Colonization: Aftershocks

by Harry Turtledove

  “High time you admit as much, too, instead of trying to act like a photocopy of a member of the Race,” he said, but warily—she’d already proved she could hold her own in a war of wits.

  “Civilization does not depend on shape or appearance,” she said now. “Civilization depends on culture. You certainly prove that.”

  “I thank you,” he said, before realizing she didn’t mean it as a compliment. A couple of males at the table with him were quicker on the uptake. Their laughter told Tessrek he’d made a fool of himself. He sprang to his feet and angrily skittered away. Kassquit ran her hand over her now fuzzy scalp. It itched a little. So did her underarms and private parts. Even so, she thought she might learn to enjoy having hair.

  When Jonathan Yeager’s father got off the telephone, he was laughing fit to burst. “What’s funny, Dad?” Jonathan asked.

  “We’ve got ourselves something brand new, that’s what,” his father answered. “We’re going to accept a couple of Lizards—and I do mean a couple, in every sense of the word—who aren’t just political refugees. They’re sexual refugees, too. Sexual outlaws, you might even say.”

  “Outlaws?” That intrigued Jonathan, as his dad must have known it would. “Why? What have they done?” He tried to imagine what sort of sex crime a Lizard—no, two Lizards—could commit. Imagination, unfortunately, failed him.

  Grinning, Sam Yeager said, “They’ve fallen in love, and they want to get married. And so the Lizards are throwing them right out of their territory and letting us worry about ’em. They’d tar ’em and feather ’em and ride ’em out of town on a rail, too, except they think feathers are just about as strange and unnatural as falling in love.”

  Jonathan didn’t think falling in love was unnatural. He enjoyed it. But it hadn’t occurred to him that Lizards might do the same. “How on earth did that happen?” he asked. Before his father could answer, he held up a hand. “It’s got something to do with ginger, doesn’t it? It would have to.”

  “Sure enough.” His father nodded. “The female Lizard and her male friend would mate whenever she tasted ginger, and she tasted a lot. After a while—from what I heard over the phone just now, they were best friends before she got the habit—they decided they wanted to stay together all the time. And boy, did they get in trouble when they told their local mayor or whomever it was they told what they wanted.”

  “I bet they would,” Jonathan exclaimed. He tried to look at things from the point of view of a Lizard official. Having done so, he whistled softly. “It’s a wonder they didn’t lock ’em in jail and throw away the key.”

  “Truth,” his father said in the language of the Race, and added an emphatic cough. “Maybe they figured this pair would be a bad influence even in jail. I don’t know anything about that. What I do know is, the Race let ’em ask for asylum here in the United States, and we’ve granted it. They expect to settle in California, as a matter of fact.”

  “We’ve probably got the biggest expatriate community in the country—either Los Angeles or Phoenix,” Jonathan said.

  His father laughed again. “Not a whole lot of them move to Boston or Minneapolis,” he agreed. “They don’t much fancy the weather in places like those. I grew up not all that far from Minneapolis. I don’t much fancy the weather there, either.”

  Having lived most of his life in Los Angeles, Jonathan had trouble imagining the sort of weather Minneapolis got. He didn’t waste his time trying. Instead, he asked, “May I tell Karen about this? She’ll think it’s funny, too.”

  “Sure, go ahead,” his dad answered. He walked across the kitchen and set a hand on Jonathan’s shoulder. “And thanks for asking before you talked with her, too. This one isn’t classified, but it could’ve been.”

  “I know better than to run my mouth, Dad,” Jonathan said righteously. After a moment, though, he admitted, “I did tell her about what you’d found out—but only after those goons grabbed you. Looking back, I don’t suppose I was doing her any big favor.”

  “No, I don’t think you were, either,” his father said. “But you were trying to make sure people didn’t get away with what they’d done to the Race. And, incidentally, you were trying to save my neck, so I guess I’ll forgive you.”

  “Okay.” Jonathan walked over to the phone. “I’m going to call her now, if that’s okay with you. The people she works with’ll think that’s funny, too.”

