This was the same procedure they had always followed in new ring systems, and it had worked well before. Finally he replied, "Certainly, there are differences, mainly that we have very little to trade for the repairs and no previous commercial contacts. If we don't use hard business sense we'll get nothing here!" He checked the various sensors strung across his Skrode, then spoke to the humans. "Do you want me to move any of the cameras? Do they all have a clear view?" Saint Rihndell was a miser when it came to renting bandwidth — or maybe it was simply cautious.
Pham Nuwen's voice came back. "No. They're okay. Can you hear me?" He was speaking through a microphone inside their skrodes. The link itself was encrypted.
"Yes."
The Skroderiders passed through OOB's locks into Saint Rihndell's arc habitat.
From within, transparency arched around them, lines of natural windows that dwindled into the distance. They looked out upon Saint Rihndell's current customers and the ring fluff beyond. The sun was dimmed in the view, but there was a haze of brightness, a super corona. That was a power-sat swarm, no doubt; ring systems did not naturally make good use of the central fire. For a moment the Riders stopped in their tracks, taken by the image of a sea greater than any sea: The light might have been sunset through shallow surf. And to them, the drifting of thousands of nearby particles looked like food in a slow tidal surge.
The concourse was crowded. The creatures here had ordinary enough body plans, though none were of species Greenstalk recognized for certain. The tusk-leg type that ran Saint Rihndell's was most numerous. After a moment, one such drifted out from the wall near the OOB's lock. It buzzed something that came out as Triskweline: "For trading, we go this way." Its ivory legs moved agilely across netting into an open car. The Skroderiders settled behind and they accelerated along the arc. Blueshell waggled at Greenstalk, "The old story, eh; what good are their legs now?" It was the oldest Rider humor, but it was always worth a laugh: Two legs or four legs — evolved from flippers or jaws or whatever — were all very good for movement on land. But in space, it scarcely mattered.
The car was making about one hundred meters per second, swaying slightly whenever they passed from one ring segment to the next. Blueshell kept up a steady patter of conversation with their guide, the sort of pitch that Greenstalk knew was one of his great joys in life. "Where are we going? What are those creatures there? What sort of things are they in search of at Saint Rihndell's?" All jovial, and almost humanly brisk. Where short-term memory was failing him, he depended on his skrode.
Tusk-legs spoke only reduced-grammar Triskweline and didn't seem to understand some of the questions: "We go to the Master Seller… helper creatures those are… allies of big new customer…" Their guide's limited speech bothered dear Blueshell not at all; he was collecting responses more than answers. Most races had interests that were obscure to the likes of Blueshell and Greenstalk. No doubt there were billions of creatures in Harmonious Repose who were totally inscrutable to Riders or Humans or Dirokimes. Yet simple dialog often gave insight on the two most important questions: What do you have that might be useful to me, and how can I persuade you to part with it? Dear Blueshell's questions were sounding out the other, trying to find the parameters of personality and interest and ability.
It was a team game the two Skroderiders played. While Blueshell chattered, Greenstalk watched everything around them, running her skrode's recorders on all bands, trying to place this environment in the context of others they had known. Technology: What would these people need? What could work? In space this flat, there would be little use for agrav fabric. And this low in the Beyond, a lot of the most sophisticated imports from above would spoil almost immediately. Workers outside the long windows wore articulated pressure suits — the force-field suits of the High Beyond would last only a few weeks down here.
They passed trees(?) that twisted and twisted. Some of the trunks circled the wall of the arc; others trailed along their path for hundreds of meters. Tusk-leg gardeners floated everywhere about the plants, yet there was no evidence of agriculture. All this was ornament. In the ring plane beyond the windows there were occasional towers, structures that sprouted a thousand kilometers above the plane and cast the pointy shadows they had seen on their final approach to the system. Ravna's voice and Pham's buzzed against her stalk, softly asking Greenstalk about the towers, speculating on their purpose. She stored their theories for later consideration… but she doubted them; some would only work in the High Beyond, and others would be clumsy given this civilization's other accomplishments.
