THE G'BUR
The prince of T'Kai let the air out of his book lungs in a hiss of despair. "Of course we will fight," K'Sed told the four human traders who sat in front of his throne. "But I fear we are done for." His mandibles clattered sadly.
The humans looked at one another. No one was eager to speak first. K'Sed watched them all, one eyestalk aimed at each. Jennifer Logan wished she were anywhere but under part of the worried alien's gaze. Being back at her university library was a first choice, but even her cabin aboard the merchant ship Flying Festoon would have done in a pinch.
At last Bernard Greenberg said, "Your Highness"—the literal translation of the title was One With All Ten Legs Off The Ground—"we will do what we may for you, but that cannot be much. We are not soldiers, and there are only the four of us." The translator on his belt turned his Spanglish words into the clicking T'Kai speech.
K'Sed slumped on his throne, a brass pillar topped by a large round cushion on which his cephalothorax and abdomen rested. His walking-legs—the last three pairs—came within centimeters of brushing the carpet and giving the lie to his honorific. His two consorts and chief minister, who perched on lower toadstool seats behind and to either side of him, clacked angrily. He waved for silence.
Once he finally had it, he turned all his eyes on Greenberg. Even after most of a year on L'Rau, the master merchant found that disconcerting; he felt as if he were being measured by a stereopantograph. "Can you truly be as weak as you claim?" K'Sed asked plaintively. "After all, you have crossed the sea of stars to trade with us, while we cannot go to you. Are your other powers not in proportion?"
Greenberg ran a hand over his bald pate. Just as he sometimes had trouble telling the crablike G'Bur apart, they only recognized him because he wore a full beard but had no hair on his crown.
"Highness, you have exposed the Soft One's cowardice!" exclaimed K'Ret, one of K'Sed's consorts. Her carapace darkened toward the green of anger.
"Highness, do not mistake thought for fear." That was Marya Vassilis. She was the best linguist on the Flying Festoon's crew and followed the T'Kai language well enough to start answering before the translator was done. "We do not want to see the M'Sak barbarians triumph any more than you do. Where is our profit if your cities are overthrown?" She tossed her head in a thoroughly Greek gesture of indignation.
"But by the same token, Highness, where is the Soft Ones' profit if they die fighting for T'Kai?" put in B'Rom, K'Sed's vizier. He was the most cynical arthropod Jennifer had ever known. "For them, fleeing is the more expedient choice."
"Manipulative, isn't he?" Pavel Koniev murmured. The other humans glanced at him sharply, but he had turned off his translator. "Get us to feel guilty enough to do or die for T'Kai."
One of K'Sed's eyestalks also peered Koniev's way; Jennifer wondered if the prince had picked up any Spanglish. But K'Sed made no comment, turning all his attention back to Greenberg. "You have not yet answered my question," he pointed out.
"That, Highness, is because the answer is neither yes nor no," Greenberg said carefully. K'Ret gave a derisive clatter. Greenberg ignored it and went on, "Of course, my people know more of the mechanic arts than yours. But as you have seen on all our visits, our only personal weapons are stunners that hardly outrange your bows and slings."
"That might serve," K'Sed said. "If a thousand of the savages suddenly fell, stunned, as they charged—"
Greenberg spread his hands in regret. "A hundred, perhaps, Highness, but not a thousand. The guns have only so much strength in them. When it is gone, they are useless, except as clubs."
Without flesh surrounding them, it was hard for K'Sed's eyes to show expression, but Jennifer thought he gave Greenberg a baleful stare. "And your ship?" the prince said. "What excuse will you give me there?"
"It is armed," Koniev admitted. K'Sed hissed again, this time with a now-we're-getting-somewhere kind of eagerness. Koniev, who was weapons officer when the Flying Festoon was offplanet, went on, "The weapons, unfortunately, function only out in space, where there is no air."
"No air? There is air everywhere," K'Sed said. T'Kai astronomy was about at the Ptolemaic level. The locals believed the humans when they said they came from another world; they and their goods were too unlike anything familiar. Not all the implications, though, had yet sunk in.
"I think we are all looking at this problem in the wrong way," Jennifer said.
Her crewmates all looked at her in surprise. Her silence through the uproarious meeting up to this point was very much in character. It wasn't just because she was only twenty-two and an apprentice. Had she been twice as old and a master merchant—not that she ever wanted to become a master merchant—she would have acted the same way.
"Tell us," Greenberg urged, in a tone that said he thought she was so quiet because she didn't operate in the same world as everyone else. "What have you seen that we've missed?" She flushed and did not answer. He growled, "Come on. His Highness doesn't care how pretty you are. Don't keep him waiting."
"I'm sorry, Master Merchant," she said, flushing even harder. It wasn't her fault she'd been born blond and beautiful. She rather wished she hadn't been; it kept people from taking her seriously. But Greenberg was right—to the T'Kai, she was as hideous and alien as the rest of the Soft Ones. The master merchant's glare forced more words from her. "We know, don't we, that there isn't much we can actually do against the M'Sak—" Her voice was small and breathy, barely enough to activate the translator.
"We don't know that," B'Rom said, not deigning to turn even one eyestalk Jennifer's way. "You Soft Ones keep saying it, but we do not know it."
The interruption flustered her. She took a while to get going again. At last she said, "Maybe the M'Sak also doubt we are as harmless as we really are—"
Sixteen eyestalks suddenly rose to their full length; sixteen eyes bored into Jennifer's two. She stopped, glancing toward Greenberg for support. He nodded encouragingly. "I think you have their attention," he said. He was fond of understatement.
"But what do I tell them now?" she asked.
"I haven't the slightest idea," he told her. "How do you think we'd look tricked out with a paint job and enough false legs and teeth to impersonate four f'noi?" The f'noi, which looked like an unlikely cross between a tiger and a lobster, was the worst predator this continent knew.
"You're baiting me!" Jennifer said. From some people, they would have been fighting words. She wished she could sound fierce instead of disappointed.
Marya Vassilis stepped into the breach. "We don't yet know your barbarous foes well," she reminded the prince and his retinue. "You will have to advise us on how we can best appear terrifying to them."
"Maybe even the sight of your ship will be enough," K'Sed said hopefully. "I do not think any Soft Ones have traded directly with the M'Sak."
"Why should they?" observed D'Kar, K'Sed's other consort, with what the translator rendered as a scornful sniff. She wore gold bands round all her walking-legs and had two rows of yellow garnets glued to her carapace. "The M'Sak are such low wretches, they surely have nothing worth trading for."
"Let them eat cake," Koniev quoted. No matter how well the computer translated, it could not provide social context. A good thing, too, Jennifer thought as the talk at last turned serious.