  Because of his time up on the space station, he still had a couple of quarters left at UCLA. After Karen graduated, she’d landed a job at a firm that adapted Lizard technology to human uses. Jonathan dialed her work number. When she answered, she didn’t go, Borogove Engineering—Karen Culpepper speaking, the way she had the day before. What she did say was, “Hello, Jonathan. How are you today?”

  “I’m fine,” he answered automatically. Then he blinked. “How’d you know it was me? I didn’t say anything.”

  “We’ve just got a new gadget—we’re sublicensing it from a company up in Canada,” she answered. “It reads phone numbers for calls you get and displays them on a screen.”

  “That’s hot,” Jonathan said. “Somebody had a real good idea there. Anyway, the reason I called . . .” He repeated the story he’d heard from his father.

  When he finished, Karen gurgled laughter. “Oh, I do like that,” she said. “That’s funny, Jonathan. I wonder what the Race will think of us from now on. The United States of America, the place where they can dump their perverts.”

  “Yeah.” Jonathan laughed, too, but not for long. “You know, that might not be so good. If they start looking at us that way, it’s liable to make them start looking down their snouts at us, too.”

  “Maybe you ought to say something about that to your dad,” Karen said.

  “I think I will,” he answered. “You still want to go to Helen Yu’s for dinner tonight?”

  “Sure,” Karen said. “It’s Friday, so we can do something afterwards, too—we don’t have to get up in the morning. Come get me around half past six, okay? That’ll let me hop in the shower after I get home.”

  “Okay. See you at six-thirty. ‘Bye.” He hung up and turned to his father. “Dad . . .”

  “I know what you’re going to want from me.” Sam Yeager pulled his wallet out of his hip pocket. “Twenty bucks do the job?”

  “Thanks. That’d be great.” Jonathan took the bill and stuck it in his own pocket. “But that wasn’t the only thing I had in mind.”

  His father laughed at him. “That’s a line you’re supposed to use with Karen, not with me.” Jonathan’s ears burned. Sometimes his dad could be very crude. Sam Yeager went on, “I’ll bite. What’s so important besides money?”

  “Something Karen said,” Jonathan answered, and explained her reaction to what the Race might think about America sheltering the two Lizards who wanted to get married.

  “That is interesting,” his father said. “But we’re a free country, and we keep getting freer a little bit at a time. If we can start giving our own Negroes a fair shake, I expect we’ll be able to find room for a few Lizards who do strange things. The Race already thinks we’re too free for our own good.”

  “All right,“ Jonathan said. “If you’re not going to worry about it, I won’t, either.”

  “I expect you’ve got other things on your mind right now, anyway,” his dad said. Jonathan did his best to look innocent. His father laughed some more, so his best probably wasn’t very good.

  He pulled up in front of Karen’s house at six-thirty on the dot. Since they were engaged, he could even give her a quick kiss in front of her parents. When they got to Helen Yu’s, on Rosecrans near Western, only a couple of spaces in the lot were empty. Jonathan grabbed one. Yu’s was one of the oldest and most popular Chinese restaurants in Gardena—actually, just outside the city limits.

  They ate egg-flower soup and sweet-and-sour pork ribs and chow mein and crunchy noodles and drank tea, something neither of them did outside a Chinese restaurant. After a while,
Karen said, “I wonder what Liu Mei would think of the food here.”

  “She’d probably say it was good,” Jonathan replied. “I don’t know how Chinese she’d think it was.” That question had occurred to him before. He’d sensibly kept his mouth shut about it. When Liu Mei visited the States with her mother, he’d had something of a crush on her. Karen had known it, too, and hadn’t been very happy about it. But now that she’d asked the question, he could safely answer it.

  After fortune cookies and almond cookies, Jonathan paid for dinner. They went out to the car. His arm slipped around Karen’s waist. She leaned against him. “What time is it?” she asked.

  Jonathan looked at his watch. “A little past eight,” he answered. “Next show at the drive-in starts at 8:45. We can do that, if you feel like it.”

