That led inevitably to Katayama’s next question: “If your fight was with Moscow, why did you also kill the other two, and why cover your tracks?”
Now Yezhov looked at the Security chief as at any fool. “To avoid embarrassing my country, of course. Too many people in the world would not understand how honor compelled me to act as I did.”
At last something angered Katayama. When he answered, Bennett could hear in his words the revived tradition of bushido that had gone with Japan’s emergence as a military as well as an economic power in the late twenty-first century. “There is no honor in shooting men from ambush,” he said implacably.
He turned to the Security people who held the Siberian, snapping, “Get him out of here.”
The camera crew followed them down the corridor and almost ran into the coach of the Siberian team, who came swinging from one ceiling handhold to the next like a desperate ape. When he spotted the camera, he almost threw himself in front of it. He started speaking in Russian, a true measure of how upset he was.
He checked himself after half a sentence and began again in French: “I must say, on behalf of Siberia and the czar, that what Nikolai Yezhov has done is the act of a solitary madman. I condemn him as strongly as any man alive; my heart goes out to the dear ones of the men-all the men-whose deaths he caused. Our Russian brothers of the People’s Republic of Moscow must know the firmness of the treaty of Sverdlovsk-”
He went on for some time. After a while he began repeating himself, but the director did not cut him off. The chance that his apology might be heading off a war was too real to disregard, and the urgency behind that apology made for incomparably dramatic stereovision.
The Siberian coach finally finished and departed to give his condolences to his Muscovite opposite number, his head still hanging in shame. The director’s finger stabbed toward Rannveig; the camera in the studio swung her way.
She said,” Once again the specter of nationalism has wounded the Olympic Games, the games that should be the chief symbol of cooperation between nations. Nation-states have existed for more than six hundred years now. If they haven’t yet learned to live together in that time, will they ever?”
“I think that may be too dim a view, Rannveig,” Bennett said. “Your own United Europe is a case in point, and Eastern Europe, and the Arab World. Step by step, we make progress.”
“But will it be enough?”
He shrugged. “The only answer is that we’re here. We haven’t managed to blow ourselves up, quite. And tomorrow, in spite of everything, the Games begin again. That’s worth remembering, you know.”
“Cut,” the director said.
LAST FAVOR
This one is a thought experiment If you put people or animals in an environment where cold can kill them, they’ll adapt by becoming short and stocky, with small appendages less vulnerable to frostbite. Look at arctic foxes and Eskimos, for instance. If you put people or animals in an environment where heat can kill them, they’ll also adapt, becoming long and lanky, sometimes with large appendages to help radiate heat Look at big-eared fennec foxes and the Tutsi people, for instance. What I wondered was, what happens if you put people-it has to be people this time-in an environment where stupidity can kill them?
Jerome Carver glanced at the Enrico Dandolo’s west-facing view panel. It seemed awash with flame. “Spectacular sunset,” the big black man remarked.
“What else is new?” Patrice Boileau was the only other person in the tradeship’s control room. She did not bother looking up from the screen where she was checking a computer subroutine.
“You’re spoiled,” Carver said in mild reproof.
Patrice shrugged. “There’ll be another one along tomorrow. Maybe I won’t be busy then.”
She was likely right, Carver thought. With an oranger sun and thicker air than Earth’s, the whole world of Ephar ran to glorious nightfalls and early mornings. The towers and spires of the city of Shkenaz, silhouetted blackly against the glowing sky, added a touch almost of Arabian Nights fantasy to the scene.
As the trader watched, Ephar’s sun slid below the horizon. Full darkness, though, was still some time away. Carver had no trouble spying the figure dashing from Shkenaz’s walls toward the greenskin town outside or the mob at the fugitive’s heels. He groaned. “Oh, God, they’ve caught a late one.”
This time Patrice did join him in front of the view panel. Of themselves, her hands knotted into fists. “Maybe he’ll make it,” she said. “If he gets back to his own kind before they catch him, they’ll let him go-it’s not the gods’ will that he die this time.”
