Departures

His chest felt on fire. He was not very young and not very light and not at all used to sprinting cross-country. He did not want to think about what would happen if he stepped in a hole or tripped over a bush. The blue guards might keep right on after Nadab. On the other hand, they might-or some of them might, which would be just as bad-decide to stop and kill him. He hoped that would stay just a thought experiment; he had no desire to test it empirically.

He also hoped people on the Enrico Dandolo were alert. The ground-level hatch was closed. If it didn’t open in the next few seconds-he was less than a hundred meters from the ship now, only a few meters behind Nadab and not nearly far enough ahead of his pursuers-things would get embarrassing. They’d get a great deal worse than that for the greenskin.

The hatch slid upward. Relief sobbed through Carver’s throat. “Go on!” he yelled or, rather croaked, to Nadab. The green-skin’s toes clicked on metal. A moment later, Carver’s boots clattered inside the cargo bay.

The hatch came down much faster than it had risen. None too soon-one of the blues was close enough to the Enrico Dandolo to hurl his bludgeon after Nadab. It belled off the descending door. Then the guards were pounding on the hatch with clubs and fists. The din was tremendous.

Carver stood with hands on knees, his head lowered, trying to catch his breath. Nadab was panting, too, but looked around the cargo bay with lively interest. The fluorescent strips in the ceiling proved particularly intriguing. “Not fire, yet they give light,” he said. “Have you, then, imprisoned glowfliers behind that glass? No, surely not,” he corrected himself: “too bright for that.”

“They work by the same power as our calculators,” Carver told him.

If the trader had expected a surprised outburst, he did not get one. “Ah. Interesting,” was all Nadab said. Carver had no chance to take things further. The inner door to the compartment came open. People burst in, shouting questions-mostly variations on “What the hell is going on?”

Carver explained. The crewfolk shouted in anger. The way the empire treated greenskins was abominable enough without cheating them besides. Patrice Boileau burst out, “We should up ship now and have nothing more to do with these savages.”

“That would not solve the problem,” Nadab said. Abrupt silence fell in the cargo bay, punctuated only by the banging from the blues outside. It was not so much for what Nadab said as for how he said it. Given the limits of his lipless beak, his Trade English was as fluent as anyone else’s in the compartment.

Captain Chen, as befitted her station, recovered her wits first. “We did not know you spoke our language,” she said, adding a moment later, “We did not know anyone on Ephar did.”

“I doubt any blues do,” Nadab said, again in Trade English.

The humans looked at one another. Lloyd Michaels said to Carver, “Seems we were on to something there back in Shkenaz a few days ago,”

“So it does,” the black man said.

“So you were,” Nadab agreed.

Captain Chen drove for the heart of the issue, asking, “Why do you choose to reveal this to us now?”

“Because at last I am convinced you do mean well for my people.” Nadab sounded as if the question had surprised him. “Jerome Carver here would not have risked himself to save me were it otherwise.”

“But-” That strangled protest came from everyone in the compartment at the same time. Carver managed to articulate it: “Ever since we came to Ephar, Nadab, we humans have been working to better the lot of you greenskins and help you take your full, rightful place in the empire.”

“What makes you think those two things are one and the same?” Nadab asked. The only flaw in his speech, Carver thought, was that he sounded pedantic. He thought about that, then reconsidered: another flaw was that the greenskin made no sense at all.

Patrice might have been reading his mind. “How could you not want to be free from persecution?” she demanded of Nadab. “How many of you have died for the sake of hatred?”

“Many, very many,” Nadab said, answering the second question first. “We believe, though, that they let us atone for a murder by one of ours long ago, a murder that was surely the stupidest thing a greenskin ever did, and so they are not in vain.”

“I don’t follow that,” Patrice said. Carver nodded; he found it tragic that such a clever being as Nadab should be trapped like a fly in superstition’s cobweb.

“In any case,” Michaels said, “a cargo bay is hardly the place for this kind of talk. What say we go up to the control room.”

“Good,” Captain Chen said briskly. “From there we can also tell the blues outside to go away, and that Nadab is under our protection.”

“That is very generous,” the greenskin said, “but what makes you believe they will listen to you?”

“They’ll listen,” the captain said, her voice grim. “Come along.” She led them up the spiral stair to the control room.