When they got back to the suite the humans had been modifying to their comfort for the past several months, Jennifer flopped down on her air mattress and put a reader on her nose. The mattress, a washbasin, and a chemical toilet were great improvements over the local equivalents. T'Kai sleeping gear, for instance, resembled nothing so much as a set of parallel bars.
Greenberg said something to her. Her attention was on the reader, so she didn't pay much attention. He coughed. She looked up. Her eyes took several seconds to focus on the real world.
"Thanks for the notion that got us going there," he repeated.
"Oh. Thank you very much. I wasn't sure what would come of it, but . . ." She hesitated. As often happened, the hesitation became a full stop.
"But anything was better than staying stuck where we were," Greenberg finished. "Yes." He was resigned to finishing sentences for her by now.
She went back to the reader, but still felt his eyes on her. She was used to looks from men, but on this cruise Greenberg and Koniev both seemed to have taken to Marya, though she was fifteen years older than Jennifer and lovely by the canon of no human world. To Jennifer, that was more a relief than anything else.
Greenberg said something to her. Again, she noticed that he said it, but not what it was. He repeated himself once more. "What are you reading?"
"Heinlein—one of the early Future History books." She'd loved Middle English science fiction ever since she was a child. It was all English; her father had taught her the ancient speech so young that she read it as fluently as she did Spanglish. She was also still young enough to think that everyone ought to love what she loved. "Would you like to borrow the fiche when I'm through with it?" she asked eagerly.
"More of your dead languages?" Greenberg asked her. She nodded. "No, thank you," he said. His voice was not ungentle, but her face fell. He went on, "I'm more interested in what's really here than in some ancient picture of a future that never happened."
"It's not so much the future he creates, but the way he does it," she said, trying to get across the fascination that rigorous world building had for her.
He shook his head. "I haven't the time or the inclination for it now. Illusions are all very well, but the M'Sak, worse luck, are real. I just hope illusory threats can chase them away. I have the bad feeling they won't. There's going to be some very real fighting before long, I'm afraid."
Jennifer nodded. As the meeting with the prince and his court was breaking up, a messenger had come in with bad news: C'Lar, one of the northern towns of the T'Kai confederacy, had fallen to the M'Sak. The T'Kai and their neighbors had been peaceful for several generations now. As K'Sed himself was uneasily aware, they were no match for the vigorous barbarians now emerging from the northern jungles.
But K'Sed intended to try, and nobody on the Flying Festoon had even brought up the idea of backing the other side. For one thing, T'Kai objets d'art brought the crew a tidy profit, trip after trip; that would vanish with a M'Sak conquest. For another, the M'Sak were not nice people, even for crabs. Their leader, V'Zek, seemed to have taken Chingis Khan lessons—he was both ruthless and extremely able.
Jennifer worried about that until the Heinlein story completely occupied her, but it was a distant sort of worry. If worse came to worst, the Flying Festoon could always lift off and leave.
K'Sed, of course, would not be so lucky.
V'Zek came down from his shelter and stepped away from it to watch the full moon rise. Many of his warriors felt anxious away from the trees they were used to, but he took the southlands' open spaces as a challenge, and he never met a challenge any way but claws-first.
Thus he did not pull in his eyestalks when he was away from the posts that held up his shelter and the web of ropes that imitated the closely twined branches of the jungle. And, indeed, there was a certain grandeur in seeing the great yellow shield unobscured by twigs and leaves.
He stretched his eyestalks as far as they would go, a grasping-claw's length from his cephalothorax. He drew a knife and brandished it at the moon. "Soon everything you shine on will be mine."
"The Soft Ones may perhaps have something to say about that, my master," a dry voice beside him observed. He hissed in surprise. He had not heard Z'Yon come up. The shaman could be eerily quiet when he chose.
"Soft Ones," V'Zek said, clicking his scorn. "They did not save C'Lar, nor will they save T'Kai when we reach it. I almost wonder if they exist at all. So much open space makes people imagine strange things."
"They exist," Z'Yon said. "They are one of the reasons I sought you out tonight. What do you plan to do about them?"
The chieftain clacked discontentedly. Since C'Lar fell, he had known the Soft Ones were real, but had tried to avoid thinking of them. Z'Yon was useful, because the shaman made him look at hard questions. "I will deal with them, if they care to deal with me," V'Zek said at last. "Some of their trinkets are amusing."
He thought of the mirror some grandee had owned in captured C'Lar. It was his now, of course. He admired the perfect reflection it gave. It was ever so much clearer than the polished bronze that was the best even T'Kai made. He had not known what a handsome fellow he was.
But Z'Yon would not leave off. "And if they do not?"
"Then I will kill them." V'Zek was very straightforward. That made him a deadly dangerous warleader—he saw an objective and went right after it. It also suited him to lead the M'Sak, whose characters were mostly similar to his own, if less intense. Z'Yon, though, did not think that way: another reason he was valuable to his chieftain.
The shaman let V'Zek's words hang in the air. V'Zek suspected his carapace was turning blue with embarrassment. Who knew what powers the Soft Ones had? "No rumor has ever spoken of them as killers," he said, the best defense of his belligerence he could come up with.
"No rumor has ever spoken of anyone attacking them, either," Z'Yon pointed out.
V'Zek knew that as well as the shaman. He changed the subject, a chiefly prerogative. "Why else did you want to see me?"
"To warn you, my master." When Z'Yon said that, V'Zek grew very alert. The shaman had smelled out plots before. But Z'Yon went on in a way his master had not looked for. "When the moon comes round to fullness again, unless I have misreckoned, the great f'noi that lives in the sky will seek to devour it." The M'Sak were not as intellectually sophisticated as the T'Kai, but their seekers-after-wisdom had watched the heavens through the trees for many years.
The chieftain cared nothing for such concerns. A superstitious chill ran through him; he felt his eyestalks contract of themselves. "It will fail?"
"It always has," Z'Yon reassured him. "Still, you might spend some time warning the warriors this will take place, so they are not taken by surprise and perhaps panic-stricken."
"Ah. That is sensible. Claim yourself any one piece of loot from my share of the booty of C'Lar." V'Zek was open-clawed with his gifts; who would stay loyal to a chieftain with a name for meanness?
Z'Yon lowered and raised his eyes, a thank-you gesture. "I wish I could have told you sooner, my master, but the campaign has disrupted my observations, and I did not become certain enough to speak until now."
"It is of no great moment." V'Zek settled back on his walking-legs. "Fifty-one days should be adequate time to prepare the fighters. By then, if all goes well, we will be attacking the city of T'Kai itself."
"Yes, and that is why you will need to harden the warriors' shells against fear. Think on it, my master: When the f'noi in the sky wounds the moon with its claws, what color does the moon turn as its blood spreads over it?"
