“He’ll die first,” Joyce wailed.

  “Hokay, we do it hard fashion.” Van Rijn forced the knife loose and kicked it aside. He let Kusalu go. But the t’Kelan had scarcely raised himself when a gauntleted fist smashed into his stomach. He reeled. Van Rijn pushed in relentlessly, blow after blow, until the warrior sank.

  The merchant stood aside. Joyce stared at him with horror. “Is all in order,” he calmed her. “I did not damage him permanent.”

  Nyaronga helped his son climb back up. Two others led Kusalu away. A low keening went among the massed t’Kelans. It was like nothing Joyce had ever heard before.

  Van Rijn and Nyaronga confronted each other. The native said very slowly, “You have proven yourself, sky-male. For a landless one, you fight well, and it was good of you not to slay him.”

  Joyce translated between sobs. Van Rijn answered, “Say I did not kill that young buck because is no need. Then say I have plenty territory of my own.” he pointed upward, where the stars glistened in the windy, hazy sky. “Tell him there is my hunting grounds, by damn.”

  When he had digested this, Nyaronga asked him plaintively, “But what does he wish in our land? What is his gain?”

  “We came to help—” Joyce stopped herself and put the question to van Rijn.

  “Ha!” the Earthman gloated. “Now we talk about turkeys.” He sqautted near a fire. The pride fathers joined him; their sons pressed close to listen. Uulobu breathed happily, “We are taken as friends.”

  “I do not come to rob your land or game,” van Rijn said in an oleaginous tone. “No, only to make deals, with good profit on both sides. Surely these folks trade with each other. They could not have so much stuffs as they do otherwise.”

  “Oh, yes, of course.” Joyce settled weakly beside him. “And their relationship to the city is essentially quid pro quo, as I told you before.”

  “Then they will understand bargains being struck. So tell them those Gaffers on the mountain has got jealous of us. Tell them they sicked the Shanga onto our camp. The whole truths, not varnished more than needful.”

  “What? But I thought…I mean, didn’t you want to give them the impression that we’re actually powerful? Should we admit we’re refugees?”

  “Well, say we has had to make a…what do the military communiques say when you has got your pants beaten off?…an orderly rearward advance for strategic reasons, to previously prepared positions.”

  Joyce did. Crests rose on the native heads, pupils narrowed and hands raised weapons anew. Nyaronga asked dubiously, “Do you wish shelter among us?”

  “No,” said van Rijn. “Tell him we is come to warn them, because if they get wiped out we can make no nice deals with profit. Tell them the Shanga now has your guns from the dome, and will move with their fellow clans into Rokulela territory.”

  Joyce wondered if she had heard aright. “But we don’t…we didn’t...we brought no weapons except a few personal sidearms. And everybody must have taken his own away with him in the retreat.”

  “Do they know that, these peoples?”

  “Why…well…would they believe you?”

  “My good pretty blonde with curves in all the right places, I give you Nicholas van Rijn’s promise they would not believe anythings else.”

  Haltingly, she spoke the lie. The reaction was horrible. They boiled throughout the camp, leaped about, brandished their spears and ululated like wolves. Nyaronga alone sat still, but his fur stood on end.

  “Is this indeed so?” he demanded. It came as a whisper through the noise.

  “Why else would the Shanga attack us, with help from the Ancients?” van Rijn countered.

  “You know very well why,” Joyce said. “The Ancients bribed them, played on their superstitions, and probably offered them our metal to make knives from.”

  “Ja, no doubt, but you give this old devil here my rhetorical just the way I said it. Ask him does it not make sense, that the Shanga would act for the sake of blasters and slugthrowers, once the Geezers put them up to it and supplied gunpowder? Then tell him this means the Graybeards must be on the side of the Shanga’s own Horde—what’s they called, now?”

  “The Yagola.”

  “So. Tell him that things you overheard give you good reason to believe the Shanga clan will put themselves at the head of the Yagola to move west and push the Rokulela out of this fine country.”

