The Mammoth Book of Nebula Awards SF

induction learning process.) One of them was leaving for Earth today, and the other was full of useless advice. “He” — they have seven singular pronoun classes, depending on the individual’s age and estrous condition — was telling “her” never to make any reference to human body odor, no matter how vile it may be. He should also have told her not to breathe on anyone. One of the byproducts of their metabolism is butyl nitrite, which smells like wellaged socks and makes humans get all faint and cross-eyed.

I’ve worked with !tangs a few times before, and they’re some of my favorite people. Very serious, very honest, and their logic is closer to human logic than most. But they are strange-looking. Imagine a perambulating haystack with an elephant’s trunk protruding. They have two arms under the pile of yellow hair, but it’s impolite to take them out in public unless one is engaged in physical work. They do have sex in public, constantly, but it takes a zoologist with a magnifying glass to tell when.

He wanted her to bring back some Kentucky bourbon and Swiss chocolate. Their metabolisms part company with ours over protein and fats, but they love our carbohydrates and alcohol. The alcohol has a psychedelic effect on them, and sugar leaves them plastered.

A human walked in and stood blinking in the half-light. I recognized him and shrank back into the booth. Too late.

He strode over and stuck out his hand. “Dick Navarro!”

“Hello, Pete.” I shook his hand once. “What brings you here? Hartford business?” Pete was also an interpreter.

—“Oh no,” he said in Arabic. —“Only journeying.”

—“Knock it off,” I said in Serbian. —“Isn’t your native language English?” I added in Greek.

“Sure it is. Yours?”

“English or Spanish. Have a seat.”

I smacked my lips twice at Slim Joan, and she came over with a menu. “To be eating you want?”

“Nyet,” he said. “Vodka.” I told her I’d take another.

“So what are you doing here?” Pete asked.

“Business.”

“Hartford?”

“Nope.”

“Secret.”

“That’s right.” Actually they hadn’t said anything about its being secret. But I knew Peter Lafitte. He wasn’t just passing through.

We both sat silently for a minute, listening to the !tangs. We had to smile when he explained to her how to decide which public bathroom to use when…. “This was important to humans,” he said. Slim Joan came with the drinks and Pete paid for both, a bad sign.

“How did that Spica business finally turn out?” he asked.

“Badly.” Lafitte and I worked together on a partition-of-rights hearing on Spica IV, with the Confederacion actually bucking Hartford over an alien-rights problem. “I couldn’t get the humans to understand that the minerals had souls, and I couldn’t get the natives to believe that refining the minerals didn’t affect their spiritual status. It came to a show of force, and the natives backed down. I wouldn’t like to be there in twenty years, though.”

“Yeah. I was glad to be recalled. Arcturus all over.”

“That’s what I tried to tell them.” Arcturus wasn’t a regular stop any more, not since a ship landed and found every human artistically dismembered. “You’re just sightseeing?”

“This has always been one of my favorite planets.”

“Nothing to do.”

“Not for you city boys. The fishing is great, though.”

Ah ha. “Ocean fishing?”

“Best in the Confederacion.”

“I might give it a try. Where do you get a boat?”

He smiled and looked directly at me. “Little coastal village, Pa’an!al.”

Smack in the middle of the tribal territory I’d be dickering for. I dutifully repeated the information into my ring.

I changed the subject and we talked about nothing for a while. Then I excused myself, saying I was time- lagging and had to get some sleep. Which was true enough, since the shuttle had stayed on Armpit time, and I was eight hours out of phase with III. But I bounced straight into the Hartford courier’s office.

The courier on duty was Estelle Dorring, whom I knew slightly. I cut short the pleasantries. “How long to get a message to Earth?”

She studied the clocks on the wall. “You’re out of luck if you want it hand-carried. I’m not going to Armpit tomorrow. Two days on the shuttle and I’ll miss the Earth run by half a day.

“If broadcast is all right, you can beam to Armpit and the courier there will take it on the Twosday run. That leaves in seventy-two minutes. Call it nineteen minutes’ beam time. You know what you want to say?”

“Yeah. Set it up.” I sat down at the customers’ console.

STARLODGE LIMITED

642 EASTRIVER

NEW YORK, NEW YORK 10099-27654

ATTENTION: PATRICE DUVAL

YOU MAY HAVE SOME COMPETITION HERE. NOTHING OPEN YET BUT A GUY WE CALL PETER RABBIT IS ON THE SCENE. CHECK INTERPRETERS GUILD AND SEE WHO’S PAYING PETER LAFITTE. CHANGE TERMS OF SALE? PLEASE SEND REPLY NEXT SAMMLER RUN — RICARDO NAVARRO/

RM2048/MOROCHO HILTON

I wasn’t sure what good the information would do me, unless they also found out how much he was offering and authorized me to outbid him. At any rate, I wouldn’t hear for three days, earliest. Sleep.

Morocho III — its real name is !ka’al — rides a slow sleeping orbit around Morocho A, the brighter of the two suns that make up the Morocho system (Morocho A is a close double star itself, but its white dwarf companion hugs so close that it’s lost in the glare). At this time of day, Morocho B was visible low in the sky, a hard blue diamond too bright to stare at, and A was right overhead, a bloated golden ball. On the sandy beach below us the flyer cast two shadows, dark blue and faint yellow, which raced to come together as we landed.

Pa’an!al is a fishing village thousands of years old, on a natural harbor formed where a broad jungle river flows into the sea. Here on the beach were only a few pole huts with thatched roofs, where the fishers who worked the surf and shallow pools lived. Pa’an!al proper was behind a high stone wall, which protected it on one side from the occasional hurricane and on the other from interesting fauna of the jungle.

I paid off my driver and told him to come back at second sundown. I took a deep breath and mounted the steps. There was an open-cage Otis elevator beside the stairs, but people didn’t use it, only fish.

The !tang are compulsive about geometry. This wall was a precise 1:2 rectangle, and the stairs mounted from one corner to the opposite in a satisfying Euclidian 30 degrees. A guardrail would have spoiled the harmony. The stairs were just wide enough for two !tang to pass, and the rise of each step was a good half meter. By the time I got to the top I was both tired and slightly terrified.

A spacefaring man shouldn’t be afraid of heights, and I’m not, so long as I’m in a vehicle. But when I attained the top of the wall and looked down the equally long and perilous flight of stairs to ground level, I almost swooned. Why couldn’t they simply have left a door in the wall?

I sat there for a minute and looked down at the small city. The geometric regularity was pleasing. Each building was either a cube or a stack of cubes, and the rock from which the city was built had been carefully sorted, so that each building was a uniform shade. They went from white marble through sandy yellow and salmon to pearly gray and obsidian. The streets were a regular matrix of red brick. I walked down, hugging the wall.

At the bottom of the steps a !tang sat on a low bench, watching the nonexistent traffic.

—Greetings, I clicked and snorted at him. — It is certainly a pleasant