Departures

LAST FAVOR

This one is a thought experiment If you put people or animals in an environment where cold can kill them, they’ll adapt by becoming short and stocky, with small appendages less vulnerable to frostbite. Look at arctic foxes and Eskimos, for instance. If you put people or animals in an environment where heat can kill them, they’ll also adapt, becoming long and lanky, sometimes with large appendages to help radiate heat Look at big-eared fennec foxes and the Tutsi people, for instance. What I wondered was, what happens if you put people-it has to be people this time-in an environment where stupidity can kill them?

Jerome Carver glanced at the Enrico Dandolo’s west-facing view panel. It seemed awash with flame. “Spectacular sunset,” the big black man remarked.

“What else is new?” Patrice Boileau was the only other person in the tradeship’s control room. She did not bother looking up from the screen where she was checking a computer subroutine.

“You’re spoiled,” Carver said in mild reproof.

Patrice shrugged. “There’ll be another one along tomorrow. Maybe I won’t be busy then.”

She was likely right, Carver thought. With an oranger sun and thicker air than Earth’s, the whole world of Ephar ran to glorious nightfalls and early mornings. The towers and spires of the city of Shkenaz, silhouetted blackly against the glowing sky, added a touch almost of Arabian Nights fantasy to the scene.

As the trader watched, Ephar’s sun slid below the horizon. Full darkness, though, was still some time away. Carver had no trouble spying the figure dashing from Shkenaz’s walls toward the greenskin town outside or the mob at the fugitive’s heels. He groaned. “Oh, God, they’ve caught a late one.”

This time Patrice did join him in front of the view panel. Of themselves, her hands knotted into fists. “Maybe he’ll make it,” she said. “If he gets back to his own kind before they catch him, they’ll let him go-it’s not the gods’ will that he die this time.”

“If,” Carver said grimly. Greenskin towns, by law, had to be more than three gibyats from the walls of a city. Say, a kilometer and a half, the trader thought. He wondered what misfortune had stranded the luckless runner inside Shkenaz so late. He must have known the risk he was taking.

Patrice stepped up the gain on the panel. The distance between the fleeing green centauroid and his blue-skinned pursuers seemed to swell, but that was only electronic illusion. “Run, damn you, run,” Carver muttered.

It was no good. A thrown stone made the greenskin stagger. That was all the fastest members of the mob needed to catch him and drag him down. Bodies thrashed, one of them not for long. After a while, realizing there was no sport left to be had, the troop began walking back to Shkenaz. Every so often a blue would spring into the air, in sheer high spirits.

Carver swung the west-facing camera to look at the greenskin village. Sure enough, two or three males stood near the boundary stone. They must have seen everything. They made no move to retrieve what little was left of their fellow, though. They would not till morning. If a blue patrol caught them coming out at night, the whole village might die to expiate their sin.

With a wordless sound, half fury and half frustration, Carver stabbed a finger at a button under the view panel. The panel went dark. “Three thousand years,” the trader said.

Patrice had never been on Ephar before. “Three thousand years of what?”

“That.” Carver waved to the blank view panel. “Maybe even longer, but three thousand years the locals have records for. The separate villages, the night ban… the murders.” In the six months since the Enrico Dandolo had landed, he had seen three now. That accorded fairly well with the data other ships visiting the Araite Empire had gathered.

“I don’t-want to believe that,” Patrice said.

“Believe it,” he told her. “The best part is, under the Code we can’t do a damn thing about it, either.”

Now she stared at him. “What? Why not?”

“No complainants.” Traders rarely meddled in the affairs of worlds without spaceflight. When they did, they needed ironclad documentation mat a local group not only seemed oppressed but felt itself to be. Judging from a purely offplanet perspective was, sensibly in most cases, against the rules.

“I don’t believe it!” Patrice exclaimed.

Carver shook his head helplessly. “Believe it. It’s true. Never one, in the two hundred years since tradeships have been coming here. Not the blues, of course-why should they complain? But not the greenskins, either. They just shrug and say they are all guilty by inheritance and deserve whatever the blues hand out to them. They believe it. As long as they believe it, officially there’s nothing we can do.”

“Officially,” Patrice said. There was precedent for bending the Code when it needed bending. On Ephar, it looked to need more than bending.

“I understand you.” Carver ran a hand down his dark forearm, reminding her of his race. “Don’t you think I, of all people, want to see the greenskins free? The night ban is just the worst of a whole set of restrictive laws. Greenskins can’t hold land, they can’t intermarry with the blues, they can’t-oh, a raft of things. Basically, they live by their wits, because that’s all they’re allowed to own. And-” He slammed the flat of his hand down on the console in complete frustration, “-they won’t do a damned thing about it.”

“ You’ve tried?”

“My last trip in. I’m not the only one, either. It’s never done a bean’s worth of good. They won’t take weapons, they won’t learn civil disobedience, they aren’t interested in our trying to change attitudes among the blues. They’re-content. And it drives me crazy.”

“I don’t blame you a bit,” Patrice said. “What are you going to do now?”

“Keep trying. What else?”

Carver tramped toward Shkenaz. A few puffy clouds floated in the green-blue sky. The breeze was at the trader’s back, and full of strange sweetnesses. Had it been blowing the other way, it would have brought him the stink of the city.

Only a long trampled swath of foliage, abruptly ending, showed what had happened the evening before. As soon as the sun was up, the greenskins had taken away their dead fellow.

Carver felt his eyes keep sliding back to the mute evidence of violence. Walking along beside him, Lloyd Michaels noticed- Carver’s fellow trader did not miss much. “Nothing we can do about it,” he said.

“I know,” Carver ground out. He stopped to adjust his pack;

the straps were digging into his shoulders. “Heaven knows we’ve tried. It galls me, though, to watch a lynching and then deal the next day with the lord who condoned it.”

“I daresay we do that on a lot of primitive worlds, and on a good many that aren’t.” Michaels’s face looked too round and pink and innocent for him to be as cynical as Carver knew he was, a fact he used to shameless advantage on every planet where the locals were sophisticated enough to try to read human expressions.

“They don’t usually get their victims to agree they should have been lynched,” the black man retorted.

“There is that,” Michaels agreed mildly. “If we knew how they did it, we could make a fortune selling the secret offworld.”

Carver glared at him, a little less than half sure he was joking. “I’m going to talk to Nadab today,” he said at last.

“Old Baasa’s pet greenskin? Sure, go ahead. I expect he’ll be there.” Michaels cocked an eyebrow at his companion. “It won’t do you one damn bit of good.”

“I’ll do it anyhow,” Carver said. He walked on, looking neither to the left nor to the right, plainly ready to ignore anything more Lloyd Michaels might say. Michaels kept his mouth shut, the most annoying thing he could do.

The walls of Shkenaz drew near. The gates were open. The guards-blues, of course-leaned back, their weight supported by hind legs and stiff, thick tails. They were bored, Carver thought.

Some-not all-of that boredom fell away as the traders drew near. Even though humans had been going in and out of Shkenaz since the Enrico Dandolo landed, they were still strange enough to be interesting. The guards came forward and down onto all four running legs, held spears across the entranceway to block the traders’ path. “With whom have you business in the city?” one of them demanded sternly.

Carver studied the male as if seeing him for the first time. Centauroid was only a vague description of the locals’ body plan; the guard’s hindquarters were not much like a horse’s, and his upthrust torso even less like a man’s. His face was most alien of all, with a wide toothless beak of a mouth, twin nostril slits, and insectile compound eyes.

