A human, or an ordinary Suleimanite, could not successfully have worn such an outfit. If nothing else, they were too big. But presumably it had not occurred to the Baburites to allow for midgets existing on this planet. The disguise was far from perfect; but presumably the computer was not programmed to check for any such contingency; furthermore, an intelligent, well-rehearsed actor, adapting his role moment by moment as no robot ever can, creates a gestalt transcending any minor errors of detail.

  And…logically, the computer must be programmed to allow Baburites into its presence, to service it and collect the bluejack stored nearby.

  Nonetheless, Dalmady’s jaws ached from the tension on them.

  The robot shifted out of the viewfield. In the receiving screens, ground continued to glide away underneath the scooter.

  Dalmady switched off audio transmission from base. Though none save Yvonne, alone in a special room, was now sending to the Translator, and she via a bone conduction receiver—still, the cheers that had filled the car struck him as premature.

  But the kilometers passed and passed. And the blockhouse hove in view, dark, cubical, bristling with sensors and antennae, cornered with the sinister shapes of gun emplacements and missile silos. No forcefield went up. Yvonne said through the Translator’s unit: Open; do not close again until told,” and the idiot-savant computer directed a massive gate to swing wide.

  What happened beyond was likewise Yvonne’s job. She scanned through the portal by the two-way, summoned what she had learned of Baburite automation technology, and directed the Translator. Afterward she said it hadn’t been difficult except for poor visibility; the builders had used standard layouts and programming languages. But to the factor it was an hour of sweating, cursing, pushing fingers and belly muscles against each other, starting and staring at the image of enigmatic units which loomed between blank walls, under bluish light that was at once harsh and wan.

  When the Translator emerged and the gate closed behind him, Dalmady almost collapsed.

  Afterward, though—well, League people were pretty good at throwing a celebration!

  “Yes,” Dalmady said. “But—”

  “Butter me no buts,” van Rijn said. “Fact is, you reset that expensive computer so it should make those expensive robots stand idle. Why not leastwise use them for Solar?”

  “That would have ruined relations with the natives, sir. Primitives don’t take blandly to the notion of technological unemployment. So scientific studies would have become impossible. How then would you attract personnel?”

  “What personnel would we need?”

  “Some on the spot, constantly. Otherwise the Baburites, close as they are, could come back and, for example, organize and arm justly disgruntled Suleimanites against us. Robots or no, we’d soon find the bluejack costing us more than it earned us…Besides, machines wear out and it costs to replace them. Live native help will reproduce for nothing.”

  “Well, you got that much sense, anyhows,” van Rijn rumbled. “But why did you tell the computer it and its robots should attack any kind of machine, like a car or spacecraft, what comes near, and anybody of any shape what tells it to let him in? Supposing situations change, our people can’t do nothings with it now neither.”

  “I told you, they don’t need to,” Dalmady rasped. “We get along—not dazzlingly, but we get along, we show a profit—with our traditional arrangements. As long as we maintain those, we exclude the Baburites from them. If we ourselves had access to the computer, we’d have to mount an expensive guard over it. Otherwise the Baburites could probably pull a similar trick on us, right? As is, the system interdicts any attempt to modernize operations in the bluejack area. Which is to say, it protects our monopoly—free—and will protect it for years to come.”

  He started to rise. “Sir,” he continued bitterly, “the whole thing strikes me as involving the most elementary economic calculations. Maybe you have something subtler in mind, but if you do—”

  “Whoa!” van Rijn boomed. “Squat yourself. Reel in some more of your drink, boy, and listen at me. Old and fat I am, but lungs and tongue I got. Also in working order is two other organs, one what don’t concern you but one which is my brain, and my brain wants I should get information from you and stuff it.”

  Dalmady found he had obeyed.

  “You need to see past a narrow specialism,” van Rijn said. “Sometimes a man is too stupid good at his one job. He booms it, no matter the consequentials to everything else, and makes trouble for the whole organization he is supposed to serve. Like, you considered how Babur would react?”

