HISTORY

Trade is vital in post-Disaster Known Space, since Earth no longer provides essentials like food or air. Traders move widely throughout human space, supplying demand and stirring the economy. Even GigaCorp doesn't have everything, and Belt traders circulate the goods that the larger corporations don't make a wide enough profit margin on. Belt traders are welcome at most stations - provided they don't cause trouble.

Mort Goldberg is one of these itinerant traders, moving from system to system, selling and bartering his way along. His battered ship, the Emporium, is a "customized" (some would say patchwork) hauler that wanders where Mort's whims and fuel supply lead. Mort is an eccentric middle-aged fellow whose stock mutates as he travels. Mort might have cloth, spices, holos, handcrafts, jewelry, or knickknacks, all of which he sells directly from his ship's hold.

Mort's customers are typically bored corporate employees, who comb the Belt traders for trinkets they can't get from the corporate retailers, often looking for something to personalize the sterile tubes and cubes they live and work in. One of his goals in life is to figure out what the Rixians have in plenty that humans want, and make a first-market killing, but so far he finds the Rixians opaque and difficult to communicate with.

Mort, a formerly-lapsed Jew, has become observant since the Disaster. He has a considerable database of Jewish literature in his computer, and observes Sabbath and holidays according to the dictates of a calendar program (based on Jerusalem time).

PHYSICAL APPEARANCE

Mort is a kindly-looking, balding, chubby fellow with dark brown eyes and a scruffy beard. Since the Disaster he always wears his yarmulke. He wears carefully patched jumpsuits with corporate logos removed, mostly acquired in trade.