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.
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