The tall fur crest above Gazar's eyes rippled slightly. With Atheters, Jennifer thought, that was supposed to mean they were going to get down to serious business. She hoped so. Gazar had shown her nothing but junk—well, not junk, but certainly nothing worth taking offworld—for the past two hours.
As the Atheter merchant rummaged through his wicker basket, Jennifer wondered, for far from the first time, what she was doing sitting cross-legged on a fat tree branch dickering with an alien who looked like a blue plush chimpanzee with a prehensile tail. She'd firmly intended to teach Middle English literature after a single trading run gave her a taste of the life Middle English science fiction writers tried to imagine.
That had been two trips ago, now. She still hadn't quite worked out why she'd signed up for her second trip. Had she really been that depressed about not getting the first teaching job she'd applied for?
She stopped the useless worrying as Gazar's big golden eyes—his least-chimplike feature—went wide. He'd found what he was looking for, then. With a fine dramatic sense, he held whatever it was concealed between his six-fingered hands. He started squawking. The translator Jennifer wore on her belt turned his words into Spanglish. "Here, my fellow trader, is something not many will be able to show you."
"Let me see—" Jennifer's soft, breathy voice didn't activate the translator. She tried again, louder. "Let me see it, please." The machine let out a series of raucous squawks and shrieks.
"Here." Crest erect with pride, Gazar opened his hands. "This is carved omphoth ivory, which of course means it is very, very old."
"Why 'of course'?" Had Gazar not made an issue of it, Jennifer would have taken him at his word. The ivory of the figurine was yellowed, the carving in a style unlike anything she had seen on Athet: it was vigorous, exuberant, unsophisticated but highly skilled. Back in civilization, collectors would pay a lot for it.
"Surely any nestling knows—" Gazar began. Then he let out a high-pitched screech that reminded Jennifer of forks on frying pans. To him, it was laughing. He was, in fact, laughing at himself. "But why should you, from the treeless wastes between the stars? 'Of course' because as soon as my earliest ancestors bravely crossed the Empty Lands into this forest, they began to hunt the omphoth that roamed here. No omphoth has been seen alive in more than a thousand winters."
"Oh." Jennifer was glad the alien would not notice her distaste. Humans, she was sure, had exterminated a lot more species than the Atheters, but they had also learned not to sound proud of it. Maybe, she thought, Gazar had an excuse. "Were these omphoth fierce animals, then, that killed and ate your people?"
"They were worse!" Gazar's tail writhed like a fat, pink worm, a sure sign of agitation. "They ate the trees! Fruit, leaves, branches, everything!"
That hit him where he lived, all right, Jennifer thought, in the most literal sense of the word. Atheters were arboreal by evolution and by choice. They only came down from their precious trees for stones and for copper and tin ores. Their domestic animals were as tree-bound as they were. No wonder they called the savannahs that alternated with their rain forests "the Empty Lands."
"No wonder you hunted them, then," Jennifer said soothingly. "What would you want in exchange for this figurine?"
"Ah, so here at last is something that interests you, then? I was beginning to think nothing did." Atheters understood sarcasm just fine. Gazar's tail twitched again, a different motion from the one it had made before; he was deciding how greedy he could be. "You must understand, of course, that because there are no more omphoth, the object is irreplaceable, and so doubly precious."
"I suppose so," Jennifer said. The flat tones of the translator made sure she sounded indifferent. She'd hoped Gazar wouldn't think of that.
"Oh, indeed!" Always raucous, his screeches were nearly apoplectic now. "In fact, I would not think of parting with it for less than half a dozen scalpels, two dozen swissarmyknives"—the Terran name came out in one squawked burst—"and, let me see, two, no, three bottles of the sweet tailtangler you humans brew."
He meant Amaretto, Jennifer knew. The Atheters were crazy about it. She also knew he had decided to be very greedy indeed. She gasped. The translator turned the noise into a scream of rage worthy of—what was that ancient mythical ape's name?—King Kong, that was it. That was how Atheters gasped. They were a noisy species. Jennifer said, "Why not ask for our ship, while you are at it?"
Gazar's grin exposed formidable teeth. "Would you sell it to me?"
"No. Nor will I give you everything that in your extravagance you demanded. Are you trying to empty all our stores so that we cannot deal with anyone else here?" The haggling went on for some time. It started to grow dark outside Gazar's hut of woven branches. Eventually they agreed on a price. Jennifer rummaged in her backpack. "Here are your two scalpels and fourteen knives. I will come back tomorrow with the bottle of tangletail," she said.
"I trust you so far," Gazar agreed.
"Now I must go back to my ship, while there is still some light." Jennifer stood up. She was not very tall by human standards, but she had to stoop to keep from bumping the ceiling of the hut.