“If,” Carver said grimly. Greenskin towns, by law, had to be more than three gibyats from the walls of a city. Say, a kilometer and a half, the trader thought. He wondered what misfortune had stranded the luckless runner inside Shkenaz so late. He must have known the risk he was taking.
Patrice stepped up the gain on the panel. The distance between the fleeing green centauroid and his blue-skinned pursuers seemed to swell, but that was only electronic illusion. “Run, damn you, run,” Carver muttered.
It was no good. A thrown stone made the greenskin stagger. That was all the fastest members of the mob needed to catch him and drag him down. Bodies thrashed, one of them not for long. After a while, realizing there was no sport left to be had, the troop began walking back to Shkenaz. Every so often a blue would spring into the air, in sheer high spirits.
Carver swung the west-facing camera to look at the greenskin village. Sure enough, two or three males stood near the boundary stone. They must have seen everything. They made no move to retrieve what little was left of their fellow, though. They would not till morning. If a blue patrol caught them coming out at night, the whole village might die to expiate their sin.
With a wordless sound, half fury and half frustration, Carver stabbed a finger at a button under the view panel. The panel went dark. “Three thousand years,” the trader said.
Patrice had never been on Ephar before. “Three thousand years of what?”
“That.” Carver waved to the blank view panel. “Maybe even longer, but three thousand years the locals have records for. The separate villages, the night ban… the murders.” In the six months since the Enrico Dandolo had landed, he had seen three now. That accorded fairly well with the data other ships visiting the Araite Empire had gathered.
“I don’t-want to believe that,” Patrice said.
“Believe it,” he told her. “The best part is, under the Code we can’t do a damn thing about it, either.”
Now she stared at him. “What? Why not?”
“No complainants.” Traders rarely meddled in the affairs of worlds without spaceflight. When they did, they needed ironclad documentation mat a local group not only seemed oppressed but felt itself to be. Judging from a purely offplanet perspective was, sensibly in most cases, against the rules.
“I don’t believe it!” Patrice exclaimed.
Carver shook his head helplessly. “Believe it. It’s true. Never one, in the two hundred years since tradeships have been coming here. Not the blues, of course-why should they complain? But not the greenskins, either. They just shrug and say they are all guilty by inheritance and deserve whatever the blues hand out to them. They believe it. As long as they believe it, officially there’s nothing we can do.”
“Officially,” Patrice said. There was precedent for bending the Code when it needed bending. On Ephar, it looked to need more than bending.
“I understand you.” Carver ran a hand down his dark forearm, reminding her of his race. “Don’t you think I, of all people, want to see the greenskins free? The night ban is just the worst of a whole set of restrictive laws. Greenskins can’t hold land, they can’t intermarry with the blues, they can’t-oh, a raft of things. Basically, they live by their wits, because that’s all they’re allowed to own. And-” He slammed the flat of his hand down on the console in complete frustration, “-they won’t do a damned thing about it.”
“My last trip in. I’m not the only one, either. It’s never done a bean’s worth of good. They won’t take weapons, they won’t learn civil disobedience, they aren’t interested in our trying to change attitudes among the blues. They’re-content. And it drives me crazy.”
“I don’t blame you a bit,” Patrice said. “What are you going to do now?”
“Keep trying. What else?”
Carver tramped toward Shkenaz. A few puffy clouds floated in the green-blue sky. The breeze was at the trader’s back, and full of strange sweetnesses. Had it been blowing the other way, it would have brought him the stink of the city.
Only a long trampled swath of foliage, abruptly ending, showed what had happened the evening before. As soon as the sun was up, the greenskins had taken away their dead fellow.
Carver felt his eyes keep sliding back to the mute evidence of violence. Walking along beside him, Lloyd Michaels noticed- Carver’s fellow trader did not miss much. “Nothing we can do about it,” he said.