V'Zek thought. He had seen such sky-fights a few times, watching as Z'Yon and the other shamans beat drums to frighten away the sky-f'noi. "The color of bronze, more or less . . ." The chieftain paused. "You are subtle."
"You see it too, then: When the heavenly f'noi attacks the moon, it will become the color of the T'Kai banners. That is an omen which, without careful preparation, common warriors might well see as disturbing."
"So they might." V'Zek opened and closed his upper grasping-claws while he thought, as if he wished to rend something. His left lower claw was never far from the shortspear strapped to his plastron. "Suppose the omen means that T'Kai will fall to us. Suppose that, till the evil night, you put that meaning about."
"Shall I consult the moltings, to seek the true significance of the phenomenon?"
"For your own amusement, if you like." That lower claw moved closer to the shortspear; Z'Yon felt his small, fanlike tail, of itself, fold under the rear of his abdomen. He did not need the reflex to know he was afraid; he felt the fear in his wits as well as his body. His chieftain went on, "Of course, you will present it to our warriors as I have given it to you now."
"Of course, my master." Z'Yon backed out of V'Zek's presence. When—actually, just before—he had gone a seemly distance, he turned and hurried away.
V'Zek let the slight breach of etiquette pass. He glowered up at the moon. Nothing would interfere with his plans for conquest: not the Soft Ones, whatever they really were, and not the moon, either. Nothing.
Having made that vow to himself, he returned at last to his shelter. The ropes and poles were a poor substitute for the fragrant, leafy branches he was used to. He let out a resigned hiss and wondered again how the southrons bore living away from the forests. Maybe, he thought, they were such skillful artificers exactly because they were trying to make up for what they lacked.
The why of it did not matter, though. They had been making their trinkets and trading them back and forth for so long that they forgot claws had any other uses. C'Lar had fallen even more easily than V'Zek had expected.
He composed himself for sleep. C'Lar was only the beginning.
Up on the battlements, Marya giggled. Jennifer took the reader off her nose for a moment so she could watch T'Kai's army march out of the city. The host looked martial enough to her, if uncertainly drilled. She asked, "What's funny?"
"It's just that I've never seen such a lot of tin openers on parade," Marya said.
Bernard Greenberg said, "They're on the big side for tin openers," but now he smiled, too. Marya had a point. Being armored themselves, the G'Bur had developed an assortment of weapons reminiscent of those of Earth's Middle Ages: halberds, bills, and partisans. All of them looked like big pieces of cutlery on long poles. On L'Rau, piercing and crushing took the place of slashing.
Pavel Koniev swung a wickedly spiked morning star, but his expression was sheepish. He said, "When the locals gave me this, I had visions of smashing the M'Sak army single-handed. But if they're all toting polearms, I won't be able to get close enough to them to do any good."
Jennifer went back to her reader; if not being described in Middle English, archaic weapons held little interest for her. Greenberg was saying, "It's a personal defense weapon, like the shortspears they carry. If you're close enough to have to use it, odds are we'll be in a lot of trouble." Out of the corner of her ear, she heard him click off his translator, in case one of the natives nearby was eavesdropping. He also lowered his voice. "We probably will be."
Marya and Koniev followed the master merchant's example. Jennifer would have, but she was engrossed in her Heinlein again. Marya said, "They seem willing enough to fight—which is more than I can say for their prince."
"I'm afraid he knows more than they do," Greenberg said. Down below, a couple of K'Sed's warriors were clicking and clacking at each other loud enough to draw even Jennifer's notice. They had gotten the heads of their weapons tangled and were holding up their whole section. Greenberg went on, "They're amateurs—smiths and taverners and carapace-painters and such. The M'Sak are professionals."
"We're amateurs, too," Koniev said.
"Don't remind me," Greenberg told him. "I'm just hoping we're amateurs at a higher level, so we can match up against G'Bur professionals."
"A higher level indeed," Marya said. "With the Flying Festoon and our drones and such, we'll be able to keep track of the barbarians and their route long before they know where we are."
Greenberg said, "That will be for you to handle, Jennifer."
"Huh?" Hearing her name brought Jennifer back to the here and now. She lowered the reader from her nose and got the local sun full in the face. Blinking, she said, "I'm so sorry. What was that?"
"The drones." Greenberg sounded as if he were holding on to his patience with both hands.
"Oh, yes, the drones. Of course," Jennifer said. Unfortunately, she hadn't the faintest idea of what he wanted her to do with them. She knew he could tell, too. Her cheeks grew hot. When she wasn't preoccupied by her Middle English science fiction, she wanted to do well.
"I'll handle the drones, Bernard," Koniev said, seeing her confusion. "I've had experience with them."
"I know you have. That's why I'm giving them to Jennifer," Greenberg said. "She has to get some herself."
Koniev nodded. So did Jennifer; Greenberg had a way of making sense. Then she saw a sparkle of irony in Marya's dark eyes. She flushed all over again. Another reason Greenberg might want her back aboard the Flying Festoon was to keep her out of trouble. It didn't occur to her to wonder whether that meant trouble with the M'Sak or trouble with him.
Just then, K'Sed came over to the four humans. The prince of T'Kai had gone martial to the extent of carrying a ceremonial shortspear that did not look sharp enough to menace anything much more armored than a balloon. "Let us see what we can do," he said. For a moment, only Jennifer's translator picked up his words. Then the other traders switched theirs back on. The machines' flat tones did not make him sound martial.
Greenberg said, "Your Highness, we admire your courage in going forth to confront your enemies. Many princes might stay within the walls and try to withstand a siege."
"If I thought I could, Soft One, I would. But V'Zek, may his clasper's prongs fall out, would swallow my cities one by one, saving T'Kai for the last. Maybe the town can hold against him, maybe not. But the confederacy would surely die. Sometimes a bad gamble is all there is."
"Yes," Greenberg said.
"I thank you for making it better than it might be. Now I join my troops." K'Sed gestured jerkily with the shortspear and headed for the way down. That was neither stairs nor ramp, merely a double row of posts driven into the wall. With ten limbs, the G'Bur needed nothing more complex. Humans could use the posts, too, though less confidently.
"More to him than I thought," Koniev said as he watched the prince descend.
"He's brave enough, and bright enough to see what needs doing," Greenberg agreed. "Whether he has the skill and the wherewithal to do it is something else again. Maybe we can help a little there."
"Maybe." Marya sounded about as convinced as K'Sed but, like the prince of T'Kai, was ready to get on with it. "Shall we go down? Otherwise they'll leave without us, which won't make them like us any better." She lowered herself off the edge of the wall, grunted when her feet found purchase, and then rapidly climbed down.
Jennifer stuck her reader in a pocket and followed Marya's lead. She didn't think about what she was doing until her boots kicked up gravel in the courtyard below. Then she started to put her reader back on.
