Free The Avengers of Carrig by John Brunner Page B

anyway?”
    “The pay!” she shot back.
    “What use are you going to put an extra lifetime to if you can’t make proper use of the first one?”
    The insult cooled her down; after a while she brought herself to apologize, and things went more smoothly. But total reform was going to take a very long time indeed.
    What helped most of all was that underneath his gruff exterior and often sarcastic manner Langenschmidt proved to be closer to the glamorized Earthside ideal of a corpsman than anyone else she had met in her year and a half of service. Subconsciously she seemed to have assumed that the administrative work she had been doing since she was posted here was all the Corps ever did. It made her ashamed to discover that Langenschmidt was virtually a polymath, able to hoist from his memory snatches of the languages spoken on Fourteen, rules regarding their relationship to each other and to the parent tongues, bits of the hypothetic ur-dialect developed from Galactic and the second language spoken on Zarathustra before its destruction, which was Irani … He had by his own admission been on Fourteen three times only: twice to get subspace communicators to agents who had had theirs accidentallydestroyed; once in company with a student of social analysis who wanted more detail about religious ritual than the resident agent, a nonspecialist, could provide. And yet he probably knew more about Fourteen than the best-educated native of the planet.
    Maddalena was proud of her linguistic ability, and had believed herself well grounded in etymology. But the difference between paper analysis of language, and learning to speak three distinct tongues each with four or five local dialects well enough to pass for a native in any of them, seemed completely terrifying.
    Things became worse still when she had to go aboard Langenschmidt’s cruiser for the trip to Fourteen itself. Half his crew was due to be rotated and take a long leave; this time, although none of them was Earthborn, they had elected to opt for a refit on Earth and spend their furlough there. Ten years on Patrol had wearied them to the limit of endurance, and now the conclusion of their tour had been postponed to allow for her delivery to Fourteen. None of them put their common thought into words, but she could feel it in the air of the ship—the unspoken comment:
You’d better make the trouble we’ve taken over you worthwhile.
    Outwardly, of course, they treated her exactly like any agent being delivered to a new assignment, with flawless politeness, and that, if anything, was even harder to bear.
    She needed to spend most of the voyage revising her knowledge of the planet’s societies and perfecting her ability to speak its languages. That kept her from having to make light conversation with the crew all the time, and she was duly grateful.
    In particular she passed many hours playing over and over the disinhibiting tapes which psychologists at the base had prepared for her. Langenschmidt had been brutally straightforward about the problems implicit in having to assign a woman to this task. He had pointed out that like most cultures at a similar level, Carrig was masculine-dominated and women were relegated to a secondary position. However, there was always one weapon a woman could use to acquire influence over men: her body. It was highly likely, therefore, that in order to establish herself in a really secure situation in Carrig she would need tomake herself the mistress of some local notable, perhaps a clan-chief. So she would have to rid herself of her instinctive distaste for the population of Fourteen as dirty barbarians. They were dirty, true. They were barbarians, also true. Which meant that reconciling herself to the prospect required a deep restructuring job on her prejudices.
    Just how ingrained those prejudices were, she had discovered when she was first told what her cover was to be. Evidence that it was the most convenient and most reliable one