Departures (47 page)

“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 their 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?”