The trader wondered how strange he looked in those eyes.

Michaels said, “We meet today with the mighty lord Baasa, representative in Shkenaz of the Araite Emperor, may his reign be long and prosperous.” The guttural local language was made for sounding arrogant.

The guard swung up his spear. “Pass, then, into Shkenaz, and may our governor’s graciousness shine upon you.”

Change the style of architecture and the shape of the inhabitants, Carver thought, and Shkenaz was much like any other primitive town on a preindustrial world. Intelligent beings needed places to live, to trade, to worship, and arranged those places in fairly standard patterns.

Differences, though, counted, too. Because of the way the locals were made, Shkenaz seemed spacious to a biped like Carver, although the townsfolk probably would have disagreed. Few animals shared the streets with the natives, who were strong enough to do their own hauling.

On a street corner, a greenskin scribe wrote a letter for a blue; another blue waited his turn. Carver pointed. “They’re polite enough now, but I wonder how many wolf packs they’ve run in after dark.”

“As many as they could, I have no doubt,” Michaels said.

By now, most of the locals were used to seeing humans in town, and gave them no more than casual glances. The trumpet-shaped ears of a farmer in town with a piece of scrap iron on his back, though, rose in surprise and his head whipped around to follow the traders as they walked toward the main market square. The junk shop owner with whom he was dickering, a greenskin, took advantage of his surprise to close the deal on the spot.

Carver, who was in earshot when he did, felt like cheering. “We got that fellow some extra silver there,” he said.

“So we did,” Michaels agreed. “We also may have got him in trouble some time down the line for cheating a poor honest yokel who had come into Shkenaz to cheat him. When you’re a blue here, you can afford a long, selective memory for such slights.”

Black skin, as Carver had discovered, had its uses. He felt his cheeks go hot, but his companion could not see him flush.

Shkenaz’s central agora had the air of barely controlled chaos usual to marketplaces. Sellers loudly sang the virtues of six-legged meat animals, knives, perfumes, fruits, grains, pots of clay, and brass. Would-be buyers just as loudly named them liars and thieves. Business got done all the same.

A bookseller waved a three-fingered hand to draw the humans’ attention. When he had it, he held up a leather-bound codex. “Illuminated by that painter from the eastern provinces whose work you like,” he called cajolingly.

“Do you want to stop?” Carver asked.

“Not with Baasa expecting us. Keep the powers that be happy first.” Michaels turned to the waiting greenskin. “Another time, Harhas. We go now to an audience with the august governor of your great city.”

Harhas dipped his head. “May it be prosperous for you.”

Temples and Shkenaz’s town hall fronted one side of the agora. Before the town hall, as before public buildings in every town of the Araite Empire, stood a statue of Peleg. Peleg was the ancient king of a city-state somehow (Carver was not sure how; no human was) connected with the rise of the empire. More than three thousand years before, a greenskin had assassinated him. Greenskins had been paying for it ever since.

A servant was waiting outside the hall. “I am to take you to his Excellency.”

The humans followed him up the ramp. A mosaic that ran the whole length of the wall showed in gruesome, imaginative detail what had happened to Peleg’s murderer. Golden tesserae gave the work its title: Justice.

An artisan was replacing a few tiles that had fallen out of a particularly lurid scene. The artisan was a greenskin. “Nice to be reminded of where you stand in the public’s esteem, isn’t it?” Michaels murmured. Carver grunted, too mortified for the greenskin’s sake to say a word. Baasa’s servant glanced back at them. They did not translate for him.

Locals, most of them blues, bustled by, too intent on their own affairs even to notice the craftsman at work. To Carver, somehow that was the worst part of the whole business.

The servant ducked into a chamber and emerged a moment later. “His Excellency will see you now.”

“Good day, good day,” Baasa rumbled from behind his desk as the humans came in. An icon of the reigning emperor hung on the wall behind him, a reminder of the power that sprawled halfway across this continent. Baasa needed no more than such a symbolic reminder to administer Shkenaz. He was shrewd and fairly able… and if that did not suffice, Carver thought, he had Nadab.

The greenskin stood at a table to one side of his master’s desk. Like most of his kind, he had eyes a little larger than those of blues, and ears of not quite the same shape. Still, even taking skin color into account, the visible differences between Nadab and Baasa were less than those between Michaels and Carver. “Shall we begin?” Carver said.

“Yes, let us,” Baasa answered. Nadab merely dipped his head a couple of centimeters to show he was ready.

The humans unslung their packs. As with long-distance caravans on ancient Earth, trade goods worth hauling across light-years had to combine low bulk and high value. Michaels went first. He was a jeweler, and offplanet baubles had grown popular on Ephar over the years. Pearls sold especially well, as they had no local equivalent.

While Michaels and Baasa haggled, Carver made small talk with the governor’s aide. At last, seeing Baasa deeply involved in a hot dicker, Carver dared say, “I am sorry one of your people perished last night, Nadab.”

“It has happened before,” the greenskin said with a fatalism that never failed to chill Carver. “It will happen again. In the end, we are the better for it.”

As near as the trader could remember, Nadab had used exactly those words the last time a greenskin had died from missing the sunset curfew. Now, though, he seemed on the point of going on when Baasa interrupted to ask, “How much of the kohath spice did we set as value for a shimmerstone “ — the name the locals gave to pearls-”of this size?”

“Sir, let me see it.” Nadab walked over to Michaels, who held out the gem. The greenskin examined it. “Seven measures,” he said at once (literally, it came out “one-one”; the locals used six as their counting base).

“Oh, you thief!” Baasa and Michaels said together. They pointed fingers at each other and laughed. One had been claiming five, the other ten. Neither, though, cared to argue with Nadab.

The greenskin returned to his place. When Carver tried to pick up the conversation where the two of them had left off, he deftly changed the subject. A few minutes later, another disputed point cropped up. Nadab settled it with the same quiet competence he had shown before.

At last Michaels said, “That’s about it for me, your Excellency. Why not let Jerome take his turn?”

“Very well.” Baasa swung his unwinking gaze on Carver. “What have you to offer me today?”

“Knowledge itself,” Carver replied in what he hoped was an impressive voice. “What could be more valuable to you and to the empire than knowledge? It is by knowing many things, after all, that we humans learned the art of flying from star to star.”

Baasa’s ears quivered and came to attention. “You would sell the secret of your flying ship?” he demanded. Reading tone into an alien’s words was always risky, but Carver thought he heard disbelief warring with greed.

Before he could say anything, Nadab broke in: “My lord, if he makes that claim, he seeks only to befool you. We lack too many of the mechanic arts known to his people to hope to duplicate what they can do.”

The Araite Empire’s technology was about on a par with that of Rome in earthly history. Like the Romans also, the locals were more sophisticated intellectually than they were with then-hands. Knowing there were things one could not do was a realization many societies never reached.

Carver dipped his head to Nadab and turned back to Baasa. “Your esteemed counselor is right, of course, your Excellency.”

The governor gestured impatiently. “I pay the greenskin to be right. What good is he to me if he is wrong? So you cannot tell me how to fly, eh? What knowledge do you sell, then?”

“Knowledge that will put you on the road to learning such things for yourself and that will show you the direction that road takes.”

“Riddles,” Baasa muttered. Local “science,” again like Rome’s, was of two sorts: collections of random facts with little theory unifying them-what passed for chemistry was like that- and, more common, huge forests of speculation springing from an acorn’s worth of knowledge. Medicine and physics were both tarred with that brush.