  “Sure,” Karen said, so Jonathan drove east on Rosecrans to Vermont and then south past Artesia to the drive-in. It wasn’t very crowded. The movie—a thriller about the ginger trade set in Marseille before it had gone up in radioactive fire—had been there for a couple of weeks, and would be closing soon. Jonathan didn’t mind. He found a spot well away from most of the other cars, under a light pole with a dead lamp.

  Karen snickered. “How much of the movie are we going to watch?” she asked.

  “I don’t know,” he answered. “We’ll find out. Shall I go get some Cokes?”

  “Sure,” she said. “Don’t bother with candy or popcorn, though—not for me, anyway. I’m pretty full.”

  “Okay. Me, too. Be right back.” Jonathan got out of the car and went over to the concession stand. When he returned to the car with the sodas, he found Karen sitting in the back seat. His hopes rose. They probably wouldn’t see a whole lot of the film. He slid in beside her. “Here.” He handed her one of the Cokes. “We’d better be careful not to spill these later.”

  She looked at him. “I don’t know what you’re talking about,” she said, which made both of them laugh so hard, they almost spilled the Cokes then.

  They did pay some attention to the first few minutes of the movie, but even then they were paying a lot more attention to each other. Jonathan put his arm around Karen. She snuggled against him. He never did figure out which of them started the first kiss. Whichever one it was, the kiss went on and on. Karen put a hand on the back of his neck to pull him to her.

  He rubbed her breasts through the fabric of her blouse. She made a noise deep in her throat—almost a growl. Thus encouraged, he undid two buttons of the blouse and reached inside the cup of her bra. Her flesh was soft and smooth and warm.

  Before very long, her blouse and bra were off. Now that they were en-gaged, there didn’t seem to be much point to the stop-and-start games they’d played while they were dating. She rubbed him, too, through his chinos. He hoped he wouldn’t explode.

  He slid his hand under her skirt to the joining of her legs. “Oh, God, Jonathan,” she whispered as he stroked her.

  “I’ve got a rubber in my wallet,” he said. She hesitated. They still hadn’t gone all the way. But then she lay back on the seat. Jonathan tried to get her panties off, get his trousers down far enough, and put on the rubber, all at the same time. At last, he managed all three. “I love you,” he gasped as he clumsily poised himself over her.

  The rubber helped. Without it, he was sure he would have come as soon as he started. As he had with Kassquit, he discovered this was Karen’s first time. Since it wasn’t his, he had a better notion of what to do than he’d had up in the starship. Karen still winced when he pierced her.

  Even with the rubber, he didn’t last long. After gasping his way to delight, he asked, “Are you okay? Was it okay?”

  “It hurt,” she answered. “I know it’s supposed to get better. Right now, I like your hand and your mouth more. Is that all right?” She sounded anxious.

  “I guess so,” Jonathan answered. He liked her hand and especially her mouth at least as well, too. But this had a finality to it that nothing else could match. He kissed her. “I love you.”

  “I love you, too,” Karen said. “Give me my top back, will you?” Inside a couple of minutes, they were fully dressed again—just in time for the big car chase. Jonathan couldn’t think of a movie he’d enjoyed more.

  Ttomalss wondered whether all the time he’d spent raising Kassquit had been for nothing. Every time he looked at her, his liver twinged inside him.

  Her hair grew longer every day, making her resemble a wild Big Ugly more and more. Her spirit seemed more like a wild Big Ugly’s every day, too.

  In something close to despair, he railed at her: “Will you also wash off your body paint and put on wrappings?”

  “No, I see no need for that,” Kassquit answered with maddening calm. “But if I am a Tosevite citizen of the Empire, should I not follow Tosevite usages where they do no harm? I do not think a head of hair is very harmful.”

  “In any direct sense, probably not,” Ttomalss admitted. “But your grow-ing it seems a slap in the snout at the Race, which has spent so much effort to nurture you and to acculturate you.”

  “You have made me a creature, a tool, a thing to be used,” Kassquit said. “It has taken me a long time, probably too long, to realize I can be more than that. If I am a citizen of the Empire, I should have as much freedom as any other citizen. If I choose to be eccentric, I may.” She ran a hand over her dark, hairy scalp.

