bother looking up from the screen where she was checking a computer subroutine.
“You’re spoiled,” Carver said in mild reproof.
Patrice shrugged. “There’ll be another one along tomorrow. Maybe I won’t be busy then.”
She was likely right, Carver thought. With an oranger sun and thicker air than Earth’s, the whole world of Ephar ran to glorious nightfalls and early mornings. The towers and spires of the city of Shkenaz, silhouetted blackly against the glowing sky, added a touch almost of Arabian Nights fantasy to the scene.
As the trader watched, Ephar’s sun slid below the horizon. Full darkness, though, was still some time away. Carver had no trouble spying the figure dashing from Shkenaz’s walls toward the greenskin town outside or the mob at the fugitive’s heels. He groaned. “Oh, God, they’ve caught a late one.”
This time Patrice did join him in front of the view panel. Of themselves, her hands knotted into fists. “Maybe he’ll make it,” she said. “If he gets back to his own kind before they catch him, they’ll let him go-it’s not the gods’ will that he die this time.”
“If,” Carver said grimly. Greenskin towns, by law, had to be more than three gibyats from the walls of a city. Say, a kilometer and a half, the trader thought. He wondered what misfortune had stranded the luckless runner inside Shkenaz so late. He must have known the risk he was taking.
Patrice stepped up the gain on the panel. The distance between the fleeing green centauroid and his blue- skinned pursuers seemed to swell, but that was only electronic illusion. “Run, damn you, run,” Carver muttered.
It was no good. A thrown stone made the greenskin stagger. That was all the fastest members of the mob needed to catch him and drag him down. Bodies thrashed, one of them not for long. After a while, realizing there was no sport left to be had, the troop began walking back to Shkenaz. Every so often a blue would spring into the air, in sheer high spirits.
Carver swung the west-facing camera to look at the greenskin village. Sure enough, two or three males stood near the boundary stone. They must have seen everything. They made no move to retrieve what little was left of their fellow, though. They would not till morning. If a blue patrol caught them coming out at night, the whole village might die to expiate their sin.
With a wordless sound, half fury and half frustration, Carver stabbed a finger at a button under the view panel. The panel went dark. “Three thousand years,” the trader said.
Patrice had never been on Ephar before. “Three thousand years of what?”
“That.” Carver waved to the blank view panel. “Maybe even longer, but three thousand years the locals have records for. The separate villages, the night ban… the murders.” In the six months since the Enrico Dandolo had landed, he had seen three now. That accorded fairly well with the data other ships visiting the Araite Empire had gathered.
“I don’t-want to believe that,” Patrice said.
“Believe it,” he told her. “The best part is, under the Code we can’t do a damn thing about it, either.”
Now she stared at him. “What? Why not?”
“No complainants.” Traders rarely meddled in the affairs of worlds without spaceflight. When they did, they needed ironclad documentation mat a local group not only seemed oppressed but felt itself to be. Judging from a purely offplanet perspective was, sensibly in most cases, against the rules.
“I don’t believe it!” Patrice exclaimed.
Carver shook his head helplessly. “Believe it. It’s true. Never one, in the two hundred years since tradeships have been coming here. Not the blues, of course-why should they complain? But not the greenskins, either. They just shrug and say they are all guilty by inheritance and deserve whatever the blues hand out to them. They believe it. As long as they believe it, officially there’s nothing we can do.”
“Officially,” Patrice said. There was precedent for bending the Code when it needed bending. On Ephar, it looked to need more than bending.
“I understand you.” Carver ran a hand down his dark forearm, reminding her of his race. “Don’t you think I, of all people, want to see the greenskins free? The night ban is just the worst of a whole set of restrictive laws. Greenskins can’t hold land, they can’t intermarry with the blues, they can’t-oh, a raft of things. Basically, they live by their wits, because that’s all they’re allowed to own. And-” He slammed the flat of his hand down on the console in complete frustration, “-they won’t do a damned thing about it.”
“ You’ve tried?”
“My last trip in. I’m not the only one, either. It’s never done a bean’s worth of good. They won’t take weapons, they won’t learn civil disobedience, they aren’t interested in our trying to change attitudes among the blues. They’re-content. And it drives me crazy.”
“I don’t blame you a bit,” Patrice said. “What are you going to do now?”
“Keep trying. What else?”
Carver tramped toward Shkenaz. A few puffy clouds floated in the green-blue sky. The breeze was at the trader’s back, and full of strange sweetnesses. Had it been blowing the other way, it would have brought him the stink of the city.
Only a long trampled swath of foliage, abruptly ending, showed what had happened the evening before. As soon as the sun was up, the greenskins had taken away their dead fellow.
Carver felt his eyes keep sliding back to the mute evidence of violence. Walking along beside him, Lloyd Michaels noticed- Carver’s fellow trader did not miss much. “Nothing we can do about it,” he said.
“I know,” Carver ground out. He stopped to adjust his pack;
the straps were digging into his shoulders. “Heaven knows we’ve tried. It galls me, though, to watch a lynching and then deal the next day with the lord who condoned it.”
“I daresay we do that on a lot of primitive worlds, and on a good many that aren’t.” Michaels’s face looked too round and pink and innocent for him to be as cynical as Carver knew he was, a fact he used to shameless advantage on every planet where the locals were sophisticated enough to try to read human expressions.
“They don’t usually get their victims to agree they should have been lynched,” the black man retorted.
“There is that,” Michaels agreed mildly. “If we knew how they did it, we could make a fortune selling the secret offworld.”
Carver glared at him, a little less than half sure he was joking. “I’m going to talk to Nadab today,” he said at last.
“Old Baasa’s pet greenskin? Sure, go ahead. I expect he’ll be there.” Michaels cocked an eyebrow at his companion. “It won’t do you one damn bit of good.”
“I’ll do it anyhow,” Carver said. He walked on, looking neither to the left nor to the right, plainly ready to ignore anything more Lloyd Michaels might say. Michaels kept his mouth shut, the most annoying thing he could do.
The walls of Shkenaz drew near. The gates were open. The guards-blues, of course-leaned back, their weight supported by hind legs and stiff, thick tails. They were bored, Carver thought.
Some-not all-of that boredom fell away as the traders drew near. Even though humans had been going in and out of Shkenaz since the Enrico Dandolo landed, they were still strange enough to be interesting. The guards came forward and down onto all four running legs, held spears across the entranceway to block the traders’ path. “With whom have you business in the city?” one of them demanded sternly.
Carver studied the male as if seeing him for the first time. Centauroid was only a vague description of the locals’ body plan; the guard’s hindquarters were not much like a horse’s, and his upthrust torso even less like a man’s. His face was most alien of all, with a wide toothless beak of a mouth, twin nostril slits, and insectile compound eyes.
The trader wondered how strange he looked in those eyes.
Michaels said, “We meet today with the mighty lord Baasa, representative in Shkenaz of the Araite Emperor, may his reign be long and prosperous.” The guttural local language was made for sounding arrogant.
The guard swung up his spear. “Pass, then, into Shkenaz, and may our governor’s graciousness shine upon you.”
Change the style of architecture and the shape of the inhabitants, Carver thought, and Shkenaz was much like any other primitive town on a preindustrial world. Intelligent beings needed places to live, to trade, to worship, and arranged those places in fairly standard patterns.
Differences, though, counted, too. Because of the way the locals were made, Shkenaz seemed spacious to a