“Not so,” Carver said. “Here, for instance.” He drew from his pack translations of Galileo, Bacon’s Novum Organum, and his prize, an edition of On the Origin of Species with its concepts intact but examples drawn from Ephar’s biology. None of the three was so far beyond local thought as to be incomprehensible; taken together, they ought to stir things up a good deal.

That was what Carver had in mind. The best way to help the greenskins, he had decided, was to change the society of which they were a part. It was slower than more open forms of aid, but in the long run much more certain.

Baasa was working through the summaries printed on the flyleaves of the books. “See what you think, Nadab,” he said, passing them on to his aide. He turned back to Carver. “Give me a price. The ideas may be interesting, though the style is rather flat.”

Carver winced. He hoped that was a ploy to knock down the price, but suspected that it was not. Some good linguists and computer people had put his translations together, but it took more than competence to be elegant in a language not one’s own. It took inspired genius, and Joseph Conrads did not come along every day, or every century, either.

Nadab read faster than Baasa. He set the books on the table in front of him. “Quite abstract,” he said. “Still, if they are affordable, perhaps you might seek to acquire them as curiosities.”

“Yes, perhaps so,” the governor agreed. “Curiosities they certainly are. Well, trader, what do you say to five measures of bulun powder apiece for them?”

“Your Excellency, who is esteemed throughout the empire for his generosity, is pleased to joke with me.” Carver was appalled for a couple of reasons. The first was the paltry offer. The translations had not come cheap; fifteen measures of bulun powder would not begin to pay off what they had cost him.

Even Lloyd Michaels, who had kept out of his fellow trader’s dicker till then, was moved to protest, “Surely savants throughout the empire should have the chance to learn of these ideas for themselves.”

“And you, your Excellency,” Carver said to Baasa, “and your assistant deserve the credit you will gain for being the first to pass this new knowledge on to your people.”

Baasa swung his head Nadab’s way. Nadab said quickly, “I deserve no credit. I am but a greenskin. All that I have I owe to my lord the governor. Without him I am as nothing, nor do I seek any acclaim for aiding him, in any way I can.”

The hell of it was, Carver thought, that he sounded as if he meant it. He would have been much easier to deal with were he only mouthing polite phrases.

Nadab’s self-effacement out of the way, Baasa proved a little more interested in dealing. He upped his offer to eight measures of bulun powder a book, then to ten, which was about half what Carver needed to break even. When at last he got up above ten measures, the haggling turned serious.

Baasa said, “Twelve measures, then, and four parts, and three parts of parts.”

“Twelve and three-quarters, by your reckoning,” Nadab said to Carver while the trader was still wrestling with the fraction that needed converting. He ruefully shook his head and stuck his calculator in his hip pocket. If Nadab felt like showing off, that was fine with Carver.

In the middle of the dicker, a servant poked his head into the chamber and said to Baasa, “Your pardon, Excellency, but the delegation from Asnah has arrived.”

“Oh, a pestilence! I did not expect them until tomorrow. I suppose I must formally greet them, as protocol requires.” The governor started to walk out, then turned back to warn Carver, “Think not that I shall forget where we stand: seventeen and three parts per volume, and I doubt you will squeeze another measure from me.”

“And a half, that is,” Nadab supplied as Baasa hurried away.

“Yes, of course,” Carver said abstractedly. He had Baasa gauged now, and did not think he would end up losing money. Nadab, though, was harder to figure. “May I ask a question without fear of giving offense?” he said to the greenskin.

“How can seeking to learn give offense?”

Carver could have named twenty different ways from twenty different worlds, but forbore. He said only, “I hoped you might see the advantage to your people of helping to spread enlightenment in the empire. That you do not surprises and disappoints me. If you have some reason I cannot see, I would be grateful for your telling me what it is.”

The greenskin was some time silent; the trader could make nothing of the steady gaze that met his. At last Nadab said, ”You tread on overgrown ground, outlander. Be careful lest you stumble.”

Carver waited.

Something like a sigh hissed through Nadab’s nostril slits. He picked up the adaptation of On the Origin of Species and turned it over and over in his hands. Again he was a long time finding words. When he did speak, he sounded as if he was choosing them carefully: “I did not know, oudander, that this notion of change over time was familiar to your people.”

Carver’s eyes slid to Michaels. His comrade was staring back at him. Of all the things he had thought he might hear, this was the last. He said, “I did not know the folk of the empire had come across it, either.”

He started to go on, then stopped. Anything he said might be wrong. But no one in the couple of centuries of fitful contact between Ephar and the universe outside had had any clue that the locals were within light-years of developing the concept of evolution.

“Ah, yes, the folk,” Nadab murmured. Carver thought he heard irony in the local’s voice, and warned himself not to let his sympathies-or his imagination-run away with him. Then, abruptly, he was sure he had not. In the language of the empire, “folk” and “blue” sprang from the same root.

Excitement flowered in him. He had brushed against something more important than bulun powder here; he was sure of it. “Tell me,” he said, “have you greenskins writings of your own? Ones the folk of the empire”-he used the term with deliberate emphasis-”know nothing about?”

If Nadab said yes to that… But he did not. He only asked, “Outlander, how could it possibly matter to you?”

“If for no other reason, then as trade items,” Carver said.

Before the words were out of his mouth, he knew he had made a mistake. Nadab’s eyes might be unreadable, but there was no mistaking the finality with which he said, “I see little point to discussing what are, in any event, shadows.”

The trader cast about for a way to put things right. Nadab stonily rebuffed his efforts. Baasa came back, assuring that the subject would stay closed. Distracted, Carver ended the dicker too soon. The city governor fairly glowed with self-satisfaction; he did not often get the better of a bargain with humans.

“If I may suggest something, Excellency,” Nadab said.

“Yes? Go on. Say what you mean.” Baasa was in a magnanimous mood.

“You have been gracious enough to speak kindly of my prose style, inadequate though it is. Perhaps, before you release these works to learned males all over the empire, I might do my poor best to make them conform to the rhetorical standards such publication requires.”

“A capital suggestion,” Baasa exclaimed. “See you to it, Nadab. Only make sure you proceed with it. I would not want the works long delayed.”

“Certainly not, Excellency.”

It was all perfectly smooth, perfectly respectful, and, from the locals’ point of view, perfectly sensible. Somehow, though, Carver was sure that whatever sprang from Nadab’s pen would be flawed: not obviously flawed, maybe, or no one would look at the books at all, but with enough errors to keep them from having the influence for which he’d hoped.

He could not say that out loud, not with no proof, not with the greenskin enjoying his overlord’s deserved confidence. But for whatever reasons, Nadab was plainly unenthusiastic about letting real science come to the attention of the empire as a whole. If Carver had been frustrated before about the way greenskins acted, now he was bewildered as well, and more man a little annoyed.

He did what he could, saying, “If you have any trouble with the concepts in the books, Nadab, please feel free to call on us humans for help.”

“That is generous of you,” the greenskin said. “If I encounter difficulties, be sure I shall consult you. I believe, however, that my grasp of what is, after all, my own language should prove adequate to the task.”

“What task do you have in mind?” Carver said, but in Trade English, so that only Michaels understood.

“Well, of course we haven’t had a great deal to do with the greenskins,” Captain Chen remarked that evening over tea and cakes. She was a tiny, very competent woman whose size belied her strength of will. She went on, “They aren’t rich enough to trade with the likes of us.”

“Some of them must be,” Michaels said. “Nadab has been Baasa’s right-hand man for years. Are you telling me he hasn’t spent some time lining the pockets he doesn’t wear?”

