Departures

Captain Chen eyed the view panel. Hardly any of the blues outside were going home, but they were not advancing on the Enrico Dandolo, and they were not heading for the greenskin village: the tracers had effectively discouraged that. “Good enough,” the captain said. For Shumilov she added, “Use the guns to keep them where they are, but don’t fire into the mob itself without my order.”

“Aye, aye,” the weapons officer said, and fell silent again. He talked as if he were afraid his pay would be docked for every surplus word he used.

The blues kept milling about without doing anything much except beginning to argue among themselves. “Stalemate,” Captain Chen said, sounding pleased with herself. “Eventually they’ll get bored and leave us alone.” She turned to Nadab. “Where were we when that mess started?”

“They will not get bored. They will not go away,” the greenskin said, in much the same tone, Carver thought, as he would have said, The sun will come up tomorrow. Nadab went on. “As for where we were, I was remarking that the key to our problem lies in the sort of occupations in which we are permitted by law to engage.”

Carver admired the way Nadab instantly repaired the broken thread of conversation. The trader started to tick off greenskin jobs on his fingers: “Scribe, banker, jeweler, shopkeeper-”

“You need not go through the entire catalog,” Nadab said with a sting in his voice that Lloyd Michaels might have envied. “Far simpler to notice what they have in common.”

Again Carver-and, he saw, his companions-danced to the greenskin’s tune. Carver rubbed his chin as he thought. Before anything occurred to him, Patrice said, “We were talking about this a while ago, Jerome, remember? More than any other locals, the greenskins live by their wits.”

“Exactly!” For the first time, Nadab seemed satisfied with the humans he was facing. He spread his hands in an expansive gesture, then let them drop again when no one picked up what was plainly a cue. “Surely you can extrapolate from what you know.”

“We know many things,” Captain Chen said shortly. She was losing patience. Her wave encompassed the control room, which anyone on Ephar was centuries from matching. “What in particular applies to you?”

“When I learned you knew of evolution, I did not think I would have to be so elementary,” Nadab said. So there, Carver thought. The greenskin resumed. “If you are raising livestock and desire a larger beast, what do you do?”

“Breed the largest ones you have to each other.” Michaels gave the obvious answer, sounding as if he were humoring the greenskin. “Then breed the largest of the next generation to each other, and…” His voice trailed away. Carver felt a tingle of something between awe and dread as he saw where Nadab was leading the humans. Michaels was more serious than Carver had ever heard him: “You’re saying this applies to you.”

“How could it not?” Nadab said. Though nothing about him had changed, he suddenly looked vastly different to Carver. The trader would rather have gone on seeing Nadab as a representative of a tormented minority than as the result of an age-long experiment in controlled breeding. Things would have been much more comfortable that way.

“You claim you greenskins have been breeding for brains for all this time?” Captain Chen sounding rattled was as unnerving as Lloyd Michaels being serious.

“Say rather we have been bred for them,” Nadab said. “After the crime of the one we do not name, the restrictions you know were forced upon us. They acted as they had to act, whether we knew of it at the time or not. Those of us who were clever enough to make their way in the face of such difficulties survived and bred; those who were not starved or were killed on account of their stupidity, either by offending the blues or from being caught out after sunset… as I was. Do you doubt now that I am something different from any blue you have known-and from yourselves?”

Before any of the humans could answer, the machine guns’ harsh chatter made them all jump. Tracers stabbed into the night, warning the blues away from the greenskin village again. “I do thank you,” Nadab said, “but how long will you keep that up? All night? A day or two? As long as you are here? Do you think the blues will have forgotten by that time? They have not forgotten us in three thousand years.”

An ancient joke floated into Carver’s mind: If you ‘re so smart, why aren‘t you rich! It rang eerily apt here. The trader said, “If you were what you say you are, Nadab, I’d expect your kind, not the blues, to be masters within the empire.”

Nadab cocked his head; had he had eyebrows, Carver thought, he would have lifted one. “Baasa listened to my advice. After I am gone, he will have another greenskin by his side: we reckon better, we remember better, we pull things together better than any other aides he is likely to find. Do you think him the only city governor who has discovered our usefulness? Do you think the emperors themselves have not?”