Isaac Asimov's Robot City Book 1: Odyssey by Michael P. Kube-McDowell

Author:Michael P. Kube-McDowell [Kube-Mcdowell, Michael P.]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Science Fiction, Fiction
ISBN: 0441731228
Publisher: Ace
Published: 1987-06-01T05:00:00+00:00

It took longer than it should have to sort out the story. Wolruf had never had to talk about her home and life to someone who did not know the thousand and one things that a person living within a culture knows without thinking. Again and again, Derec had to ask her to go back and fill in some clarifying detail.

Beyond that, there were language problems, as some of what Wolruf was trying to convey ran up against the limits of her Standard vocabulary. At other times she seemed to be talking around some fact or idea that she did not feel comfortable disclosing.

Piecing together what he heard and filling in a few of the blanks on his own, Derec gained a reasonably coherent answer to his question. Despite Wolruf’s boast of two hundred inhabited worlds, the crew of the ship was from a single solar system. Aranimas’s kind—the Erani—and the Narwe lived on the second planet, Mrassdf, which by Wolruf’s description was a hot, windswept, unpleasant world. Wolruf’s kind—the name was just as unpronounceable as Wolruf’s own—and the elusive star-creatures were from the temperate fourth planet.

The relationship between the Narwe and the Erani was like that between sheep and their shepherds, except that the Narwe were more intelligent and physically adept than sheep. But the comparison was still apt. The Narwe vastly outnumbered the Erani, but the Erani—aggressive, inventive, acquisitive—were completely dominant.

The relationship between the two worlds was rather more complex, and Derec did not completely understand it. Neither planet seemed to have a unified government. That might have been the only thing that kept them from going to war, for there clearly was a basic antipathy between them. Despite that, there was active commerce between the worlds. At the center of it were trading companies operated by several factions of Erani and goods produced by several families of Wolruf’s people.

Wolruf would not talk much about Aranimas in particular, but he seemed to be a younger member of one of the more powerful Erani factions. Derec gleaned that somehow Wolruf’s family had run afoul of Aranimas’s trading company.

“My service on this mission lifts the dhierggra from my family,” she explained.

The dhierggra, Derec determined after much questioning, was equivalent to a blacklist—while it was in effect, no Erani would deal with the family. That made Wolruf, in essence, an indentured servant—a slave, working off her family’s debt.

“Why were you chosen?”

“I am youngest, least valuable to my family.”

Derec did not want to rush to judge an entire culture on one story from one member, but he found himself getting angry over the injustice. “Is that why Aranimas treats you the way he does? Is that part of the deal, that he gets to push you around?”

“That iss the Erani way. They treat everyone so.”

“Not each other,” Derec said. “That’s what makes it wrong.”

It was then that Derec realized that somewhere in the course of the conversation, something unexpected had happened. He had drawn Wolruf out selfishly, calculating. It was just another angle to exploit.

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