Greenberg came down beside her. He wiped his hands on the sides of his coverall and shook his head. "I don't like that. Hell of a thing for a spacer, isn't it—a bad head for heights?"
"It would be a nuisance, wouldn't it?" Jennifer said. "I just don't notice them."
"Nothing seems to get to you, does it?" Greenberg said. She shrugged and started to walk with the rest of the humans toward the T'Kai army. The warriors milled about under their standards: bronze-colored pennons bearing the emblem of the confederacy T'Kai ruled—a golden grasping-claw, its two pincers open. Greenberg coughed. "You won't be marching with us," he reminded her." You're going back aboard the Flying Festoon, remember?"
"Oh, that's right," she said, embarrassed. She'd forgotten all about it. The ship sat a few hundred meters away, its smooth silver curves contrasting oddly with the vertical dark stone curtain of the walls of T'Kai. Willingly enough, Jennifer hurried toward it.
Bernard Greenberg watched Jennifer head back to the Flying Festoon. Her curves contrasted oddly with the jointed, armored G'Bur all around her. He sighed. Try as he might, he could not stay annoyed with her. He walked on over to where K'Sed was haranguing his army.
The prince was less optimistic than most human leaders would have been, were they facing his predicament. Even his peroration sounded downbeat. "Warriors of T'Kai, we are fighting for our freedom and our lives. Fighting is our best chance to keep them; if we do not fight, we will surely lose them. So when the time comes, let us fight with all our strength."
He got no cheers, but the soldiers began tramping north, the humans with them. Heavy wagons drawn by t'dit—large, squat, enormously strong quasi-crustaceans—rumbled in a long column between troops of warriors. Choking clouds of dust rose into the sky.
"I wish I had a set of nose-filters," Koniev said, coughing.
"Get used to it," Greenberg waved his hand at the ground over which they were walking—bare dirt, sparsely sprinkled with small bushes here and there. Most of them, now, were sadly bedraggled. "No grasses, or anything like them," the master merchant went on.
"So?" Koniev said indifferently.
Greenberg stared at him. "So?" he echoed. "Next trip in, we'll have a load of grain genetically engineered to take advantage of the gap in the ecosystem—grain is just grass with big seeds, after all. I've had people working on that for a long time, but always on a shoestring, so it's taken a while. T'Kai would pay plenty for a new food crop like that . . . if there's any T'Kai left to sell it to in a couple of years. The M'Sak won't give a damn about it—what forest nomads would?"
Marya knew about the grain project. "We're not just trying to save T'Kai out of altruism, Pavel," she said.
"Well, I was hoping not," he said. "Where's the profit in that?"
Greenberg clapped him on the back. He had the proper merchant's attitude. Now if only Jennifer could find a fraction of it in herself . . .
Quiet and smooth, the Flying Festoon rose into the air. The ground screen showed G'Bur with eyestalks that seemed more than fully extended, G'Bur pointing grasping-claws at the trade-ship, a few G'Bur running like hell even though starships had been visiting L'Rau every few years for a couple of generations now.
Jennifer noticed the excited locals only peripherally. The novel she was reading interested her much more than they did. Only when the Flying Festoon reached the five thousand meters she had preset did she reluctantly lower the reader and get around to the job she had been assigned.
Three drones dropped away from the ship and slowly flew off: northeast, due north, and northwest. One of them, Jennifer thought, ought to pick up the advancing M'Sak army. When it did, she would have more to handle. Until then, she could take it easy. She got out the reader and put it back on. The novel engrossed her again.
Prestarflight writers, she reflected, had one thing wrong about trading runs. Nobody in a novel ever complained about how boring they were. But then, she supposed, nobody set out to write a deliberately boring book.
Not for the first time, she wished she'd never gotten involved with real traders. But it had seemed such a good idea at the time. A whole little academic community specialized in comparing the imagined worlds of Middle English science fiction with the way things had actually happened. She'd always intended to join that community and, at the end of her sophomore year, she'd had a notion original enough to guarantee her tenure before she turned thirty—no mean trick, if she could pull it off.
She had reasoned that her competition—ivory-tower types, one and all—hardly knew more about how things really worked outside the university than the old SF writers had. If she spent a couple of years on real fieldwork and coupled that unique perspective with a high-powered degree, what doors would not open for her?
And so she'd taken a lot of xenanth courses her last two years. Some of them, to her surprise, were even interesting. When the crew of the Flying Festoon decided to carry an apprentice, there she was, ready and eager.
Here she was still, bored.
She read for a while, took a shower she did not really need, and programmed the autochef for a meal whose aftermath, she realized with remorse, she would have to exercise off. She did, until sweat stuck her singlet and shorts to her. Then she took another shower. This one, at least, she had earned.
After all that, she decided she might as well check the drones' reporting screens. Night had fallen while she was killing time. She did not expect to find anything exciting, the more so as the drones would be only halfway to the jungle home of the M'Sak.
For a moment, the regular array of lights twinkling in the blackness did not mean much to her. A town, she thought, and checked the map grid to find out which one it was. coordinates unmatched, the screen flashed.
"Oh, dear," she said, and then, finding that inadequate, followed it with something ripe enough to have made Bernard Greenberg blink, were he there to hear it.
She sent the drone in for a closer look. Then she called Greenberg. He sounded as if he were underwater—not from a bad signal, but plainly because she had awakened him. "I hope this is important," he said through an enormous yawn.
Jennifer knew him well enough to translate that: it had better be sounded in her mind. "I think so," she said. "You do want to know where the M'Sak are camped, don't you?" The silence on the comm circuit lasted so long, she wondered if he had fallen asleep again. "Bernard?"
"I'm here." Greenberg paused again, then sighed. "Yes, you'd better tell me."
V'Zek peered into the night. The tympanic membrane behind his eyestalks was picking up a low-pitched buzz that would not go away. Scratching the membrane with a grasping-claw did not help. The chieftain summoned Z'Yon. His temper rose when the shaman clicked laughter. Laughing around V'Zek was dangerous, laughing at him insanely foolhardy.
"Well?" V'Zek growled. He reared back so the other M'Sak could see his shortspear.
Z'Yon opened the joint between his carapace and plastron to let the chieftain drive home the spear if he wanted. V'Zek thought the gesture of ritual submission insolently performed, but his anger gave way to surprise when the shaman said, "I hear it, too, my master. The whole army hears it."
"But what is it?" V'Zek demanded. "No sky-glider makes that sort of noise."
Z'Yon opened the edges of his shell again, this time, V'Zek judged, in all sincerity. "My master, I cannot say. I do not know."