  Nyaronga and the others, who fell into an ominous quiet as Joyce spoke, had no trouble grasping the concept. As she had told van Rijn, war was not a t’Kelan institution. But she was not conveying the idea of a full-dress war—rather, a Völkerwanderung into new hunting grounds. And such things were frequent enough on this dying planet. When a region turned utterly barren, its inhabitants must displace someone else, or die in the attempt.

  The difference now was that the Yagola were not starved out of their homes. They were alleged to be anticipating that eventuality, plotting to grab off more land with their stolen firearms to give them absolute superiority.

  “I had not thought them such monsters,” Nyaronga said.

  “They aren’t,” Joyce protested in Anglic to van Rijn. “You’re maligning them so horribly that…that—”

  “Well, well, all’s fair in love and propaganda,” he said. “Propose to Nyaronga that we all return to Kusulongo, collecting reinforcements as we go, to see for ourselves if this business really is true and use numerical advantage while we have still got it.”

  “You are going to set them at each other’s throats! I won’t be party to any such thing. I’ll die first.”

  “Look, sweet potato, nobody has got killed yet. Maybe nobody has to be. I can explain later. But for now, we have got to strike while the fat is in the fire. They is wonderful excited. Don’t give them a chance to cool off till they has positive decided to march.” The man laid a hand on his heart. “You think old, short of breath, comfort-loving, cowardly Nicholas van Rijn wants to fight a war? You think again. A form-fitting chair, a tall cool drink, a Venusian cigar, Eine Kleine Nachtmusik on the taper, aboard his ketch while he sails with a bunch of dancing girls down Sunda Straits, that is only which he wants. Is that much to ask? Be like your own kind, gentle selfs and help me stir them up to fight.”

  Trapped in her own bewilderment, she followed his lead. That same night riders went out, bearing messages to such other Rokulela clans as were known to be within reach.

  The first progress eastward was in darkness, to avoid the still flaring sun. Almost every male, grown or half grown, rode along, leaving females and young behind in camp. They wore flowing robes and burnooses, their basai were blanketed, against the fierce itch that attacked exposed t’Kelan skin during such periods. Most of the charged particles from the star struck the planet’s dayside, but there was enough magnetic field to bring some around to the opposite hemisphere. Even so, the party made surprisingly good speed. Peering from the car windows, Joyce glimpsed them under the two moons, shadowy shapeless forms that slipped over the harsh terrain, an occasional flash of spearheads. Through the engine’s low voice she heard them calling to each other, and the deep earth-mutter of unshod hoofs.

  “You see,” van Rijn lectured, “I am not on this world long, but I been on a lot of others, and read reports about many more. In my line of business this is needful. They always make parallels. I got enough clues about these t’Kelans to guess the basic pattern of their minds, from analogizings. You Esperancers, on this other hand, has not had so much experience. Like most colonies, you is too isolated from the galactic mainstream to keep au courant with things, like for instance the modern explorer techniques. That was obvious from the fact you did not make depth psychology studies the very first thing, but instead took what you found at face valuation. Never do that, Joyce. Always bite the coin that feeds you, for this is a hard and wicked universe.”

  “You seem to know what you’re about, Nick,” she admitted. He beamed and raised her hand to his lips. She made some confused noise about heating coffee and retreated. She didn’t want to hurt his feelings; he really was an old dear, under that crust of his.

  When she came back to the front seat, placing herself out of his reach, she said, “Well, tell me, what pattern did you deduce? How do their minds work?”

  “You assumed they was like warlike human primitives, in early days on Earth,” he said. “On the topside, that worked hokay. They is intelligent, with language; they can reason and talk with you; this made them seem easy understood. What you forgot, I think, me, was conscious intelligence is only a small part of the whole selfness. All it does is help us get what we want. But the wanting itself—food, shelter, sex, everything—our motives—they come from deeper down. There is no logical reason even to stay alive. But instinct says to, so we want to. And instinct comes from very old evolution. We was animals long before we became thinkers and, uh”—van Rijn’s beady eyes rolled piously ceilingward—“and was given souls. You got to think how a race evolved before you can take them…I mean understand them.

