The hatch slid upward. Relief sobbed through Carver’s throat. “Go on!” he yelled or, rather croaked, to Nadab. The green-skin’s toes clicked on metal. A moment later, Carver’s boots clattered inside the cargo bay.
The hatch came down much faster than it had risen. None too soon-one of the blues was close enough to the Enrico Dandolo to hurl his bludgeon after Nadab. It belled off the descending door. Then the guards were pounding on the hatch with clubs and fists. The din was tremendous.
Carver stood with hands on knees, his head lowered, trying to catch his breath. Nadab was panting, too, but looked around the cargo bay with lively interest. The fluorescent strips in the ceiling proved particularly intriguing. “Not fire, yet they give light,” he said. “Have you, then, imprisoned glowfliers behind that glass? No, surely not,” he corrected himself: “too bright for that.”
“They work by the same power as our calculators,” Carver told him.
If the trader had expected a surprised outburst, he did not get one. “Ah. Interesting,” was all Nadab said. Carver had no chance to take things further. The inner door to the compartment came open. People burst in, shouting questions-mostly variations on “What the hell is going on?”
Carver explained. The crewfolk shouted in anger. The way the empire treated greenskins was abominable enough without cheating them besides. Patrice Boileau burst out, “We should up ship now and have nothing more to do with these savages.”
“That would not solve the problem,” Nadab said. Abrupt silence fell in the cargo bay, punctuated only by the banging from the blues outside. It was not so much for what Nadab said as for how he said it. Given the limits of his lipless beak, his Trade English was as fluent as anyone else’s in the compartment.
Captain Chen, as befitted her station, recovered her wits first. “We did not know you spoke our language,” she said, adding a moment later, “We did not know anyone on Ephar did.”
“I doubt any blues do,” Nadab said, again in Trade English.
The humans looked at one another. Lloyd Michaels said to Carver, “Seems we were on to something there back in Shkenaz a few days ago,”
“So it does,” the black man said.
“So you were,” Nadab agreed.
Captain Chen drove for the heart of the issue, asking, “Why do you choose to reveal this to us now?”
“Because at last I am convinced you do mean well for my people.” Nadab sounded as if the question had surprised him. “Jerome Carver here would not have risked himself to save me were it otherwise.”
“But-” That strangled protest came from everyone in the compartment at the same time. Carver managed to articulate it: “Ever since we came to Ephar, Nadab, we humans have been working to better the lot of you greenskins and help you take your full, rightful place in the empire.”
“What makes you think those two things are one and the same?” Nadab asked. The only flaw in his speech, Carver thought, was that he sounded pedantic. He thought about that, then reconsidered: another flaw was that the greenskin made no sense at all.
Patrice might have been reading his mind. “How could you not want to be free from persecution?” she demanded of Nadab. “How many of you have died for the sake of hatred?”
“Many, very many,” Nadab said, answering the second question first. “We believe, though, that they let us atone for a murder by one of ours long ago, a murder that was surely the stupidest thing a greenskin ever did, and so they are not in vain.”
“I don’t follow that,” Patrice said. Carver nodded; he found it tragic that such a clever being as Nadab should be trapped like a fly in superstition’s cobweb.
“In any case,” Michaels said, “a cargo bay is hardly the place for this kind of talk. What say we go up to the control room.”
“Good,” Captain Chen said briskly. “From there we can also tell the blues outside to go away, and that Nadab is under our protection.”
“That is very generous,” the greenskin said, “but what makes you believe they will listen to you?”
“They’ll listen,” the captain said, her voice grim. “Come along.” She led them up the spiral stair to the control room.
“You half-built beings have an easier time of this than I,” Nadab complained. He had to twist his body awkwardly all the way up the stairs, and slowed Patrice and Carver, who were behind him.
Captain Chen stalked over to the intercom, flipped a switch to channel it through the outside speakers. “Get away from our ship!” she roared to the blues below. The volume control was all the way to the right; she must have sounded like an angry god. She went on, “Nadab is under our protection. We do not allow you to harm him.”
One of the blues ran, hurrying back toward Shkenaz. The rest stayed where they were, though for upwards of a minute they simply stood in place, giving up their pounding on the cargo hatch. Carver thought the noise had stunned them. More attuned to the subtleties of his people’s body language, Nadab said, “They do not believe their ears.”
When the blues did regain their tongues, he was quickly proved right. “But the greenskin has violated his parole,” a guard shouted, and even the humans could hear his incredulity. “He is now ours, to do with as we wish.”
“He is not,” Captain Chen declared, still at the top of her electronic lungs. “You forced him to stay outside his village past sunset. Otherwise he would not have.”
“What has that to do with it?” the blue yelled back. “The act is all. Had the gods wished him to live, they would not have let us detain him.”
“Oh, shut up,” Captain Chen snarled, but in Trade English. She clicked off the intercom and the outside mike. “Let them scream their fool heads off out there. Eventually they’ll get tired and go away.”
“No, they will not,” Nadab said.
“Well, then, let them have their fit. They can’t hurt the ship, and now-” The captain pointed at the switched-off intercom- “they can’t bother us any more, either.” She folded her arms across her chest, glowered at the greenskin. “Now, perhaps, you will start making sense of yourself.”
“I am more curious about what you intend doing with me,” Nadab said.
“How you answer our questions will make a difference in what we decide, you know,” Carver told him.
The greenskin considered. “Yes, that has some truth to it. Very well; ask what you will.”
Despite the invitation, the control room stayed silent a moment. Patrice spoke first; working as she did with computers, she was used to breaking down questions into the smallest possible pieces. She said, “Why did you say bettering your people’s lot was not the same thing as taking an equal part with the blues in the life of the empire?”
“Because we better ourselves precisely by not taking an equal part,” Nadab replied at once.
“Riddles,” Michaels said. Carver just suppressed an urge to kick him in the shin.
“Riddles have answers,” Captain Chen said sharply. She glared at Michaels, who looked away; even the boldest man thought twice about risking her anger. She turned back to Nadab. “Go on.”
“I would think the matter obvious,” the greenskin said. “As Carver showed me, you people grasp the concept of life’s changing over time, depending on the circumstances brought to bear upon it.”
“Evolution,” Carver supplied.
“If that is your word; I have not met it before. We have been aware of it for something close to two thousand years ourselves.”
The humans stirred. “Longer than we have,” Michaels muttered. This time, no one shushed him. He went on. “Our arts were at a much higher level when we first thought of the notion of evolution than yours are now, to say nothing of what yours must have been so long ago. If what you say is true, how did you learn of it so quickly?”