Without flesh surrounding them, it was hard for K'Sed's eyes to show expression, but Jennifer thought he gave Greenberg a baleful stare. "And your ship?" the prince said. "What excuse will you give me there?"

"It is armed," Koniev admitted. K'Sed hissed again, this time with a now-we're-getting-somewhere kind of eagerness. Koniev, who was weapons officer when the Flying Festoon was offplanet, went on, "The weapons, unfortunately, function only out in space, where there is no air."

"No air? There is air everywhere," K'Sed said. T'Kai astronomy was about at the Ptolemaic level. The locals believed the humans when they said they came from another world; they and their goods were too unlike anything familiar. Not all the implications, though, had yet sunk in.

"I think we are all looking at this problem in the wrong way," Jennifer said.

Her crewmates all looked at her in surprise. Her silence through the uproarious meeting up to this point was very much in character. It wasn't just because she was only twenty-two and an apprentice. Had she been twice as old and a master merchant?not that she ever wanted to become a master merchant?she would have acted the same way.

"Tell us," Greenberg urged, in a tone that said he thought she was so quiet because she didn't operate in the same world as everyone else. "What have you seen that we've missed?" She flushed and did not answer. He growled, "Come on. His Highness doesn't care how pretty you are. Don't keep him waiting."

"I'm sorry, Master Merchant," she said, flushing even harder. It wasn't her fault she'd been born blond and beautiful. She rather wished she hadn't been; it kept people from taking her seriously. But Greenberg was right?to the T'Kai, she was as hideous and alien as the rest of the Soft Ones. The master merchant's glare forced more words from her. "We know, don't we, that there isn't much we can actually do against the M'Sak?" Her voice was small and breathy, barely enough to activate the translator.

"We don't know that," B'Rom said, not deigning to turn even one eyestalk Jennifer's way. "You Soft Ones keep saying it, but we do not know it."

The interruption flustered her. She took a while to get going again. At last she said, "Maybe the M'Sak also doubt we are as harmless as we really are?"

Sixteen eyestalks suddenly rose to their full length; sixteen eyes bored into Jennifer's two. She stopped, glancing toward Greenberg for support. He nodded encouragingly. "I think you have their attention," he said. He was fond of understatement.

"But what do I tell them now?" she asked.

"I haven't the slightest idea," he told her. "How do you think we'd look tricked out with a paint job and enough false legs and teeth to impersonate four f'noi?" The f'noi, which looked like an unlikely cross between a tiger and a lobster, was the worst predator this continent knew.

"You're baiting me!" Jennifer said. From some people, they would have been fighting words. She wished she could sound fierce instead of disappointed.

Marya Vassilis stepped into the breach. "We don't yet know your barbarous foes well," she reminded the prince and his retinue. "You will have to advise us on how we can best appear terrifying to them."

"Maybe even the sight of your ship will be enough," K'Sed said hopefully. "I do not think any Soft Ones have traded directly with the M'Sak."

"Why should they?" observed D'Kar, K'Sed's other consort, with what the translator rendered as a scornful sniff. She wore gold bands round all her walking-legs and had two rows of yellow garnets glued to her carapace. "The M'Sak are such low wretches, they surely have nothing worth trading for."

"Let them eat cake," Koniev quoted. No matter how well the computer translated, it could not provide social context. A good thing, too, Jennifer thought as the talk at last turned serious.

When they got back to the suite the humans had been modifying to their comfort for the past several months, Jennifer flopped down on her air mattress and put a reader on her nose. The mattress, a washbasin, and a chemical toilet were great improvements over the local equivalents. T'Kai sleeping gear, for instance, resembled nothing so much as a set of parallel bars.

Greenberg said something to her. Her attention was on the reader, so she didn't pay much attention. He coughed. She looked up. Her eyes took several seconds to focus on the real world.

"Thanks for the notion that got us going there," he repeated.

"Oh. Thank you very much. I wasn't sure what would come of it, but…" She hesitated. As often happened, the hesitation became a full stop.

"But anything was better than staying stuck where we were," Greenberg finished. "Yes." He was resigned to finishing sentences for her by now.

She went back to the reader, but still felt his eyes on her. She was used to looks from men, but on this cruise Greenberg and Koniev both seemed to have taken to Marya, though she was fifteen years older than Jennifer and lovely by the canon of no human world. To Jennifer, that was more a relief than anything else.

Greenberg said something to her. Again, she noticed that he said it, but not what it was. He repeated himself once more. "What are you reading?"

"Heinlein?one of the early Future History books." She'd loved Middle English science fiction ever since she was a child. It was all English; her father had taught her the ancient speech so young that she read it as fluently as she did Spanglish. She was also still young enough to think that everyone ought to love what she loved. "Would you like to borrow the fiche when I'm through with it?" she asked eagerly.

"More of your dead languages?" Greenberg asked her. She nodded. "No, thank you," he said. His voice was not ungentle, but her face fell. He went on, "I'm more interested in what's really here than in some ancient picture of a future that never happened."

"It's not so much the future he creates, but the way he does it," she said, trying to get across the fascination that rigorous world building had for her.

He shook his head. "I haven't the time or the inclination for it now. Illusions are all very well, but the M'Sak, worse luck, are real. I just hope illusory threats can chase them away. I have the bad feeling they won't. There's going to be some very real fighting before long, I'm afraid."

Jennifer nodded. As the meeting with the prince and his court was breaking up, a messenger had come in with bad news: C'Lar, one of the northern towns of the T'Kai confederacy, had fallen to the M'Sak. The T'Kai and their neighbors had been peaceful for several generations now. As K'Sed himself was uneasily aware, they were no match for the vigorous barbarians now emerging from the northern jungles.

But K'Sed intended to try, and nobody on the Flying Festoon had even brought up the idea of backing the other side. For one thing, T'Kai objets d'art brought the crew a tidy profit, trip after trip; that would vanish with a M'Sak conquest. For another, the M'Sak were not nice people, even for crabs. Their leader, V'Zek, seemed to have taken Chingis Khan lessons?he was both ruthless and extremely able.

Jennifer worried about that until the Heinlein story completely occupied her, but it was a distant sort of worry. If worse came to worst, the Flying Festoon could always lift off and leave.

K'Sed, of course, would not be so lucky.

V'Zek came down from his shelter and stepped away from it to watch the full moon rise. Many of his warriors felt anxious away from the trees they were used to, but he took the southlands' open spaces as a challenge, and he never met a challenge any way but claws-first.

Thus he did not pull in his eyestalks when he was away from the posts that held up his shelter and the web of ropes that imitated the closely twined branches of the jungle. And, indeed, there was a certain grandeur in seeing the great yellow shield unobscured by twigs and leaves.