‘Well, you’ll have to take somethin’ on my word. But listen. Kind of a bad storm last night, no? Did a lot o’ damage, I’ll bet. How much less would’ve been done if you’d been able to predict it? I can make that possible.” Tom paused before adding cynically, “You can share the information with all Nike, or keep it your national secret. Could be useful, if you feel like maybe the planet should—have a really strong Emperor, name of Weyer, for instance.”
The Engineer leaned forward till his image seemed about to jump from the screen. “How is this?”
Tom related what Yasmin had told him. “No wonder your solar meteorologists never get anywhere,” he finished. “They’re usin’ exactly the wrong mathematical model.”
Weyer’s eyes dwelt long upon Tom. “Are you giving this information away in hopes of my good will?” he said.
“No. As a free sample, to shake you loose from your notion that every chap who drops in from space is necessarily a hound o’ hell. And likewise this. Camarado Weyer, your astronomers’ll tell you my wife’s idea makes sense. They’ll be right glad to hear they’ve got an old star. But they’ll need many years to work out the details by themselves. You know enough science to realize that, I’m sure. Now I can put you in touch with people that already know the details—that can come here, study the situation for a few weeks, and predict your weather like dice odds.
“That’s my hole card. And you can only benefit by helpin’ us leave. Don’t think you can catch us and beat what we know out of us. First, we haven’t got the information. Second; we’ll die before we become slaves, in any meanin’ o’ the word. If it don’t look like we can get killed fightin’ the men you send to catch us, why, we’ll turn on our weapons on ourselves. Then all you’ve got is a spaceship that to you is nothin’ but scrap metal.”
Weyer drew a sharp breath. But he remained cautious. “This may be,” he said. “Nonetheless, if I let you go, why should you bring learned people back to me?”
“Because it’ll pay. I’m a trader and a warlord. The richer my markets, the stronger my allies, the better off I am.” Tom punched a forefinger at the screen. “Get rid o’ that conditioned reflex o’ yours and think a bit instead. You haven’t got much left that’s worth anybody’s lootin’. Why should I bother returnin’ for that purpose? But your potential, that’s somethin’ else entirely. Given as simple a thing as reliable weather forecasts—you’ll save, in a generation, more wealth than the ‘friends’ ever destroyed. And this’s only one for instance o’ what the outside universe can do for you. Man, you can’t afford not to trust me!”
They argued, back and forth, for a long time. Weyer was intrigued buy wary. Granted, Yasmin’s revelation did provide evidence that Tom’s folk were not utter savages like the last visitors from space. But the evidence wasn’t conclusive. And even if it was, what guarantee existed that the strangers would bring the promised experts?
The wrangle ended as well as Tom had hoped, in an uneasy compromise. He and his wives would be brought to Sea Gate. They’d keep their sidearms. Though guarded, they were to be treated more or less as guests. Discussions would continue. If Weyer judged, upon better acquaintance, that they were indeed trustworthy, he would arrange for the ship’s repair and release.
“But don’t be long about makin’ up your mind,” Torn warned, “or it won’t do us a lot o’ good to come home.”
“Perhaps,” Weyer said, “you can depart early if you leave a hostage.”
“You’ll be all right?” Tom asked for the hundredth time.
“Indeed, my lord,” Yasmin said. She was more cheerful than he, ‘bidding him good-by in the Engineer’s castle. “I’m iised to their ways by now, comfortable in this environment—honestly! And you know how much in demand an outworlder is.”
“That could get dull. I won’t be back too bloody soon, remember. What’ll you do for fun?”
“Oh,” she said demurely, “I plan to make arrangements with quite a number of men.”
“Stop teasin’ me.” He hugged her close. “I’m goin’ to miss you.”
And so Roan Tom and Dagny Od’s-daughter left Nike.
He fretted somewhat about Yasrnin, while Firedrake made the long flight back to Kraken, and while he mended his fences there, and while he voyaged back with his scholars and merchants. Had she really been joking, at the very last? She’d for sure gotten almighty friendly with Yanos Aran, and quite a few other young bucks. Tom was not obsessively jealous, but he could not afford to become a laughing stock.
He needn’t have worried. When he made his triumphant, landing at Sea Gate, he found that Yasmin had been charming, plausible, devious and, in short, had convinced several feudal lords of Nike that it was to their advantage that the rightful Shah be restored to the throne of Sassania. They commanded enough men to do the job. If the Krakeners could furnish weapons, training, and transportation—
Half delighted, half stunned, Tom said, “So this time we had a lingo scramble without somethin’ horrible happenin’? I don’t believe it!”
“Happy endings do occur,” she murmured, and came to him. “As now.”
And everyone was satisfied except, maybe, some few who went to lay a wreath upon a certain grave.
In the case of the King and Sir Christopher, however, a compliment was intended. A later era would have used the words “awe-inspiring, stately, and ingeniously conceived.”
The histories of Sassania and Nike illustrate how precious knowledge was being lost and reclaimed on a hundred thousand worlds. Sundered by the dark between the stars, Technic civilization’s wretched heirs no longer spoke the same language even when they shared a common tongue. Since reopening communications at whatever cost was the first step to lasting recovery, accounts of such problems dominate the annals of the post-Imperial era.
Freebooter that he was, Roan Tom’s contributions to the process were haphazard and self-serving, yet his legendary exploits did light the way for more systematic explorers to follow Natives of his birth world Lochlann and his adopted homeworld Kraken played crucial roles in rediscovery expeditions during the next four centuries.
Time and again, these contact teams would find that simple ignorance was the least of the barriers to mutual understanding.
The Sharing of Flesh
Moru understood about guns. At least the tall strangers had demonstrated to their guides what the things that each of them carried at his hip could do in a flash and a flameburst. But he did not realize that the small objects they often moved about in their hands, while talking in their own language, were audiovisual transmitters. Probably, he thought they were fetishes.
Thus, when he killed Donli Sairn, he did so in full view of Donli’s wife.
That was happenstance. Except for prearranged times at morning and evening of the planet’s twenty-eight- hour day, the biologist, like his fellows, sent only to his computer. But because they had not been married long and were helplessly happy, Evalyth received his ‘casts whenever she could get away from her own duties.
The coincidence that she was tuned in at that one moment was not great. There was little for her to do. As Militech of the expedition—she being from a half barbaric part of Kraken where the sexes had equal opportunities to learn arts of combat suitable to primitive environments—she had overseen the building of a compound; and she kept the routines of guarding it under a close eye. However, the inhabitants of Lokon were as cooperative with the visitors from heaven as mutual mysteriousness allowed. Every instinct and experience assured Evalyth Sairn that their reticence masked nothing except awe, with perhaps a wistful hope of friendship. Captain Jonafer agreed. Her position having thus become rather a sinecure, she was trying to learn enough about Donli’s work to be a useful assistant after he returned from the lowlands.
Also, a medical test had lately confirmed that she was pregnant. She wouldn’t tell him, she decided, not yet, over all those hundreds of kilometers, but rather when they lay again together. Meanwhile, the knowledge that they had begun a new life made him a lodestar to her.
On the afternoon of his death she entered the biolab whistling. Outside, sunlight struck fierce and brass colored on dusty ground, on prefab shacks huddled about the boat which had brought everyone and everything down from the orbit where
