Chapter 3

“Not his fault,” the Paratime Police agent said. “I’m the one the
Company’ll be sore at, but I’d rather have them down on me rather than
old Tortha Karf. Well, sit on the lid till I get back,” he told both
of them. “We’ll need some kind of a story for the locals. Let’s
see–Explain to the guards, in the hearing of some of the more
talkative slaves, that these slaves are from the Asian mainland, that
they are of a people friendly to our people, and that they were
kidnaped by pirates, our enemies. That ought to explain everything
satisfactorily.”

On his way back to the plantation house, he saw a clump of local
slaves staring curiously at the stockade, and noticed that the guards
had unslung their rifles and fixed their bayonets. None of them had
any idea, of course, of what had happened, but they all seemed to
know, by some sort of ESP, that something was seriously wrong. It was
going to get worse, too, when strangers began arriving, apparently
from nowhere, at the plantation.

* * * * *

Verkan Vall waited until the small, dark-eyed woman across the
circular table had helped herself from one of the bowls on the
revolving disk in the middle, then rotated it to bring the platter of
cold boar-ham around to himself.

“Want some of this, Dalla?” he asked, transferring a slice of ham and
a spoonful of wine sauce to his plate.

“No, I’ll have some of the venison,” the black-haired girl beside him
said. “And some of the pickled beans. We’ll be getting our fill of
pork, for the next month.”

“I thought the Dwarma Sector people were vegetarians,” Jandar Jard,
the theatrical designer, said. “Most nonviolent peoples are, aren’t
they?”

“Well, the Dwarma people haven’t any specific taboo against taking
life,” Bronnath Zara, the dark-eyed woman in the brightly colored
gown, told him. “They’re just utterly noncombative, nonaggressive.
When I was on the Dwarma Sector, there was a horrible scandal at the
village where I was staying. It seems that a farmer and a meat butcher
fought over the price of a pig. They actually raised their voices and
shouted contradictions at each other. That happened two years before,
and people were still talking about it.”

“I didn’t think they had any money, either,” Verkan Vall’s wife,
Hadron Dalla, said.

“They don’t,” Zara said. “It’s all barter and trade. What are you and
Vall going to use for a visible means of support, while you’re there?”

“Oh, I have my mandolin, and I’ve learned all the traditional Dwarma
songs by hypno-mech,” Dalla said. “And Transtime Tours is fitting Vall
out with a bag of tools; he’s going to do repair work and carpentry.”

“Oh, good; you’ll be welcome anywhere,” Zara, the sculptress, said.
“They’re always glad to entertain a singer, and for people who do the
fine decorative work they do, they’re the most incompetent practical
mechanics I’ve ever seen or heard of. You’re going to travel from
village to village?”

“Yes. The cover-story is that we’re lovers who have left our village
in order not to make Vall’s former wife unhappy by our presence,”
Dalla said.

“Oh, good! That’s entirely in the Dwarma romantic tradition,” Bronnath
Zara approved. “Ordinarily, you know, they don’t like to travel. They
have a saying: ‘Happy are the trees, they abide in their own place;
sad are the winds, forever they wander.’ But that’ll be a fine
explanation.”

Thalvan Dras, the big man with the black beard and the long red coat
and cloth-of-gold sash who lounged in the host’s seat, laughed.

“I can just see Vall mending pots, and Dalla playing that mandolin and
singing,” he said. “At least, you’ll be getting away from police work.
I don’t suppose they have anything like police on the Dwarma Sector?”

“Oh, no; they don’t even have any such concept,” Bronnath Zara said.
“When somebody does something wrong, his neighbors all come and talk
to him about it till he gets ashamed, then they all forgive him and
have a feast. They’re lovely people, so kind and gentle. But you’ll
get awfully tired of them in about a month. They have absolutely no
respect for anybody’s privacy. In fact, it seems slightly indecent to
them for anybody to want privacy.”

One of Thalvan Dras’ human servants came into the room, coughed
apologetically, and said:

“A visiphone-call for His Valor, the Mavrad of Nerros.”

Vall went on nibbling ham and wine sauce; the servant repeated the
announcement a trifle more loudly.

“Vall, you’re being paged!” Thalvan Dras told him, with a touch of
impatience.

Verkan Vall looked blank for an instant, then grinned. It had been so
long since he had even bothered to think about that antiquated title
of nobility–

“Vall’s probably forgotten that he has a title,” a girl across the
table, wearing an almost transparent gown and nothing else, laughed.

“That’s something the Mavrad of Mnirna and Thalvabar never forgets,”
Jandar Jard drawled, with what, in a woman, would have been
cattishness.

Thalvan Dras gave him a hastily repressed look of venomous anger, then
said something, more to Verkan Vall than to Jandar Jard, about titles
of nobility being the marks of social position and responsibility
which their bearers should never forget. That jab, Vall thought,
following the servant out of the room, had been a mistake on Jard’s
part. A music-drama, for which he had designed the settings, was due
to open here in Dhergabar in another ten days. Thalvan Dras would
cherish spite, and a word from the Mavrad of Mnirna and Thalvabar
would set a dozen critics to disparaging Jandar’s work. On the other
hand, maybe it had been smart of Jandar Jard to antagonize Thalvan
Dras; for every critic who bowed slavishly to the wealthy nobleman,
there were at least two more who detested him unutterably, and they
would rush to Jandar Jard’s defense, and in the ensuing uproar, the
settings would get more publicity than the drama itself.

* * * * *