business. The captain and his exec. wore long coats, almost knee-length,
buttoned to the throat, and small white caps like foragecaps; the third, one
of their priests, wore a robe with a cowl, and the symbol of their religion, a
blue triangle in a white circle, on his breast. They all wore beards that hung
down from their cheeks, with their chins and upper lips shaved. They all had
the same righteous, disapproving faces, they all refused refreshments of any
sort, .and they sat uneasily as though fearing contamination from the heathens
who had sat in their chairs before them. They had a mixed cargo of general
merchandise picked up here and there on subcivilized planets, in which nobody
on Tanith was interested. They also had some good stuff vegetable-amber and
flame-bird plumes from Irminsul; ivory or something very like it from
somewhere else; diamonds and Uller organic opals and Zarathustra sunstones.
They
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also had some platinum. They wanted machinery, especially contragravity
engines and robots.
The trouble was, they wanted to haggle. Haggling, it seemed, was the Gilgamesh
planetary sport.
"Have you ever heard of a Space Viking ship named the Enterprise?" he asked
them, at the seventh or eighth impasse in the bargaining. "She bears a
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crescent, light blue on black. Her captain's name is Andray Dunnan."
"A ship so named, with such a device, raided Chermosh more than a year ago,"
the priest-supercargo said. "Some of our people tarry on Chermosh to trade.
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This ship sacked the city in which they were; some of them lost heavily in
world's goods."
"That's a pity."
The Gilgamesh priest shrugged. "It is as Yah the Almighty wills," he said,
then brightened slightly. "The Chermoshers are heathens and worshipers of
false gods. The Space Vikings looted their temple and destroyed it utterly;
they carried away the graven images and abominations. Our people bore witness
that there was much wailing and lamentation among the idolators."
So that was the first entry on the Big Board. It covered, optimistically, the
whole of one wall in his office, and for some time that one chalked note about
the raid on Cbermosh, and the date, as nearly as it could be approximated
looked very lonely on it. The captain of the Black Star brought back material
for a couple more. He had put in on several planets known to be temporarily
occupied by Space Vikings, to barter loot, give his men some time off-ship,
and make inquiries, and he had names for a couple of planets raided by the
blue crescent ship. One was only six months old.
The way news filtered about in the Old Federation, that was practically hot
off the stove.
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