way!" the boy yelled.

"Uwaka! Ubaka!" Damning both parents of the rude one, another youngster trotted up to Aaron's wagon and raised a skinny brown fist in greeting. "Sir Off-Worlder, I who am named Waziri, Musa-the-Carpenter's son, would be honored to direct you to the house of Sarki Kazunzumi."

"The honor, young man, is mine," Stoltzfoos assured the lad, raising his own fist gravely. "My name is Haruna, son of Levi," he said, reaching down to hoist the boy up beside him on the wagon's seat. "Your friends have ill manners." He giddapped the horse.

"Buzzard-heads!" Waziri shouted back at his whilom companions.

"Peace, Waziri!" Aaron protested. You'll frighten my poor horse into conniptions. Do you work for your father, the carpenter?"

"To, honorable Haruna," the boy said. "Yes." The empty wagon thumped over the wheel-cut streets like a wooden drum. "By the Mother, sir, I have great knowledge of planing and joining; of all the various sorts of wood, and the curing of them; all the tools my father uses are as familiar to me as my own left hand."

"Carpentry is a skillful trade," Aaron said. "Myself, I am but a farmer."

"By Mother's light! So am I!" Waziri said, dazzled by this coincidence. "I can cultivate a field free of all its noxious weeds and touch never a food-plant. I can steer a plow straight as a snapped chalk-string, grade seed with a sure eye; I can spread manure—"

"I'm sure you can, Waziri," Aaron said. "I need a man of just those rare qualifications to work for me. Know you such a paragon?"

"Mother's name! Myself, your Honor!"

Aaron Stoltzfoos shook the hand of his hired man, an alien convention that much impressed Waziri. The boy was to draw three hundred anenes a day, some thirty-five cents, well above the local minimum-wage conventions; and he would get his bed and meals. Aaron's confidence that the boastful lad would make a farmer was bolstered by Waziri's loud calculations: "Three hundred coppers a day make, in ten day's work, a bronze cowrie; ten big bronzes make a silver cowrie, the price of an acre of land. Haruna, will you teach me your off-world farming? Will you allow me to buy land that neighbors yours?"

"Sei schtill, Buu," Aaron said, laughing. "Before you reap your first crop, you must find me the 

 Prev. P 11/30 next