“Yes. You see, there are two related species on the planet, one farther along in evolution than the other. As if Australopithecus had survived till today on Earth. The Yildivans have made slaves of the Lugals—certainly in Ulash, and as far as we could find out by spot checks, everywhere on Cain.”

  “Pretty roughly treated, aren’t they, the poor devils?” Harry said. “I wouldn’t trust a slave with weapons.”

  “But Lugals are completely trustworthy,” Per said. “Like dogs. They do the hard, monotonous work. The Yildivans—male and female—are the hunters, artists, magicians, everything that matters. That is, what culture exists is Yildivan.” He scowled into his drink. “Though I’m not sure how meaningful ‘culture’ is in this connection.”

  “How so?” Van Rijn lifted brows far above his small black eyes.

  “Well…they, the Yildivans, haven’t anything like a nation, a tribe, any sort of community. Family groups split up when the cubs are old enough to fend for themselves. A young male establishes himself somewhere, chases off all comers, and eventually one or more young females come join him. Their Lugals tag along, naturally—like dogs again. As near as I could learn, such families have only the most casual contact. Occasional barter, occasional temporary gangs formed to hunt extra-large animals, occasional clashes between individuals, and that’s about it.”

  “But hold on,” I objected. “Intelligent races need more. Something to be the carrier of tradition, something to stimulate the evolution of brain, a way for individuals to communicate ideas to each other. Else intelligence hasn’t got any biological function.”

  “I fretted over that too,” Per said. “Had long talks with Shivaru, Fereghir, and others who drifted into camp whenever they felt like it. We really tried hard to understand each other. They were as curious about us as we about them, and as quick to see the mutual advantage in trade relations. But what a job! A whole different planet—two or three billion years of separate evolution—and we had only pidgin Ulash to start with, the limited vocabulary Brander’s people had gotten. We couldn’t go far into the subtleties. Especially when they, of course, took everything about their own way of life for granted.

  “Toward the end, though, I began to get a glimmering. It turns out that in spite of their oafish appearance, the Lugals are not stupid. Maybe even as bright as their masters, in a different fashion; at any rate, not too far behind them. And—in each of these family groups, these patriarchal settlements in a cave or hut, way off in the forest, there are several times as many Lugals as Yildivans. Every member of the family, even the kids, has a number of slaves. Thus you may not get Yildivan clans or tribes, but you do get the numerical equivalent among the Lugals.

  “Then the Lugals are sent on errands to other Yildivan preserves, with messages or barter goods or whatever, and bring back news. And they get traded around; the Yildivans breed them deliberately, with a shrewd practical grasp of genetics. Apparently, too, the Lugals are often allowed to wander off by themselves when there’s no work for them to do—much as we let our dogs run loose—and hold powwows of their own.

  “You mustn’t think of them as being mistreated. They are, by our standards, but Cain is a brutal place and Yildivans don’t exactly have an easy life either. An intelligent Lugal is valued. He’s made straw boss over the others, teaches the Yildivan young special skills and songs and such, is sometimes even asked by his owner what he thinks ought to be done in a given situation. Some families let him eat and sleep in their own dwelling, I’m told. And remember, his loyalty is strictly to the masters. What they may do to other Lugals is nothing to him. He’ll gladly help cull the weaklings, punish the lazy, anything.

  “So, to get to the point, I think that’s your answer. The Yildivans do have a community life, a larger society—but indirectly, through their Lugals. The Yildivans are the creators and innovators, the Lugals the communicators and preservers. I daresay the relationship has existed for so long a time that the biological evolution of both species has been conditioned by it.”

  “You speak rather well of them,” said Harry grimly, “considering what they did to you.”

  “But they were very decent people at first.” I could hear in Per’s voice how hurt he was by that which had happened. “Proud as Satan, callous, but not cruel. Honest and generous. They brought gifts whenever they arrived, with no thought of payment. Two or three offered to assign us Lugal laborers. That wasn’t necessary or feasible when we had machinery along, but they didn’t realize it then. When they did, they were quick to grasp the idea, and mightily impressed. I think. Hard to tell, because they couldn’t or wouldn’t admit anyone else might be superior to them. That is, each individual thought of himself as being as good as anyone else anywhere in the world. But they seemed to regard us as their equals. I didn’t try to explain where we were really from. ‘Another country’ looked sufficient for practical purposes.

