Departures

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 ru

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-ru

“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 a

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 begi

“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 u

“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?”