Gazar scurried around to open the door for her, a courtesy she'd read of but one long obsolete on civilized worlds, where doors were smart enough to open themselves. "Until tomorrow," the Atheter merchant said.
"Yes." Jennifer started down the chain ladder the crew of the Pacific Overtures used to reach the lower branches of the big trees on which the locals lived. The Atheters carved what they reckoned hand-, foot-, and tailholds into the forest giants' trunks, but for humans, who unfortunately lacked both opposable big toes and any sort of tails, prehensile or otherwise, ladders were infinitely preferable.
Gazar peered anxiously after her. "Be careful down there," he called. "The omphoth may be gone, but there are all manners of dangerous beasts."
"I have my weapon that throws sleep," she reminded him. He smiled a big-toothed, reassured smile, then started screaming at the top of his lungs for customers. His shrieks were just a tiny part of the din; living as they did in an environment where they could rarely see far, Atheters advertised with noise.
Jennifer was relieved to descend to the relative quiet of the forest floor. She took out her stunner; she knew Gazar hadn't warned her just for politeness' sake. The ground featured not just the usual assortment of large mammaloid carnivores, but also poisonous lizardy things that struck from ambush out of piles of leaves. The thick boots she wore to protect herself against them were one more reason not to use the locals' routes up and down trees.
Being under those trees, Jennifer discovered, had other risks she hadn't thought of. Something whistled past her face, so close she could feel the breeze it raised, and smacked to earth just in front of her feet. She sprang back in alarm. Without her willing it, her finger went to the stunner's firing button.
But, she saw, it was only one of the big, knobby, hard-skinned fruits that fell from the Atheters' trees. As she looked around, she saw two or three more similar fruits and a couple of scraggly saplings that were not doing at all well as they tried to grow in the gloom cast by their elder relatives.
"A stupid seed," she muttered. Then she shivered. Stupid the seed certainly was, but had it fallen in a spot half a meter different, it would have smashed her skull. As she walked on, she cocked her head to look up every so often. Not just seeds fell from the Atheters' tree, but also rubbish the locals threw out.
After a few hundred meters, she emerged from the forest into a large clearing, almost big enough to be an independent patch of plain. In the middle of it, sunset gleamed off the metallic bulk of Pacific Overtures. Jennifer blinked; after forest twilight, the crimson sun-reflections from the ship were dazzling.
She hurried toward it. Less than a hundred meters away, she stumbled over something and nearly fell. As she caught herself, she saw she'd tripped on a stump completely overgrown by grass and low bushes. It had been a big tree once; now it was just a menace to navigation.
She sighed with animal pleasure the moment she got inside Pacific Overtures. After the humid heat of the jungle, conditioned air was a blessing. She shook back her long, blond hair, frowned at how heavy and limp with sweat it was. As she had before, she thought about cutting it short. But it helped the Atheters tell her apart from the other humans on Pacific Overtures, so she supposed it was worth the bother.
She was into the common room before she realized how much like a trader she was starting to think. Annoyed, she kicked at the carpet.
The scuffing noise made Sam Watson look up from the spice cones he was grading. His eyes lingered. That annoyed Jennifer all over again; hot, grubby, and none too clean, she felt anything but attractive. Men, though, usually seemed to think otherwise.
The once-over ended soon enough not to be offensive. "How'd you do?" Watson asked. "Get anything interesting?"
"As a matter of fact, I did." She took the ivory figurine from her beltpouch and set it on the table in front of him. "Have you ever seen anything like this before?"
He reached for it, then paused. "May I?" At her nod, he picked it up. He was a medium-sized, medium-brown man in his mid-thirties, five or six years older than Jennifer. She suspected he wore his bristly handlebar mustache for the same reason she kept her hair long: to give aliens something by which to recognize him. She couldn't think of any other reason for him to want a black caterpillar in the middle of his face.
The caterpillar twitched as he pursed his lips. "Can't say as I have," he said slowly. "That's an old, old style of carving."
"I thought so, too, though I hadn't seen it before," she nodded. "Gazar—the merchant I got it from—says the animal whose ivory it comes from is a thousand years extinct."
"I wouldn't be surprised, though I've never met a merchant, human or otherwise, who wouldn't stretch things for the sake of profit. Still, it's a pretty piece." He handed it back to her. "If it really is as old and rare as all that, it might even be museum quality."
"Do you think so?" Jennifer felt her pulse race, as if Watson had said a magic word. In a way, he had. Private collectors had only private wealth with which to buy. Museums could draw on the resources of whole planets. If they started bidding against one another, they could make a trader rich for life.
"Might be, I said." Watson jabbed a rueful thumb at his spice cones. "One thing certain—none of these is. Some will help make prime Athet brandy, some good brandy, and the rest rotgut. They'll all turn a profit, but no big deal."
