3 x T

Gazar's crest rose. His tail thrashed. "Your people will be buying many omphoth-ivory pieces, you say?"

Je

"And if I do get them, you will trade those offworld goods to me?" The Atheter's golden eyes were big and yellow as twin full moons.

"Certainly," Je

Gazar winced. "Now I understand why your teeth are so small, merchant from the stars?your sharp tongue long ago sliced off their points." He displayed his own formidable set of ivory.

"From you, I will take that as a compliment," Je

"I meant it as one," Gazar said. "You must understand me, even with advance notice I doubt I will be able to get a great many pieces. Omphoth ivory has become rare enough over the years that most of it, now, is in the treasury of one treelord or another. Still, some may be persuaded to fall from the branch."

"I hope so." Je

"I'm glad you escaped. Still, that shows the folly of going down to the ground, does it not?"

"Not what I meant." Je

The Atheter made a horrible face. "Not even the crawlers in the leaves would want them. Our trees are wonderful. They are our lives, they are our livelihoods, they are our homes. But we do not eat their fruits. They taste dreadful."

"Oh. All right." Je

"A few," Gazar said grudgingly, as if making an enormous concession. "Most, though, are truly foul?better for weapons, as you saw, than for food."

"You know best, I'm sure." Je

"So do I," Gazar said. "My mate is pregnant with a new set of twins, and I expect we will need a larger house after they are born. The more offworld goods I get from you, the sooner I can buy it. Maybe I will buy a slave or two as well."

Je

As she walked back to Pacific Overtures this time, she kept a wary eye on the treetops. When a big fruit crashed down into the bushes, maybe fifty meters off to her left, she almost jumped out of her skin. No missiles came any closer than that, though, for which she was duly grateful.

Back at the ship, she gave herself the luxury of a few seconds of gloating. A small private hoard of omphoth ivory couldn't help but improve her credit rating when she got back to civilization. A large private hoard would be nicer yet, but she knew she lacked the resources to get her hands on one.

Maybe next trip out, she'd score that really big coup… She stopped in dismay. That was thinking too much like a trader to suit her. If she got a decent stake out of this run, she'd be able to afford to look for an academic job.

"And if I land one," she said aloud, "I'll never again go to a world that doesn't have an automated information retrieval system."

Pleased at that promise to herself, she dug out her reader and returned to twentieth?or was it nineteenth??century London. The more stories she read about this detective, the more she wanted to read. That surprised her; the fellow who wrote them had also turned out a lot of bad science fiction. But the detective and his amanuensis lived and breathed. These tales were what the writer should have been doing all along, instead of wasting his time on things he wasn't good at.

She put down the reader and fought back angry tears. What was she doing aboard Pacific Overtures except wasting her time on things she wasn't good at?

Tranh Nguyen made as if to bang his head against the corridor wall. "I don't know why the forest is shrinking," he growled. "As far as I can tell, the soil in the grasslands is the same as the soil where the trees still grow. It has the same mineral content, the same little wormy things crawling through it, the same everything."

"Not the same everything." Celia Rodriguez shook her head. "It doesn't have trees on it any more. We still have to find out why."

"Excuse me," Je

Neither master merchant paid any attention to her. Tranh Nguyen said, "I know we have to, but I'm not sure we can. I do what the computer tells me to do, I compare the results of one sample to those from another, but if nothing obvious shows up, I'm stuck. I can't make the intuitive leap?I'm a trader, after all, not an agronomist who might see more than is in the computer program."

"Excuse me," Je

"An agronomist!" Rodriguez clapped a hand to her forehead. "As if we could afford to haul an agronomist all the way out here! As if we could find an agronomist crazy enough to want to come! We have to be able to do this kind of work for ourselves, because if we don't, no one will."

"I know that as well as you do," Tranh Nguyen said. "Why carry the big computer library, except to make sure we can do a little of everything? A little of everything, though, Celia, not everything. We may really need a specialist here. Right now, I'm stymied."

"Excuse me," Je

Celia Rodriguez finally noticed she was there. She stepped out of the way. "Why didn't you say something?" she demanded.

Je

Sometimes she wished she were chunky and hard-featured like Celia Rodriguez instead of slim and curved and possessed of an i

She let herself into her cubicle and closed the door after her. That cut off most of the noise from the corridor, where Rodriguez and Tranh Nguyen were still arguing. She carefully took off her backpack and set it on the floor. Then, gri

When she was done bouncing, she got up again and opened the backpack. Inside, wrapped in a square of thick, native, printed cloth that was a minor work of art in itself, lay two fine omphoth-ivory figurines. One was a carving of an Atheter; but for its age, Je