Rockabye, Grady

by DAVID MASON
Illustrated by TEMPLE
When on Pru'ut, you must do as the natives do—and that includes dying as they do!
On the charts, it's P-1345-AZ, and a thin blue line marked with cryptic letters indicates that a Mallor Lines cargo ship stops three times in each local year. The Guide will tell you a little more; that it's a small hot planet, covered with fern forests and swamps, and inhabited by one of the innumerable primate-human species of the universe. It was also inhabited, for a while, by one Terran, James Grady.
The natives call it Pru'ut, which, freely translated, means the world. They refer to themselves as Kya, which means people. James Grady, being a realist, called it the Mudhole, and added a descriptive adjective or two; but he did not find it nearly as unpleasant a place as a few others in which he had been in the course of forty years of wandering.
Pru'ut has no inclination, and only one season, which is rather like a rainy August on Earth. When Grady arrived, he stepped from the landing stage of the Mallor Lines' Berenice into six inches of gluey mud; the sun was seldom out long enough to harden the surface of Pru'ut.
It's not an easy place, the departing agent, Jansen, told Grady. Rain, and heat, and getting along with the locals.
Anything the matter with 'em? Grady asked. He was watching the tall, yellow-pale shapes of natives loading bales into the Berenice's cargo slings.
Nothing much, Jansen said. Sane as any primitives. All kinds of complicated rules and taboos, and naturally they'll get as mad as hell at you if you scratch a single rule. Most of the data on that is in the agent's notebooks. You add anything to the record that seems to be worth putting down, the way the rest of us have.
And if they get mad at you, they stop packing plants, the Berenice's mate put in. Which will make the Mallor Company mad at you, too. This place is a regular bargain basement for drug materials. At least eight different drug plants, all of them worth as much as uranium. More, in some ways.