Departures (51 page)

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 live,” 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.

Sooner or later just about everybody tries his hand at writing a bar story. This one’s mine. It may also be of interest because it introduces the Foitani, who play such a prominent role in
Earthgrip
(Del Rey: New York, 1991). They aren’t an entirely pleasant people, but given their history, they could hardly be expected to be.

ONLY HUMANS, AND NOT MANY OF THEM, KNOW
why my favorite bar is called Hobbes’. That doesn’t mean humans are the only people who go in, though, not by a long shot. Humans are spread thin out here, a couple of thousand light-years from home. The night I’m thinking of, I was the only one in the place.

“What’ll it be, Walt?” Raoul L’évesque’s number-two bartender asked me when I came in. (No, Hobbes’ isn’t named for the owner, obviously.)

“Something nasty, brutish, and short,” I told him.
(That’s
why it’s called Hobbes’, and knowing it’s worth a free drink.)

“Tequila and mor-fruit?” Joe suggested. He knows me. He reached for the tequila with one hand, the mor-fruit (it’s called that, I suppose, because it’s
mor
or less like lime) with another, and the saltshaker with another. That left one free to wave at somebody who’d come in behind me. (I told you I was the only human in the place.)

While I was licking the salt off the web of my thumb, I looked around to see who—or what—was in Hobbes’ this time. There were three or four tables full of Joe’s people: not surprising, since Rapti, the planet under this space station, was Joe’s homeworld. It was early yet, but a couple of them looked about ready to slide under their tables. (That’s what they get for being four-fisted drinkers.)

An Atheter was already swinging from the chandelier. She was good at it. Atheters live in trees when they’re at home, and they have prehensile tails. This one waved an empty glass at Joe and screeched for a refill.

A couple of Egnants put their credit cards in the music ma
chine, one after the other. Raucous noise started blaring, loud enough to drown out even the Atheter.

I walked over to the machine, saw how much they’d paid, and used my own plastic to outbid them for quiet. They let their lips skin back from their teeth, but cheered up again when I bought them drinks. Egnants aren’t hard to deal with unless you try to talk about religion.

I sneezed when I sat back down at the bar. Joe’s ears twitched in surprise. “What kind of noise is that?” he asked.

“I’ve got the edge of a cold—a small sickness humans get,” I said, disgusted at the way the worlds worked. They keep saying they’ll have a cure for colds Real Soon Now. I’ll believe it when I see it; they’ve been saying that since before humans got off Terra. Greenbelly fever is dead as smallpox now, because it killed people and they threw research money at it till it went away. Colds are just nuisances. It’s hard to get excited enough about a nuisance to get rid of it.

I ordered a beer to chase the tequila, took a sip, looked around some more. What would have been the second sip stopped halfway to my mouth. Off in a corner by him/her/itself sat a person whose species I didn’t recognize, and I’ve seen a lot of them.

“Where’s that one from?” I asked Joe. (Bartenders know everything. It’s part of their job. If you don’t believe me, just ask one.)

“Who?”

“The big blue one back there over my right shoulder.” I didn’t point at the person. You never can tell what gesture will offend somebody.

“Oh, him? He’s a Foitan.”

“No kidding!” Now I really had to work to keep from staring. “I thought they were extinct.”

A lot of worlds in this part of space, Rapti among them, had Foitani artifacts; they were on the edges of what had been a really big Foitani empire maybe thirty, fifty thousand years ago. Then the really big empire fought a
really
big civil war. There are a lot of dead worlds in this part of space, too, and the Foitani killed most of them.

“So did we, until maybe fifty years ago,” Joe said. “Then they started showing up every so often, traders mostly, but archaeologists, too. They only have a few planets now, and they’re interested in their glory days.”

I shivered a little. “Where’s their homeworld? Do you know?”

“About as far from here toward galactic center as yours is away from it.”

I shivered again, not a little this time. If the Foitani Empire had reached across thousands of light-years, how big
had
that war been? How many more dead worlds lay inside that sphere? More than I wanted to think about, I was certain. Not even humans were stupid on that scale.

I found myself walking back toward the Foitan. Tequila always makes me reckless. “Excuse me,” I said. “May I buy you another of whatever you are drinking?”

The Foitan had a bug by its ear. It looked like a Rapti bug, which meant it ought to handle Spanglish. It did. The Foitan said something in a language I didn’t recognize, but my own bug did. I heard, “Thank you, if I may do the same for you.”

I waved to Joe, pointed at my beer and the bottle in front of the Foitan, held up a finger. Joe waved back; he’d seen me. “May I join you?” I asked the Foitan, nodding toward a chair across from him.

By the way of answer, he pushed the chair out with his foot so I could sit. My legs wouldn’t have been long enough for that, but then, what I could see of the Foitan was a lot bigger than I was. He looked more or less humanoid, but only the biggest battleball players would have seemed like anything but children next to him. His face reminded me of what people might have looked like if they’d come from bears—blue bears—instead of apes: nasty, brutish, and tall, you might say. Actually, that’s not fair. He was pretty impressive.