  “Shivaru was especially interested in us. He was middle-aged, most of his children grown and moved away. Wealthy in local terms, progressive—he was experimenting with ranching as a supplement to hunting—and his advice was much sought after by the others. I took him for a ride in a flitter and he was happy and excited as any child; brought his three mates along next time so they could enjoy it too. We went hunting together occasionally. Lord, you should have seen him run down those great horned beasts, leap on their backs, and brain them with one blow of that tremendous ax! Then his Lugals would butcher the game and carry it home to camp. The meat tasted damn good, believe me. Cainite biochemistry lacks some of our vitamins, but otherwise a human can get along all right there.

  “Mainly, though, I remember how we’d talk. I suppose it’s old hat to you freemen, but I had never before spent hour after hour with another being, both of us at work trying to build up a vocabulary and an understanding, both getting such a charge out of it that we’d forget even to eat until Manuel or Cherkez—that was his chief Lugal, a gnarly, droll old fellow, made me think of the friendly gnomes in my fairy tale books when I was a youngster—until one of them would tell us. Sometimes my mind wandered off and I’d come back to earth realizing that I’d just sat there admiring his beauty. Yildivans are as graceful as cats, as pleasing in shape as a good gun. And as deadly, when they want to be. I found that out!

  “We had a favorite spot, in the lee of a cottage-sized boulder on the hillside above camp. The rock was warm against our backs; seemed even more so when I looked at that pale shrunken sun and my breath smoking out white across the purplish sky. Far, far overhead a bird of prey would wheel, then suddenly stoop—in the thick air I could hear the whistle through its wing feathers—and vanish into the treetops down in the valley. Those leaves had a million different shades of color, like an endless autumn.

  “Shivaru squatted with his tail curled around his knees, ax on the ground beside him. Cherkez and one or two other Lugals hunkered at a respectful distance. Their eyes never left their Yildivan. Sometimes Manuel joined us, when he wasn’t busy bossing some phase of construction. Remember, Manuel? You really shouldn’t have kept so quiet.”

  “Silence was fitting, Captain,” said the Nuevo Méxican.

  “Well,” Per said, “Shivaru’s deep voice would go on and on. He was full of plans for the future. No question of a trade treaty—no organization for us to make a treaty with—but he foresaw his people bringing us what we wanted in exchange for what we offered. And he was bright enough to see how the existence of a central mart like this, a common meeting ground, would affect them. More joint undertakings would be started. The idea of close cooperation would take root. He looked forward to that, within the rather narrow limits he could conceive. For instance, many Yildivans working together could take real advantage of the annual spawning run up the Mukushyat River. Big canoes could venture across a strait he knew of, to open fresh hunting grounds. That sort of thing.

  “But then in a watchtick his ears would perk, his whiskers vibrate, he’d lean forward and start to ask about my own people. What sort of country did we come from? How was the game there? What were our mating and childrearing practices? How did we ever produce such beautiful things? Oh, he had the whole cosmos to explore! Bit by bit, as my vocabulary grew, his questions got less practical and more abstract. So did mine, naturally. We were getting at each other’s psychological foundations now, and were equally fascinated.

  “I was not too surprised to learn that his culture had no religion. In fact, he was hard put to understand my questions about it. They practiced magic, but looked on it simply as a kind of technology. There was no animism, no equivalent of anthropomorphism. A Yildivan knew too damn well he was superior to any plant or animal. I think, but I’m not sure, that they had some vague concept of reincarnation. But it didn’t interest them much, apparently, and the problem of origins hadn’t occurred. Life was what you had, here and now. The world was a set of phenomena, to live with or master or be defeated by as the case might be.

  “Shivaru asked me why I’d asked him about such a self-evident thing.”

  Per shook his head. His glance went down to the blanket around his lap and quickly back again. “That may have been my first mistake.”

  “No, Captain,” said Manuel most gently. “How could you know they lacked souls?”

