Departures (50 page)

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.”