"Thus was the first of the monsters slain," Gazar had declaimed, "giving proof—could be done again." Jennifer remembered staring at her translator; the machine wasn't programmed to produce rhymes like that.
Now, though, she was more interested in the statuette than in the poetry its model had inspired. No matter how many treelords ransacked their collections for Celia Rodriguez, she did not think the master merchant would come up with a finer piece.
How much would the omphoth be worth? Enough to set up an endowed chair of Middle English literature? Jennifer knew she was dreaming. The whole hoard Pacific Overtures was bringing back might be worth something close to that, but her few private pieces wouldn't come close.
She sighed, rewrapped the figurines, and put them in her strongbox. One of these days, she told herself—most likely, just about the time when she would start forgetting her Middle English.
No, that was unfair. She loved the old language—although perhaps it wasn't older, she thought, surprised, than Gazar's hunting epic—and kept fresh her command of it. Fiche and a reader even a journeyman could easily afford.
She settled in with her scientific detective. This tale, part of what was called his memoirs, had to do with horse racing. Jennifer had seen a great many alien beasts on her trading runs, but never a horse. She had to struggle to work out from context what several of the words in the story meant; she was always rediscovering how large a vocabulary Middle English had. Even so, as she usually did, she got the gist of the piece and smiled at finding an exchange that had passed straight into Spanglish.
"'Is there any point to which you would wish to draw my attention?'
" 'To the curious incident of the dog in the nighttime.'
" 'The dog did nothing in the nighttime.'
" 'That was the curious incident,' remarked Sherlock Holmes."
She finished "The Silver Blaze," loaded the fiche Oxford English Dictionary into the reader so she could look up a few words that had completely baffled her. But her mind kept going back to the dog that had not done anything. She frowned, trying to figure out why.
Then her eyes got wide. She reached under the bunk for her strongbox. She got out the two figurines she had just bought from Gazar. She looked from one of them to the other, then slowly nodded. This had to be how Holmes felt when all the pieces fell together. She quoted him again. "When you have eliminated the impossible, whatever remains, however improbable, must be the truth."
* * *
"Excuse me, Master Merchant." Jennifer had to say it three times before Celia Rodriguez noticed her. She didn't mind; she was used to that.
Finally Rodriguez looked up from her computer screen. "You want something, Jennifer?" She sounded surprised. Jennifer didn't mind that, either. She usually kept a low profile.
"Yes, I think so, Master Merchant. That is, I think I may know why this forest is shrinking."
Rodriguez slammed a meaty hand down on the panel in front of her. "Well, if you do, that's more than anyone else does. And I haven't seen you doing anything in the way of trying to find out, either. So how do you know? Divine inspiration?"
"No. I—I—" Jennifer had to work to keep her voice audible in the face of such daunting sarcasm. "I—I got the idea from a Middle English book I was reading."
The master merchant groaned. "Jennifer, I don't begrudge anyone a hobby. Tranh Nguyen keeps trying to beat the computer at chess. He'll keep trying till he's 105, if he lives that long. Me, I like to knit. That's even useful, every now and then. I've traded things I've made for more than they're worth. You have your ancient books. They're harmless, I suppose. But what can they possibly have to do with why this forest tract on Athet is getting smaller?"
"It's—a way of thinking. But never mind that now. You're right, Master Merchant, I haven't done much work on the problem till now. I'm sorry. But can you tell me if you have maps that show the boundaries of the forest from a long time ago? Long before we first landed here, I mean: back when the Atheters were first settling this territory."
"I think so, yes." Rodriguez fiddled with the computer. A map appeared on the screen, replacing the chart she had been studying. "As best we can tell now, this is the size of the forest about fifteen hundred local years ago. It started declining then, slowly at first, but more and more rapidly in the past millennium. The process was well under way when humans came here, for reasons we still can't fathom—no great climatic changes, no shifts in the nature of the soil, nothing."
The master merchant checked herself, glanced sourly at Jennifer. "Oh, I'm so sorry. Now you know why, out of your antique books. Enlighten me, please."