“I would doubt that myself,” the captain said dryly.

“So would I,” Carver agreed.”But even if he has, he doesn’t dare show it. What do you suppose happens if somebody in a greenskin village starts looking too prosperous?”

“The blues come out and burn his house down around his ears,” Michaels supplied, “and probably his neighbors’ houses, too, just on the off chance that they’re thinking wicked thoughts about living above subsistence level.”

“You’ve got it,” Carver said. “We have tapes to prove it. It doesn’t happen very often, though. The greenskins have been pariahs for a long time now; they know how to lay low.”

“ ‘Pariah’ isn’t quite the right word,” Captain Chen said, precise as usual.”The greenskins play an important part in local society: shopkeepers, scholars, artisans, merchants. They aren’t menials by any means.”

“So long as the sun is in the sky,” Carver said. “They aren’t menials after dark, either-they’re fair game. Still, I take your point. It’s just because of the role they play that I wondered if they have a literature of their own.”

“From the way Nadab clammed up about it, you’d have thought Jerome asked him how many blue children he’d eaten lately,” Michaels added.

The captain pursed her lips. “Interesting,” she said judiciously, “but I’m not sure how important it is.”

“Something odd is going on there,” Carver insisted. “Nadab knows about evolution, and none of the natural philosophers among the blues does. I’d lay money on that.”

“The other thing,” Michaels said, “is that he didn’t want them knowing about it, either.”

Carver gave him a grateful look. “So you saw that, too?”

“Interesting,” Captain Chen said again. “The more enlightened, the more scientifically oriented a society is, the less the inclination it usually has for harassing its minorities, at least openly. You’d think Nadab would grasp that.”

“I think perhaps he does,” Carver said slowly.

Michaels parted company with him there. “That’s crazy, Jerome. Nobody wants to be persecuted forever.”

“Till my first trip to Ephar, I would have said the same thing.” Carver scratched his head. “But if the greenskins don’t, they certainly hide it well. And I don’t just mean Nadab. None of them seems interested in changing the way things are.”

“They are a small minority,” the captain said, “and very vulnerable because of that. They must know it.”

“That’s true enough,” Carver admitted. “I’ve never seen a greenskin I’d call a fool.”

“Hardly,” Michaels agreed. “A greenskin who was a fool wouldn’t live long.”

“But still-” Carver said.

“Yes, but still,” Captain Chen said. “Yes, it is a puzzle. If it can be arranged so as not to disturb the imperial authorities in Shkenaz, you might pay a visit to the greenskin village.”

“There’s no profit in it,” Michaels said.

“Money and profit are not always the same thing,” the captain said.

The locals’ faces did not show many emotions a human could read, but the set of the blue guards’ ears and the way they only stood aside at the last moment for Carver to pass told the trader plenty about what they thought of his having anything to do with greenskins.

Nadab came out past the village boundary stone to meet Carver. It was safe enough; local noon had only just passed.

The greenskin waved a hand. “Welcome, outlander. Shall we stroll?”

“Whatever you wish, of course,” the trader said, falling in beside Nadab. After a little while he asked casually, “How are you coming with your, ah, editing of the volumes Baasa acquired?”

Nadab did not miss a beat. “Well enough.” Carver shook his head in rueful admiration: the greenskin was as polite as he was uninformative.

They went into the village. Carver had walked past it many times, and seen it from the Enrico Dandolo’s view panels, but he had hoped actually being in it would give him some new perspective on the way greenskins lived their lives. He found himself disappointed. The houses were as he’d already known they were: old, not especially prosperous, but on the clean side by local standards.

Some elderly males stood in the village square. They crowded around to get a good look at Carver. Females and children peered from doorways. Most of the adult males in their prime were working in Shkenaz.

Also in the square was something Carver did not remember noticing: a statue of Peleg. Maybe, he thought, he had not wanted to see it before. He pointed at it. “Why do you have this here?”

“To remind us of our shame.” It was a chorus from all the greenskins in earshot, even the youngsters. Carver realized he must have asked a ritual question. The humiliation drilled into each succeeding generation chilled him. Was this, he wondered, why the greenskins never questioned their oppression?

He doubted it. Surely some rebels would arise to challenge the way things were. Or would they? He was thinking in human terms. The strange smells on the breeze, the proportions of the buildings around him, even the ruddy quality of the light reminded him that those did not apply here. In all his dealing with the locals, he had never felt them so alien as they seemed in this quiet little square.

Lost in his thoughts, he missed something Nadab had said. “Your pardon, I pray.”

“I said, also to remind us of our separation.”

Baasa’s aide, Carver knew, was the most prominent greenskin attached to-not in-Shkenaz. That did not keep several of the old males from hissing at him in anger-or was it alarm? The trader frowned. Nadab had told him something important. The only trouble was, he was not sure what.

He found no easy way to ask straight out. Maybe changing the subject would let him come back later. He said to Nadab, “I must tell you how much I admire the wisdom you and your people display.”

This time, the murmurs from the old males were gratified. “You are most kind,” Nadab said. He pointed toward the Enrico Dandolo. “Our ignorance is all too manifest when set beside such achievements as that.”

“We are not the proper comparison, though, are we?” Carver asked. “I was thinking of how much more you know than, say, the most learned blue savants of the empire.”

The shot was blind, but it hit. Silence slammed down in the square. From far off, Carver heard a flying hunter screech as it swooped down on something in the not-quite-grass. The old males waited for Nadab’s lead. Nadab did not seem inclined to do much leading.

At last the greenskin said, “Come wander with me. We will, I suppose we must, discuss this further.” One of the old males spoke in harsh protest, almost too fast for Carver to follow. Nadab said, “Be still, Ithamar. The need is here. This has been spoken of among us, as you know.”

“The time is not yet ripe,” Ithamar insisted.

“And I say it is. Who has the broader perspective, you or I? “

Ithamar lowered his head and bent his forelegs in respect. “May you be right,” he said. He still did not sound as though he thought Nadab was. The rest of the old males left the square.

The building nearest the statue of Peleg was larger than the rest in the greenskin village, and did not look like a home. Carver guessed it might have the same sort of importance in the village that the local governor’s hall did in Shkenaz. Pointing at it, he asked, “Is that where your people keep the books you do not show the blues?”

“I have never said there are such books,” Nadab said. The trader felt his shoulders sag. Whatever Nadab was contemplating, it was not simply opening up to him. Too bad.

“Will you show me what is in there?” Carver persisted.

“Presently, presently.” Was that amusement in Nadab’s voice? Greenskins seldom seemed amused; they seldom, Carver thought, had much to be amused about. Nadab went on.”Now, as I said, we will wander.”

Having no choice, the trader wandered. The village did indeed remind him of a moderately poor chunk of Shkenaz, set outside the city walls. It seemed quieter than such a chunk, but that, the trader thought, could just have been because Shkenaz’s big central marketplace went a long way toward making the whole town raucous.

“You see,” Nadab said, “that we are no threat to outbid Baasa for your goods.”

“You might well be, could you compete fairly with his kind.” “What is fair?” Nadab said, sounding surprisingly like a six-limbed Pilate. Unlike the Roman procurator, he undertook to answer the question, at least metaphorically: “Fair is that all advantages have corresponding disadvantages to make up for them.”

“The reverse also has to be true,” Carver said harshly.”Your disadvantages are all around me. Where are the offsetting advantages? Those I do not see.”

