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. Let me introduce myself. I'm not a trader; I'm an anthropologist they are allowing to travel with them. My name is Doctor Margaret Mader."
Thorby ducked his head and pressed his palms together. "I am honored. My name is Thorby, son of Baslim."
"The pleasure is mine, Thorby. Call me 'Margaret.' My title doesn't count here anyhow, since it is not a ship's title. Do you know what an anthropologist is?"
"Uh, I am sorry, ma'am -- Margaret."
"It's simpler than it sounds. An anthropologist is a scientist who studies how people live together."
Thorby looked doubtful. "This is a science?"
"Sometimes I wonder. Actually, Thorby, it is a complicated study, because the patterns that men work out to live together seem unlimited. There are only six things that all men have in common with all other men and not with animals -- three of them part of our physical makeup, the way our bodies work, and three of them are learned. Everything else that a man does, or believes, all his customs and economic practices, vary enormously. Anthropologists study those variables. Do you understand variable'?"
"Uh," Thorby said doubtfully, "the x in an equation?"
"Correct!" she agreed with delight. "We study the x's in the human equations. That's what I'm doing. I'm studying the way the Free Traders live. They have worked out possibly the oddest solutions to the difficult problem of how to be human and survive of any society in history
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