  “Do they?” Per mumbled.

  “We leave that to the theologians,” Van Rijn said. “They get paid to decide. Go on, boy.”

  I could see Per brace himself. “I tried to explain the idea of God,” he said tonelessly, “I’m pretty sure I failed. Shivaru acted puzzled and…troubled. He left soon after. The Yildivans of Ulash use drums for long-range communication, have I mentioned? All that night I heard the drums mutter in the valley and echo from the cliffs. We had no visitors for a week. But Manuel, scouting around in the area, said he’d found tracks and traces. We were being watched.

  “I was relieved, at first, when Shivaru returned. He had a couple of others with him, Fereghir and Tulitur, important males like himself. They came straight across the hill toward me. I was supervising the final touches on our timber-cutting system. We were to use local lumber for most of our construction, you see. Cut and trim in the woods with power beams, load the logs on a gravsled for the sawmill, then snake them directly through the induration vats to the site, where the foundations had now been laid. The air was full of whine and crash, boom and chug, in a wind that cut like a laser. I could hardly see our ship or our sealtents through dust, tinged bloody in the sun.

  “They came to me, those three tall hunters, with a dozen armed Lugals hovering behind. Shivaru beckoned. ‘Come,’ he said. ‘This is no place for a Yildivan.’ I looked him in the eyes and they were filmed over, as if he’d put a glass mask between me and himself. Frankly, my skin prickled. I was unarmed—everybody was except Manuel, you know what Nuevo Méxicans are—and I was afraid I’d precipitate something by going for a weapon. In fact, I even made a point of speaking Ulash as I ordered Tom Bullis to take over for me and told Manuel to come along uphill. If the autochthones had taken some notion into their heads that we were planning harm, it wouldn’t do for them to hear us use a language they didn’t know.

  “Not another word was spoken till we were out of the dust and racket, at the old place by the boulder. It didn’t feel warm today. Nothing did. ‘I welcome you,’ I said to the Yildivans, ‘and bid you dine and sleep with us.’ That’s the polite formula when a visitor arrives. I didn’t get the regular answer.

  “Tulitur hefted the spear he carried and asked—not rudely, understand, but with a kind of shiver in the tone—‘Why have you come to Ulash?’

  “ ‘Why?’ I stuttered. ‘You know. To trade.’

  “ ‘No, wait, Tulitur,’ Shivaru interrupted. ‘Your question is blind.’ He turned to me. ‘Were you sent?’ he asked. And what I would like to ask you sometime, freemen, is whether it makes sense to call a voice black.

  “I couldn’t think of any way to hedge. Something had gone awry, but I’d no feeblest notion what. A lie or a stall was as likely, a priori, to make matters worse as the truth. I saw the sunlight glisten along that dark ax head and felt most infernally glad to have Manuel beside me. Even so, the noise from the camp sounded faint and distant. Or was it only that the wind was whittering louder?

  “I made myself stare back at him. ‘You know we are here on behalf of others like us at home,’ I said. The muscles tightened still more under his fur. Also…I can’t read nonhuman expressions especially well. But Fereghir’s lips were drawn off his teeth as if he confronted an enemy. Tulitur had grounded his spear, point down. Brander’s reports observed that a Yildivan never did that in the presence of a friend. Shivaru, though, was hardest to understand. I could have sworn he was grieved.

  “ ‘Did God send you?’ he asked.

  “That put the dunce’s cap on the whole lunatic business. I actually laughed, though I didn’t feel at all funny. Inside my head it went click-click-click. I recognized a semantic point. Ulash draws some fine distinctions between various kinds of imperative. A father’s command to his small child is entirely different—in word and concept both—from a command to another Yildivan beaten in a fight, which is different in turn from a command to a Lugal, and so on through a wider range than our psycholinguists have yet measured.

  “Shivaru wanted to know if I was God’s slave.

  “Well, this was no time to explain the history of religion, which I’m none too clear about anyway. I just said no, I wasn’t; God was a being in Whose existence some of us believed, but not everyone, and He had certainly not issued me any direct orders.