Jennifer took a deep breath. If she was wrong now, the fitness report Rodriguez turned in on her would make it next to impossible for her to fly again. After not getting a fair shot at one career, the prospect of washing out of another frightened her more than she was willing to admit, even to herself.
"I think it was—" She spoke so softly that Rodriguez had to lean forward to hear what she was saying. She involuntarily yelped, "—the omphoth."
"The omphoth?" The master merchant looked disgusted. "You come in here, waste my time with this foolishness when I have serious work to do? The omphoth," she said, as if to an idiot child, "have been extinct for a thousand years. You were the one who found that out. How can something that isn't here any more have anything to do with conditions now?"
"By not being here," Jennifer said. Rodriguez snorted and turned back toward the computer screen. "No, wait!" Jennifer said desperately. "The forests really started shrinking a thousand years ago—you said so yourself. And the Atheters here finished wiping out the omphoth a thousand years ago. Don't you think there's a connection?"
"Coincidence," Rodriguez snorted. But she did look at Jennifer again. Now she might have been talking to a clever child. "Be reasonable. The Atheters got rid of the omphoth because they kept eating up the forest. So why is it shrinking now that they're gone?"
"Yes, they ate the trees," Jennifer agreed. "They even ate the horrible fruits that the Atheters can't stand, that none of the animals that are still around want anything to do with. What happens to the fruits that fall to the ground now?"
"They sprout, of course."
"Yes." Jennifer nodded eagerly. She was so full of her idea, she was almost fluent. "They sprout. They sprout under the trees that dropped them in the rain-forest gloom. Not many grow up, and the ones that do only grow up in the same place trees had always been."
"So what do the omphoth have to do with any of that? If they eat those fruits, they digest them, don't they? That gets rid of them a lot more thoroughly than trying to grow in the shade."
"They digest the fruit, yes, but what about the seeds inside?" Jennifer asked. "Lots of plants on lots of worlds disperse their seeds by passing them through animals' guts. I looked that up when I first wondered if there was any connection between the omphoth disappearing and the forest shrinking back."
"Do they? Did you?" Now, at last, Celia Rodriguez began to seem interested.
"Yes. It makes sense here, too, in ecological terms. It really does, Master Rodriguez. The omphoth ate fruit nothing else here likes at all. Doesn't that probably mean they and the trees evolved together? The trees provided them a special food and in return they disseminated the seeds inside. And so when they disappeared, the seeds didn't get disseminated any more, and that's what I think has made this tract of forest get smaller."
"Hmm." The master merchant pulled out her lower lip, then let it snap back with a soft plop. "You've done your homework on this, haven't you?"
"Of course I have, Master Rodriguez." Jennifer knew she sounded surprised. If she was good at anything, it was research.
"Hmm," Celia Rodriguez said again. "Well, what do we do even if you're right? The omphoth are extinct. We don't have a time machine to bring them back."
"Ooh." It was like a blow in the belly—Jennifer hadn't thought that far ahead.
But once the master merchant had an idea, s
he was not one to let go of it. She said, as much to herself as to Jennifer, "They're extinct here, anyhow. But this isn't the only tract of rain forest on Athet, not by a long shot. It's just the one offworlders do the most business with. Maybe others have relatives of the omphoth still running around loose."
"It shouldn't be hard to find out," Jennifer said.
Celia Rodriguez barked a couple of syllables' worth of laughter. "No, not hardly," she agreed. "Even with our translators barely working, the way they act when they're still picking up new languages, the locals won't be in much doubt about whether they have omphoth around."
Jennifer thought of something else. "I hope the main hold is big enough to carry one. More than one, I mean, if we intend to establish them here."
"First things first." The master merchant laughed again. "Hope the stunners are strong enough to put them under. Otherwise I suppose we'll have to herd them across the however many hundreds or thousands of kilometers it is from where they are to here. And for that—" Rodriguez's tone was still bantering, but Jennifer had no doubt she meant what she said "—for that, I would definitely charge extra."
