Departures

“He’s right,” Patrice said softly. “Check the records. Every blue official traders have dealt with has always had a greenskin at his elbow.” From the way she stared at Nadab, she too was seeing him with new eyes.

“Of course,” the greenskin went on, “we also have the advantage of being disposable at need.” Was that bitterness? Somehow Carver doubted it. Nadab sounded altogether matter-of-fact. Alien, the trader thought.

“Let’s say you do rule behind the scenes.” Captain Chen had recovered her briskness, to Carver’s relief. She reached a hand toward Nadab as if to pull the answer to her next question from him. “Why, then, haven’t you people used your position of power to better your lot and get rid of the burdens you suffer under?”

Nadab drew back a pace; his tail switched up and down, a gesture of dismay. “Because we do not wish to, and we must not. We have been atoning for the nameless one’s crime all these years by making ourselves into a people that will not act so stupidly as he did. If there were no longer pressure to force wisdom upon us, we would fall back into sloth and ease, and cease to improve ourselves.”

“That’s the craziest-” Lloyd Michaels began, but stopped before he finished the sentence. Carver understood: from the greenskins’ point of view, what Nadab was saying was perfectly logical. And intelligence was not always what set basic premises; it only worked from them.

Carver understood something else as well. “That’s why you were going to butcher the science books Baasa bought from me. If the blues catch on to evolution, they may realize what you’ve become.”

“What we are becoming,” Nadab corrected gravely. “But yes, you are in essence correct. I doubt they would approve.” Even in Trade English, the greenskin had a gift for understatement.

“How can you presume to speak for all your people?” Captain Chen demanded. “What of those who do not care to be persecuted for the sake of an ancient crime? Don’t they want us to do whatever we can to lighten their load?”

“You humans have been coming to the empire for two hundred years now, your reckoning. In that time, how many greenskins have sought such aid from you?”

“None.” The captain did not sound happy about admitting it. Nadab let the silence grow behind that solitary word.

The tracers punctuated it. The humans jumped again. Nadab repeated quietly, “How long will you keep that up?”

“What would you have us do?” Captain Chen’s voice was no louder.

“Open a door and let me out.”

“No!” Patrice and Michaels spoke at the same time, while Carver said, “They’ll kill you out there.” Captain Chen said only, “You know what the consequences will be if we do that. Why do you want us to?”

“The consequences for me will be bad in any case. My life is forfeit now all through the empire, and I do not care to live outside it. Would you take me to your world with you? Being a curiosity there, the only one of my kind, has no appeal. So I count myself doomed, come what may. I do not wish my village, and perhaps greenskin villages all through the empire, to be injured on my account.”

The captain spoke to the air. “Shumilov, are you listening to this?”

“Aye.” The weapons officer’s voice was machine-flat. “Comments?”

A moment’s pause, then Shumilov said. “He’s right.”

Captain Chen made a sour face. She turned back to Nadab and repeated, “You know what will happen to you out there.”

“Yes: the same as would have happened had I let the blue guards have their sport with me at sunset.”

“You don’t want to five,” Carver said harshly.

“Of course I do. Who does not? Why would I have run for your ship here when you cried out if I did not want to live? I thought you were giving me a new option, one none of my people ever had before. But”-the greenskin waved at the view panel that showed the mob of blues- “I see that is not so. I was wrong.”

He sounded so downcast at the admission that Michaels asked, “Do you want to go out there and die just to punish yourself for making a mistake?” At first Carver thought his fellow trader was letting his sardonic imagination run away with him; then, looking at Nadab, he wondered if Michaels hadn’t hit it dead center.

All Nadab said, though, was, “My people are more important than I am. I have my duty to them. You outlanders have a word for the concept; do you not recognize it?”

Carver winced. So did Captain Chen. She said, “I have another duty also: not to send anyone out to certain death.”

“You do not send me. You merely let me go. And if you do not, you condemn the greenskins in my village and others you have never seen to a fate worse than mine.”

Anastas Shumilov fired off another burst, the longest one yet. “They’re getting harder to convince,” he remarked.

“You may also end up slaughtering a good many blues who have done you no harm,” Nadab said.

“How can you sympathize with them!” Carver said. “After all they’ve done to your people-”