  “That rocked them back! The breath hissed between Shivaru’s fangs, his ruff bristled aloft and his tail whipped his legs. ‘Then who did send you?’ he nearly screamed. I could translate as well by: ‘So who is your owner?’

  “I heard a slither alongside me as Manuel loosened his gun in the holster. Behind the three Yildivans, the Lugals gripped their own axes and spears at the ready. You can imagine how carefully I picked my words. ‘We are here freely,’ I said, ‘as part of an association.’ Or maybe the word I had to use means ‘fellowship’— I wasn’t about to explain economics either. ‘In our home country,’ I said, none of us is a Lugal. You have seen our devices that work for us. We have no need of Lugalhood.’

  ‘Ah-h-h,’ Fereghir sighed, and poised his spear. Manuel’s gun clanked free. ‘I think best you go,’ he said to them, ‘before there is a fight. We do not wish to kill.’

  “Brander had made a point of demonstrating guns, and so had we. No one stirred for a time that went on eternally, in that Fimbul wind. The hair stood straight on the Lugals. They were ready to rush us and die at a word. But it wasn’t forthcoming. Finally the three Yildivans exchanged glances. Shivaru said in a dead voice, ‘Let us consider this thing.’ They turned on their heels and walked off through the long, whispering grass, their pack close around them.

  “The drums beat for days and nights.

  “We considered the thing ourselves at great length. What was the matter, anyhow? The Yildivans were primitive and unsophisticated by Commonwealth standards, but not stupid. Shivaru had not been surprised at the ways we differed from his people. For instance, the fact that we lived in communities instead of isolated families had only been one more oddity about us, intriguing rather than shocking. And, as I’ve told you, while large-scale cooperation among Yildivans wasn’t common, it did happen once in a while; so what was wrong with our doing likewise?

  “Igor Yuschenkoff, the captain of the Miriam, had a reasonable suggestion. ‘If they have gotten the idea that we are slaves,’ he said, ‘then our masters must be still more powerful. Can they think we are preparing a base for invasion?’

  “ ‘But I told them plainly we are not slaves,’ I said.

  “ ‘No doubt.’ He laid a finger alongside his nose. ‘Do they believe you?’

  “You can imagine how I tossed awake in my sealtent. Should we haul gravs altogether, find a different area and start afresh? That would mean scrapping nearly everything we’d done. A whole new language to learn was the least of the problems. Nor would a move necessarily help. Scouting trips by flitter had indicated pretty strongly that the same basic pattern of life prevailed everywhere on Cain, as it did on Earth in the paleolithic era. If we’d run afoul, not of some local taboo, but of some fundamental…I just didn’t know. I doubt if Manuel spent more then two hours a night in bed. He was too busy tightening our system of guards, drilling the men, prowling around to inspect and keep them alert.

  “But our next contact was peaceful enough on the surface. One dawn a sentry roused me to say that a bunch of natives were here. Fog had arisen overnight, turned the world into wet gray smoke where you couldn’t see three meters. As I came outside I heard the drip off a trac parked close by, the only clear sound in the muffledness. Tulitur and another Yildivan stood at the edge of camp, with about fifty male Lugals behind. ‘Their fur sheened with water, and their weapons were rime-coated. They must have traveled by night, Captain,’ Manuel said, ‘for the sake of cover. Surely others wait beyond view.’ He led a squad with me.

  “I made the Yildivans welcome, ritually, as if nothing had happened. I didn’t get any ritual back. Tulitur said only, ‘We are here to trade. For your goods we will return those furs and plants you desire.’

  “That was rather jumping the gun, with our post still less than half built. But I couldn’t refuse what might be an olive branch. ‘That is well,’ I said. ‘Come, let us eat while we talk about it.’ Clever move, I thought. Accepting someone’s food puts you under the same sort of obligation in Ulash that it used to on Earth.

  “Tulitur and his companion—Bokzahan, I remember the name now—didn’t offer thanks, but they did come into the ship and sit at the mess table. I figured this would be more ceremonious and impressive than a tent; also, it was out of that damned raw cold. I ordered stuff like bacon and eggs that the Cainites were known to like. They got right to business. How much will you trade to us?