* * *
Something went crashing through the undergrowth far below the branch on which Gazar's establishment was perched. Then the something—Jennifer and Gazar both knew what it was; nothing else made that much racket—let out a bellow that sounded like a cross between a kettledrum and a synthesizer with a bad short in its works.
Gazar made a ghastly face. "Now I know why our heroic ancestors slew all the ancient omphoth—in the hope of getting a good night's sleep. The cursed beasts are never quiet, are they?"
"They don't seem to be," Jennifer admitted. The cries of the newly released animals could be heard even inside Pacific Overtures.
Out along the branch, Atheters shouted and screeched. Jennifer's translator screeched, too, protesting the overload. It did manage to pick up one call. "Come on out, Gazar, and look at the omphoth! Here it comes!"
"Why should I want to see the creature that torments my rest?" Gazar grumbled, but he went. Jennifer followed more slowly, the hobnails in the bottom of her boots helping to give her purchase on the branch.
Young Atheters squealed and clung to their mothers' fur as the omphoth lumbered by underneath. It took no notice of the excited locals in the tree; its attention was centered solely on food. It pulled up a bush, spat it out—it was still learning what was good in this new forest and what was not.
"It doesn't look the way an omphoth is supposed to," Gazar complained; having found that figurine for Jennifer, he fancied himself an expert. "It doesn't even have tusks."
He had a point, she supposed. The new beasts were not identical to their exterminated cousins. Not only were they tuskless, but their lower-lip trunks were bifurcated for the last meter or so of their length. They hardly had any tails, either, and their claws were smaller than those of the omphoth this forest had once known.
But in the one essential way, they were like the omphoth of old: they were ravenously fond of the big, knobby fruits the various trees here produced. The omphoth under Gazar's tree bent its head down so its forked trunk could grab fruit that had fallen to the ground. Wet chewing noises followed.
Then the omphoth reached up almost as high as the branch on which Jennifer was perched. If the baby Atheters had squealed before, they shrieked now. Jennifer could not blame them. The sight of that open pink maw only a few meters away made her want to shriek, too. The omphoth had dreadful breath.
It was not interested in snacking off the locals, though. All it wanted to do was pluck more fruit from any branch it could reach. Finally it stripped those branches bare and stamped away to look for more fodder.
Gazar turned around to display his hindquarters at it, a gesture of contempt he had never been rude enough to use on a human. He caught Jennifer's eye. "Some treetowns are even less happy with these beasts than ours," he said. "I only hope they are not so shortsighted as to try to get rid of them."
"Why would they do that?" Jennifer exclaimed in horror. "The omphoth are saving the forest for you."
"Saving the whole, aye, but damaging the parts. We have laws against building on branches lower than a certain height." Gazar blinked. "I suppose one reason we have those laws is the omphoth of long ago. I never thought about it till now. But not every treelord enforces those laws—without omphoth, they matter little. Now there are omphoth again, and they've already wrecked some houses that were low enough for them to reach."
"Oh. I'm sorry to hear that," Jennifer said. "Your people had better know, though, that we won't be around to get more omphoth for them if they go and kill these. You need to build up the herd, not destroy it."
"The treelords know that," Gazar said, still sounding a long way from happy at the prospect. "Armed males travel through the trees to guard the beasts from harm."
"I should hope so," Jennifer said. After all the trouble the crew of Pacific Overtures had gone through in stunning and transporting the great beasts, the idea of having them hunted down was appalling.
She took her leave from Gazar and climbed down the chain ladder to the ground. The omphoth was nowhere to be seen, although she could still hear it somewhere off deeper in the forest. She was glad it was not between her and Pacific Overtures.
Immense footprints and crushed bushes showed the beast's path. So did a huge pile of steaming, stinking, green dung. In the dung Jennifer saw several teardrop-shaped seeds.
She smiled. These particular seeds got no great advantage from their trip through the omphoth's gut. But omphoth also wandered out to the edges of the savannah country surrounding the forest. Seeds deposited there would be more likely to thrive. With luck, the forest would grow again.
