Trygve Ytre was a slightly safer variant, and a common situation: The star was accompanied by a giant planet, Trygve, which orbited a bit outside of the primary's ecosphere. The giant planet had just two moons, one of them Earth-sized. Both were inhabited in the era when Pham visited. But the larger, Ytre, was the gem. Tidal and direct heating from Trygve supplemented the sun's meager output. Ytre had land and air and liquid oceans. The humans of Trygve Ytre had survived at least one collapse of their civilization.
What they had now was a technology as high as Humankind ever attained. Pham's little fleet of starships was welcomed, found decent shipyards in the asteroid belt that lay a billion kilometers out from the sun. Pham left crews aboard the ships, and took local transport inward, to Trygve and Ytre. This was no Namqem, but these people had seen other Traders. They had also seen Pham's ramscoops and his preliminary trading list...and most of what Pham had did not measure up to Ytre's native magics.
Nuwen stayed on Ytre for a time, someweeks the locals called the unit, the 600Ksec or so that it took giant Ytre to orbit Trygve. Trygve itself orbited the sun in just over 6Msec. So the Ytreisch calendar worked out neatly to ten weeks.
Though the world teetered between fire and ice, much of Ytre was habitable. "We have a more climate-stable world than Old Earth itself," the locals bragged. "Ytre is deep within Trygve's gravity well, with no significant perturbers. The tidal heating has been mellow across a geologic time." And even the dangers were no big surprise. The M3 sun was just over one degree across. A foolish person could look directly at the reddish disk, see the whorling of gasses, see sunspots vast and dark. A few seconds of such sungazing could cause serious retinal burns, since of course the star was far brighter in the near-IR than in visible light. The recommended eye protectors looked like clear plastic, but Pham was very careful to wear them.
His hosts—a group of local companies—put him up at their expense. He spent his official time trying to learn more of their language and trying to discover something his fleet had brought that might be worth something to his customers. They were trying just as hard. It was something like industrial espionage in reverse. The locals' electronics was a little better than Pham had ever seen, though there were program improvements the Qeng Ho might suggest. Their medical automation was significantly backward; that would be his foot in the door, a place to haggle from.
Pham and his staff categorized all the things they might bring from this encounter. It would pay for the voyage and more. But Pham heard rumors. His hosts represented a number of—"cartels" was the nearest translation that Pham could make of the word. They hid things from one another. The rumor was of a new type of localizer, smaller than any made elsewhere, and needing no internal power supply. Any improvement in localizers was a profitable item; the gadgets were the positional glue that made embedded systems so powerful. But these "super" localizers were alleged to contain sensors and effectors. If it was anything more than rumor, it would have political and military consequences on Ytre itself—destabilizing consequences.
By now, Pham Nuwen knew how to collect information in a technical society, even one where he wasn't a fluent speaker, even one where he was being watched. In four weeks he knew which cartel might have the maybe-existent invention. He knew the name of its magnate: Gunnar Larson. The Larson cartel had not mentioned the invention in their trading negotiations. It was not on the table—and Pham didn't want to hint about it when others were present. He arranged a face-to-face meeting with Larson. It was the sort of thing that would have made sense even to Pham's aunts and uncles back on medieval Canberra, though the technical subterfuge behind the meeting would have been unintelligible to them.
Six weeks after his landfall on Ytre, Pham Nuwen walked alone through the most exclusive open street in Dirby. Scattered clouds were reminders of the recent rain. They showed pink and gray in the bright twilight. The sun had just set in the deep heart of Trygve. Near the limb of the giant planet, an arch of gold and red was the memory of the sun's passing into eclipse. The disk of the giant stood across ten degrees of sky. Silent blue lightning flickered in its polar latitudes.
