“Exactly!” For the first time, Nadab seemed satisfied with the humans he was facing. He spread his hands in an expansive gesture, then let them drop again when no one picked up what was plainly a cue. “Surely you can extrapolate from what you know.”
“We know many things,” Captain Chen said shortly. She was losing patience. Her wave encompassed the control room, which anyone on Ephar was centuries from matching. “What in particular applies to you?”
“When I learned you knew of evolution, I did not think I would have to be so elementary,” Nadab said. So there, Carver thought. The greenskin resumed. “If you are raising livestock and desire a larger beast, what do you do?”
“Breed the largest ones you have to each other.” Michaels gave the obvious answer, sounding as if he were humoring the greenskin. “Then breed the largest of the next generation to each other, and…” His voice trailed away. Carver felt a tingle of something between awe and dread as he saw where Nadab was leading the humans. Michaels was more serious than Carver had ever heard him: “You’re saying this applies to you.”
“How could it not?” Nadab said. Though nothing about him had changed, he suddenly looked vastly different to Carver. The trader would rather have gone on seeing Nadab as a representative of a tormented minority than as the result of an age-long experiment in controlled breeding. Things would have been much more comfortable that way.
“You claim you greenskins have been breeding for brains for all this time?” Captain Chen sounding rattled was as unnerving as Lloyd Michaels being serious.
“Say rather we have been bred for them,” Nadab said. “After the crime of the one we do not name, the restrictions you know were forced upon us. They acted as they had to act, whether we knew of it at the time or not. Those of us who were clever enough to make their way in the face of such difficulties survived and bred; those who were not starved or were killed on account of their stupidity, either by offending the blues or from being caught out after sunset… as I was. Do you doubt now that I am something different from any blue you have known-and from yourselves?”
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.”