"Is it a thing of the T'Kai?" V'Zek was worried. He expressed it as anger; no chieftain could show anything that looked like fear. "Can they smite us with it? Have you heard of their possessing such?" He looked as if he wanted to tear the answer from Z'Yon, with iron pincers if his own were not strong enough.
"Never, my master." Now the shaman truly was afraid, which made his overlord a trifle happier. Z'Yon spoke more firmly a moment later. "My master, truly I doubt it is a T'Kai thing. How could they conceal it?"
"And more to the point, why? Yes." V'Zek thought, but came up with no alternatives that satisfied him. "What then?"
"The Soft Ones," Z'Yon said quietly. "Traveling through the air, after all, is said to be their art, is it not?"
The suggestion made sense to V'Zek. He wished it had not. When the other choice was thinking them creatures of near—or maybe not just near—supernatural powers, he had preferred to doubt that such things as Soft Ones even existed. After C'Lar, he could not do that any more. So he had thought of them as skilled artificers—their mirrors and such certainly justified that. But then, the T'Kai confederacy was full of skilled artificers. The difference between those of his own race and the strangers seemed one of degree, not of kind.
The T'Kai, though, he knew perfectly well, could not make anything that buzzed through the air. If the Soft Ones could . . . It had never occurred to V'Zek that the line between skilled artificers and creatures of near-supernatural powers might be a fine one.
Someone cried out in the camp, a shout of fear and alarm that tore the chieftain from his uncharacteristically philosophical musings. "There it is! The sky-monster!" Other yells echoed the first. Warriors who should have been sleeping tumbled out of their tents to see what the trouble was. Panic ran through the camp.
"By the First Tree, I see it myself," Z'Yon murmured. V'Zek aimed his eyestalks where the shaman's grasping-claw pointed. At first, he saw nothing. Then he spied the little, silvery box his army's campfires were illuminating. The buzzing came from there, sure enough. No, no T'Kai had made the thing, whatever it was. Every line, every angle screamed its alienness. V'Zek wanted to run, to hide himself under the leaves and branches of the forests of M'Sak, to imagine himself undisputed lord of all creation.
He did not run. He filled his book lungs till they pressed painfully against his carapace. "Warriors!" he bellowed, so loud and fierce that eyestalks whipped toward him all through the camp. "Will you flee like hatchlings from something that does you no harm?"
"How much you take for granted," Z'Yon said, but only V'Zek heard him.
He knew the shaman was right. He ignored him anyhow—he had only this one chance to rally the army to him before it fell apart. He cried out again. "Let us try to make it run off, not the other way round!" He snatched up a fair-sized stone, flung it with all his might at the thing in the sky, and wondered if he would be struck dead the next moment.
So, evidently, did his followers. The stone flew wide, but the thing floating in the air took no notice of it and did not retaliate. "Knock it down!" V'Zek shouted, even louder than before. He threw another stone. Again the buzzing device—creature?—paid no attention, though this time the missile came close to it.
Crazy confidence, fueled mostly by relief, tingled through V'Zek. "You see? It cannot harm us. Use arrows, not stones, and it will be ours!" He had led the M'Sak many years now, almost always in victory. As they had so often before, they caught fire from him. Suddenly the sky was full of rocks and arrows, as if the fear the northerners had felt were transmuted all at once to rage.
"My master, you have magics of your own," Z'Yon said, watching the frenzied attack on the sky-thing. V'Zek knew the shaman had no higher praise to give.
Praise, however, won no battles. The M'Sak roared as one when a stone crashed against the side of the sky-thing. It staggered in the air. V'Zek ached to see it fall, but it did not. An arrow hit the thing and bounced off. Another, perhaps shot by a stronger warrior, pierced its shiny skin. It lurched again.
Despite that, its buzzing never changed. And after a little while, it began to drift higher, so that not even the mightiest male could hope to hit it.
"A victory," V'Zek shouted. "We've taught it respect."
His warriors cheered. The thing was still there; they could see it faintly and still catch its sound, though that was muted now. But they had made it retreat. Maybe it had not been slain or broken or whatever the right word was, but they must have hurt it or it would not have moved away at all. The panic was gone.
But if V'Zek had managed to hold his army together, he still felt fury at the buzz which remained, to his way of thinking, all too audible. The sky-thing showed no sign of departing for good. It hung over the camp like, like—on a world where nothing flew and only a few creatures could glide, he failed to find a simile. That only made him angrier.
"What's it doing up there?" he growled. At first it was a rhetorical question. Then the chieftain rounded on Z'Yon. "Shaman, you lay claim to all sorts of wisdom. What is it doing up there?"
Z'Yon was glad he had been working through that question in his own mind. "My master, I do not think it came here merely to terrify us. Had that been the aim, it would be more offensive than it is. But for its, ah, strangeness, in fact, it does not seem to seek to disturb us."
V'Zek made an irregular clicking noise. The sky-thing was disturbing enough as it was. Yet Z'Yon had seen a truth: it could have been worse. "Go on," the chieftain urged.
"From the way it hangs over us—and keeps on hanging there—my guess is that somehow it passes word of us to the Soft Ones and, I suppose, to the T'Kai as well. I say again, though, my master, this is only a guess."
"A good one," V'Zek said with a sinking feeling. Hanging there in the sky, that buzzing thing could watch everything he did. At a stroke, two of his main advantages over T'Kai disappeared. His army was more mobile than any the city-dwellers could patch together, and he knew with no false modesty that he surpassed any southron general. But how would that matter, if T'Kai learned of every move as he made it?
He clicked again, and hissed afterward. Maybe things could not have been worse after all.
B'Rom peered into the screen Greenberg was holding. "So that is the barbarians' army, is it?" the vizier said. "Does their leader camp always in the same place within the host?"
"I'd have to check our tapes to be sure, but I think so," Greenberg answered cautiously; B'Rom never asked anything without an ulterior motive. "Why?"
The chief minister's eyestalks extended in surprise. "So I can give proper briefing to the assassins I send out, of course. What good would it do me to have them kill some worthless double-pay trooper, thinking all the while they were slaying the fierce V'Zek?"
"None, I suppose," Greenberg muttered. He had to remind himself that the M'Sak had not invaded the T'Kai confederacy for a picnic. Drone shots of what was left of C'Lar said that louder than any words.
B'Rom said, "Do you think our agents would be able to poison the barbarians' food, or will we have to use weapons to kill him? We would find fewer willing to try that, as the chances for escape seem poor."
"So they do." The master merchant thought for a moment, then went on carefully, "Excellency, you know your people better than I ever could. I have to leave such matters of judgment in your hands." He knew the translator would spit out the appropriate idiom, probably something like in the grasp of your claws.
