... type^2.1

Ha! says rgb.

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...crenali^3.1

Smaller but vicious raptors of some sort, possibly deinonychus

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... Shark^3.2

A shark was generically referred to as a sharedha in Ushtian, but I'm going to just call at a shark in the story because The Grinning Sharedha doesn't have the same ring to it in English.

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...maloon^3.3

Forty-three days, the period of revolution about the Gas Giant (and also just called a ``big moon'') as noted. A ``little moon'' or minaan, the period of revolution of the small moon of Mirath, was five days. They work out to be pretty close to a month vs a week, except that the month is the seasonal year, and there is a non-seasonal streyaan (year) associated with a full revolution around the local sun, Streya. Sam explains this all later, but it doesn't hurt to know it now. rgb

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...mala^3.4

plesiosaur

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... ate^5.1

Chorus: Anything it wanted!

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... origin^8.1

The cultures of Mirath turned out to be a melange of customs imported by world-walkers from many regions and eras of Earth and all its shadows, as well as several other ``human'' worlds. And then there were the (relatively rare) aliens -- but that is getting really ahead of the story.

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... change)^8.2

To those who want to know things like exchange rates, and the monetary basis of the economy, one gold piece on Mirath weighed around five grams (the weight of a nickel). It was considerably smaller, about the size of a thin dime and, surprisingly, an ``official'' gold piece was generally banded in copper to prevent the edges from being filed or nicked. Gold was scarce and a gold piece was ``worth'', I estimate, roughly $1000 US 1990 dollars in local purchasing power, so fifty gold pieces was a considerable fortune. Brin was paying me the equivalent of several million dollars to collect the equivalent of ten million from the princess. Needless to say I was skeptical of surviving the job.

Silver was much more common in the local mines, and coins came in two sizes: a twenty five gram coin and a five gram coin. The former was worth around a hundred dollars, the latter around twenty, but this is really approximate as some things were much cheaper than they are in a modern society and some things more expensive. Silver coins, too, were banded in copper by the prince's guild of coinsmiths.

Finally, there were coppers in a variety of sizes worth roughly a quarter to a few dollars. Coppers were easily counterfeited, but no one cared since the cost of raw copper determined the worth of the coins.

The gold and silver were harder to counterfeit and worth a bit more than the base metal plus the cost of manufacturing (the difference going to the prince, of course). Just as naturally, Brin had a monopoly on the counterfeiting operations of Sind-a-Lay and apparently turned out better coinage than the prince!

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... technology^8.3

He really used a pair of terms that literally meant ``tool work'', since Ushti didn't even have a word for real technology

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...crenali^8.4

Deinonychus, recall, which are these nifty pack hunting raptor dinosaurs with oversize sickle-shaped toe claws for disembowelling prey. They were one thing that made the Endless Plain essentially uninhabitable for humans and damn dangerous to visit or traverse even in an armed and armored group.

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...slithorni^9.1

Snakes. Highly venomous snakes in many cases, really big ones in others.

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... coffee^14.1

Yes, Hassan had coffee, the bastard. It wasn't native to Mirath - it appeared to be a private stash imported from whatever plane he came from. It wasn't ordinarily for sale, and it wasn't for guards, although he did deign to sell me some back when I was one of the richest men on the planet living in Sind-a-Lay.

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