  “Of course. Freelady Vaillancourt—” When will I be with her again?—“and Drs. Bergen and Nakamura in particular, did an exhaustive analysis of materials on hand. As a result, we gave the computer an additional directive: that it warn any approaching vehicle before opening fire. The conversation I had later, with the spaceship captain, or whatever he was, bore out our prediction.”

  (A quivering snout. A bleak-gleam in four minikin eyes. But the voice, strained through a machine, emotionless: “Under the rules your civilization has devised, you have not given us cause for war; and the League always responds to what it considers unprovoked attack. Accordingly, we shall not bombard.”)

  “No doubt they feel their equivalent of fury,” Dalmady said. “But what can they do? They’re realists. Unless they think of some new stunt, they’ll write Suleiman off and try elsewhere.”

  “And they buy our bluejack yet?”

  “Yes.”

  “We should maybe lift the price, like teaching them a lesson they shouldn’t make fumblydiddles with up?”

  “You can do that, if you want to make them decide they’d rather synthesize the stuff. My report recommends against it.”

  This time Dalmady did rise. “Sir,” he declared in anger, “I may be a yokel, my professional training may have been in a jerkwater college, but I’m not a congenital idiot who’s mislaid his pills and I do take my pride seriously. I made the best decision I was able on Suleiman. You haven’t tried to show me where I went wrong, you’ve simply had me dismissed from my post, and tonight you drone about issues that anybody would understand who’s graduated from diapers. Let’s not waste more of our time. Good evening.”

  Van Rijn avalanched upward to his own feet. “Ho, ho!” he bawled. “Spirit, too! I like, I like!”

  Dumfounded, Dalmady could only gape.

  Van Rijn clapped him on the shoulder, nearly felling him. “Boy,” the merchant said, “I didn’t mean to rub your nose in nothings except sweet violets. I did have to know, did you stumble onto your answer, which is beautiful, or can you think original? Because you take my saying, maybe everybody understands like you what is not wearing diapers no more; but if that is true, why, ninety-nine point nine nine percent of every sophont race is wearing diapers, at least on their brains, and it leaks out of their mouths. I find you is in the oh point oh one percent, and I want you. Hoo-ha, how I want you!” He thrust the gin-filled goblet back into Dalmady’s hand. His tankard clanked against it. “Drink! Drink!”

  Dalmady took a sip. Van Rijn began to prowl.

  “You is from a frontier planet and so is naïve,” the merchant said, “but that can be outlived like pimples. See, when my underlings at HQ learned you had pulled our nuts from the fire on Suleiman, they sent you a standard message, not realizing an Altaian like you would not know that in such cases the proceeding is SOP,” which he pronounced “sop.” He waved a gorilla arm, splashing beer on the floor. “Like I say, we had to check if you was lucky only. If so, we would promote you to be manager some place better and forget about you. But if you was actual, extra smart and tough, we don’t want you for a manager. You is too rare and precious for that. Would be like using a Hokusai print in a catbox.”

  Dalmady raised goblet to mouth, unsteadily. “What do you mean?” he croaked.

  “Entrepreneur! You will keep title of factor, because we can’t make jealousies, but what you do is what the old Americans would have called a horse of a different dollar.

  “Look.” Van Rijn reclaimed his cigar from the disposal rim, took a puff, and made forensic gestures with it and tankard alike while he continued his earthquake pacing. “Suleiman was supposed to be a nice routine post, but you told me how little we know on it and how sudden the devil himself came to lunch. Well, what about the real new, real hairy—and real fortune-making—places? Ha?

  “You don’t want a manager for them, not till they been whipped into shape. A good manager is a very high-powered man, and we need a lot of him. But in his bottom, he is a routineer; his aim is to make things go smooth. No, for the wild places you need an innovator in charge, a man what likes to take risks, a heterodoxy if she is female—somebody what can meet wholly new problems in unholy new ways—you see?

