The domes were almost touching. Corwin emerged from his, immaculate in khaki, cardigan, and high boots. He beamed. “Welcome,” he greeted, striding over to shake hands. “How are you?”
“Okay, thanks,” Tamberly said. “How’ve you been getting along?”
He raised his brows. “What, you haven’t played back my reports?” he asked playfully. “I am shocked and grieved. After all the trouble I went to, composing them.”
“Composing” is right, she thought. Not that they aren’t scientific accounts. Elegant diction doesn’t hurt them any. It’s this sense I got of… glossing over, here and there. Maybe I’m prejudiced. “Of course I did,” she replied. Taking care to smile: “Including the objections you registered to my being reassigned here.”
He stayed amicable. “No reflection on you, Agent Tamberly, as I hope you realized. I simply thought it would add an unnecessary complication and risk, including the risk to you. I was overruled. Quite possibly I was mistaken. Indeed, I’m sure we can work well together. From a personal standpoint, how can I be other than happy to have company like yours?”
Tamberly made haste to sidestep that question. “No hard feelings, sir. But we won’t actually collaborate, you know. You study the, uh, Cloud People. I need to do a winter’s worth of observations on the animals, to get a halfway Complete picture of certain life cycles that seem to be critical to the ecology.”
She had repeated the obvious as the most gracious way she could think of to say, “Let me go about my business in peace. I mean to keep out from under your feet, and from under you.”
He took it in good part: “Certainly. With experience, we’ll work out the practical details, of noninterference with one another’s projects, cooperation and mutual assistance as called for. Meanwhile, may I invite you to breakfast? Since you’ve doubtless synchronized yourself with local time, I imagine you didn’t eat before you left.”
“Well, I figured—”
“Oh, do accept. We must have a serious discussion, and it may as well be in comfort. I assure you, I am not a bad cook.”
Tamberly yielded. Corwin had arranged things inside his shelter more neatly and compactly than she had ever managed in hers, making it a trifle roomier. He insisted that she take the chair, and poured coffee from a pot already at work. “This is an upper-case Occasion,” he declared. “Ordinarily in the field one merely refuels, eh? Today, what would you say to bacon, French toast, and maple syrup?”
“I’d say, ‘Let me at ’em before I trample the fence down,’” she admitted.
“Splendid.” He busied himself at the tiny electric stove. The nuclear miniunit that powered it also kept the dome warm. She shed her mackinaw, leaned back, sipped the excellent coffee, and let her gaze rove. Books—his tastes were more highbrow than hers, unless he’d gone for these when he knew she would join him; they didn’t seem much handled. The two he had published while in academe stood among them. Some implements rested on a shelf, gifts or exchanges which he probably meant to take home for souvenirs. Among them were a lance with a composite head and a stone-bladed, antler-hafted hatchet, held together by thongs and glue. Even the handleless cutters, scrapers, burins, and other tools were finely made. Tamberly recalled the crude work of the We; tears stung her eyes.
“I trust you are aware,” he said, keeping his look on the cookery, “the Wanayimo think you’re my wife. That is, when I told them you were coming, they took it for granted. They haven’t the free and easy sexual mores of the Tulat.”
“Wanayimo? Oh, yes, the Cloud People. Uh—”
“Not to worry. They accept that you will have your own house, to work your own magic. You’re safe among them, especially since they think of you as mine. Otherwise … fear of your powers might stay their hands, but scruples would not, and some young bucks could decide this was a test of their courage, their manhood. After all, I had to tell them beforehand what they were bound to find out, that you were earlier associated with the Tulat, whom they don’t really consider human.”
Grimness drew Tamberly’s lips tight. “I’ve gathered that, from your accounts that I’ve seen. Frankly, I wish you’d paid more attention to it. The relationship between the two peoples, I mean.”
“My dear, I can’t cover everything. Not a fraction of what I should, if this were a proper anthropological undertaking. I’ve only been with them seven months or a bit less, their chronology.” He’d gone uptime occasionally, to confer and take a rest, but unlike her among the We, always came back to a day soon after his departure. Continuity was important in human affairs, in ways that it was not when you studied wildlife.
I’ve got to admit he’s done a remarkable job in so short a span, and under a lot of other handicaps as well, she thought. He did have a head start on the language; it’s close to that of tribes in eastern Siberia who’d been visited, and not terribly different from that of later generations migrating through Canada, whom he himself had worked with. But that was his solitary advantage at the beginning. It took nerve, too. He could’ve been killed. They’re a fierce and touchy lot … he reports.
“And I scarcely have more time ahead of me,” Corwin continued. “Next year the tribe moves on eastward. I may or may not find it worthwhile to travel with them, or rejoin them wherever they resettle, but the interruption will be disruptive at best.”
“What?” Tamberly exclaimed. “You haven’t entered that!”
“No, not yet. It’s such a new discovery for me. At present, they fully expect to stay, they believe they’ve reached their Promised Land. In order to get some idea of how they’d develop in it, the better to understand their interaction with the next immigrants, I jaunted several years uptime. The region is abandoned. I established that will happen this coming spring. No, I don’t know why. Do they find certain resources insufficient? Perhaps you can solve the riddle. I doubt they will feel any threat from the west. I ascertained that no new Paleo-Indians will arrive in these parts for some fifty years, as slow and fitful as their migrations are.”
Then my We will have that long a peace. The release within Tamberly lasted barely a second. She remembered what had been going on, and apparently would as long as the Cloud People remained. When they left, how many We would be alive?
She forced herself to tackle the matter. “You said a minute ago, they don’t look on the Tulat as being quite human,” she stated. “Your accounts say very little about how they actually treat them. You just mention ‘tribute.’ What is the truth?”
His tone grew slightly irritated. “I told you, I haven’t had the chance to examine every detail, and I never shall.” He broke eggs into a mixing bowl as if they were the heads of referees who had rejected an article. “I acquired the Tula language in advance. I spoke with some who came here bearing the levy; the season for that started shortly after my arrival. I mitigated the lot of two or three individuals. I paid a visit to one of their miserable little warrens on the coast. What more do you expect? Like it or not, my concern, my duty is with the peoples who will make the future. Aren’t you supposed to concentrate on those things in nature that are important to them?”
His testiness evaporated. He offered her a smile. “I don’t want to seem callous,” he added. “You are new in the service, and from a country that had had a remarkably fortunate history. I don’t want to seem condescending to you, either. But the fact is that throughout humanity’s existence, till indefinitely far uptime of our birth period, clans, tribes, nations normally regard the rest of mankind as booty, potential or actual—unless somebody else is sufficiently strong to be an enemy, potential or actual.