"I suppose not." Jennifer daydreamed about what she could do with a really big profit. Heading the list, as always, was setting up—and then occupying—an endowed chair. She smiled, imagining the Jennifer Logan Endowed Chair for the Study of Middle English Science Fiction—maybe even of Middle English Literature, for her interests had broadened since she left the university. "But I'd need to find the omphoths' graveyard for that," she murmured.
Watson scratched his head. "The which? For what?"
"Never mind, Sam." Jennifer felt herself flushing. After so many years of ancient literature, she often found herself speaking a foreign language even when she used perfectly good Spanglish.
"All right." Watson shrugged. He was a pragmatic type who did not waste his time worrying about what was of no immediate use to him. That made him narrow, but within his limits acute. "Now that we know your ivory exists, we'll have to see if we can get more. Don't forget to tell Master Rodriguez about it."
"I won't. When do you suppose she'll be back?"
Watson shrugged again. "She's got some sort of complicated deal brewing with the treelords, so she may be gone days yet. Who can say?" He gave a wry chuckle. "Whatever she's up to, it's a lot bigger than the trinket exchange level we humble journeymen operate at."
"I suppose so." Jennifer still had mixed feelings about her rank. If she hadn't made journeyman at the end of her first run, she wouldn't have had anything to fall back on when her try at a real job went up in smoke. Maybe she would have tried again instead of signing up for another trip.
Watson, she knew, would have told her it was much too late to worry about such things now. He would have been right, too. That didn't stop her.
Now he glanced longingly back toward his spice cones. "I'd better finish these, so I can see exactly what I've got. Congratulations on the ivory. I'm most sincerely jealous."
She smiled. "Thanks." She headed on to her own cubicle and shut the door behind her. The figurine went into her strongbox. She walked down the hall to take a fast shower. Then she did what she did during most of her free time: she got out her reader and went from modern times back to the days before English changed to Spanglish. She might not be teaching the ancient literature, but she still loved it.
This new tale wasn't science fiction but, she discovered as she read, it did show respect for rational thought. She laughed a little, quietly, at a pleasant coincidence between past and present. Even across a gap of a thousand years, such things turned up now and again. They only made her enjoy her reading more.
Master Merchant Celia Rodriguez called a crew's meeting two afternoons later. Jennifer made sure she was in the common room at the appointed time; Master Rodriguez's tongue could degauss computer chips when she got annoyed. The other five merchants who made up the rest of Pacific Overtures' crew were equally punctual, no doubt for the same reason.
Jennifer loathed meetings, feeling they wasted time in which she could be doing something useful instead. Sitting through a great many of them had only made that feeling stronger. She got ready to look interested while she thought about her ancient scientific detective.
Celia Rodriguez's first words, though, made her sit up and take notice. "The civilization in this whole tract of forest is in deep trouble." Master Rodriguez's take-it-or-leave-it delivery was a good match for her looks: she was about fifty, heavyset, with blunt features and iron-gray hair she wore short. She badly intimidated Jennifer. Most loud, self-assured people intimidated Jennifer.
"What do you mean?" demanded Tranh Nguyen. He was also a master merchant, though junior to Rodriguez. "Judging from the records of earlier trade missions here, technology is improving, the standard of living is up, and population per tree keeps increasing." A couple of others, Sam Watson among them, nodded agreement.
"You're right," Rodriguez answered at once. "None of that matters at all, though, because the forest itself is dying back. Dim lights!" she told the ship's computer, and the common room went dark.
"First image," she commanded. The computer projected a map onto the wall next to her. "The green shows the extent of this tract of forest at the time of the first landing on Athet, 250 years ago. Second image." The borders of the green patch changed shape. "This is about a hundred years ago. Note the losses here, here, and here. Note also that the open space in which we are sitting appears during that interval."
Jennifer thought of the stump she'd tripped over. That had seemed just one of the small things that made up a day. Now it looked more like a symptom of a much bigger problem.
So it proved. "Third image," Rodriguez said. The map changed again. "This is where we are today. See how much bigger this clearing has grown, and the appearance of these two further west. See also where grassland has replaced forest here, and in this sector. The next map is an extrapolation of where these trends will lead if they keep on for another two hundred years. Fourth image."
The new map that appeared beside the master merchant brought gasps of surprise and dismay from her colleagues. The broad expanse of forest that had dominated this part of the continent was gone, only a few small outcrops surviving like islands in a sea of grass.
"This, of course, spells catastrophe for the Atheter civilization here," Master Rodriguez said. "The locals are so tied to their arboreal life-style that they have a great deal of trouble adapting to life on the ground. Their most likely response to the failure of the trees would be to try migrating to the next big forest tract, a couple of hundred kilometers away. That tract is already settled; I doubt its inhabitants would welcome newcomers with open arms."
"Have you shown the treelords these maps?" Tranh Nguyen asked.
