Departures (48 page)

“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, outlander, 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 than 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.”