Departures

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 then-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 ca

“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?”

“Your Excellency, who is esteemed throughout the empire for his generosity, is pleased to joke with me.” Carver was appalled for a couple of reasons. The first was the paltry offer. The translations had not come cheap; fifteen measures of bulun powder would not begin to pay off what they had cost him.

Even Lloyd Michaels, who had kept out of his fellow trader’s dicker till then, was moved to protest, “Surely savants throughout the empire should have the chance to learn of these ideas for themselves.”

“And you, your Excellency,” Carver said to Baasa, “and your assistant deserve the credit you will gain for being the first to pass this new knowledge on to your people.”

Baasa swung his head Nadab’s way. Nadab said quickly, “I deserve no credit. I am but a greenskin. All that I have I owe to my lord the governor. Without him I am as nothing, nor do I seek any acclaim for aiding him, in any way I can.”

The hell of it was, Carver thought, that he sounded as if he meant it. He would have been much easier to deal with were he only mouthing polite phrases.

Nadab’s self-effacement out of the way, Baasa proved a little more interested in dealing. He upped his offer to eight measures of bulun powder a book, then to ten, which was about half what Carver needed to break even. When at last he got up above ten measures, the haggling turned serious.

Baasa said, “Twelve measures, then, and four parts, and three parts of parts.”

“Twelve and three-quarters, by your reckoning,” Nadab said to Carver while the trader was still wrestling with the fraction that needed converting. He ruefully shook his head and stuck his calculator in his hip pocket. If Nadab felt like showing off, that was fine with Carver.