“I know,” Carver ground out. He stopped to adjust his pack;
the straps were digging into his shoulders. “Heaven knows we’ve tried. It galls me, though, to watch a lynching and then deal the next day with the lord who condoned it.”
“I daresay we do that on a lot of primitive worlds, and on a good many that aren’t.” Michaels’s face looked too round and pink and innocent for him to be as cynical as Carver knew he was, a fact he used to shameless advantage on every planet where the locals were sophisticated enough to try to read human expressions.
“They don’t usually get their victims to agree they should have been lynched,” the black man retorted.
“There is that,” Michaels agreed mildly. “If we knew how they did it, we could make a fortune selling the secret offworld.”
Carver glared at him, a little less than half sure he was joking. “I’m going to talk to Nadab today,” he said at last.
“Old Baasa’s pet greenskin? Sure, go ahead. I expect he’ll be there.” Michaels cocked an eyebrow at his companion. “It won’t do you one damn bit of good.”
“I’ll do it anyhow,” Carver said. He walked on, looking neither to the left nor to the right, plainly ready to ignore anything more Lloyd Michaels might say. Michaels kept his mouth shut, the most annoying thing he could do.
The walls of Shkenaz drew near. The gates were open. The guards-blues, of course-leaned back, their weight supported by hind legs and stiff, thick tails. They were bored, Carver thought.
Some-not all-of that boredom fell away as the traders drew near. Even though humans had been going in and out of Shkenaz since the Enrico Dandolo landed, they were still strange enough to be interesting. The guards came forward and down onto all four running legs, held spears across the entranceway to block the traders’ path. “With whom have you business in the city?” one of them demanded sternly.
Carver studied the male as if seeing him for the first time. Centauroid was only a vague description of the locals’ body plan; the guard’s hindquarters were not much like a horse’s, and his upthrust torso even less like a man’s. His face was most alien of all, with a wide toothless beak of a mouth, twin nostril slits, and insectile compound eyes.
The trader wondered how strange he looked in those eyes.
Michaels said, “We meet today with the mighty lord Baasa, representative in Shkenaz of the Araite Emperor, may his reign be long and prosperous.” The guttural local language was made for sounding arrogant.
The guard swung up his spear. “Pass, then, into Shkenaz, and may our governor’s graciousness shine upon you.”
Change the style of architecture and the shape of the inhabitants, Carver thought, and Shkenaz was much like any other primitive town on a preindustrial world. Intelligent beings needed places to live, to trade, to worship, and arranged those places in fairly standard patterns.
Differences, though, counted, too. Because of the way the locals were made, Shkenaz seemed spacious to a biped like Carver, although the townsfolk probably would have disagreed. Few animals shared the streets with the natives, who were strong enough to do their own hauling.
On a street corner, a greenskin scribe wrote a letter for a blue; another blue waited his turn. Carver pointed. “They’re polite enough now, but I wonder how many wolf packs they’ve run in after dark.”
“As many as they could, I have no doubt,” Michaels said.
By now, most of the locals were used to seeing humans in town, and gave them no more than casual glances. The trumpet-shaped ears of a farmer in town with a piece of scrap iron on his back, though, rose in surprise and his head whipped around to follow the traders as they walked toward the main market square. The junk shop owner with whom he was dickering, a greenskin, took advantage of his surprise to close the deal on the spot.
Carver, who was in earshot when he did, felt like cheering. “We got that fellow some extra silver there,” he said.
“So we did,” Michaels agreed. “We also may have got him in trouble some time down the line for cheating a poor honest yokel who had come into Shkenaz to cheat him. When you’re a blue here, you can afford a long, selective memory for such slights.”
Black skin, as Carver had discovered, had its uses. He felt his cheeks go hot, but his companion could not see him flush.
Shkenaz’s central agora had the air of barely controlled chaos usual to marketplaces. Sellers loudly sang the virtues of six-legged meat animals, knives, perfumes, fruits, grains, pots of clay, and brass. Would-be buyers just as loudly named them liars and thieves. Business got done all the same.