  “Only such is rare, I tell you. They command high prices: high as they can earn for themselves. Natural, I want them earning for me, too. So I don’t put that kind of factor on salary and dangle a promotion ladder in front of him. No, the entrepreneur kind, first I get his John Bullcock on a ten-year oath of fealty. Next I turn him loose with a stake and my backup, to do what he wants, on straight commission of ninety percent.

  “Too bad nobody typed you before you went in managerial school. Now you must have a while in an entrepreneurial school I got tucked away where nobody notices. Not dull for you—I hear they throw fine orgies—but mainly I think you will enjoy your classes, if you don’t mind working till brain-sweat runs out your nose. Afterward you go get rich, if you survive, and have a big ball of fun even if you don’t. Hokay?”

  Dalmady thought for an instant of Yvonne; and then he thought, What the deuce, if nothing better develops, in a few years I can set any hiring policies I feel like; and: “Hokay!” he exclaimed, and tossed off his drink in a single gulp.

  Strangers

  Last night as I stood on the clifftop and Hrau, seeking dreams, a ghost sailed by. The moon was well aloft, full, so bright that it flooded most stars out of heaven, for clouds had whitened nearly all its face. The light shimmered over darkful waves as if to make a path to Lost Motherland. Afar on my left, the northern horizon flickered with the campfires of the dead.

  Wind lulled and ruffled my fur. It was cool, and full of salt odors to which my tendrils quivered. The surf broke utterly white, so far beneath me that the sound came low and steady, like the murmur of First River on its way to the sea when I was young. Here was a good loneliness in which to hope for dreams that would help me understand what this life has meant that now nears its end. I had not thought myself to be the kind that does—I am no saint or familiar of the Unseen—but the Watermother says I should, because of what happened long ago. Aia, how long ago!

  Then as I waited, something glimmered yonder. It might have been a leaf, pale with autumn, which the wind hunted along the foam-crests. Yet it was too large, and fared too steadily, and it came not down the wind but across, from the east. Was this the form of my guide into sleep? A shiver and a shiver passed through me.

  Still it neared, until suddenly it swung about. By that time it was so close that I could see what was below, the knife-lean shape cleaving its way, with a wake behind on which the moonlight shattered and swirled. My fin, already lowered, shut itself hard against my back. That was no canoe of ours passing by. That was a boat of the Night Folk.

  Why have they come to seek us out, after these many years? What has changed in the Forest or in Lost Motherland, and is it of horror or of hope? Almost, I called out, but fear choked me and I crouched down, not to be seen against the western stars and the Sky Flow.

  The ghost boat sailed on in swiftness and silence, following the shoreline but well clear of the breakers. As it moved away, dread left me. Might those be aboard whom I had known? I sprang to my feet, raised my fin to the full that moonlight might gleam off it, shouted and sprang about.

  The boat sailed on. I do not know if they saw me. Surely they could have, as great as their powers are; but I do not know. The boat vanished southward. Grief welled up in me. I dropped to all fours, my tail lashed to and fro, I wailed for my loss, if it was indeed a loss.

  No dream would come to me before dawn. Presently, though, calm did. I rose again and sang the song of farewell. After that I went home. Today I tell you of this that I have seen.

  Most of you are young. You have heard the tales and learned the songs, but you do not know Lost Motherland as we few aged do who were born there and once walked on the downs and offered at the ancestral tombs. And I alone remain of those who ever saw the Night Folk. I alone sought them out in the Forest. We who remember have paid the price and suffered that loss which mortals must who deal with them; but mine was the sacrifice over and above this. Therefore you others do not know what you believe you know. I must try to tell you. Hear me.