Rodriguez shook her head. "I prepared them last night, after our meeting. The treelords realize they have a problem, but not its extent. As you said before, they can support more people per tree than they once could, which has helped mask there being fewer trees in which to support them. But now they have begun to notice."
"What do they want us to do, then?" Nguyen went on, having the seniority to ask the questions the whole crew was thinking.
"We've spent 250 years building up our image here as the wise, powerful traders from the stars. Now they want us to live up to it." Master Rodriguez's smile was ironic. "They want us to make the forest grow bigger again. Not much, eh?"
This time, several people spoke at once. "How do they propose to pay for it?" It was the first question that flashed through Jennifer's mind, though she did not speak aloud. Her own smile was rueful. Yes, she thought like a merchant now, sure enough.
"I don't know," Rodriguez said. "I don't know if we can, for that matter, but even trying will be expensive. And Athet has never been what you'd call a high-profit world. For something of this scale . . ." She let the words hang.
"I don't like the idea of standing by and watching a civilization fall," Suren Krikorian said. He was a journeyman hardly senior to Jennifer, but came from a wealthy family—he did not need to worry about the consequences of speaking his mind.
"Neither do I," Celia Rodriguez replied. "I don't like the idea of bankrupting myself either, though. Even a preliminary study on the local problem will keep us here a lot longer than we'd planned, and that will be expensive. If we don't have something to show for it when we get back to our civilization, we'll all be badly hurt."
Krikorian scowled but did not answer. The master merchant was right, and everyone knew it. Jennifer suddenly got up and hurried away from the table. She remembered to say "Excuse me" just as she left the common room, but so softly she was afraid nobody heard her.
"I trust this will be interesting," Rodriguez said when she got back. By her tone, she did not trust any such thing.
Jennifer felt herself flush. "I—I hope so, Master Merchant," she said, wishing she could push arrogance into her voice whenever she needed it. She held up the omphoth-ivory figurine. "I—I was just thinking that if the Atheters have more pieces of this quality, they would help pay us for our time here."
Celia Rodriguez's voice changed. "May I see it, please?" Jennifer brought it to her. She examined it closely, then asked, "May I show it to the rest of our group?" Jennifer nodded. "Opinions?" the master merchant asked as she handed Tranh Nguyen the piece.
The merchants passed it from one to another. Finally, Sam Watson returned it to Jennifer. "Enough like this, and staying here may well be worth our while," Nguyen said. No one argued with him.
"I only hope there are enough pieces," Jennifer said. "The trader from whom I got this one told me that the animals from which the ivory came have been extinct for a thousand years."
"Have they?" Now calculation was in Rodriguez's voice, and something else as well—the purr of a predator that had just spotted dinner. "Then with a little luck, we may be able to clean out the whole supply. We'll sell a few pieces when we get back to civilization, leave the rest with our brokers while half a dozen other ships scurry out here to try to get in on the good thing. And when they come back empty—why, then we'll sell more, at four times the price."
Everyone in the common room grinned at Jennifer. She smiled back, a little uncertainly—attracting attention, even favorable attention, made her nervous. It did, however, beat the stuffing out of the other kind, she thought.
Gazar's crest rose. His tail thrashed. "Your people will be buying many omphoth-ivory pieces, you say?"
Jennifer nodded. "As many as they can. If you want more, if you want more to sell to us, now would be a good time to get them, before you have to compete with the lure of offworld goods."
"And if I do get them, you will trade those offworld goods to me?" The Atheter's golden eyes were big and yellow as twin full moons.
"Certainly," Jennifer said. "Provided, that is, that you remember the favor I have done you and keep your demands within the bounds of reason."
Gazar winced. "Now I understand why your teeth are so small, merchant from the stars—your sharp tongue long ago sliced off their points." He displayed his own formidable set of ivory.
"From you, I will take that as a compliment," Jennifer chuckled.
"I meant it as one," Gazar said. "You must understand me, even with advance notice I doubt I will be able to get a great many pieces. Omphoth ivory has become rare enough over the years that most of it, now, is in the treasury of one treelord or another. Still, some may be persuaded to fall from the branch."
"I hope so." Jennifer paused. "Speaking of falling from the branch, I almost had my head smashed in by a falling fruit the other day."
"I'm glad you escaped. Still, that shows the folly of going down to the ground, does it not?"
"Not what I meant." Jennifer reminded herself not to be annoyed. Just as she was a product of her environment, so Gazar was of his. "I would have thought that you treefolk would take care to harvest those fruits for yourselves, and not let the ground creatures have the benefit of them."
The Atheter made a horrible face. "Not even the crawlers in the leaves would want them. Our trees are wonderful. They are our lives, they are our livelihoods, they are our homes. But we do not eat their fruits. They taste dreadful."
"Oh. All right." Jennifer thought for a moment. "But you have many different kinds of large trees in this forest. Surely some must be of use to you."
