"That's true," Jennifer said. "I wouldn't feel right if we'd brought them here just to have them killed off."
"No." Sam gave Jennifer an admiring look. She hardly noticed it; she was used to admiring looks from men, and used to discounting them, too. But this one proved different from most. "That was a lovely piece of analysis you did, Jennifer, working out the connection between the extinction of the old omphoth and the trouble the forest was having."
She felt her cheeks heat with pleasure. "Oh. Thank you very much."
"I ought to thank you, for bumping up our profits, and I suppose for the Atheters, too. How did you ever work out that the omphoth passed the seeds through their intestinal tracts and then out again?"
"That? It was?" Jennifer paused, knowing he wouldn't understand?he was just a merchant, after all, not a scholar of Middle English. She found she didn't care. "It was alimentary, my dear Watson."
IV
Ali Bakhtiar glanced toward the clock. A dark, arched eyebrow rose. "Isn't your first class at 0930, Jennifer? You're going to be late."
"I'm almost ready." Jennifer made sure one last time that she had all her notes. She took a couple of deep breaths, as if she were going to start lecturing then and there. "I hope the hall's well miked. My voice just isn't big enough to carry well by itself."
Bakhtiar smiled encouragingly. "You'll do fine." When he looked at the clock again, the smile faded. "But you'd better get moving."
"Here I go." Jennifer ran a hand through her long, blond hair. "Do I look all right?"
"That is a foolish question. You know you look wonderful." He stepped forward to kiss her; his hand slid down her back to cup her left buttock. He pulled her closer. The kiss went on and on.
Finally she twisted away. "You were the one who said I'd be late," she reminded him. She knew her looks drew men to her; she found that a nuisance as often as she enjoyed it. Living with Ali Bakhtiar the past year had at least given her an anchor. Seeing her on his arm kept a fair number of other men?not all, but a fair number?from pestering her. Even so, there were times when she wished she was still trading with aliens, to whom she was as peculiar as they were to her. It made life simpler.
But as she strode out of the apartment she and Bakhtiar shared, that sometimes-wish vanished. This would be her third semester of teaching Middle English science fiction at Saugus Central University. She still had trouble believing that, after close to ten years traveling the wilder reaches of the local arm of the galaxy, she actually had the academic job she'd wanted all along.
Sometimes you'd rather be lucky than good, she thought as she hurried toward and then across the university campus. She'd been about to set out on yet another trading run when word of the opening at Saugus Central came over the data net. The post would have been long filled by the time she got back, which meant she would have left on one more mission still, just to put more credit in her account. By the time the next job opening appeared, she might have been nearing master-trader status. Master trader was all very well?after some years of trading, she knew it was a title that had to be earned?but she much preferred putting assistant professor in front of her name.
Saugus was a good planet for hurrying. The weather here in the foothills was cool and crisp, the gravity was only about.85 standard, and the air held a little more oxygen than human beings had evolved to breathe. The clock in the classroom said 0929 when she stepped through the door. She grinned to herself. Being late on the first day didn't make a prof look good.
She got to the podium just as the clock clicked to 0930. "Good morning. I'm Dr. Logan," she said?she didn't believe in wasting time. "This is Middle English 217: Twentieth-century Science Fiction." Someone got up and left in a hurry. In the wrong room, Jennifer thought. Other students tittered.
"Can you all hear me?" Jennifer asked. Everyone nodded, even the students in the back of the hall. The miking was all right, then. Her voice was so light and breathy that it needed all the help it could get.
"All right. This course is part language, part literature. As you'll have noticed when you were registering, beginning and intermediate Middle English are prerequisites. Don't forget, the documents we'll be reading are a thousand years old. If you think you'll be able to get through them with just your everyday Spanglish, or even with an ordinary translation program, you can think again."
Someone else, a girl this time, walked out the door shaking her head. Jennifer felt the eyes of the rest of the class upon her. Most students muttered their notes into recorders with hush-mikes. A few stroked typers or scribbled on paper in the ancient fashion; in every class, she'd found people who remembered better when they wrote things down.
A couple of male students hadn't started taking notes at all. She could tell what was in their minds as well as if she were telepathic. It annoyed her. No only were they boys by her reckoning, but she'd been places and faced challenges they could hardly imagine. She knew they didn't care what she'd done. To them, she was only an attractively shaped piece of meat. That annoyed her even more.
She sighed to herself and went on, "That's not to say you won't find words?a lot of words?that look familiar. A lot of Spanglish vocabulary can be traced back to roots in Middle English. That's especially true of Middle English science fiction. Many, in fact most, of our modern terms relating to spaceflight come from those first coined by science-fiction writers. Remarkably, most of those coinages were made before the technology for actual spaceflight existed. I want you to think for a moment of the implications of that, and to think about the leap of imagination those writers were taking."
Some of them made the mental effort, she saw. She knew they were doomed to failure. Imagining what humanity had been like before spaceflight was as hard for them as willing oneself into the mind of an ancient Sumerian would have been for an ordinary citizen of the twentieth century.
She held up a sheet of paper. "I want to talk about the books we'll be reading this semester," she said. The back door to the lecture hall opened. She frowned. This was one of the times she wished she had a deep, booming voice. She hated latecomers interrupting her when she'd already started lecturing. She began, "I hope you'll be on time for our next?" but stopped with the complaint only half-spoken. The new students were not human.
The whole room grew quiet when the three of them walked in. They were dark blue and on the shaggy side. The door was more than two meters high, but they had to stoop to get under the lintel. The door was more than a meter wide, but they had to turn sideways to go through it. Their faces had short muzzles and impressive teeth.
"What species are they?" a student in the front row asked the fellow next to her. He shrugged and shook his head. Likely neither of them had ever been off Saugus before, Jennifer thought.
She knew the aliens' race. Of all the places she would never have expected to meet Foitani, though, a Middle English class on a human-settled planet of no particular importance to anyone ten light-years away came close to topping the list. Maybe, she thought, they were looking for the engineering department instead. She called, "How may I help you, Foitani?"
The three big blue creatures cocked their heads to one side, listening to the translators each wore. One of them answered, speaking softly in his own rumbling language. His translator turned the words to Spanglish. "Apologies for tardiness, honored instructor. We concede the fault is ours; we will yield any forfeit your customs require."