Free Vietnam and Other Alien Worlds by Joe Haldeman

walls that normally protected farmland.)
    â€”These mechanical workers would not be good to eat? For the animals?
    â€”No, and they would be very hard for the animals even to damage.
    There was a lot of whispered conversation. Uncle conferred with the !tang at the front of each row, then returned.
    â€”I die. Before I die my body turns hair-side-in. People come from everywhere to see the insides of themselves. But the sight makes them lose the will, and all die. O the embarrassment. The rum is welcome, but we cannot accept the mechanical workers. When the beast eats someone he sleeps, and can be killed, and eaten in turn. If he does not eat he will search, and in searching destroy crops. This we know to be true.
    â€”Then allow me to triple the quantities of gin, bourbon, and brandy. I will add two tonnes each of vermouth and hydrochloric acid, for flavoring. (That came to about H710.)
    â€”This is gratefully accepted. Does your tribe, Lafitte, care to include these as a subset of your final offer?
    â€”Final offer, Uncle?
    â€”Two legs, two arms, two eyes, two mouths, two offers.
    â€”I die, Lafitte said. —Where they bury me, the ground caves in. It swallows up the city and all die, O the embarrassment. Look, Uncle, that’s the market law for material objects. You can’t move land around; its ownership is an abstraction.
    Uncle exposed one arm—the Council tittered—and reached down and thumped the floor twice. —The land is solid, therefore material. You can move it around with your machines; I myself saw you do this in my youth, when the spaceport was built. The market law applies.
    Lafitte smiled slowly. —Then the Navarro’s tribe can no longer bid. He’s had two.
    Uncle turned to the Council and gestured toward Rabbit, and said,—Is he standing on feet? And they cracked and snuffled at the joke. To Lafitte, he said,—The Navarro’s offer was rejected, and he made a substitution. Yours was not rejected. Do you care to make his amended offer a subset of yours?
    â€”If mine is rejected, can I amend it?
    This brought an even louder reaction. —Poor one, Uncle said. —No feet, no hands. That would be a third offer. You must see that.
    â€”All right. Lafitte began pacing. He said he would start with my amended offer and add the following things. The list was very long. It started with a hydroelectric generator and proceeded with objects of less and less value until he got down to individual bottles of exotic liqueurs. By then I realized he was giving me a message: he was coming down as closely as he could to exactly a thousand shares of Hartford. So we both had the same limit. When he finished he looked right at me and raised his eyebrows.
    Victory is sweet. If the Rabbit had bothered to spend a day or two in the marketplace, watching transactions, he wouldn’t have tried to defeat me by arithmetic; he wouldn’t have tried by accretion to force me into partnership.
    Uncle looked at me and bared his arms for a split second. —Your tribe, Navarro? Would you include this offer as a subset of your final offer?
    What Rabbit apparently didn’t know was that this bargaining by pairs of offers was a formalism: if I did simply add to his last offer, the haggling would start over again, with each of us allowed another pair. And so on and on. I unlocked my briefcase and took out two documents.
    â€”No. I merely wish to add two inducements to my own previous offer (sounds of approval and expectation).
    Lafitte stared, his expression unreadable.
    â€”These contracts are in Spanish. Can you read them, Uncle?
    â€”No, but there are two of us who can.
    â€”I know how you like to travel. (I handed him one of the documents.)—This allows each of five hundred !tang a week’s vacation on the planet of its choice, any planet where Starlodge has facilities.
    â€œWhat?” Lafitte said, in English. “How the hell can you do