The minister went click-click-hiss, sounding rather, Greenberg thought unkindly, like an irritated pressure cooker. "Do not liken me to the savages infesting our land." He glared at Greenberg from four directions at once, then suddenly made the rusty-hinge noise that corresponded to a wry chuckle. "Although I suppose from your perspective such confusion is only natural. Very well, you may think of yourself as forgiven." He creaked again and scurried away.
No doubt he's plotting more mischief, Greenberg thought. That was one of the vizier's jobs. The old devil was also a lot better than most G'Bur—most humans, too, come to that—at seeing the other fellow's point of view, very likely because he believed in nothing himself and found shifting position easy on account of that.
The T'Kai army moved out. Greenberg, Marya, and Koniev tramped along with the G'Bur. Even the locals' humblest tools would have fetched a good price on any human world. The water-pots they carried strapped to their left front walking-legs, for instance, were thrown with a breathtaking clarity of line the Amasis potter would have envied. And when they worked at their art, the results were worth traveling light-years for.
The T'Kai treated their land the same way. The orchards where they grew their tree-tubers and nuts were arranged like Japanese gardens, and with a good deal of the same spare elegance. The road north curved to give the best possible view of a granite boulder off to one side.
Greenberg sighed. The M'Sak cared little for esthetics. They were, however, only too good at one art: destruction. The master merchant wished he had a warship here instead of his merchant vessel. He wished for an in-atmosphere fighter. Neither one appeared.
"I didn't think they would," he said, and sighed again.
"Didn't think what would?" Marya asked. He explained. She said, "How do the M'Sak know the Flying Festoon isn't a warship?"
"Because it won't blast them into crabcakes, for one thing."
"Will it have to? They've never seen it before. They've never seen anything like it before. If a starship drops out of the sky with an enormous sonic boom and lands in front of them, what do you think they'll do?"
Greenberg considered. As far as he knew, no offworlders had ever visited the M'Sak. He laughed out loud and kissed Marya on the mouth. She kissed him back, at least until a couple of G'Bur pulled them apart. "Why are you fighting?" the locals demanded.
"We weren't," Greenberg said. "It's a—"
"Mating ritual," Marya supplied helpfully.
The G'Bur clacked among themselves. The translator, doing its duty, laughed in Greenberg's ear. He didn't care. He thought what the G'Bur did to make more G'Bur was pretty funny, too.
Jennifer put down the reader. Naturally, Greenberg's orders had come just when she was getting to the interesting part of the book. She wished this Anderson fellow, who seemed to have a feel for what the trader's life was like, were on the Flying Festoon instead of her. As he was about a thousand years dead, however, she seemed stuck with the job.
She had all three drones over the M'Sak army now, flying in triangular formation. They stayed several hundred meters off the ground. That first night had not been the only time the barbarians attacked them, and they thought of more ploys than Jennifer had. One M'Sak climbed a tall tree to pump arrows into a drone she'd thought safely out of range. Greenberg would not have thought well of her had it gone down.
She made a sour face. She did not think Greenberg thought well of her, anyway. Too bad. No one had held a gun to his head to make him take her on. Just as she had to make the best of boredom, he had to make the best of her.
The M'Sak were approaching a wide, relatively open space with low bushes growing here and there. When L'Rau got around to evolving grasses, that kind of area would be a meadow. It would, Jennifer thought with a faint sniff, certainly be more attractive as a broad expanse of green than as bare dirt and rocks punctuated by plants.
But even as it was, it would serve her purpose. She did not want the M'Sak distracted from her arrival by anything.
She told the computer what she wanted the Flying Festoon to do. She was smiling as she picked up the reader again. She doubted the M'Sak would have trouble paying attention to her.
These days, V'Zek and his army almost ignored the drones that hung over them. Their buzzing still reached the chieftain's tympanic membrane, but he no longer heard it unless he made a deliberate effort. If the things were spying on him for the Soft Ones, then they were. He could do nothing about it, now that the drones kept out of missile range.
The M'Sak marched in a hollow square, with booty and prisoners inside. The army was smaller than it had been when it entered T'Kai territory, not so much from casualties as because V'Zek had left garrisons in the towns he had taken. He intended to rule this land, not just raid it. When the T'Kai finally came out to fight, he would still have enough warriors to deal with them.
"For that matter, they may just yield tamely," the chieftain said to Z'Yon, who was ambling along beside him. The shaman was not a large male, nor physically impressive, but had no trouble keeping up with the hulking youths who made up the bulk of V'Zek's army.
Z'Yon did not answer for a moment; he was chewing a f'leg-fruit he had snipped from a bush as he walked past. When he was done with it, he said, "I have to doubt that. The confederation is stronger to the south. I think they will try to meet us somewhere there."
"I begin to wonder. The southrons are such cowards," V'Zek said derisively.
"Such what?"
"Cowards," V'Zek said, a little louder. The noise from the sky was louder, too. The chieftain turned his eyestalks that way, wondering if the drones were dropping lower again for some reason of their own. If they were, he would have his troopers drive them up again—they should not be allowed to think they could get gay with the bold M'Sak.
But the sky-things were where they had always been.
"Don't take the T'Kai too lightly," Z'Yon warned. He also had to raise his voice. V'Zek felt his eyestalks shrink back toward his shell. That was not a thin buzz coming from the sky now; it was a roar. It got louder and louder and LOUDER. V'Zek's walking-legs bent under it, as if he had some great weight tied to his carapace.
Z'Yon pointed with a grasping-claw. V'Zek made an eyestalk follow it. Something else was in the sky that did not belong there. At first he thought it just a bright silver point, as if a star were to appear in daylight. But it got bigger with terrifying speed—it became a shining fruit, a ball, and then, suddenly, the chieftain realized it was a metal building falling toward him. No wonder his legs were buckling!
He no longer heard the noise of its approach, but felt it as a vibration that seemed to be trying to tear his shell from his flesh. He looked up again, willing one eye to follow the sky-building as it descended. Would it crush him? No, not quite, he saw.
The roar continued to build, even after the thing was down on the ground in front of the M'Sak host. Then all at once it ended, and silence seemed to ache as much as clamor had a moment before.
"The Soft Ones!" Z'Yon was shrieking.
V'Zek wondered how long the shaman had been talking, or rather, screaming. "What about them?" he said. His own voice echoed brassily on his tympanic membrane.
"It's their ship," Z'Yon said.
"Well, who cares?" the chieftain growled. Now that the accursed noise had stopped, he was able to think again, and the first thing he thought about was his army.
When he looked back over his cephalothorax and tail, he let out a whistle of fury. His army, his precious, invincible army, was in full flight, dashing in all directions.
"Come back!" he bellowed. He chose the one line that had even a tiny chance of turning the warriors. "The prisoners are escaping with our loot!"