"A few," Gazar said grudgingly, as if making an enormous concession. "Most, though, are truly foul—better for weapons, as you saw, than for food."
"You know best, I'm sure." Jennifer stood up, as well as she could inside Gazar's shop. "I'll come back again in a few days. I hope you'll have found some omphoth ivory by then."
"So do I," Gazar said. "My mate is pregnant with a new set of twins, and I expect we will need a larger house after they are born. The more offworld goods I get from you, the sooner I can buy it. Maybe I will buy a slave or two as well."
Jennifer was glad Atheters had trouble reading human expressions; she was afraid her revulsion showed on her face. You are not here to reform these people, she told herself. Until they industrialized, they probably would have slaves, and there was nothing she could do about it. No, not quite nothing—trading with them was bound to spur their own technology, which might hasten the day when slavery grew uneconomic here.
As she walked back to Pacific Overtures this time, she kept a wary eye on the treetops. When a big fruit crashed down into the bushes, maybe fifty meters off to her left, she almost jumped out of her skin. No missiles came any closer than that, though, for which she was duly grateful.
Back at the ship, she gave herself the luxury of a few seconds of gloating. A small private hoard of omphoth ivory couldn't help but improve her credit rating when she got back to civilization. A large private hoard would be nicer yet, but she knew she lacked the resources to get her hands on one.
Maybe next trip out, she'd score that really big coup . . . She stopped in dismay. That was thinking too much like a trader to suit her. If she got a decent stake out of this run, she'd be able to afford to look for an academic job.
"And if I land one," she said aloud, "I'll never again go to a world that doesn't have an automated information retrieval system."
Pleased at that promise to herself, she dug out her reader and returned to twentieth—or was it nineteenth?—century London. The more stories she read about this detective, the more she wanted to read. That surprised her; the fellow who wrote them had also turned out a lot of bad science fiction. But the detective and his amanuensis lived and breathed. These tales were what the writer should have been doing all along, instead of wasting his time on things he wasn't good at.
She put down the reader and fought back angry tears. What was she doing aboard Pacific Overtures except wasting her time on things she wasn't good at?
Tranh Nguyen made as if to bang his head against the corridor wall. "I don't know why the forest is shrinking," he growled. "As far as I can tell, the soil in the grasslands is the same as the soil where the trees still grow. It has the same mineral content, the same little wormy things crawling through it, the same everything."
"Not the same everything." Celia Rodriguez shook her head. "It doesn't have trees on it any more. We still have to find out why."
"Excuse me," Jennifer said—softly, as usual—as she tried to get past them.
Neither master merchant paid any attention to her. Tranh Nguyen said, "I know we have to, but I'm not sure we can. I do what the computer tells me to do, I compare the results of one sample to those from another, but if nothing obvious shows up, I'm stuck. I can't make the intuitive leap—I'm a trader, after all, not an agronomist who might see more than is in the computer program."
"Excuse me," Jennifer said again.
"An agronomist!" Rodriguez clapped a hand to her forehead. "As if we could afford to haul an agronomist all the way out here! As if we could find an agronomist crazy enough to want to come! We have to be able to do this kind of work for ourselves, because if we don't, no one will."
"I know that as well as you do," Tranh Nguyen said. "Why carry the big computer library, except to make sure we can do a little of everything? A little of everything, though, Celia, not everything. We may really need a specialist here. Right now, I'm stymied."
"Excuse me," Jennifer said one more time.
Celia Rodriguez finally noticed she was there. She stepped out of the way. "Why didn't you say something?" she demanded.
Jennifer shrugged and walked by. She was often effectively invisible aboard Pacific Overtures. She much preferred that to the way things had been on her last trading run, when two male journeymen, neither of whom she wanted in the least, had relentlessly hounded her through the whole mission.
Sometimes she wished she were chunky and hard-featured like Celia Rodriguez instead of slim and curved and possessed of an innocent look she could not get rid of no matter how hard she tried. She would have enjoyed being valued for herself instead of just for her blue eyes. She'd never found a tactful way to say that to the master merchant, though, and so sensibly kept her mouth shut.
She let herself into her cubicle and closed the door after her. That cut off most of the noise from the corridor, where Rodriguez and Tranh Nguyen were still arguing. She carefully took off her backpack and set it on the floor. Then, grinning, she leaped onto her mattress and bounced up and down like a little kid.
When she was done bouncing, she got up again and opened the backpack. Inside, wrapped in a square of thick, native, printed cloth that was a minor work of art in itself, lay two fine omphoth-ivory figurines. One was a carving of an Atheter; but for its age, Jennifer would have guessed it a portrait of Gazar. It certainly captured the local merchant's top-of-his-lungs style—she could practically see the fur rising on the figurine's back.
