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Trading Places
At about three hours past noon one summer day (local time, local season), we accidentally destroyed the Auds' begdim. When I say “we,” I don't mean my sister Marzi and I. I mean “we” like Terrans means we. And when I say “accidentally,” I mean like we didn't even know it was there. You can't see a begdim. Well, you can, but it doesn't look different from any other piece of land on Audor. An Aud has to tell you it's there, so we just didn't know. They didn't tell us. There is a lot of things the Auds didn't tell us. #
I felt sorry for the Auds. Here they are one day, thinking their begdim is. . . well, just that it is. The next day, there's a prefabricated Terran building sitting in the middle of it. After all, begdims are maybe the most important place to Auds, after their towns. Begdims are their trading places. "The Auds think we're offering to trade the Interstellar Communications Center! Well, we did leave it in their begdim, after all. That's what the Auds do when they want to trade something away -- leave it in the begdim," my older sister Marzi told me, laughing and almost wringing her hands with glee. She liked that the colony leaders had gotten themselves into trouble with the Auds; Marzi always cheered for the aliens, even in the three-dees where the aliens were bug-eyed villains. Maybe she had to. She was in her preliminary courses to become an anthropologist. She was supposed to know all about the local aliens, the Auds. She certainly sounded as if she knew all about them, but that was just the way Marzi was about everything. I guess she was right this time, because the Auds brought us herds of their shaggy livestock and carts heaped high with very best embroidered cloth. We didn't take any of it, of course. We couldn't give them the I-Comm Center, not even if they offered us every shaggy gepple and every bolt of tu-cloth on the planet! This upset the Auds a lot. Seven citizens from the Lalish, the nearest town, protested at the colony gate. They weren't especially threatening-looking. Auds tend to be tall but slender, and look very human except for their wedge-shaped faces and the black stubble of hair that grows down the center of their skull and around their shoulders. Our anthropologists went out and talked to them as best they could. Because she couldn't go, Marzi sulked and watched them from the balcony. "Look at them, Sis! They can scarcely talk to the Auds," Marzi said in disgust. "Every Aud town has its own language, as different from each other as English is from Chinese. Terrans have been on Audor for fifteen years, and they still barely know even the Lalishi language." Marzi didn't really think of herself of as Terran, and neither did I. After all, unlike our parents, we were both born on Audor and had never seen Old Earth. We felt a little like aliens ourselves. "What do you suppose they're doing, then?" I asked. "They're apologizing, or trying to, anyway." Either Marzi could read lips or she just knew what the anthropologists should be saying, because she was taking courses. "They're telling the Auds that no, we can't take down the I-Comm Center. They're asking if the Auds can't find somewhere else for their begdim." Whether or not Marzi was right about what the anthropologists were saying, the Auds from Lalish did exactly that: picked another begdim. Auds are independent folk. They don't even deal with Auds from other towns very often and don't even know each others' languages. The only word shared by all the Aud languages (according to Marzi) is begdim, "trading place." Every town is self-sufficient; they rely on no one else for whatever they need to eat or to shelter themselves. They're proud of that, too. I think they look down on us Terrans because starships bring us things that we can't make for ourselves just yet. But it's not that the Auds never have contact with outsiders. Each town takes care of its own citizens' needs. The begdim takes care of their wants. Even though we'd just ruined their begdim, the Lalishi invited us Terrans to the begdim ul. This is the ceremony that turns an ordinary piece of land into a begdim, so everyone will know where it is. And that included us. Now the Auds hoped we wouldn't go putting a landing strip or a fission plant on it. Not that we'd want to do anything with this piece of land anyway: it was a forested gully with a creek that flooded every spring. Not the ideal begdim, maybe, but it sure was out of our way. Marzi made sure that I -- that anyone who could hear her -- realized this. "See how considerate the Auds are? They don't want us to embarrass ourselves again." The anthropologists and everyone else agreed with her. Maybe they didn't want to argue, or maybe they'd known this all along and just hadn't ever seen a reason to say it aloud. Marzi never needed a reason to say anything. read the rest of the story in Bruce Coville's Strange Worlds (Avon, 2000)
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 Science fiction short story Bruce Coville's Strange Worlds edited by Bruce Coville Avon/Camelot 2000 Amazon (out of print) other excerpts: Ankhtifi the Brave is dying. Callum's Feast The Chapter of Bringing a Boat into Heaven The Chapter of Coming forth by Night The Chapter of the Hawk of Gold The Dovecote The Execration Horizon The Rope Shadow of the Pyramid |
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