“Well, we are still just walking about,” Nadab said. He dipped his head to a male coming by. “Good day to you, Kohath. How does it fare in the city?”

“Much as always, Nadab. Compound interest is such a painful mystery to those caught in its toils.” Kohath turned the corner; Carver heard him open a door. On few worlds, the trader thought, would a banker live so modestly. He wondered if that was one of the mysterious advantages of which Nadab had spoken. He doubted it. No one on Ephar made a virtue of abstaining from worldly goods.

More males were coming back from Shkenaz now. Carver glanced at the sky. The sun had slid a long way down toward the west. The trader was surprised when Nadab led him out past the boundary stone and into the fields again. By the look of things, so were the blues who made up the guard squad. They muttered among themselves as the greenskin and Carver walked by.

“Is this safe?” Carver asked. He wished he had his stunner. He hadn’t thought he’d need k. Michaels, he knew, would have something sharp to say about showing that kind of confidence on an alien world.

But Nadab seemed unconcerned. “Safe enough, so long as I am back within the village by sunset. Being busy so much, either here or within the walls of Shkenaz, I have too few chances simply to amble this way. When one comes, I make the most of it.”

Traveling as he often did for weeks at a time cooped up inside a metal shell, Carver understood that sentiment down to the ground. He said quietly, “Thank you for sharing the moment with me.”

“Not to do so would be unjust to the one who made it possible,” Nadab said. He looked from Carver to the Enrico Dandolo a few hundred meters away. “And, of course, would be inappropriate, as your people have posed the problem now facing me on behalf of mine.”

The trader grew alert. Now we come down to it, he thought. He said, “We have never intended anything but good for greenskins, Nadab. We want to end your oppression, if we can.”

“That is why, then, you offered Baasa the volumes you did?”

“Certainly. Why else?”

“Who could say, judging beings so strange?” A nice way to remind me, Carver thought, that I’m as alien to Nadab as he is to me, and a point worth getting across. Nadab went on, “I thought perhaps your purpose was to destroy my entire people.”

Carver stared. There are times when, no matter how well one speaks a language not his own, he will hear something, understand it perfectly, and still doubt his ears. This was one of those times. The trader spread his hands in a gesture of confusion. “We wish your folk nothing but good, Nadab. We think it wrong for you to be forced into separation on account of the color of your skin. My own race”-he touched the dark brown skin of his arm- “has too much of that in its own past. Save for your being green and Baasa blue, we know your kind and his are no different.”

It was Nadab’s turn to look sharply at the human. “You know that, do you?” He astonished Carver by throwing back his head and letting out the strangled snorts that served the locals for laughter.

“What’s funny?” the trader demanded, a bit angrily.

“Only that I came close to confusing skill with wisdom, a mistake I thought myself too wise for.” The oblique reply did little to soothe Carver’s temper. Nadab said, “Never mind. I see you bear me and mine no malice. Ignorance we shall cope with: we have before, often enough.”

The calm confidence with which the greenskin spoke only nettled Carver further. Somehow Nadab had put the shoe on the other foot, and the trader did not care for it. He was unused to being forced into the role of ignorant outsider, with the local as sophisticate.

“I think we can return now,” Nadab said. He still sounded,

Carver thought, quite full of his own importance. And then, as he turned, that note vanished from his voice. “Or perhaps not.”

Carver looked back toward the greenskin village. The blue guards had spread into a line between him, Nadab, and the buildings. “What are they doing?” the trader asked. But even as he spoke, he knew. His glance went to the sun. Not much daylight was left.

Nadab’s head swung in the same direction, then back to Carver. “Yes, outlander, it is exactly what you think. If I am not on the other side of the boundary stone by sunset-”

“But that’s murder!” Carver burst out. Immediately afterwards, he felt like a fool. Hunting down any greenskin outside his village when the sun went down was murder. He had seen that in gruesome telephoto from the safety of the Enrico Dandolo. Somehow, though, it had not occurred to him that even that violence might be perverted further by deliberately keeping a greenskin from reaching sanctuary.

Nadab, with three thousand years of tradition to guide him, had no such naivet?. He said, “It happens. From time to time, it happens. Now all that remains to be seen is whether they are out for their own amusement, or have something more in mind.”

He walked slowly toward the blue guards. They held their line, positioning themselves so he had no chance of breaking past them back into the village. Carver stood where he was, feeling extraordinarily helpless. He wished he were carrying a Kalashnikov to mow down the blues, who were waving clubs and spears and yelling threats at Nadab.

The greenskin said loudly, “Let me by. Baasa will not be pleased to learn I have come to harm at your hands.”

Strangled snorts came from the blues.”We’ll take our chances on that!” one shouted. “That’s what you think,” said another.

Carver saw Nadab’s shoulders sag. Such was what passed for a greenskin’s power in Shkenaz: if Nadab’s patron tired of him, he was as much at the mercy of the blues as was the lowliest greenskin tinsmith.

A small crowd of greenskins had gathered just on the safe side of the boundary stone. They watched and waited, making no move to help Nadab. Carver was sure they would not. The whole village stood hostage to the blues of Shkenaz. Everyone knew it, greenskins and blues alike. The ritual of death would be played out with no interference.

The lower edge of the local sun’s red, swollen disk touched the western horizon. The blues sidled forward. In a couple of minutes, Nadab was theirs in perfect legality. He drew back a few paces toward Carver, not that running would do him any good.

Or would it? That retreat, that pathetic reflex of life trying to prolong itself even to no purpose, broke the trader’s horrified paralysis. “Nadab!” he shouted. The greenskin kept his eyes on the blues, but his ears twisted toward Carver. The trader yelled, “Run for our tradeship!”

Nadab stood motionless for another long moment. He had, Carver thought, been so sure of his imminent death that he needed time to realize he might live yet. Then he whirled and dashed toward the Enrico Dandolo. Carver, slower on two legs than the greenskin was on four but also closer to the ship, began to run, too.

The blues shouted in outrage. They were bound in the same web of custom as Nadab, though, and hesitated before giving chase: a sliver of sun still glowed above the horizon. Then it was gone, and they came pelting after Nadab and Carver. The trader heard their three-toed feet pounding behind him.

His chest felt on fire. He was not very young and not very light and not at all used to sprinting cross-country. He did not want to think about what would happen if he stepped in a hole or tripped over a bush. The blue guards might keep right on after Nadab. On the other hand, they might-or some of them might, which would be just as bad-decide to stop and kill him. He hoped that would stay just a thought experiment; he had no desire to test it empirically.

He also hoped people on the Enrico Dandolo were alert. The ground-level hatch was closed. If it didn’t open in the next few seconds-he was less than a hundred meters from the ship now, only a few meters behind Nadab and not nearly far enough ahead of his pursuers-things would get embarrassing. They’d get a great deal worse than that for the greenskin.

The hatch slid upward. Relief sobbed through Carver’s throat. “Go on!” he yelled or, rather croaked, to Nadab. The green-skin’s toes clicked on metal. A moment later, Carver’s boots clattered inside the cargo bay.

The hatch came down much faster than it had risen. None too soon-one of the blues was close enough to the Enrico Dandolo to hurl his bludgeon after Nadab. It belled off the descending door. Then the guards were pounding on the hatch with clubs and fists. The din was tremendous.

Carver stood with hands on knees, his head lowered, trying to catch his breath. Nadab was panting, too, but looked around the cargo bay with lively interest. The fluorescent strips in the ceiling proved particularly intriguing. “Not fire, yet they give light,” he said. “Have you, then, imprisoned glowfliers behind that glass? No, surely not,” he corrected himself: “too bright for that.”