That piece was excellent, but it paled beside the other. "This," Gazar had said, swelling up with self-importance, "is a veritable omphoth, carved from its own ivory to show later generations the sort of monsters we had to battle in those ancient days."
To a tree-dweller, Jennifer had to admit, it must have looked like a nightmare come to life. She thought of an elephant's head mounted on a brachiosaur's body, though the ears were small and trumpetlike, the tusks curved down, and the trunk—miraculously unbroken on the figurine—seemed to be an elongated lower lip rather than a nose run rampant. Such details aside, the carved omphoth certainly looked ready to lay waste to whole forests.
Imagining a full-sized one, Jennifer had trouble seeing how the Atheters ever could have killed it. When she had said as much to Gazar, he'd burst into epic verse in a dialect so antique that her translator kept hiccuping over it. Apparently a band of heroes had gone out into the Empty Lands, brought back an immense boulder, somehow manhandled it up into the treetops, and then dropped it on an omphoth's head.
"Thus was the first of the monsters slain," Gazar had declaimed, "giving proof—could be done again." Jennifer remembered staring at her translator; the machine wasn't programmed to produce rhymes like that.
Now, though, she was more interested in the statuette than in the poetry its model had inspired. No matter how many treelords ransacked their collections for Celia Rodriguez, she did not think the master merchant would come up with a finer piece.
How much would the omphoth be worth? Enough to set up an endowed chair of Middle English literature? Jennifer knew she was dreaming. The whole hoard Pacific Overtures was bringing back might be worth something close to that, but her few private pieces wouldn't come close.
She sighed, rewrapped the figurines, and put them in her strongbox. One of these days, she told herself—most likely, just about the time when she would start forgetting her Middle English.
No, that was unfair. She loved the old language—although perhaps it wasn't older, she thought, surprised, than Gazar's hunting epic—and kept fresh her command of it. Fiche and a reader even a journeyman could easily afford.
She settled in with her scientific detective. This tale, part of what was called his memoirs, had to do with horse racing. Jennifer had seen a great many alien beasts on her trading runs, but never a horse. She had to struggle to work out from context what several of the words in the story meant; she was always rediscovering how large a vocabulary Middle English had. Even so, as she usually did, she got the gist of the piece and smiled at finding an exchange that had passed straight into Spanglish.
"'Is there any point to which you would wish to draw my attention?'
" 'To the curious incident of the dog in the nighttime.'
" 'The dog did nothing in the nighttime.'
" 'That was the curious incident,' remarked Sherlock Holmes."
She finished "The Silver Blaze," loaded the fiche Oxford English Dictionary into the reader so she could look up a few words that had completely baffled her. But her mind kept going back to the dog that had not done anything. She frowned, trying to figure out why.
Then her eyes got wide. She reached under the bunk for her strongbox. She got out the two figurines she had just bought from Gazar. She looked from one of them to the other, then slowly nodded. This had to be how Holmes felt when all the pieces fell together. She quoted him again. "When you have eliminated the impossible, whatever remains, however improbable, must be the truth."
"Excuse me, Master Merchant." Jennifer had to say it three times before Celia Rodriguez noticed her. She didn't mind; she was used to that.
Finally Rodriguez looked up from her computer screen. "You want something, Jennifer?" She sounded surprised. Jennifer didn't mind that, either. She usually kept a low profile.
"Yes, I think so, Master Merchant. That is, I think I may know why this forest is shrinking."
Rodriguez slammed a meaty hand down on the panel in front of her. "Well, if you do, that's more than anyone else does. And I haven't seen you doing anything in the way of trying to find out, either. So how do you know? Divine inspiration?"
"No. I—I—" Jennifer had to work to keep her voice audible in the face of such daunting sarcasm. "I—I got the idea from a Middle English book I was reading."
The master merchant groaned. "Jennifer, I don't begrudge anyone a hobby. Tranh Nguyen keeps trying to beat the computer at chess. He'll keep trying till he's 105, if he lives that long. Me, I like to knit. That's even useful, every now and then. I've traded things I've made for more than they're worth. You have your ancient books. They're harmless, I suppose. But what can they possibly have to do with why this forest tract on Athet is getting smaller?"
"It's—a way of thinking. But never mind that now. You're right, Master Merchant, I haven't done much work on the problem till now. I'm sorry. But can you tell me if you have maps that show the boundaries of the forest from a long time ago? Long before we first landed here, I mean: back when the Atheters were first settling this territory."
"I think so, yes." Rodriguez fiddled with the computer. A map appeared on the screen, replacing the chart she had been studying. "As best we can tell now, this is the size of the forest about fifteen hundred local years ago. It started declining then, slowly at first, but more and more rapidly in the past millennium. The process was well under way when humans came here, for reasons we still can't fathom—no great climatic changes, no shifts in the nature of the soil, nothing."