  “Now humans, the experts tell me, got started way back when, as ground apes that turned carnivore when the forests shrank up in Africa for lots of megayears. This is when they started to walking erect the whole time, and grew hands fully developed to make weapons because they had not claws and teeth like lions. Hokay, so we is a mean lot, we Homo Sapienses, with killer instincts. But not exclusive. We is still omnivores who can even survive on Brussels sprouts if we got to. Pfui! But we can. Our ancestors been peaceful nutpluckers and living off each other’s fleas a long, longer time than they was hunters. It shows.

  “The t’Kelans, on the other side, has been carnivores since they was still four-footers. Not very good carnivores. Unspecialized, with no claws and pretty weak biting apparatus even if it is stronger than humans’. That is why they also developed hands and made tools, which led to them getting big brains. Nevertheleast, they have no vegetarian whatsolutely in their ancestors, as we do. And they have much powerfuller killing instincts than us. And is not so gregarious. Carnivores can’t be. You get a big concentration of hunters in one spot, and by damn, the game goes away. Is that coffee ready?”

  “I think so.” Joyce fetched it. Van Rijn slurped it down, disregarding a temperature that would have taken the skin off her palate, steering with one bare splay foot as he drank.

  “I begin to see,” she said with growing excitement. “That’s why they never developed true nations or fought real wars. Big organizations are completely artificial things to them, commanding no loyalty. You don’t fight or die for a Horde, any more than a human would fight for…for his bridge club.”

  “Um-m-m, I have known some mighty bloodshot looks across bridge tables. But ja, you get the idea. The pride is a natural thing here, like the human family. The clan, with blood ties, is only one step removed. It can excite t’Kelans as much, maybe, as his country can excite a man. But Hordes? Nie. An arrangement of convenience only.

  “Not that pride and clan is loving kindness and sugar candy. Humans make family squabbles and civil wars. T’Kelans have still stronger fighting instincts than us. Lots of arguments and bloodshed. But only on a small scale, and not taken too serious. You said to me, is no vendettas here. That means somebody killing somebody else is not thought to have done anything bad. In fact, whoever does not fight—male, anyhow—strikes them as unnatural, like less than normal.”

  “Is…that why they never warmed up to us? To the Esperancian mission, I mean?”

  “Partly. Not that you was expected to fight at any specifical time. Nobody went out to pick a quarrel when you gave no offense and was even useful. But your behavior taken in one lump added up to a thing they couldn’t understand. They figured there was something wrong with you, and felt a goodly natured contempt. I had to prove I was tough as they or tougher. That satisfied their instincts, which then went to sleep and let them listen to me with respects.”

  Van Rijn put down his empty cup and took out his pipe. “Another thing you lacked was territory,” he said. “Animals on Earth, too, has an instinct to stake out and defend a piece of ground for themselves. Humans do. But for carnivores this instinct has got to be very, very, very powerful, because if they get driven away from where the game is, they can’t survive on roots and berries. They die.

  “You saw yourselfs how those natives what could not maintain a place in their ancestral hunting grounds, but went to you instead, was looked downwards on. You Esperancers only had a dome on some worthless nibble of land. Then you went around preaching how you had no designs on anybody’s country. Ha! They had to believe you was either lying—maybe that is one reason the Shanga attacked you—or else was abnormal weaklings.”

  “But couldn’t they understand?” Joyce asked. “Did they expect us, who didn’t even look like them, to think the same way as they do?”

  “Sophisticated, civilized t’Kelans could have caught the idea,” van Rijn said. “However, you was dealing with naïve barbarians.”

  “Except the Ancients. I’m sure they realize—”

  “Maybe so. Quite possible. But you made a deadly threat to them. Could you not see? They has been the scribes, doctors, high-grade artisans, sun experts, for ages and ages. You come in and start doing the same as them, only much better. What you expect them to do? Kiss your foots? Kiss any part of your anatomy? Not them! They is carnivores, too. They fight back.”

  “But we never meant to displace them!”

  “Remember,” van Rijn said, wagging his pipestem at her, “reason is just the lackey for instinct. The Gaffers is more subtle than anybody elses. They can sit still in one place, between walls. They do not hunt. They do not claim thousands of square kilometers for themselves. But does this mean they have no instinct of territoriality? Ha! Not bloody likely! They has only sublimed it. Their work, that is their territory—and you moved in on it!”

