She sighed, rewrapped the figurines, and put them in her strongbox. One of these days, she told herself?most likely, just about the time when she would start forgetting her Middle English.
No, that was unfair. She loved the old language?although perhaps it wasn't older, she thought, surprised, than Gazar's hunting epic?and kept fresh her command of it. Fiche and a reader even a journeyman could easily afford.
She settled in with her scientific detective. This tale, part of what was called his memoirs, had to do with horse racing. Jennifer had seen a great many alien beasts on her trading runs, but never a horse. She had to struggle to work out from context what several of the words in the story meant; she was always rediscovering how large a vocabulary Middle English had. Even so, as she usually did, she got the gist of the piece and smiled at finding an exchange that had passed straight into Spanglish.
"'Is there any point to which you would wish to draw my attention?'
" 'To the curious incident of the dog in the nighttime.'
" 'The dog did nothing in the nighttime.'
" 'That was the curious incident,' remarked Sherlock Holmes."
She finished "The Silver Blaze," loaded the fiche Oxford English Dictionary into the reader so she could look up a few words that had completely baffled her. But her mind kept going back to the dog that had not done anything. She frowned, trying to figure out why.
Then her eyes got wide. She reached under the bunk for her strongbox. She got out the two figurines she had just bought from Gazar. She looked from one of them to the other, then slowly nodded. This had to be how Holmes felt when all the pieces fell together. She quoted him again. "When you have eliminated the impossible, whatever remains, however improbable, must be the truth."
"Excuse me, Master Merchant." Jennifer had to say it three times before Celia Rodriguez noticed her. She didn't mind; she was used to that.
Finally Rodriguez looked up from her computer screen. "You want something, Jennifer?" She sounded surprised. Jennifer didn't mind that, either. She usually kept a low profile.
"Yes, I think so, Master Merchant. That is, I think I may know why this forest is shrinking."
Rodriguez slammed a meaty hand down on the panel in front of her. "Well, if you do, that's more than anyone else does. And I haven't seen you doing anything in the way of trying to find out, either. So how do you know? Divine inspiration?"
"No. I?I?" Jennifer had to work to keep her voice audible in the face of such daunting sarcasm. "I?I got the idea from a Middle English book I was reading."
The master merchant groaned. "Jennifer, I don't begrudge anyone a hobby. Tranh Nguyen keeps trying to beat the computer at chess. He'll keep trying till he's 105, if he lives that long. Me, I like to knit. That's even useful, every now and then. I've traded things I've made for more than they're worth. You have your ancient books. They're harmless, I suppose. But what can they possibly have to do with why this forest tract on Athet is getting smaller?"
"It's?a way of thinking. But never mind that now. You're right, Master Merchant, I haven't done much work on the problem till now. I'm sorry. But can you tell me if you have maps that show the boundaries of the forest from a long time ago? Long before we first landed here, I mean: back when the Atheters were first settling this territory."
"I think so, yes." Rodriguez fiddled with the computer. A map appeared on the screen, replacing the chart she had been studying. "As best we can tell now, this is the size of the forest about fifteen hundred local years ago. It started declining then, slowly at first, but more and more rapidly in the past millennium. The process was well under way when humans came here, for reasons we still can't fathom?no great climatic changes, no shifts in the nature of the soil, nothing."
The master merchant checked herself, glanced sourly at Jennifer. "Oh, I'm so sorry. Now you know why, out of your antique books. Enlighten me, please."
Jennifer took a deep breath. If she was wrong now, the fitness report Rodriguez turned in on her would make it next to impossible for her to fly again. After not getting a fair shot at one career, the prospect of washing out of another frightened her more than she was willing to admit, even to herself.
"I think it was?" She spoke so softly that Rodriguez had to lean forward to hear what she was saying. She involuntarily yelped, "?the omphoth."
"The omphoth?" The master merchant looked disgusted. "You come in here, waste my time with this foolishness when I have serious work to do? The omphoth," she said, as if to an idiot child, "have been extinct for a thousand years. You were the one who found that out. How can something that isn't here any more have anything to do with conditions now?"
"By not being here," Jennifer said. Rodriguez snorted and turned back toward the computer screen. "No, wait!" Jennifer said desperately. "The forests really started shrinking a thousand years ago?you said so yourself. And the Atheters here finished wiping out the omphoth a thousand years ago. Don't you think there's a connection?"
"Coincidence," Rodriguez snorted. But she did look at Jennifer again. Now she might have been talking to a clever child. "Be reasonable. The Atheters got rid of the omphoth because they kept eating up the forest. So why is it shrinking now that they're gone?"
"Yes, they ate the trees," Jennifer agreed. "They even ate the horrible fruits that the Atheters can't stand, that none of the animals that are still around want anything to do with. What happens to the fruits that fall to the ground now?"
"They sprout, of course."
"Yes." Jennifer nodded eagerly. She was so full of her idea, she was almost fluent. "They sprout. They sprout under the trees that dropped them in the rain-forest gloom. Not many grow up, and the ones that do only grow up in the same place trees had always been."
"So what do the omphoth have to do with any of that? If they eat those fruits, they digest them, don't they? That gets rid of them a lot more thoroughly than trying to grow in the shade."
"They digest the fruit, yes, but what about the seeds inside?" Jennifer asked. "Lots of plants on lots of worlds disperse their seeds by passing them through animals' guts. I looked that up when I first wondered if there was any connection between the omphoth disappearing and the forest shrinking back."
"Do they? Did you?" Now, at last, Celia Rodriguez began to seem interested.
"Yes. It makes sense here, too, in ecological terms. It really does, Master Rodriguez. The omphoth ate fruit nothing else here likes at all. Doesn't that probably mean they and the trees evolved together? The trees provided them a special food and in return they disseminated the seeds inside. And so when they disappeared, the seeds didn't get disseminated any more, and that's what I think has made this tract of forest get smaller."
"Hmm." The master merchant pulled out her lower lip, then let it snap back with a soft plop. "You've done your homework on this, haven't you?"
"Of course I have, Master Rodriguez." Jennifer knew she sounded surprised. If she was good at anything, it was research.
"Hmm," Celia Rodriguez said again. "Well, what do we do even if you're right? The omphoth are extinct. We don't have a time machine to bring them back."
"Ooh." It was like a blow in the belly?Jennifer hadn't thought that far ahead.