The master merchant checked herself, glanced sourly at Jennifer. "Oh, I'm so sorry. Now you know why, out of your antique books. Enlighten me, please."
Jennifer took a deep breath. If she was wrong now, the fitness report Rodriguez turned in on her would make it next to impossible for her to fly again. After not getting a fair shot at one career, the prospect of washing out of another frightened her more than she was willing to admit, even to herself.
"I think it was—" She spoke so softly that Rodriguez had to lean forward to hear what she was saying. She involuntarily yelped, "—the omphoth."
"The omphoth?" The master merchant looked disgusted. "You come in here, waste my time with this foolishness when I have serious work to do? The omphoth," she said, as if to an idiot child, "have been extinct for a thousand years. You were the one who found that out. How can something that isn't here any more have anything to do with conditions now?"
"By not being here," Jennifer said. Rodriguez snorted and turned back toward the computer screen. "No, wait!" Jennifer said desperately. "The forests really started shrinking a thousand years ago—you said so yourself. And the Atheters here finished wiping out the omphoth a thousand years ago. Don't you think there's a connection?"
"Coincidence," Rodriguez snorted. But she did look at Jennifer again. Now she might have been talking to a clever child. "Be reasonable. The Atheters got rid of the omphoth because they kept eating up the forest. So why is it shrinking now that they're gone?"
"Yes, they ate the trees," Jennifer agreed. "They even ate the horrible fruits that the Atheters can't stand, that none of the animals that are still around want anything to do with. What happens to the fruits that fall to the ground now?"
"They sprout, of course."
"Yes." Jennifer nodded eagerly. She was so full of her idea, she was almost fluent. "They sprout. They sprout under the trees that dropped them in the rain-forest gloom. Not many grow up, and the ones that do only grow up in the same place trees had always been."
"So what do the omphoth have to do with any of that? If they eat those fruits, they digest them, don't they? That gets rid of them a lot more thoroughly than trying to grow in the shade."
"They digest the fruit, yes, but what about the seeds inside?" Jennifer asked. "Lots of plants on lots of worlds disperse their seeds by passing them through animals' guts. I looked that up when I first wondered if there was any connection between the omphoth disappearing and the forest shrinking back."
"Do they? Did you?" Now, at last, Celia Rodriguez began to seem interested.
"Yes. It makes sense here, too, in ecological terms. It really does, Master Rodriguez. The omphoth ate fruit nothing else here likes at all. Doesn't that probably mean they and the trees evolved together? The trees provided them a special food and in return they disseminated the seeds inside. And so when they disappeared, the seeds didn't get disseminated any more, and that's what I think has made this tract of forest get smaller."
"Hmm." The master merchant pulled out her lower lip, then let it snap back with a soft plop. "You've done your homework on this, haven't you?"
"Of course I have, Master Rodriguez." Jennifer knew she sounded surprised. If she was good at anything, it was research.
"Hmm," Celia Rodriguez said again. "Well, what do we do even if you're right? The omphoth are extinct. We don't have a time machine to bring them back."
"Ooh." It was like a blow in the belly—Jennifer hadn't thought that far ahead.
But once the master merchant had an idea, she was not one to let go of it. She said, as much to herself as to Jennifer, "They're extinct here, anyhow. But this isn't the only tract of rain forest on Athet, not by a long shot. It's just the one offworlders do the most business with. Maybe others have relatives of the omphoth still running around loose."
"It shouldn't be hard to find out," Jennifer said.
Celia Rodriguez barked a couple of syllables' worth of laughter. "No, not hardly," she agreed. "Even with our translators barely working, the way they act when they're still picking up new languages, the locals won't be in much doubt about whether they have omphoth around."
Jennifer thought of something else. "I hope the main hold is big enough to carry one. More than one, I mean, if we intend to establish them here."
"First things first." The master merchant laughed again. "Hope the stunners are strong enough to put them under. Otherwise I suppose we'll have to herd them across the however many hundreds or thousands of kilometers it is from where they are to here. And for that—" Rodriguez's tone was still bantering, but Jennifer had no doubt she meant what she said "—for that, I would definitely charge extra."
Something went crashing through the undergrowth far below the branch on which Gazar's establishment was perched. Then the something—Jennifer and Gazar both knew what it was; nothing else made that much racket—let out a bellow that sounded like a cross between a kettledrum and a synthesizer with a bad short in its works.
Gazar made a ghastly face. "Now I know why our heroic ancestors slew all the ancient omphoth—in the hope of getting a good night's sleep. The cursed beasts are never quiet, are they?"
"They don't seem to be," Jennifer admitted. The cries of the newly released animals could be heard even inside Pacific Overtures.
Out along the branch, Atheters shouted and screeched. Jennifer's translator screeched, too, protesting the overload. It did manage to pick up one call. "Come on out, Gazar, and look at the omphoth! Here it comes!"
