Departures

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.