Departures

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.”

Nadab cocked his head; had he had eyebrows, Carver thought, he would have lifted one. “Baasa listened to my advice. After I am gone, he will have another greenskin by his side: we reckon better, we remember better, we pull things together better than any other aides he is likely to find. Do you think him the only city governor who has discovered our usefulness? Do you think the emperors themselves have not?”

“He’s right,” Patrice said softly. “Check the records. Every blue official traders have dealt with has always had a greenskin at his elbow.” From the way she stared at Nadab, she too was seeing him with new eyes.

“Of course,” the greenskin went on, “we also have the advantage of being disposable at need.” Was that bitterness? Somehow Carver doubted it. Nadab sounded altogether matter-of-fact. Alien, the trader thought.

“Let’s say you do rule behind the scenes.” Captain Chen had recovered her briskness, to Carver’s relief. She reached a hand toward Nadab as if to pull the answer to her next question from him. “Why, then, haven’t you people used your position of power to better your lot and get rid of the burdens you suffer under?”

Nadab drew back a pace; his tail switched up and down, a gesture of dismay. “Because we do not wish to, and we must not. We have been atoning for the nameless one’s crime all these years by making ourselves into a people that will not act so stupidly as he did. If there were no longer pressure to force wisdom upon us, we would fall back into sloth and ease, and cease to improve ourselves.”

“That’s the craziest-” Lloyd Michaels began, but stopped before he finished the sentence. Carver understood: from the greenskins’ point of view, what Nadab was saying was perfectly logical. And intelligence was not always what set basic premises; it only worked from them.

Carver understood something else as well. “That’s why you were going to butcher the science books Baasa bought from me. If the blues catch on to evolution, they may realize what you’ve become.”

“What we are becoming,” Nadab corrected gravely. “But yes, you are in essence correct. I doubt they would approve.” Even in Trade English, the greenskin had a gift for understatement.

“How can you presume to speak for all your people?” Captain Chen demanded. “What of those who do not care to be persecuted for the sake of an ancient crime? Don’t they want us to do whatever we can to lighten their load?”

“You humans have been coming to the empire for two hundred years now, your reckoning. In that time, how many greenskins have sought such aid from you?”

“None.” The captain did not sound happy about admitting it. Nadab let the silence grow behind that solitary word.

The tracers punctuated it. The humans jumped again. Nadab repeated quietly, “How long will you keep that up?”

“What would you have us do?” Captain Chen’s voice was no louder.

“Open a door and let me out.”

“No!” Patrice and Michaels spoke at the same time, while Carver said, “They’ll kill you out there.” Captain Chen said only, “You know what the consequences will be if we do that. Why do you want us to?”

“The consequences for me will be bad in any case. My life is forfeit now all through the empire, and I do not care to live outside it. Would you take me to your world with you? Being a curiosity there, the only one of my kind, has no appeal. So I count myself doomed, come what may. I do not wish my village, and perhaps greenskin villages all through the empire, to be injured on my account.”

The captain spoke to the air. “Shumilov, are you listening to this?”

“Aye.” The weapons officer’s voice was machine-flat. “Comments?”

A moment’s pause, then Shumilov said. “He’s right.”

Captain Chen made a sour face. She turned back to Nadab and repeated, “You know what will happen to you out there.”

“Yes: the same as would have happened had I let the blue guards have their sport with me at sunset.”

“You don’t want to five,” Carver said harshly.

“Of course I do. Who does not? Why would I have run for your ship here when you cried out if I did not want to live? I thought you were giving me a new option, one none of my people ever had before. But”-the greenskin waved at the view panel that showed the mob of blues- “I see that is not so. I was wrong.”

He sounded so downcast at the admission that Michaels asked, “Do you want to go out there and die just to punish yourself for making a mistake?” At first Carver thought his fellow trader was letting his sardonic imagination run away with him; then, looking at Nadab, he wondered if Michaels hadn’t hit it dead center.

All Nadab said, though, was, “My people are more important than I am. I have my duty to them. You outlanders have a word for the concept; do you not recognize it?”

Carver winced. So did Captain Chen. She said, “I have another duty also: not to send anyone out to certain death.”

“You do not send me. You merely let me go. And if you do not, you condemn the greenskins in my village and others you have never seen to a fate worse than mine.”

Anastas Shumilov fired off another burst, the longest one yet. “They’re getting harder to convince,” he remarked.

“You may also end up slaughtering a good many blues who have done you no harm,” Nadab said.

“How can you sympathize with them!” Carver said. “After all they’ve done to your people-”

“They are the instruments of our improvement,” the greenskin said mildly. “Does the raw clay hate the kiln that burns it to make it into a vase?” Nadab swung his unwinking eyes to Captain Chen. “Now will you let me do as I must do?”

“Damn you.” The captain turned on the control board as if it were an enemy and stabbed a button with wholly u

Captain Chen said nothing more. If Nadab’s so smart, Carver thought, let him figure that out for himself. He was; he did. Without hesitation, he started down the stairs. His voice floated up after him: “My people are in your debt.”

“Oh, shut up,” the captain muttered. She watched Nadab’s progress on the ship’s internal monitor. He went straight to the cargo bay’s outer door. Captain Chen made him wait several minutes. At last, still shaking her head, she let the door rise.

The outside mikes picked up the roar the blues let out when they saw Nadab. It sent atavistic chills racing up Carver’s spine; though he had never seen one, his glands scream lion. The instant Nadab was outside the ship, Captain Chen sent the cargo bay door slamming shut.

Like the tide rolling in, the blues surged forward. Nadab did not die tamely. He sprinted for the greenskin village like an antelope trying to break through a hundred prides of big cats. He still had that one chance in ten billion of wi

He never got fifty meters from the Enrico Dandolo. The blues dragged him down and took their vengeance on him-and then on his corpse-for his presumption. Carver made himself watch it all, even when the flames sprang up. His only consolation by then was that Nadab could not possibly be feeling what was going on any more.

Once they were done amusing themselves with Nadab-or once there was nothing left to amuse themselves with-some blues started for the greenskin village. Quite without orders (in itself unheard of before) Shumilov fired a burst to warn them back. To his credit-not that any human was ready to give him much-Baasa had the Shkenaz garrison keep the mob away. At last the blues began drifting back toward the city.