His arms were curled around the bushel-sized pile of strung beads resting on his lap. Beside the corpse, one hand toying with the beads, stood a younger man with similar facial features. His chest was splotched orange, blue and yellow also, but he wore a feather breechclout like other adult natives; children under the age of ten went naked.
The whole village was assembled, close to two hundred people above the age of nursing infants. They had neither plates nor utensils, but each held a polished wooden drinking bowl.
On reed mats stretching from where the dead man sat were baskets of fruit, trays of broiled fish, and wooden tubs cut from sections of large tree-trunks. Some of the tubs held porridge, but most of them were filled with pale yellow fluid on which floated chewed bits of vegetable matter. Adele assumed it was alcoholic, but she couldn’t imagine circumstances in which she would taste it herself.
Valentina drove the aircar slowly into the clearing with twenty heavily-armed spacers walking alongside. The Count sat beside his wife; Woetjans and the native Captain had the rearmost pair of seats. Mr. Pasternak’s technicians had removed the middle bench and put in its place a 50-gallon tank, previously part of the water purification system.
The Sissies pushed back the crowding natives until the car could halt beside the corpse as the Captain had directed. As soon as the vehicle stopped, eight crewmen began filling gallon buckets from the tap in the big tank while the others remained on guard.
Adele felt prickly, prepared for serious trouble but not seeing any way to prevent it. She clasped her hands in front of her. She’d have been less nervous if she could’ve taken out her data unit, but that would’ve been silly.
Daniel, walking beside her, looked cheerfully at ease. He wore a pistol in a full-flap holster, but Adele didn’t recall ever having seen her friend use a gun. He had a baton of structural plastic as long as his forearm, however. Given the strength of Daniel’s wrists and shoulders, it would lay out anyone as quickly as a shot from his service pistol.
Daniel eyed the beads in the dead man’s lap. “Look, Adele!” he whispered. “They’re seeds, little hard seeds. They must come from gourds like those near the wreck. Of course! The seeds are valuable because the insects, the firebugs, make them difficult to gather!”
Adele looked carefully at the strings because they were of interest to her friend, though she didn’t share Daniel’s enthusiasm for natural history. The individual seeds were about the size of her little fingernail and flat, running ten or a dozen to the inch the way they were strung. She frowned: there must be many thousands of seeds in the pile. Cleaning and drilling each one would’ve taken time, quite apart from the risk of being attacked by the insects.
The Captain rose to his feet in the back of the aircar. “My people!” he shouted. “My great friends from the sky have brought me slash! I will share it with you out of the goodness of my heart!”
When the aircar stopped, the villagers had been seated to either side of the long mat; the elders—the officers—and their families were on the end close to the dead man. The crowd gave a great bawl of sound and surged upright, about to rush the aircar like a tidal wave pouring over the shore.
“Hogg!” Daniel said.
Hogg fired his stocked impeller into the treetop, blowing a thigh-thick limb off in a shower of matchstick-sized fragments. The gun’s buzzing whiplash was lost in the whack! of the slug disintegrating thick wood a heartbeat later. The limb sagged with a series of pops as it tore the few remaining fibers holding it to the trunk; then it plunged twisting to the ground.
Natives nearby wailed as they scrambled back. Hogg watched with a disdainful expression as heat waves shimmered above the barrel of his weapon. The powerful slug had kicked the limb enough to the side that no one in the crowd was in any danger.
“If you, our honored hosts, will remain seated with your bowls waiting . . . ,” Daniel said in a voice easily heard even by ears stunned by the sudden gunshot. “Then members of my crew will pour out the amount of our gift to you. Anyone who gets to his feet instead of waiting will show himself to be unworthy of the gift. Do you understand?”