A bookseller waved a three-fingered hand to draw the humans’ attention. When he had it, he held up a leather-bound codex. “Illuminated by that painter from the eastern provinces whose work you like,” he called cajolingly.
“Do you want to stop?” Carver asked.
“Not with Baasa expecting us. Keep the powers that be happy first.” Michaels turned to the waiting greenskin. “Another time, Harhas. We go now to an audience with the august governor of your great city.”
Harhas dipped his head. “May it be prosperous for you.”
Temples and Shkenaz’s town hall fronted one side of the agora. Before the town hall, as before public buildings in every town of the Araite Empire, stood a statue of Peleg. Peleg was the ancient king of a city-state somehow (Carver was not sure how; no human was) connected with the rise of the empire. More than three thousand years before, a greenskin had assassinated him. Greenskins had been paying for it ever since.
A servant was waiting outside the hall. “I am to take you to his Excellency.”
The humans followed him up the ramp. A mosaic that ran the whole length of the wall showed in gruesome, imaginative detail what had happened to Peleg’s murderer. Golden tesserae gave the work its title: Justice.
An artisan was replacing a few tiles that had fallen out of a particularly lurid scene. The artisan was a greenskin. “Nice to be reminded of where you stand in the public’s esteem, isn’t it?” Michaels murmured. Carver grunted, too mortified for the greenskin’s sake to say a word. Baasa’s servant glanced back at them. They did not translate for him.
Locals, most of them blues, bustled by, too intent on their own affairs even to notice the craftsman at work. To Carver, somehow that was the worst part of the whole business.
The servant ducked into a chamber and emerged a moment later. “His Excellency will see you now.”
“Good day, good day,” Baasa rumbled from behind his desk as the humans came in. An icon of the reigning emperor hung on the wall behind him, a reminder of the power that sprawled halfway across this continent. Baasa needed no more than such a symbolic reminder to administer Shkenaz. He was shrewd and fairly able… and if that did not suffice, Carver thought, he had Nadab.
The greenskin stood at a table to one side of his master’s desk. Like most of his kind, he had eyes a little larger than those of blues, and ears of not quit
e the same shape. Still, even taking skin color into account, the visible differences between Nadab and Baasa were less than those between Michaels and Carver. “Shall we begin?” Carver said.
“Yes, let us,” Baasa answered. Nadab merely dipped his head a couple of centimeters to show he was ready.
The humans unslung their packs. As with long-distance caravans on ancient Earth, trade goods worth hauling across light-years had to combine low bulk and high value. Michaels went first. He was a jeweler, and offplanet baubles had grown popular on Ephar over the years. Pearls sold especially well, as they had no local equivalent.
While Michaels and Baasa haggled, Carver made small talk with the governor’s aide. At last, seeing Baasa deeply involved in a hot dicker, Carver dared say, “I am sorry one of your people perished last night, Nadab.”
“It has happened before,” the greenskin said with a fatalism that never failed to chill Carver. “It will happen again. In the end, we are the better for it.”
As near as the trader could remember, Nadab had used exactly those words the last time a greenskin had died from missing the sunset curfew. Now, though, he seemed on the point of going on when Baasa interrupted to ask, “How much of the kohath spice did we set as value for a shimmerstone “ — the name the locals gave to pearls-”of this size?”
“Sir, let me see it.” Nadab walked over to Michaels, who held out the gem. The greenskin examined it. “Seven measures,” he said at once (literally, it came out “one-one”; the locals used six as their counting base).
“Oh, you thief!” Baasa and Michaels said together. They pointed fingers at each other and laughed. One had been claiming five, the other ten. Neither, though, cared to argue with Nadab.
The greenskin returned to his place. When Carver tried to pick up the conversation where the two of them had left off, he deftly changed the subject. A few minutes later, another disputed point cropped up. Nadab settled it with the same quiet competence he had shown before.
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