XVI P.R.S. ASTARTE
OSCAB WAS SUMMONED again the next day into the presence of the city's chief magistrate and started laying the foundation, in a leisurely, indirect fashion, for formal diplomatic relations in the future. He began by getting her story of the trouble with the Gary and its skipper. It was much as Burke had admitted it to be, although from a different viewpoint.
Oscar had inquired casually as to why the swamp Burke wanted was tabu. He was worried that he might be invading religious matters but he felt that he needed to know it was a dead certainty that others would be along, in due course, to attempt to exploit the trans-uranic" ores; if the Patrol was to prevent further breaches of the peace the matter must be investigated.
The matriarch answered without hesitation; the swamp was tabu because the ore muds were poisonous.
Oscar felt the relief of a man who has just been told that it will not be necessary to lose a leg, after all. The ores were understandably poisonous; it was a matter that the Patrol could undoubtedly negotiate-conditional or practical tabus had been overcome many times with natives. He tabled the matter, as something to be taken up at a later time by the appropriate experts.
In a later interview he sounded her out on the. subject of the Patrol. She had heard of it, in a fashion, apparently - she used the native word given by the polar-region natives to all colonial government, a word meaning "guardians of the customs" or "keepers of the law."
The native meaning was quite useful to Oscar, for he found it impossible to get over to her the idea that the , Patrol was intended to prevent war-"war" was a concept she had never heard of!
But her conservative mind was naturally prejudiced in favor of any organization tagged as "guardians of the customs." Oscar approached it from that viewpoint. He explained to her that more of his own kind would be arriving; therefore the "great mother of many" of his own people had sent them as messengers to propose that a "mother" from Oscar's people be sent to aid her in avoiding friction.
She was receptive to the idea as it fitted her own experience and concepts. The groups of natives near the polar colonies were in the habit of handling their foreign affairs by exchanging "mothers"-actually judges-who ruled on matters arising out of differences in custom; Oscar had! presented the matter in the same terms. ^
He had thus laid the groundwork for a consulate, extraterritorial courts, and an Earthman police force; the mission, as he saw it, was complete- provided he could get back to base and report before other prospectors, mining engineers, and boomers of all sorts started showing up.