In the middle of the dicker, a servant poked his head into the chamber and said to Baasa, “Your pardon, Excellency, but the delegation from Asnah has arrived.”
“Oh, a pestilence! I did not expect them until tomorrow. I suppose I must formally greet them, as protocol requires.” The governor started to walk out, then turned back to warn Carver, “Think not that I shall forget where we stand: seventeen and three parts per volume, and I doubt you will squeeze another measure from me.”
“And a half, that is,” Nadab supplied as Baasa hurried away.
“Yes, of course,” Carver said abstractedly. He had Baasa gauged now, and did not think he would end up losing money. Nadab, though, was harder to figure. “May I ask a question without fear of giving offense?” he said to the greenskin.
“How can seeking to learn give offense?”
Carver could have named twenty different ways from twenty different worlds, but forbore. He said only, “I hoped you might see the advantage to your people of helping to spread enlightenment in the empire. That you do not surprises and disappoints me. If you have some reason I cannot see, I would be grateful for your telling me what it is.”
The greenskin was some time silent; the trader could make nothing of the steady gaze that met his. At last Nadab said, ”You tread on overgrown ground, outlander. Be careful lest you stumble.”
Carver waited.
Something like a sigh hissed through Nadab’s nostril slits. He picked up the adaptation of On the Origin of Species and turned it over and over in his hands. Again he was a long time finding words. When he did speak, he sounded as if he was choosing them carefully: “I did not know, oudander, that this notion of change over time was familiar to your people.”
Carver’s eyes slid to Michaels. His comrade was staring back at him. Of all the things he had thought he might hear, this was the last. He said, “I did not know the folk of the empire had come across it, either.”
He started to go on, then stopped. Anything he said might be wrong. But no one in the couple of centuries of fitful contact between Ephar and the universe outside had had any clue that the locals were within light-years of developing the concept of evolution.
“Ah, yes, the folk,” Nadab murmured. Carver thought he heard irony in the local’s voice, and warned himself not to let his sympathies-or his imagination-run away with him. Then, abruptly, he was sure he had not. In the language of the empire, “folk” and “blue” sprang from the same root.
Excitement flowered in him. He had brushed against something more important than bulun powder here; he was sure of it. “Tell me,” he said, “have you greenskins writings of your own? Ones the folk of the empire”-he used the term with deliberate emphasis-”know nothing about?”
If Nadab said yes to that… But he did not. He only asked, “Outlander, how could it possibly matter to you?”
“If for no other reason, then as trade items,” Carver said.
Before the words were out of his mouth, he knew he had made a mistake. Nadab’s eyes might be unreadable, but there was no mistaking the finality with which he said, “I see little point to discussing what are, in any event, shadows.”
The trader cast about for a way to put things right. Nadab stonily rebuffed his efforts. Baasa came back, assuring that the subject would stay closed. Distracted, Carver ended the dicker too soon. The city governor fairly glowed with self-satisfaction; he did not often get the better of a bargain with humans.
“If I may suggest something, Excellency,” Nadab said.
“Yes? Go on. Say what you mean.” Baasa was in a magnanimous mood.
“You have been gracious enough to speak kindly of my prose style, inadequate though it is. Perhaps, before you release these works to learned males all over the empire, I might do my poor best to make them conform to the rhetorical standards such publication requires.”
“A capital suggestion,” Baasa exclaimed. “See you to it, Nadab. Only make sure you proceed with it. I would not want the works long delayed.”
“Certainly not, Excellency.”
It was all perfectly smooth, perfectly respectful, and, from the locals’ point of view, perfectly sensible. Somehow, though, Carver was sure that whatever sprang from Nadab’s pen would be flawed: not obviously flawed, maybe, or no one would look at the books at all, but with enough errors to keep them from having the influence for which he’d hoped.
He could not say that out loud, not with no proof, not with the greenskin enjoying his overlord’s deserved confidence. But for whatever reasons, Nadab was plainly unenthusiastic about letting real science come to the attention of the empire as a whole. If Carver had been frustrated before about the way greenskins acted, now he was bewildered as well, and more man a little annoyed.
He did what he could, saying, “If you have any trouble with the concepts in the books, Nadab, please feel free to call on us humans for help.”
“That is generous of you,” the greenskin said. “If I encounter difficulties, be sure I shall consult you. I believe, however, that my grasp of what is, after all, my own language should prove adequate to the task.”
“What task do you have in mind?” Carver said, but in Trade English, so that only Michaels understood.
“Well, of course we haven’t had a great deal to do with the greenskins,” Captain Chen remarked that evening over tea and cakes. She was a tiny, very competent woman whose size belied her strength of will. She went on, “They aren’t rich enough to trade with the likes of us.”
“Some of them must be,” Michaels said. “Nadab has been Baasa’s right-hand man for years. Are you telling me he hasn’t spent some time lining the pockets he doesn’t wear?”
“I would doubt that myself,” the captain said dryly.
“So would I,” Carver agreed.”But even if he has, he doesn’t dare show it. What do you suppose happens if somebody in a greenskin village starts looking too prosperous?”
“The blues come out and burn his house down around his ears,” Michaels supplied, “and probably his neighbors’ houses, too, just on the off chance that they’re thinking wicked thoughts about living above subsistence level.”
“You’ve got it,” Carver said. “We have tapes to prove it. It doesn’t happen very often, though. The greenskins have been pariahs for a long time now; they know how to lay low.”
“ ‘Pariah’ isn’t quite the right word,” Captain Chen said, precise as usual.”The greenskins play an important part in local society: shopkeepers, scholars, artisans, merchants. They aren’t menials by any means.”
“So long as the sun is in the sky,” Carver said. “They aren’t menials after dark, either-they’re fair game. Still, I take your point. It’s just because of the role they play that I wondered if they have a literature of their own.”
“From the way Nadab clammed up about it, you’d have thought Jerome asked him how many blue children he’d eaten lately,” Michaels added.
The captain pursed her lips. “Interesting,” she said judiciously, “but I’m not sure how important it is.”
“Something odd is going on there,” Carver insisted. “Nadab knows about evolution, and none of the natural philosophers among the blues does. I’d lay money on that.”
“The other thing,” Michaels said, “is that he didn’t want them knowing about it, either.”
Carver gave him a grateful look. “So you saw that, too?”
“Interesting,” Captain Chen said again. “The more enlightened, the more scientifically oriented a society is, the less the inclination it usually has for harassing its minorities, at least openly. You’d think Nadab would grasp that.”
“I think perhaps he does,” Carver said slowly.
Michaels parted company with him there. “That’s crazy, Jerome. Nobody wants to be persecuted forever.”
“Till my first trip to Ephar, I would have said the same thing.” Carver scratched his head. “But if the greenskins don’t, they certainly hide it well. And I don’t just mean Nadab. None of them seems interested in changing the way things are.”