Departures (49 page)

“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 in
deed 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 it. 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 Dan-dob
. 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 naïveté. 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.