That made eyestalks whip around where nothing else would have. He saw he had not even been lying: captives from C'Lar and other towns were scuttling this way and that, with baskets on their carapaces and in their grasping-claws. He sprang after one and swung down his axe. It bit through the poor fellow's shell, which was softened by recent privation. Body fluids spurted. The prisoner fell. V'Zek slew one of his own soldiers, one who was running.
The chieftain reared back on his hindmost pair of legs, waved the dripping axe on high. "Rally!" he cried. "Rally!" A few officers took up the call. V'Zek fought and killed another would-be fugitive. The warriors began to regroup. They had feared their master for years, the unknown from out of the sky only for moments.
Then an even louder voice came from the sky-thing, roaring in the T'Kai dialect, "Go away! Leave this land! Go away!"
V'Zek understood it perfectly well. Most of his soldiers could follow it after a fashion; the M'Sak language and that of the southrons were cousins. The chieftain thought the sky-thing made a mistake by speaking. Had it remained silent and menacing, he could not have fought it, for it would have given him nothing to oppose. This way—
"It's a trick!" he shouted. "It's the accursed T'Kai, trying to run us off without fighting us!"
"Doing a good job, too!" one of his fleeing soldiers cried.
The fellow was too far away for him to catch and kill. V'Zek had to rely on persuasion instead, a much less familiar technique. Still, with the full power of his book lungs, he said, "It hasn't harmed us. Will you run from noise alone? Do you run from thunder and lightning?"
"Not bad," Z'Yon said beside him. Then he, too, raised his voice. "If this is the best the T'Kai can do, you warriors should be ashamed. Our master has the right of it: a good thunderstorm back home is more frightening than this big hunk of ironmongery ever could be. If it smites us, that is the time to worry. Till then, it's only so much wind."
As an aside to V'Zek, he added, "If it smites us, I suspect we'll be too dead to worry about anything." But only the chieftain heard him; Z'Yon knew what he was doing.
Long-ingrained discipline, the fear of losing plunder, and the sky-thing's failure to do anything more than make threatening noises slowly won the day for V'Zek. The M'Sak reclaimed most of their captives and most of their loot. They re-formed their ranks and, giving the building that had fallen from the sky a wide berth, resumed their march south.
V'Zek wanted more than that. He wanted revenge for the sky-building's nearly having put paid to his whole campaign. He sent a squad of halberdiers against it. Their weapons were good for cracking shells; he wanted to see what they would do against that gleaming metal skin.
He never found out. The sky-thing emitted such a piercing screech that he, no short distance away, drew in his eyestalks in a wince of pain. His warriors dropped their polearms and fled. Most returned to their troop, but two dashed straight for Z'Yon: the shaman was the army's chief healer.
Z'Yon examined them, gave them a salve, and sent them back to the comrades. When he turned back to V'Zek, his hesitancy showed the chieftain he was troubled. "The salve will soothe a bit. It will do no more. Their tympanic membranes are ruptured."
"Deafened, are they?" V'Zek glowered at the flying building. He only glowered, though. If the thing really could be dangerous when provoked, he would not provoke it. He had more important things to do than pausing for vengeance in the middle of his attack on T'Kai.
But once he had broken the confederacy, he told himself, the Soft Ones—or whoever was in charge of the sky-thing—would pay for trying to thwart him. Anticipating that was almost as sweet as wondering how many days he could keep Prince K'Sed alive before he finally let him die.
Browns and greens chased each other across K'Sed's carapace as he looked at the M'Sak army in the vision screen. His eyestalks pulled in a little. He noticed and lengthened them again, but Greenberg caught the involuntary admission of fear. "They are still advancing," the prince said. The translator's flat tones could not sound accusing, but the master merchant knew what he would have felt in K'Sed's shoes.
Not, he thought, that the prince wore any. He shoved the irrelevance aside. "So they are, Highness," he said. If K'Sed felt like restating the obvious, he could match him.
"You said your ship would frighten them away," K'Sed said. "Were I not used to it, the sight and sound of a ship falling from the sky would be plenty to frighten me away."
"Yes, Highness," Greenberg agreed. "I thought that would be true of the M'Sak as well." Out loud, he did not draw the obvious conclusion: that the invaders, or at least their leader, were braver than K'Sed. He hoped the prince would not reach that conclusion for himself. K'Sed was demoralized enough already.
His next words showed that to be true, but at least he was thinking in terms of the nation he led, rather than personally. "I wish we could fortify a strongpoint and force the M'Sak to attack us on ground of our own choosing. But I fear they would only go around us and keep on ravaging the countryside." Refugees from the north had spread lurid tales of the destructiveness of the M'Sak, tales that did not shrink in the telling. Sadly, recon photos confirmed them.
"Your Highness, I fear you are right." Anything that kept K'Sed focused on dealing with his problems seemed a good policy to Greenberg.
"And after all," the prince said, mostly to himself, "the savages are still some days' journey from us."
"So they are." Greenberg chose his words with care, not wanting to let K'Sed delude himself that he need do nothing, but not wanting to alarm him further, either. "And remember Your Highness, that we still shadow their every move. When our forces close with theirs—" not, Greenberg made sure, when they attack us "—we will know their every move. They cannot take us by surprise."
"That is true." K'Sed brightened a little. "We will be able to ready ourselves to meet them. I shall remind my officers of this."
As soon as the prince was gone, Greenberg called Jennifer. He'd grown to expect to have to wait for her to answer the signal. When she finally responded, he said, "From now on, I want to hear everything the M'Sak do. Everything, do you hear? We can't afford to let them get any kind of edge at all."
"I understand," she said after another pause. "I'll do the best I can."
"Keep the reader off your nose for a while, can you?" he said.
Still another pause, this time a hurt one. "I said I'd do my best, Bernard."
"All right." Against his best intentions, Greenberg felt guilty. "It's important, Jennifer. Try to remember that. A whole civilization could be riding on what you spot."
"I'll remember," she said. He had to be content with that.
"We draw closer, my master," Z'Yon said. As the M'Sak moved further from their home, the land grew strange. These cool uplands—with only those trees that yielded nuts and tubers, and those in the neat orchards—were daunting. Even the shaman felt under his shell how far away the horizon was.
V'Zek rarely showed worry. This time was no exception. He made his eyestalks long as he peered south. The smellpores around his eyes opened wider; he seemed to be trying to sniff out the T'Kai. At last he said, "It will be soon."
Two of his eyes stayed where they were. The other two broke from their southward stare to glance up at the three drones that still shadowed his army, and at the flying building as well. The latter was just a silver dot in the sky now, but V'Zek knew its true size. He wondered absently how far up it was, to look so small. However far that was, it was not far enough.
Without his willing it, his grasping-claws clattered angrily. "They watch us," he said. His voice reminded Z'Yon of the hunting call of a f'noi.