  Joyce sat numbly, staring out into night. Time passed before she could protest: “But we explained to them—I’m sure they understood…We explained this planet will die without our help.”

  “Ja, ja. But a naturally born fighter has less fear of death than other kinds animals. Besides, the death was scheduled for a thousand years from now, did you not say? That is too long a time to feel with emotions. Your own threat to them was real, here and now.”

  Van Rijn lit his pipe. “Also,” he continued around the mouthpiece, “your gabbing about planetwide cooperation did not sit so well. I doubt they could really comprehend it. Carnivores don’t make co-operations except on the most teensy scale. It isn’t practical for them. They haven’t got such instincts. The Hordes—which, remember, is not nations in any sense—they could never get what you was talking about, I bet. Altruism is outside their mental horizontals. It only made them suspicious of you. The Ancients maybe had some vague notion of your motives, but didn’t share them in the littlest. You can’t organize these peoples. Sooner will you build a carousel on Saturn’s rings. It does not let itself be done.”

  “You’ve organized them to fight!” she exclaimed in her anguish.

  “No. Only given them a common purpose for this time being. They believed what I said about weapons left in the dome. With minds like that, they find it much the easiest thing to believe. Of course you had an arsenal—everybody does. Of course you would have used it if you got the chance—anybody would. Ergo, you never got the chance; the Shanga captured it too fast. The rest of the story, the Yagola plot against the Rokulela, is at least logical enough to their minds that they had better investigate it good.”

  “But what are you going to make them do?” She couldn’t hold back the tears any longer. “Storm the mountain? They can’t get along without the Ancients.”

  “Sure, they can, if humans substitute.”

  “B-b-but…but…no, we can’t, we mustn’t—”

  “Maybe we don’t have to,” van Rijn said. “I got to play by my ear of tinned cauliflower when we arrive. We will see.” He laid his pipe aside. “There, there, now, don’t be so sad. But go ahead and cry if you want. Pap Nicky will dry your eyes and blow your nose.” He offered her the curve of his arm. She crept into it, buried her face against his side, and wept herself to sleep.

  Kusulongo the Mountain rose monstrous from the plain, cliff upon gloomy cliff, with talus slopes and glaciers between, until the spires carved from its top stood ragged across the sun disk. Joyce had seldom felt the cold and murk of this world as she did now, riding up the path to the city on a horned animal that must be blanketed against the human warmth of her suit. The wind went shrieking through the empty dark sky, around the crags, to buffet her like fists and snap the banner which Uulobu carried on a lance as he rode ahead. Glancing back, down a dizzying sweep of stone, she saw Nyaronga and the half-dozen other chiefs who had been allowed to come with the party. Their crests and cloaks streamed about them; spears rose and fell with the gait of their mounts; the color of their fur was lost in this dreary light, but she thought she made out the grimness on their faces. Immensely far below, at the mountain’s foot, lay their followers, five hundred armed and angry Rokulela. But they were hidden by dusk, and if she died on the heights they could give her no more than a vengeance she didn’t want.

  She shuddered and edged her basai close to the one which puffed and groaned beneath van Rijn’s weight. Their knees touched. “At least we have some company,” she said, knowing the remark was moronic but driven to say anything that might drown out the wind. “Thank God the flare died away so fast.”

  “Ja, we made good time,” the merchant said. “Only three days from the Lubambaru to here, that’s quicker than I forewaited. And lots of allies picked up.”

  She harked back wistfully to the trek. Van Rijn had spent the time being amusing, and had succeeded better than she would have expected. But then they arrived, and the Shanga scrambled up the mountain one jump ahead of the Rokulela charge; the attackers withdrew, unwilling to face cannon if there was a chance of avoiding it; a parley was agreed on; and she couldn’t imagine how it might end other than in blood. The Ancients might let her group go down again unhurt, as they’d promised—or might not—but however that went, before sundown many warriors would lie broken for the carrion fowl. Oh, yes, she admitted to herself, I’m also afraid of what will happen to me, if I should get back alive to Esperance. Instigating combat! Ten years’ corrective detention if I’m lucky…unless I run away with Nick and never see home again, never, never— But to make those glad young hunters die!