“Goodbye,” Reatur said. Irv tried to read emotion in his voice and failed. In Reatur’s grip, the babies made noise. Reatur paid no attention to it, so Irv supposed it was the kind of noise baby Minervans were supposed to make.
“Come on,” the anthropologist said. The three humans left the females’ chambers through the room where most of Reatur’s-spouses? again Irv found himself stuck for a word-were still amusing themselves.
The females came crowding round, as full of curiosity as before. Irv was glad he could neither understand nor answer their questions.
Outside Reatur’s castle stood three all-terrain bicycles. They could go places a four-wheeled vehicle could not, and six of them weighed a lot less than a rover would have. “I’m going back to the ship,” Pat said, climbing aboard hers. “I want to get these pictures developed.”
“I just want to get away and think for a while,” Sarah said. She pedaled down the curved track that ran through Reatur’s fields. Her breath streamed out behind her like a frosty scarf.
Irv hesitated. “Which way are you heading?” Pat asked.
“Want to ride along with me?”
“I think I’d better see to Sarah.”
“She’ll be all right.”
“I know. Even so, though-“ He left the words hanging and started after his wife.
“Ah, well, see you later, then,” Pat called to his retreating back. When he did not answer, she slowly rode off toward Athena.
“I didn’t understand that, Valery Aleksandrovich,” Tolmasov said. “Ask Fralk to say it again.” “He said-“ Bryusov began.
The colonel raised a hand. “I thought you understood it. I want to make sure I do, too, and if you translate for me all the time, how can I?” Having decided to learn Minervan, Tolmasov was throwing himself into the project with his usual dogged persistence.
“Again, please,” Bryusov said in the best Minervan he could muster.
“Slowly,” Tolmasov added. That was one word he had used often enough to feel confident about it.
“You give me-“ Fralk pointed to the hatchets, hammers, and other tools the Russians had brought for trade goods. “Some l give Hogram, he-“ The word that followed was unfamiliar to Tolmasov. He looked at Bryusov.
“Trade, I think,” the linguist said doubtfully. “Maybe context will make it clearer.” He turned back to Fralk. “Go on.”
“Hogram, he-“ That word again. “Then he use what he get to get you things. Some things you give me, I not give Hogram. I”-and again-“them myself. Some of what I get for them, I keep and save. Some I use to get other things; them, to get more things. Some I use to get you things you want.”
“Not ‘trade,’ “Tolmasov exclaimed. “I know what that word means-it means sell. Fralk will sell some of what he gets from us, use some of the profits to acquire more goods, whether from us or his own people, and invest the rest.” The colonel rubbed his eyes with the heels of his hands. “What does that make him?”
“A capitalist,” Bryusov said in a small voice.
“Just what I was thinking.” Tolmasov looked at Fralk, not altogether happily. As an alien, the Minervan could be studied for his own sake, without preconceptions. Thinking of him as a capitalist brought in a whole load of ideology. The colonel suddenly laughed out loud.
“What?” Bryusov said.
“He would look very strange, driving a large American car.” “So he would.” Bryusov permitted himself a smile, but it was a nervous one. “Moscow will not find it funny,” he warned. “I doubt Oleg Borisovich will, either.”
“There is that,” Tolmasov said. Still, he wanted to be there when Lopatin got the news, just to see his expression.
Fralk made a noise that sounded amazingly like a woman clearing her throat when the two men with whom she is at dinner have spent too much time talking about their jobs and not enough with her. Tolmasov shook his head at the irony of that marvelous voice being wasted on an alien, and, the Russians had learned, a male alien at that. The colonel bowed to Fralk in polite apology for his woolgathering.
The Minervan widened himself in turn. “Want more-“ He pointed at the hatchets and hammers again, and also at a box of little battery-powered lamps.
“Shall we give him more of the axes?” Bryusov asked.
“Well, why not? We brought them to trade, and the local tools and books and specimens we get in return will be worth a lot more than their weight in diamonds back on Earth. Still, I suppose you have a point, Valery.” Tolmasov tried to use his tiny Minervan vocabulary. “These-“ He pointed to the hatchets himself. “What you do with? Use for?” “Use on Omalo.”
Tolmasov took a certain small pride in noticing Fralk had chosen a preposition different from the one he had used. The object of the preposition, though, remained obscure. “Omalo? Omalo is what?” he asked.
Fralk said something. “Ervis Gorge” was all the colonel understood: the local name for Jotun Canyon. He turned to Bryusov. “Did you follow that?”
The linguist frowned. “The Omalo are something across Ervis Gorge.”
Tolmasov frowned, too. That was better than he had done, but not enough to tell him much. “Again please, slowly,” he said to Fralk.
The Minervan pointed to himself. “Skarmer,” he said. He pointed to the castle where his king? grandfather? relived, the castle that was much the biggest building in this settlement. “Hogram Skarmer.”
“A surname?” Tolmasov asked.
“We’ve seen no signs of such yet,” Valery Bryusov answered. “And while he might use an ax on Hogram, he would not use one on himself. Besides, let him go on-I don’t believe he’s finished.”
The linguist was right. Seeing he had not yet made his point, Fralk said, “Ervis Gorge-this side-Skarmer-all.” He waved his six arms to emphasize his words. “Ervis Gorge-across-Omalo.”
“Borezmoi,” Tolmasov said softly. He was afraid he did understand that. “Valery, I think he’s trying to tell us these Omalo on the other side of the canyon are another whole country. I think we should think three times before we go arming these folk for war.”
“I think also, Sergei Konstantinovich, that we should consult with Moscow,” Bryusov said.
The colonel made a sour face. Bryusov wanted to consult with Moscow to decide which pair of socks to put on in the morning. Then, reluctantly, Tolmasov nodded. “I am afraid you are right. The Americans, after all, are also on the other side of Jotun Canyon. War against them, even by proxy, would not be well received back home, I suspect. We came too close to falling off the big cliff, the nuclear cliff, in Lebanon.”
“We need to learn more of the situation here as well,” Bryusov said.
“So we do.” They could not hope to learn enough, either, Tolmasov thought, not in the limited time they had on Minerva. In the end, they might act anyway. People did things like that.
“Shall we tell the Americans?” Bryusov asked.
“We’ll let Moscow worry about that, too,” Tolmasov decided. “If it were my choice, though, I’d say no, at least not yet.”
Reatur finished cleaning the chamber where the new budlings had burst into the world. It was somber work. That was one of the reasons he did not give it to the mates. The other, of course, was simply that, being as they were, they would have done a bad job of it.
He dragged Biyal’s corpse out of the room, toward the door that kept the mates in their own part of the castle. The evening was growing dark, and he hoped the mates would be back in the little rooms where they slept.
Seventeen evenings out of eighteen, they would have been. Even tonight, most of them were. But Numar and Lamra were still chasing each other up and down the hall. They came to a stumbling stop when they saw the domain master and his burden.
“It’s Biyal,” Numar said.
“How sad,” Lamra echoed. But she did not sound full of grief, no more than if she were speaking of a broken pot or, at most, a dead animal she did not care much about one way or the other. She was too young to grasp that Biyal’s fate awaited her as well. As if to underscore that, she said, “Feel me, Reatur. I think I’m going to bud.”