Timothy Zahn - Spinneret

There was a long pause—so long, in fact, that Meredith wondered if the translator had hit a snag somewhere. He was trying to come up with a complete rephrasing when Beaeki spoke. "Forgive our breach of understanding," he said, slipping his hands momentarily behind his back. "I am named Beaeki nul Dies na. We did not realize you were of equal status with your home planet. We assumed you were a vassal world, or possibly a detention center. We apologize."

"It's all right," Meredith assured him. Now what brought that on? he wondered.

The business about selling them our sulfur! He wished desperately the Ctencri had given them a little more data on Rooshrike psychology. "Human political and organizational structures can be pretty hard even for humans to understand, let alone outsiders. I take it the Ctencri didn't tell you very much about us?"

"The Ctencri do not give information away free. We ascertained you would be no military threat to us, even if you were outcasts, but could afford no more."

"Mm. The Ctencri charge too much, you think?"

"The Ctencri are usurers," the Rooshrike said flatly. "They perhaps appear generous to you at this time because you are newly contacted and they do not yet know what they want from you. But you will learn, as we did, that their only interests are building their own power and influence."

"Well, we have a long history of that ourselves. Once we find our feet the Ctencri may find us harder to fleece than they expect." Meredith suddenly remembered his duties as host, and gestured back toward the cars. "May I offer you that look around now? I'm sure the Ctencri didn't tell you what we had planned for Astra—and we don't charge for the tour."

"I will accept." If Beaeki had caught the attempt at humor he gave DO sign of it.

"I would prefer we use my vehicle, though. If you have no objection."

Meredith shrugged, trying hard not to read anything sinister into the suggestion.

"No objections at all. Whenever you're ready."

It took only a few minutes to offload the vehicle, a sort of cross between a hovercraft and a powerboat with stubby outriggers; but once he and Beaeki were inside, Meredith understood the alien's reluctance to rough it in Astra's more primitive cars. The passenger compartment was large, comfortable, and whisperquiet, with a climate control Beaeki had thoughtfully set to match the outside air temperature. The ground effect cushion, which seemed both more powerful and less dust-making than those of the military ground-effect vehicles Meredith was used to, handled even boulder-sized obstacles with ease. Meredith's escort, confined as they were to cars and the water-only hovercraft, had a hard time keeping up, but Meredith wasn't overly concerned. Beaeki didn't seem bothered by the possible breach of protocol, and as their conversation was being monitored via Meredith's phone, the colonel didn't feel nervous when out of sight of his men.

What he did feel was surprise. Beaeki, he'd judged, was only mildly interested in what the humans were building on Astra, and he'd accordingly been thinking along the lines of a half-hour trip to Unie and back. But the Rooshrike, with no trace of his earlier official coolness, asked question after question, and before he knew it Meredith had launched them on a grand tour.

They began at the continental shelf due east of Martello Island, where the mysterious mineral deposits lay clearly visible a few meters beneath the water.

Crossing the narrow strip of land that separated the ocean from the northernmost finger of Splayfoot Bay, they came to the village of Wright, where the mined minerals would eventually be separated and purified. The road from there to Unie bordered both the bay and the Wright-Unie fanning area, and Meredith spent several minutes talking about the special fertilization being used. He broke off the monologue when Beaeki explained that his race had little interest in plant cultivation; on Rooshrike worlds, with solar energy up to thirty times more abundant than on Earth, keeping the flora cut back was more of a problem than persuading it to grow. The fish nurseries near Unie were far more to his interest, inducing him even to stop the vehicle and get out. Squatting by the offshore mesh pens, whose tops barely cleared the surface of the water, he peered into the depths as Meredith described how the metal-rich runoff from the Crosse fields would be carried by the river to the bay, where it would presumably allow the growth of algae and more complex plants to which the penned fish would have access.

"You go to great lengths for such a useless world," Beaeki commented as they headed toward Ceres.

"It may be the only other one we ever have," Meredith said sourly, "if the Ctencri are to be believed. Besides, we humans are very big on challenges."

They made a fast circuit of Ceres—where, thankfully, the workers were sticking to business today—looked at Teardrop Lake, and then headed south to Crosse, at the junction of whose rivers a second fish nursery was located.

And through it all, Meredith learned a great deal about the Rooshrike.

They were a young race, relatively speaking, technologically anywhere from eighty to three hundred years behind the other starfaring races of the region. As junior members of the six-nation trading association, they had chafed somewhat under the perceived condescension of the older races, particularly that of the Ctencri, and while they had rapidly built an empire of twenty colonies and bases, they had always had the feeling none of the others really took them seriously.

Though Beaeki never actually said so, Meredith got the distinct impression the Rooshrike were relieved that the beings from Earth were taking their former place at the bottom of the pecking order.

"Nice that at least no one's all that much more advanced technologically than all the others," Meredith noted at one point. "Still seems sort of odd, though, considering all the time that's been available for life to develop in."

"An accident of nature," Beaeki said, gazing out the side window as he drove.

"Approximately one hundred forty million years ago a supernova saturated this part of space with enhanced cosmic radiation, resulting in rapid mutation of disease organisms, destruction of high-atmosphere protective regions, and direct large-creature destruction via tissue damage. Those peoples capable of survival lost nearly all technology; the few who survived are more primitive now than even your people."

"I would have thought some of their knowledge would have survived with them."

"But the material base did not. Too much of their metal was already in forms too difficult for a primitive technology to extract."

Meredith swallowed. Metal again; metal, and lack of same. Just what his lowflying morale needed to hear about.

"Other more advanced races are reputed to exist," Beaeki continued. "But they are far away and few have seen them. They show as little interest in us as we do in the non-space-going peoples within this region."

"Um." Probably, Meredith thought, just as well.

He probed for information about the other nearby races, too, but here he had somewhat less success. Whether Beaeki simply wasn't interested in talking about their trading partners or whether the Rooshrike had learned the folly of giving away useful information for free Meredith didn't know. Still, he managed to get the races' names and general locations and, in a couple of instances, a brief physical description. Of those, the most interesting was that of the Poms, seagoing creatures that sounded something like dolphins equipped with manipulative tentacles. Meredith had often heard that a mechanical culture was impossible without fire, but Beaeki wouldn't say what the Poms had discovered as a substitute.

"That's something else that seems odd about this whole setup," Meredith commented. The tour over, Beaeki had brought his vehicle back to the ship and set it down expertly beneath its davits. "You said the edge of the Poms' territory is only a couple of light-years away. Since you're only interested in hot, Mercurytype worlds and the Poms live in liquid water, why haven't your two empires interpenetrated? Surely each of you has planets the other could use; it seems a perfectly reasonable deal for both sides."