"Why should I want to see the creature that torments my rest?" Gazar grumbled, but he went. Jennifer followed more slowly, the hobnails in the bottom of her boots helping to give her purchase on the branch.
Young Atheters squealed and clung to their mothers' fur as the omphoth lumbered by underneath. It took no notice of the excited locals in the tree; its attention was centered solely on food. It pulled up a bush, spat it out—it was still learning what was good in this new forest and what was not.
"It doesn't look the way an omphoth is supposed to," Gazar complained; having found that figurine for Jennifer, he fancied himself an expert. "It doesn't even have tusks."
He had a point, she supposed. The new beasts were not identical to their exterminated cousins. Not only were they tuskless, but their lower-lip trunks were bifurcated for the last meter or so of their length. They hardly had any tails, either, and their claws were smaller than those of the omphoth this forest had once known.
But in the one essential way, they were like the omphoth of old: they were ravenously fond of the big, knobby fruits the various trees here produced. The omphoth under Gazar's tree bent its head down so its forked trunk could grab fruit that had fallen to the ground. Wet chewing noises followed.
Then the omphoth reached up almost as high as the branch on which Jennifer was perched. If the baby Atheters had squealed before, they shrieked now. Jennifer could not blame them. The sight of that open pink maw only a few meters away made her want to shriek, too. The omphoth had dreadful breath.
It was not interested in snacking off the locals, though. All it wanted to do was pluck more fruit from any branch it could reach. Finally it stripped those branches bare and stamped away to look for more fodder.
Gazar turned around to display his hindquarters at it, a gesture of contempt he had never been rude enough to use on a human. He caught Jennifer's eye. "Some treetowns are even less happy with these beasts than ours," he said. "I only hope they are not so shortsighted as to try to get rid of them."
"Why would they do that?" Jennifer exclaimed in horror. "The omphoth are saving the forest for you."
"Saving the whole, aye, but damaging the parts. We have laws against building on branches lower than a certain height." Gazar blinked. "I suppose one reason we have those laws is the omphoth of long ago. I never thought about it till now. But not every treelord enforces those laws—without omphoth, they matter little. Now there are omphoth again, and they've already wrecked some houses that were low enough for them to reach."
"Oh. I'm sorry to hear that," Jennifer said. "Your people had better know, though, that we won't be around to get more omphoth for them if they go and kill these. You need to build up the herd, not destroy it."
"The treelords know that," Gazar said, still sounding a long way from happy at the prospect. "Armed males travel through the trees to guard the beasts from harm."
"I should hope so," Jennifer said. After all the trouble the crew of Pacific Overtures had gone through in stunning and transporting the great beasts, the idea of having them hunted down was appalling.
She took her leave from Gazar and climbed down the chain ladder to the ground. The omphoth was nowhere to be seen, although she could still hear it somewhere off deeper in the forest. She was glad it was not between her and Pacific Overtures.
Immense footprints and crushed bushes showed the beast's path. So did a huge pile of steaming, stinking, green dung. In the dung Jennifer saw several teardrop-shaped seeds.
She smiled. These particular seeds got no great advantage from their trip through the omphoth's gut. But omphoth also wandered out to the edges of the savannah country surrounding the forest. Seeds deposited there would be more likely to thrive. With luck, the forest would grow again.
Her smile grew broader. All too often preindustrial races wanted nothing more from traders than help in war against their neighbors. This time, though, the crew of Pacific Overtures had really accomplished something worth doing. They'd turned a profit on the deal, too. Jennifer had learned to think well of the combination. She hurried toward the ship.
An omphoth came out of the forest. Sam Watson stepped up the gain on Pacific Overtures' viewscreen. He and Jennifer watched the beast's pupils shrink in the sudden bright sun. It didn't seem to like the feeling much. With a bellow, it drew back into the shelter of the trees.
Watson yawned and stretched. "I'll almost miss the big noisy things," he said.
"Yes, so will I, but not their racket," Jennifer said.
"No, not that. Maybe the next ship in can see if coffee does for Atheters what it does for us. I suspect a good many of them will need it, though they're not what you'd call a quiet race themselves."
"Hardly." Thinking of Gazar, Jennifer knew that was, if anything, an understatement. After a moment, she went on, "Maybe we should have done some tests with the coffee in the galley. If it worked, they'd have paid plenty for it."
"Too late to worry about it now, what with us upshipping tomorrow. I wonder how much the ivory will end up bringing. The way Master Rodriguez has things lined up, we may take a while selling everything, but we'll get a lot when we finally do. It's especially nice," Watson added, "that the new kind of omphoth we've introduced here doesn't have tusks; the Atheters won't have the incentive of hunting them to carve more trinkets for traders."
"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."
THE FOITANI