Her smile grew broader. All too often preindustrial races wanted nothing more from traders than help in war against their neighbors. This time, though, the crew of Pacific Overtures had really accomplished something worth doing. They'd turned a profit on the deal, too. Jennifer had learned to think well of the combination. She hurried toward the ship.
* * *
An omphoth came out of the forest. Sam Watson stepped up the gain on Pacific Overtures' viewscreen. He and Jennifer watched the beast's pupils shrink in the sudden bright sun. It didn't seem to like the feeling much. With a bellow, it drew back into the shelter of the trees.
Watson yawned and stretched. "I'll almost miss the big noisy things," he said.
"Yes, so will I, but not their racket," Jennifer said.
"No, not that. Maybe the next ship in can see if coffee does for Atheters what it does for us. I suspect a good many of them will need it, though they're not what you'd call a quiet race themselves."
"Hardly." Thinking of Gazar, Jennifer knew that was, if anything, an understatement. After a moment, she went on, "Maybe we should have done some tests with the coffee in the galley. If it worked, they'd have paid plenty for it."
"Too late to worry about it now, what with us upshipping tomorrow. I wonder how much the ivory will end up bringing. The way Master Rodriguez has things lined up, we may take a while selling everything, but we'll get a lot when we finally do. It's especially nice," Watson added, "that the new kind of omphoth we've introduced here doesn't have tusks; the Atheters won't have the incentive of hunting them to carve more trinkets for traders."
"That's true," Jennifer said. "I wouldn't feel right if we'd brought them here just to have them killed off."
"No." Sam gave Jennifer an admiring look. She hardly noticed it; she was used to admiring looks from men, and used to discounting them, too. But this one proved different from most. "That was a lovely piece of analysis you did, Jennifer, working out the connection between the extinction of the old omphoth and the trouble the forest was having."
She felt her cheeks heat with pleasure. "Oh. Thank you very much."
"I ought to thank you, for bumping up our profits, and I suppose for the Atheters, too. How did you ever work out that the omphoth passed the seeds through
their intestinal tracts and then out again?"
"That? It was—" Jennifer paused, knowing he wouldn't understand—he was just a merchant, after all, not a scholar of Middle English. She found she didn't care. "It was alimentary, my dear Watson."
THE FOITANI
IV
Ali Bakhtiar glanced toward the clock. A dark, arched eyebrow rose. "Isn't your first class at 0930, Jennifer? You're going to be late."
"I'm almost ready." Jennifer made sure one last time that she had all her notes. She took a couple of deep breaths, as if she were going to start lecturing then and there. "I hope the hall's well miked. My voice just isn't big enough to carry well by itself."
Bakhtiar smiled encouragingly. "You'll do fine." When he looked at the clock again, the smile faded. "But you'd better get moving."
"Here I go." Jennifer ran a hand through her long, blond hair. "Do I look all right?"
"That is a foolish question. You know you look wonderful." He stepped forward to kiss her; his hand slid down her back to cup her left buttock. He pulled her closer. The kiss went on and on.
Finally she twisted away. "You were the one who said I'd be late," she reminded him. She knew her looks drew men to her; she found that a nuisance as often as she enjoyed it. Living with Ali Bakhtiar the past year had at least given her an anchor. Seeing her on his arm kept a fair number of other men—not all, but a fair number—from pestering her. Even so, there were times when she wished she was still trading with aliens, to whom she was as peculiar as they were to her. It made life simpler.
But as she strode out of the apartment she and Bakhtiar shared, that sometimes-wish vanished. This would be her third semester of teaching Middle English science fiction at Saugus Central University. She still had trouble believing that, after close to ten years traveling the wilder reaches of the local arm of the galaxy, she actually had the academic job she'd wanted all along.
Sometimes you'd rather be lucky than good, she thought as she hurried toward and then across the university campus. She'd been about to set out on yet another trading run when word of the opening at Saugus Central came over the data net. The post would have been long filled by the time she got back, which meant she would have left on one more mission still, just to put more credit in her account. By the time the next job opening appeared, she might have been nearing master-trader status. Master trader was all very well—after some years of trading, she knew it was a title that had to be earned—but she much preferred putting assistant professor in front of her name.
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