"They are not very brave, my master," the shaman said, trying to ease the chieftain's gloom.
But V'Zek burst out, "How brave need they be? Knowing how we come, they can meet us at a spot of their own choosing. And when at last we fight them, they will see every move we make, as we make it. They will be able to respond at once, and in the best possible way. How can we gain surprise in a fight like that?"
"Warrior for warrior, we are better than they," Z'Yon said. But he knew, as did V'Zek, that that only meant so much. Fighting defensively, the T'Kai might hold their casualties close to even with those of the invaders. A few engagements like that, and the M'Sak were ruined. Unlike their foes, the T'Kai could levy fresh troops from towns and countryside. The M'Sak had to win with what they had.
The shaman turned one cautious eye toward his chieftain. He was in luck: V'Zek paid him no attention. The chieftain's eyestalks were all at full length, his eyes staring intently at one another—a sure sign of furious concentration.
Then V'Zek let out a roar like a f'noi that had just killed. "Let them see whatever they want!" he cried, so loud that half the army looked his way. He took Z'Yon's upper grasping-claws in his and squeezed till the shaman clattered in pain and feared for his integument.
V'Zek finally let go. He capered about like a hatchling, then, as if whispering some secret bit of magical lore, bent to murmur into the shaman's tympanum, "They cannot see into my mind."
Pavel Koniev leaped aside. The halberd's head buried itself in the ground where he had stood. The G'Bur hissed with effort, using all four grasping-legs to tug the weapon free. It lifted.
Too slow, too slow—before the local could take another swing with the long, unwieldy polearm, Koniev sprang close. The G'Bur hissed again, dropped the halberd, and grabbed for his shortspear. By then Koniev had jumped onto his back. He swung the mace up over his head.
The circle of spectators struck spearshafts against carapaces in noisy tribute to his prowess. The claps and whoops that Greenberg and Marya added were drowned in the din. Koniev scrambled down from the G'Bur and gave him a friendly whack where a grasping-leg joined his shell. "You almost split me in two there, N'Kor, even though that halberd just has a wooden head."
"I meant to," N'Kor said. Luckily, the soldier did not seem angry at having lost. "I thought it would be easy—I flattened you often enough when we started our little games. But you're learning, and you Soft Ones dodge better than I dreamed anything could. Comes of having just the two legs, I suppose." With their wide, armored bodies and three walking-legs splayed off to either side, the G'Bur were less than agile.
Of course, Greenberg thought as Koniev repeated his moves slowly so the locals could watch, the G'Bur weren't very fragile, either. A practice halberd would bounce off a carapace with the equivalent of no more than a nasty bruise, but it really might have done in Pavel.
"A good practice," Koniev was saying to N'Kor. "With the M'Sak so close, we need all the work we can get."
N'Kor made a puzzled noise that sounded like brushes working a snare drum. "But you have your little belt weapons that bring sleep from far away. You will not need to fight at close quarters."
"Not if everything goes exactly as it should," Koniev agreed. "How often, in a battle, does everything go exactly as it should?"
This time, N'Kor's clattering was a G'Bur chuckle. "Next time will be the first. As I said, for a trader you are learning."
"Hmm," was all Koniev said to that. He wiped sweat from his face with a yellow-haired forearm as he walked over to the other two humans. "What are they doing?" he asked Greenberg; the master merchant always kept the vision screen with him.
"Making camp, same as we are," he answered after a brief look at it.
"How far away are they?" Marya asked.
She and Koniev waited a moment while Greenberg keyed new instructions into the vision screen. The M'Sak camp vanished, to be replaced by a map of the territory hereabouts. Two points glowed on the map, one gold, the other menacing scarlet. "Fifteen kilometers, more or less," Greenberg said, checking the scale along one side of the screen.
"Tomorrow," Marya said thoughtfully. Her dark eyes were hooded, far away. Greenberg suspected he bore a similarly abstracted expression. He had been in plenty of fights and skirmishes, but all of them out of the blue, leaving him no time for anything but reaction. Deliberately waiting for combat was, in a way, harder than taking part.
Because humans needed less room than G'Bur, the tents they set up were dwarfed by the locals' shelters. But their three stood out all the same, the orange nylon fiery bright when compared to the undyed, heavy fabric that was the standard tent-cloth on L'Rau.
Marya opened her tent flap. She hesitated before going through and looked from Greenberg to Koniev. Daylight was fading fast now, and campfires were not enough to let the master merchant be sure she flushed, not with her dark skin. Had it been Jennifer, there could have been no doubt.
"Come in with me," Marya said quietly.
Now the two men looked at each other. "Which one?" they asked together. They laughed, but without much mirth. Till now, they had never had any trouble sharing her affection . . . but there might not be another night after this one.
Marya knew that, too. "Both of you."
Greenberg and Koniev looked at each other again. They had never done that before. Koniev shrugged. Greenberg smiled.
"Come on, dammit," Marya said impatiently.
As the closing tent flap brushed him, Greenberg reflected that he had already decided it was no ordinary night.
In the Flying Festoon, Jennifer read fantasy and wished she were with the three traders. She had heard them all together when she called to ask if they'd come up with any new notions on how to use the starship in the upcoming battle. They hadn't; flying low and creating as much confusion as possible was the best thought they'd had. Jennifer got the idea their minds were elsewhere.
They could have invited me down, she thought. There would have been nothing to landing the Flying Festoon outside the T'Kai camp and then finding the brilliant tents the humans used. Except for Prince K'Sed's huge pavilion, they were the most conspicuous objects in camp.
But they had not asked her to come down, and she would not go anywhere she was not asked. She felt the hurt of that implied rejection, and the sadness. The three of them had a world in which she was not welcome. Maybe it's just because I'm younger than any of them, she told herself. She did not believe it. No matter what courses she had taken, she was not a trader. Greenberg must be sorry he had ever chosen her.
She gave herself back to her fantasy novel. It reminded her that she had a place of her own, too, in an intellectual world where she was up and coming, not all too junior and none too skilled. It also reminded her, unfortunately, that the nearest center of that world was some light-years away.
She began a fantasy of her own, one where she saved the Flying Festoon from hideous danger in space. The traders were ready to go into cold sleep and unfurl the light-sail for a sublight trip back to civilization that would surely last centuries. Somehow, armed with no more than a screwdriver and determination, she saved the hyperdrive.
She managed to laugh at herself. Even before spaceflight, that would have made god-awful science fiction. Here and now, it was simply ridiculous. If anything went wrong, the best she could do was scream for help; all other alternatives were worse.
She turned down the temperature in her cabin till it was just above chilly, then dug out blankets and wrapped them tight around her. She finally fell asleep, but it was not the sort of warm embrace she wanted to enjoy.