  “If you choose to make yourself ugly, you mean,” Ttomalss said.

  But Kassquit made the negative gesture. “For Tosevites, and especially for Tosevite females, hair seems to contribute to attractiveness. I should prefer to be judged by the standards of my own biological species there. I have had enough of being thought a repulsively ugly imitation of a female of the Race. Believe me, superior sir, I have had more than enough of that.” She used an emphatic cough.

  Ttomalss flinched. He knew some of the things Tessrek and other males had said while he was rearing Kassquit. He’d never really thought about the effect that hearing such things might have on a young individual isolated from everyone around her because of her appearance and biology. There were probably a lot of things he’d never thought about while rearing Kassquit. Some of them were coming up out of the shadows to bite him now.

  Slowly, he said, “Punishing me for errors I made in the past serves no useful purpose I can see.”

  “I am not punishing you. That is not my intention at all,” Kassquit said. “I am, however, asserting my own individuality. Any citizen of the Empire may do as much.”

  “That is a truth,” Ttomalss said. “Another truth, however, is that most citizens of the Empire suppress a good deal of their individuality, the better to fit into the society of which they are but small parts.”

  Kassquit ran a hand over her hair again, and then along her smooth, scaleless, upright body. Even as she bent into the posture of respect, she spoke with poisonous politeness: “Exactly how, superior sir, am I supposed to suppress my individuality? You cannot change me into a female of the Race. You do not know how many times I have wished you could. Since I cannot be a female of the Race, how can I do better than to be the best Tosevite female I can possibly be?”

  Her argument was painfully cogent. But Ttomalss had an argument of his own: “You are not culturally prepared to be a Tosevite female.”

  “Of course I am not,” Kassquit said. “You were the one who told me I was the first Tosevite citizen of the Empire. Do you now disavow those words because I have learned to see that I am truly a Tosevite and cannot imitate the Race in every imaginable way?”

  “At the moment, you seem to be doing your best not to imitate the Race in any imaginable way.” Ttomalss didn’t try to hide his bitterness.

  “I have spent my whole life imitating the Race,” Kassquit said. “Am I not entitled to spend some little while discovering what the biological part of my individuality means, and how I can best adjust to its demands?”

  “Of course you are,” Ttomalss answered, wishing he could
say no. “But I do wish you would not throw yourself into this voyage of discovery with such painful intensity. It will do you no good.”

  “No doubt you were the proper judge of such things when I was a hatchling,” Kassquit said. “Now that I am an adult, however, I will plot my course as I think best, not in accordance with anyone else’s views.”

  “Even if that course proves a disastrous mistake?” Ttomalss asked.

  Kassquit made the affirmative gesture. “Even if that course proves a di-sastrous mistake. You, of course, superior sir, have never made a single mistake in all the days since you broke out of your eggshell.”

  At the moment, Ttomalss was thinking the most disastrous mistake he’d ever made was deciding to rear a Tosevite hatchling. He’d thought that before, when the terrifying Chinese female named Liu Han kidnapped him as vengeance for his trying to raise her hatchling as he’d succeeded in raising Kassquit. But even his success here was proving full of thorns he’d never expected.

  “Every male, every female makes mistakes,” he said. “Wise ones, however, do not make unnecessary mistakes.”

  “Which are which is for me to judge, superior sir,” Kassquit said. “And now, if you will excuse me . . .” She didn’t wait to find out if he would excuse her. She just turned and strode out of his chamber. Had the door been the type common on Tosev 3, she would have slammed it. As things were, she could only leave in a huff.

  With a sigh, Ttomalss got down to the rest of his work, to everything that had accumulated while he was down in Cairo working with the other members of the commission on Earl Warren. He studied a report of Tosevite attendance at shrines dedicated to the spirits of Emperors past. Since establishing those shrines had been his idea, reports naturally came to him.

  He would have liked to see the numbers larger than they were. Few Big Uglies in the regions where their native superstitions were particularly powerful sought to modify those superstitions. That was unfortunate, because those were the areas where Ttomalss had most hoped to change Tosevite behavior and beliefs.