“They work by the same power as our calculators,” Carver told him.

If the trader had expected a surprised outburst, he did not get one. “Ah. Interesting,” was all Nadab said. Carver had no chance to take things further. The inner door to the compartment came open. People burst in, shouting questions-mostly variations on “What the hell is going on?”

Carver explained. The crewfolk shouted in anger. The way the empire treated greenskins was abominable enough without cheating them besides. Patrice Boileau burst out, “We should up ship now and have nothing more to do with these savages.”

“That would not solve the problem,” Nadab said. Abrupt silence fell in the cargo bay, punctuated only by the banging from the blues outside. It was not so much for what Nadab said as for how he said it. Given the limits of his lipless beak, his Trade English was as fluent as anyone else’s in the compartment.

Captain Chen, as befitted her station, recovered her wits first. “We did not know you spoke our language,” she said, adding a moment later, “We did not know anyone on Ephar did.”

“I doubt any blues do,” Nadab said, again in Trade English.

The humans looked at one another. Lloyd Michaels said to Carver, “Seems we were on to something there back in Shkenaz a few days ago,”

“So it does,” the black man said.

“So you were,” Nadab agreed.

Captain Chen drove for the heart of the issue, asking, “Why do you choose to reveal this to us now?”

“Because at last I am convinced you do mean well for my people.” Nadab sounded as if the question had surprised him. “Jerome Carver here would not have risked himself to save me were it otherwise.”

“But-” That strangled protest came from everyone in the compartment at the same time. Carver managed to articulate it: “Ever since we came to Ephar, Nadab, we humans have been working to better the lot of you greenskins and help you take your full, rightful place in the empire.”

“What makes you think those two things are one and the same?” Nadab asked. The only flaw in his speech, Carver thought, was that he sounded pedantic. He thought about that, then reconsidered: another flaw was that the greenskin made no sense at all.

Patrice might have been reading his mind. “How could you not want to be free from persecution?” she demanded of Nadab. “How many of you have died for the sake of hatred?”

“Many, very many,” Nadab said, answering the second question first. “We believe, though, that they let us atone for a murder by one of ours long ago, a murder that was surely the stupidest thing a greenskin ever did, and so they are not in vain.”

“I don’t follow that,” Patrice said. Carver nodded; he found it tragic that such a clever being as Nadab should be trapped like a fly in superstition’s cobweb.

“In any case,” Michaels said, “a cargo bay is hardly the place for this kind of talk. What say we go up to the control room.”

“Good,” Captain Chen said briskly. “From there we can also tell the blues outside to go away, and that Nadab is under our protection.”

“That is very generous,” the greenskin said, “but what makes you believe they will listen to you?”

“They’ll listen,” the captain said, her voice grim. “Come along.” She led them up the spiral stair to the control room.

“You half-built beings have an easier time of this than I,” Nadab complained. He had to twist his body awkwardly all the way up the stairs, and slowed Patrice and Carver, who were behind him.

Captain Chen stalked over to the intercom, flipped a switch to channel it through the outside speakers. “Get away from our ship!” she roared to the blues below. The volume control was all the way to the right; she must have sounded like an angry god. She went on, “Nadab is under our protection. We do not allow you to harm him.”

One of the blues ran, hurrying back toward Shkenaz. The rest stayed where they were, though for upwards of a minute they simply stood in place, giving up their pounding on the cargo hatch. Carver thought the noise had stunned them. More attuned to the subtleties of his people’s body language, Nadab said, “They do not believe their ears.”

When the blues did regain their tongues, he was quickly proved right. “But the greenskin has violated his parole,” a guard shouted, and even the humans could hear his incredulity. “He is now ours, to do with as we wish.”

“He is not,” Captain Chen declared, still at the top of her electronic lungs. “You forced him to stay outside his village past sunset. Otherwise he would not have.”

“What has that to do with it?” the blue yelled back. “The act is all. Had the gods wished him to live, they would not have let us detain him.”

“Oh, shut up,” Captain Chen snarled, but in Trade English. She clicked off the intercom and the outside mike. “Let them scream their fool heads off out there. Eventually they’ll get tired and go away.”

“No, they will not,” Nadab said.

“Well, then, let them have their fit. They can’t hurt the ship, and now-” The captain pointed at the switched-off intercom- “they can’t bother us any more, either.” She folded her arms across her chest, glowered at the greenskin. “Now, perhaps, you will start making sense of yourself.”

“I am more curious about what you intend doing with me,” Nadab said.

“How you answer our questions will make a difference in what we decide, you know,” Carver told him.

The greenskin considered. “Yes, that has some truth to it. Very well; ask what you will.”

Despite the invitation, the control room stayed silent a moment. Patrice spoke first; working as she did with computers, she was used to breaking down questions into the smallest possible pieces. She said, “Why did you say bettering your people’s lot was not the same thing as taking an equal part with the blues in the life of the empire?”

“Because we better ourselves precisely by not taking an equal part,” Nadab replied at once.

“Riddles,” Michaels said. Carver just suppressed an urge to kick him in the shin.

“Riddles have answers,” Captain Chen said sharply. She glared at Michaels, who looked away; even the boldest man thought twice about risking her anger. She turned back to Nadab. “Go on.”

“I would think the matter obvious,” the greenskin said. “As Carver showed me, you people grasp the concept of life’s changing over time, depending on the circumstances brought to bear upon it.”

“Evolution,” Carver supplied.

“If that is your word; I have not met it before. We have been aware of it for something close to two thousand years ourselves.”

The humans stirred. “Longer than we have,” Michaels muttered. This time, no one shushed him. He went on. “Our arts were at a much higher level when we first thought of the notion of evolution than yours are now, to say nothing of what yours must have been so long ago. If what you say is true, how did you learn of it so quickly?”

“And what does it have to do with the greenskins’ plight?” Captain Chen asked.

Nadab opened and closed his hands several times. “Are you all blind?” he said, in the local language this time. He returned to Trade English. “Think: what restrictions have applied to us greenskins since the one we never name slew Peleg and fled under cover of darkness?”

“That’s why they don’t let you out at night!” Carver said.

“Yes, of course,” Nadab said impatiently. “Can you not answer a question without being diverted down a double hand-no, excuse me, you would say half a dozen-sidetracks? “

Carver threw the greenskin a curious look. He saw he was not the only one doing so. Always before, on Ephar, he had felt himself more able, more sophisticated than the locals. Now, though, Nadab seemed in control of things, not any human. Taking turns, Carver and his companions spelled out the prohibitions greenskins had to endure: no intermarriage, no owning land, all the rest.

“Enough,” Nadab said at last-yes, he was in control.”What sort of lives do we lead, then, as a result of all this?”

“Narrow ones,” Carver told him. “Forgive me, but that is the truth as we humans see it. You are restricted to a tiny handful of trades among the many in the empire, and insecure in your hold on those because you are so vulnerable to the blues.” The rest of the people in the control room nodded. Carver pointedly added, “As the events of the day have shown.”

“All true, but all, I fear, superficial,” Nadab said. “The key is in the sort of-”

The chime of the phone from the weapons turret interrupted the greenskin. Like all weapons officers, Anastas Shumilov always stood his watch there rather than in the control room so he could aim the guns by hand if the electronics were damaged. Shumilov said, “Captain, forgive me for interrupting, but a fair-sized mob is coming this way.”