  It may be that the ghost boat was bound past on its way to some mystery beyond sight. It may be that the Night Folk have many times flitted about these islands unbeknownst to us. Did I only chance to see last night, or did they want me to see? That may have been the sending I sought, to make me ready; and after I am in my dolmen they will come by moonlight and whisper to me. Who can say? If they do seek you out, you will need the awe, the wariness, and also the eerie gladness that were ours, not as words but deep in your dreams. It is for your children and their children, who will not have countless ancestors to watch over them as we did, but merely us. Though you believe you have heard my story before, you have not really. Hear me.

  For two days, people at home saw smoke drift up in the distance above Gneissback Fell. Ktiya had been a large thorp; it and its croplands were long in burning and longer still in smoldering after the Charioteers torched them. The sullen sight brooded behind us through our return to Oaua and haunted the following sunrise. At last it grew thin and the merciful winds scattered what was left. They could not blow the memories out of us, nor the forebodings. Ktiya as large, I say, and it had gotten the help of such other Wold People as spied the beacon fires that meant Charioteers were on their way to it. Nevertheless Ktiya perished. Oaua was small; and belike it would stand alone when next the destroyers came, for our kindred around the land would be in despair.

  “But we drove them off, Ak’hai’i,” my oath-comrade Izizi protested when I forced myself to utter this. “We killed several and hurt more—as you know better than anyone else among us—until they wheeled about and lashed their ehins to full speed eastward.”

  “They were a small party,” I answered. “We had thrice the count of them, I think. Even so, they left our dead and wounded wide-strewn. They withdrew in good order, taking their own fallen along, except for those two it happened we surrounded.”

  “You should sing of that, Ak’hai’i,” he said.

  I might well have, for it was I who led the charge that split the enemy line. We cut a single chariot off from the rest, and Ngi of Thunder Bay put a spear in the driver but it was I—I—I who sprang up over the rail and killed the warrior himself. My ax smashed his head before his blade gave me more than a shallow slash, and now that blade rested sheathed upon my breast.

  But darkness had risen in me with the smoke of Ktiya. “They rallied at once,” I said. “They could have cloven us asunder and hunted us down one by one as we fled. They did not, because it was not worth their trouble. They had done what they meant to do, and longed to get back to their horde.”

  We lay in the Male Lodge, we who had gone forth to battle and lived. Soon we would seek the females and their wisdom, but first we must come to terms with those of us whom we had carried home for burial, and with ourselves. Afterward we would explain as best we could to the females, and take counsel, and all together try to come to terms with the Unseen. Thus did the Wold People do in the old times. It is different today. Everything is different.

  Coolness dwelt within the thick clay walls. Sunlight filtered through the matting in the doorway to make dusk for us. The thatch smelled of nightwort and dry forage, a peaceful smell. Our gaze we kept on the lampflame on top of the Block.

  “What was it, then, that the Charioteers came to do?” asked Ngi. He and his family lived by themselves, strandfishing or venturing out into the bay on a raft more than they worked the soil. Therefore he had not heard as much as we did in our thorp, and until this moment, time and breath had been lacking for him to learn.

  “To lay waste,” I told him. “They have cleared that vale of people and crops. Naught will meet them when they return but the whistlewing above and the wanderbeast on the ground. Naught will be growing but forage for their herds. In this wise, piece by piece they take the world away from the Wold People.”

  “What drives them to such deeds?” Izizi cried.

  I shrugged my fin. “Who knows? Maybe not even themselves. Or maybe the years have worsened still more in the far east than they have here, as the sun slips from her rightful path.”

  “They fall on us who never harmed them!”

  “A flippertail may think the same of me when my net hauls him from the water,” said Ngi harshly.

  “They have the power, true,” breathed from me, “the chariots and the iron.” So did we call the terrible material that cut and stabbed, unbreakable, keener than the finest-knapped sharpstone. Nobody knew who first named it. The Watermother said the word might have come from the users. Sometimes they bore off captives, and maybe a very few of these had escaped over the years and made their way back.

  “If I did,” rumbled Ngi, “I would use it against them just as they do against us.”

  “But the fate is otherwise,” I replied. “Now let us be silent, mingle our spirits with the lampflame, and find peace.”