No one had been paying attention to the view panels. “Oh, dear me,” Michaels said, or words to that effect.

“I guess that blue guard wasn’t just running away,” Patrice added. Her comment, though less colorful than Michaels’s, was as inadequate.

Blues with torches, blues with clubs, blues with spears were streaming out of Shkenaz toward the Enrico Dandolo. Carver started to worry when he saw locals in bronze helmets: if soldiers were part of the crowd, it all too likely had official sanction. His concern doubled when he saw blues hauling stout timbers of the sort they would think able to batter down the outer cargo bay door, and doubled again when he spotted Baasa near the rear of the mob-official sanction, indeed.

Nadab said, “If you thwart them over me, they will surely turn on my people’s village.” Carver was sure bitter experience informed the greenskin’s words.

“No, they won’t,” Captain Chen ground out. She spoke to Shumilov: “Wait until the front-runners are within fifty meters of the ship, then hit ‘em with the searchlight.”

“Aye, aye.” The weapons officer wasted few words. A minute later, the view panels lit up bright as day. Suddenly the blue’s torches seemed feeble and insignificant, not the frightening harbingers of fury they had been, blazing in the darkness. The locals came to a ragged halt.

Captain Chen clicked on the outside speakers. “Go back to your city,” her amplified voice roared. “The greenskin Nadab is under our protection. We will not let him be harmed.”

That blunt announcement set the blues screaming again. They started to surge forward. The captain said, “Do you need to be reminded of what our weapons can do?” The surge collapsed.

Tradeships had used their guns a couple of times on Ephar. The most recent occasion had been seventy-five years before. After that, imperial authorities forbade attacks on offworlders. They were too expensive to be worthwhile.

But the locals were still anything but happy. “Give us the greenskin!” they shouted. “Let us finish him!” Searchlight or no, weapons or no, the blues hauling the makeshift ram began moving forward.

Captain Chen’s jaw tightened. Carver understood her dilemma. Opening fire on the mob not only would ruin the Enrico Dandolo’s trading mission, it also would cause endless red tape when the ship got back to civilization. Not opening fire, though, would be seen as weakness… and there was always the horrible off chance the locals really could break in. Not every ship got back to civilization to worry about red tape.

While the humans watched the head of the mob, Nadab spotted several blues slipping away from the rear. “As I thought,” he said. “They will avenge me upon my village.”

“What? No, they won’t.” Relieved at finding an action she could take, Captain Chen snapped an order to Shumilov: “Give me a few rounds of tracers. Shoot to miss, but show them they can’t have the greenskins.”

“Tracers, aye.” Machine guns hammered. They made an ideal weapons system on pretechnological worlds, being both raucous and spectacularly lethal. Lines of glowing red reached across the night. The locals abruptly lost interest in going any closer to the greenskin village. The blues with the ram looked to be having second thoughts, too.

Baasa’s retinue pushed through the mob so the local governor could confront the Enrico Dandolo. He seemed dubious about the honor of that, but spoke up as boldly as he could: “Send Nadab the greenskin out to us and we will go home. Having broken our strongest law, he must face justice.”

“No,” was all Captain Chen said.

Carver gestured for the mike. The captain gave it to him. He said. “The toughs outside the village deliberately kept Nadab from returning in good time. What’s more, I’d guess they did so at your orders. Now you say he has broken the law. How do you have the crust to call that justice?”

“It is our ancient way, by which we and the greenskins have always lived. The excuse is nothing, the act all. If Nadab was out of his village, he must atone for his guilt.”

“As I predicted he would say,” Nadab told Carver.

Rage ripped through the black man. He spoke into the microphone again:”It is not our ancient way, and we do not accept it. Go back into Shkenaz; leave us-and Nadab-at peace. You have seen we own the power to enforce our demands. Go back to your homes, all of you. There is nothing for you here.” Carver switched off the mike.

Captain Chen eyed the view panel. Hardly any of the blues outside were going home, but they were not advancing on the Enrico Dandolo, and they were not heading for the greenskin village: the tracers had effectively discouraged that. “Good enough,” the captain said. For Shumilov she added, “Use the guns to keep them where they are, but don’t fire into the mob itself without my order.”

“Aye, aye,” the weapons officer said, and fell silent again. He talked as if he were afraid his pay would be docked for every surplus word he used.

The blues kept milling about without doing anything much except beginning to argue among themselves. “Stalemate,” Captain Chen said, sounding pleased with herself. “Eventually they’ll get bored and leave us alone.” She turned to Nadab. “Where were we when that mess started?”

“They will not get bored. They will not go away,” the greenskin said, in much the same tone, Carver thought, as he would have said, The sun will come up tomorrow. Nadab went on. “As for where we were, I was remarking that the key to our problem lies in the sort of occupations in which we are permitted by law to engage.”

Carver admired the way Nadab instantly repaired the broken thread of conversation. The trader started to tick off greenskin jobs on his fingers: “Scribe, banker, jeweler, shopkeeper-”

“You need not go through the entire catalog,” Nadab said with a sting in his voice that Lloyd Michaels might have envied. “Far simpler to notice what they have in common.”

Again Carver-and, he saw, his companions-danced to the greenskin’s tune. Carver rubbed his chin as he thought. Before anything occurred to him, Patrice said, “We were talking about this a while ago, Jerome, remember? More than any other locals, the greenskins live by their wits.”

“Exactly!” For the first time, Nadab seemed satisfied with the humans he was facing. He spread his hands in an expansive gesture, then let them drop again when no one picked up what was plainly a cue. “Surely you can extrapolate from what you know.”

“We know many things,” Captain Chen said shortly. She was losing patience. Her wave encompassed the control room, which anyone on Ephar was centuries from matching. “What in particular applies to you?”

“When I learned you knew of evolution, I did not think I would have to be so elementary,” Nadab said. So there, Carver thought. The greenskin resumed. “If you are raising livestock and desire a larger beast, what do you do?”

“Breed the largest ones you have to each other.” Michaels gave the obvious answer, sounding as if he were humoring the greenskin. “Then breed the largest of the next generation to each other, and…” His voice trailed away. Carver felt a tingle of something between awe and dread as he saw where Nadab was leading the humans. Michaels was more serious than Carver had ever heard him: “You’re saying this applies to you.”

“How could it not?” Nadab said. Though nothing about him had changed, he suddenly looked vastly different to Carver. The trader would rather have gone on seeing Nadab as a representative of a tormented minority than as the result of an age-long experiment in controlled breeding. Things would have been much more comfortable that way.

“You claim you greenskins have been breeding for brains for all this time?” Captain Chen sounding rattled was as unnerving as Lloyd Michaels being serious.

“Say rather we have been bred for them,” Nadab said. “After the crime of the one we do not name, the restrictions you know were forced upon us. They acted as they had to act, whether we knew of it at the time or not. Those of us who were clever enough to make their way in the face of such difficulties survived and bred; those who were not starved or were killed on account of their stupidity, either by offending the blues or from being caught out after sunset… as I was. Do you doubt now that I am something different from any blue you have known-and from yourselves?”

Before any of the humans could answer, the machine guns’ harsh chatter made them all jump. Tracers stabbed into the night, warning the blues away from the greenskin village again. “I do thank you,” Nadab said, “but how long will you keep that up? All night? A day or two? As long as you are here? Do you think the blues will have forgotten by that time? They have not forgotten us in three thousand years.”

An ancient joke floated into Carver’s mind: If you ‘re so smart, why aren‘t you rich! It rang eerily apt here. The trader said, “If you were what you say you are, Nadab, I’d expect your kind, not the blues, to be masters within the empire.”

Nadab cocked his head; had he had eyebrows, Carver thought, he would have lifted one. “Baasa listened to my advice. After I am gone, he will have another greenskin by his side: we reckon better, we remember better, we pull things together better than any other aides he is likely to find. Do you think him the only city governor who has discovered our usefulness? Do you think the emperors themselves have not?”

“He’s right,” Patrice said softly. “Check the records. Every blue official traders have dealt with has always had a greenskin at his elbow.” From the way she stared at Nadab, she too was seeing him with new eyes.

“Of course,” the greenskin went on, “we also have the advantage of being disposable at need.” Was that bitterness? Somehow Carver doubted it. Nadab sounded altogether matter-of-fact. Alien, the trader thought.

“Let’s say you do rule behind the scenes.” Captain Chen had recovered her briskness, to Carver’s relief. She reached a hand toward Nadab as if to pull the answer to her next question from him. “Why, then, haven’t you people used your position of power to better your lot and get rid of the burdens you suffer under?”

Nadab drew back a pace; his tail switched up and down, a gesture of dismay. “Because we do not wish to, and we must not. We have been atoning for the nameless one’s crime all these years by making ourselves into a people that will not act so stupidly as he did. If there were no longer pressure to force wisdom upon us, we would fall back into sloth and ease, and cease to improve ourselves.”

“That’s the craziest-” Lloyd Michaels began, but stopped before he finished the sentence. Carver understood: from the greenskins’ point of view, what Nadab was saying was perfectly logical. And intelligence was not always what set basic premises; it only worked from them.

Carver understood something else as well. “That’s why you were going to butcher the science books Baasa bought from me. If the blues catch on to evolution, they may realize what you’ve become.”

“What we are becoming,” Nadab corrected gravely. “But yes, you are in essence correct. I doubt they would approve.” Even in Trade English, the greenskin had a gift for understatement.

“How can you presume to speak for all your people?” Captain Chen demanded. “What of those who do not care to be persecuted for the sake of an ancient crime? Don’t they want us to do whatever we can to lighten their load?”

“You humans have been coming to the empire for two hundred years now, your reckoning. In that time, how many greenskins have sought such aid from you?”

“None.” The captain did not sound happy about admitting it. Nadab let the silence grow behind that solitary word.

The tracers punctuated it. The humans jumped again. Nadab repeated quietly, “How long will you keep that up?”

“What would you have us do?” Captain Chen’s voice was no louder.

“Open a door and let me out.”

“No!” Patrice and Michaels spoke at the same time, while Carver said, “They’ll kill you out there.” Captain Chen said only, “You know what the consequences will be if we do that. Why do you want us to?”

“The consequences for me will be bad in any case. My life is forfeit now all through the empire, and I do not care to live outside it. Would you take me to your world with you? Being a curiosity there, the only one of my kind, has no appeal. So I count myself doomed, come what may. I do not wish my village, and perhaps greenskin villages all through the empire, to be injured on my account.”

The captain spoke to the air. “Shumilov, are you listening to this?”

“Aye.” The weapons officer’s voice was machine-flat. “Comments?”

A moment’s pause, then Shumilov said. “He’s right.”

Captain Chen made a sour face. She turned back to Nadab and repeated, “You know what will happen to you out there.”

“Yes: the same as would have happened had I let the blue guards have their sport with me at sunset.”

“You don’t want to five,” Carver said harshly.

“Of course I do. Who does not? Why would I have run for your ship here when you cried out if I did not want to live? I thought you were giving me a new option, one none of my people ever had before. But”-the greenskin waved at the view panel that showed the mob of blues- “I see that is not so. I was wrong.”

He sounded so downcast at the admission that Michaels asked, “Do you want to go out there and die just to punish yourself for making a mistake?” At first Carver thought his fellow trader was letting his sardonic imagination run away with him; then, looking at Nadab, he wondered if Michaels hadn’t hit it dead center.

All Nadab said, though, was, “My people are more important than I am. I have my duty to them. You outlanders have a word for the concept; do you not recognize it?”

Carver winced. So did Captain Chen. She said, “I have another duty also: not to send anyone out to certain death.”

“You do not send me. You merely let me go. And if you do not, you condemn the greenskins in my village and others you have never seen to a fate worse than mine.”

Anastas Shumilov fired off another burst, the longest one yet. “They’re getting harder to convince,” he remarked.

“You may also end up slaughtering a good many blues who have done you no harm,” Nadab said.

“How can you sympathize with them!” Carver said. “After all they’ve done to your people-”

“They are the instruments of our improvement,” the greenskin said mildly. “Does the raw clay hate the kiln that burns it to make it into a vase?” Nadab swung his unwinking eyes to Captain Chen. “Now will you let me do as I must do?”

“Damn you.” The captain turned on the control board as if it were an enemy and stabbed a button with wholly unnecessary violence. The door to the stairwell that led down to the cargo bay slid open.

Captain Chen said nothing more. If Nadab’s so smart, Carver thought, let him figure that out for himself. He was; he did. Without hesitation, he started down the stairs. His voice floated up after him: “My people are in your debt.”

“Oh, shut up,” the captain muttered. She watched Nadab’s progress on the ship’s internal monitor. He went straight to the cargo bay’s outer door. Captain Chen made him wait several minutes. At last, still shaking her head, she let the door rise.

The outside mikes picked up the roar the blues let out when they saw Nadab. It sent atavistic chills racing up Carver’s spine; though he had never seen one, his glands scream lion. The instant Nadab was outside the ship, Captain Chen sent the cargo bay door slamming shut.

Like the tide rolling in, the blues surged forward. Nadab did not die tamely. He sprinted for the greenskin village like an antelope trying to break through a hundred prides of big cats. He still had that one chance in ten billion of winning freedom.

He never got fifty meters from the Enrico Dandolo. The blues dragged him down and took their vengeance on him-and then on his corpse-for his presumption. Carver made himself watch it all, even when the flames sprang up. His only consolation by then was that Nadab could not possibly be feeling what was going on any more.

Once they were done amusing themselves with Nadab-or once there was nothing left to amuse themselves with-some blues started for the greenskin village. Quite without orders (in itself unheard of before) Shumilov fired a burst to warn them back. To his credit-not that any human was ready to give him much-Baasa had the Shkenaz garrison keep the mob away. At last the blues began drifting back toward the city.

“Poor bastards,” Michaels grunted. “Some of ‘em’ll be all tired tomorrow from working so late tonight.”

Carver threw himself into a chair buried his face in his hands. Patrice touched his shoulder. “You did everything you could, Jerome,” she said gently. “You cannot blame yourselves that things here are different from what we thought. What can you do for people who have their own reasons, ones they find good, for not wanting their lot to change?”

He sat and thought about that for a long time. He knew that Patrice meant the answer to her question to be nothing, and that she had spoken mostly to lift him from his gloom. He was grateful to her for that. But her words sparked something in him that perhaps had not occurred to her.

He got up and went to his cabin. When he came back, he was carrying a large, fat codex.”What do you have there?” Captain Chen asked.

“An astronomy text based on Kepler and Newton. I intended to use it as a follow-up to the Galileo; it has the math to carry the blues forward from there.”

“Intended?” Not for the first time, Carver remembered that Lloyd Michaels was too good a trader to let much get past him. “What will you do with it now?”

Carver threw the book down the disposal chute. “Call it a last favor for Nadab,” he said. He walked out of the control room again.