Colonization: Down to Earth

by Harry Turtledove

  “It shall be done,” Kassquit said with a sigh. She did not flinch as the needle penetrated her.

  “There. That was very easy,” the physician said, swabbing the injection site with a disinfectant. “It was, in fact, easier than it would have been with a male or female of the Race. Here, your thin skin is an advantage?”

  “How nice,” Kassquit said distantly. She did not want to be different from the Race. With all her heart, she wished she could be a female like any other. She knew what such wishes were worth, but couldn’t help making them.

  Except for the one that had raised the pustule, the injection for the disease called cholera proved the most unpleasant Kassquit had endured. She enjoyed neither the pain nor the fever. They seemed to take forever to ebb. If the disease was worse than the treatment that guarded against it, it had to be very nasty indeed.

  Sam Yeager telephoned Kassquit while she was recovering from the immunization. Not feeling up to dealing with the Big Ugly, she refused the call. Before long, he sent her a message over the computer network: I hope I have done nothing to cause offense.

  That was polite enough to require a polite answer. No, she replied. It is only that I have not felt well lately.

  I am sorry to hear it, he wrote back promptly. I did not think it would be easy for you to get sick up there, away from all the germs of Tosev 3. I hope you get better soon.

  I have been free of the germs of Tosev 3, Kassquit answered. That is the cause of my present discomfort: I am being immunized against them, and some of the immunizations have unpleasant aftereffects.

  Again, Sam Yeager wrote back almost at once. He had to be sitting by his computer as Kassquit was sitting by hers. Are you getting immunized so you can meet Big Uglies in person? he asked. If you are, I hope that my hatchling and I are two of the Big Uglies you will want to meet. We certainly want to meet you. He used the conventional symbol that represented an emphatic cough.

  Despite its breezily informal syntax, Kassquit studied that message with considerable respect. Wild Big Ugly Sam Yeager might be, but he was anything but a fool. Yes, that is why I am being immunized, Kassquit told him, her artificial fingerclaws clicking on the keyboard. And yes, you and your hatchling are two of the Tosevites I am interested in meeting.

  Sam Yeager’s hatchling, Jonathan Yeager, intrigued her no end. She had never seen anyone who resembled her so closely. Living as she did among the Race, she had never imagined that anyone could resemble her so closely. He even shaved his head and wore body paint. It was as if he and she were two ends of the same bridge, reaching toward the middle to form . . . what?

  If this world has a future as part of the Empire, she thought, its future will be as whatever forms in the middle of that bridge.

  Once more, Sam Yeager wasted no time in replying. We very much look forward to it, superior female, he wrote. Shall we start setting up arrangements with the Race?

  Part of Kassquit—probably the larger part—dreaded the idea. The rest, though, the rest was intrigued. And she agreed with Ttomalss that such a meeting would bring advantage to the Race. And so, in spite of a sigh, she answered, Yes, you may do that, and I will do the same. I do not know how long the negotiations will take.

  Too long, Sam Yeager predicted.

  Kassquit laughed. You are intolerant of bureaucracy, she observed.

  I hope so, the wild Big Ugly wrote, which made Kassquit laugh again. Sam Yeager went on, Bureaucracy is like spice in food. A little makes food taste good. Because it does, too many males and females think a lot will make the food taste even better. But cooking does not improve that way, and neither does bureaucracy.

  Some regulation is necessary, Kassquit wrote. She had known nothing but regulation throughout her life.

  I said as much, Sam Yeager answered. But when does some become too much? Tosevites have been arguing that question for as long as we have been civilized. We still are. I suppose the Race is, too.

  No, not really. Kassquit keyed the characters one by one. I have never heard such a discussion among the Race. We have, for the most part, the amount of regulation that suits us.

  I do not know whether to congratulate the Race or offer my sympathy, the Tosevite responded. And as for you, you are with the Race but not of it, the way hatchlings of the Race would be if Big Uglies raised them.

  I would like to meet such hatchlings, if there were any, Kassquit wrote. I have thought about that very possibility, though I do not suppose it is likely. Even if it were, such hatchlings would still be very small.

  So they would, Sam Yeager replied. And I have another question for you—even if you did meet these hatchlings when they were grown, what language would you speak with them?

  Why, the language of the Race, of course, Kassquit wrote, but she deleted the words instead of sending them. The Big Ugly had thought of something she hadn’t. If his kind were raising hatchlings of the Race to be as much like Tosevites as possible, they would naturally teach them some Tosevite tongue. Kassquit had trouble imagining males and females of the Race who didn’t know their own language, but it made sense that such hatchlings wouldn’t. And why not? She was a Big Ugly by blood, but spoke not a word of any Tosevite tongue.

  What she did transmit was, I see that you have done a good deal of thinking on these matters. Do I understand that you have been dealing with the Race since the conquest fleet came to Tosev3?

  Yes, the Tosevite answered. In fact, I was interested in non-Tosevite intelligences even before the conquest fleet got here.

  Kassquit studied the words on the screen. Sam Yeager wrote the language of the Race well, but not as a male of the Race would have: every so often, the syntax of his own language showed through. That was what had first made her suspect he was a Big Ugly. Did his message mean what it looked to mean, or had he somehow garbled it? Kassquit decided she had to ask. How could you have known of non-Tosevite intelligences before the conquest fleet came? she wrote. Big Uglies had no space travel of their own up till that time.

  No, we had no space travel, Sam Yeager agreed. But we wrote a lot of fiction about what it might be like if Tosevites met all different kinds of intelligent creatures. I used to enjoy that kind of fiction, but I never thought it would come true till the day the Race shot up the railroad train I was riding.

  “How strange.” Kassquit spoke the words aloud, and startled herself with the sound of her own voice. The more she learned about the species of which she was genetically a part, the more alien it seemed to her. She wrote, Such things would never have occurred to the Race before spaceflight.

  So I gather Sam Yeager replied. We speculate more than the Race does, or so it seems.

  Is that good or bad? Kassquit wrote.

  Yes. The unadorned word made her stare. After a moment, in a separate message, Sam Yeager went on, Sometimes differences are not better or worse. Sometimes they are just different. The Race does things one way. Big Uglies do things a different way—or sometimes a lot of different ways, because we are more various than the Race.

  If it hadn’t been for that variability, Kassquit knew the Race would easily have conquered Tosev 3. The majority of the planet’s inhabitants, the majority of the regions of its land surface, had fallen to the conquest fleet with relatively little trouble. But the minority . . . The minority had given, and continued to give, the Race enormous difficulties.

  Before Kassquit could find a way to put any of that into words, SamYeager wrote, I have to leave now—time for my evening meal. I will be in touch by message and by telephone—if you care to talk with me—and I hope to see you in person before too long Goodbye.

  Goodbye, Kassquit answered. She got up from her seat in front of the computer, took off the artificial fingerclaws one by one, and set them in a storage drawer near the keyboard. It wasn’t time for her evening meal, or anywhere close to it. All the ships in the conquest fleet—and now in the colonization fleet, too—kept the same time, independent of where in their orbit around Tosev 3 they happened to be. I
ntellectually, Kassquit understood how time on the surface of a world was tied to its sun’s apparent position, but it had never mattered to her.

  She hoped she would hear from Sam Yeager again soon. Such hope surprised her; she remembered how frightened she’d been at first of the idea of communicating with a wild Big Ugly. But he looked at the world in a way so different from the Race, he gave her something new and different to think about in almost every message. Not even Ttomalss did that.

  And Sam Yeager, just because he was a Big Ugly, knew her and knew her reactions, or some of them, better than even Ttomalss could. In some ways, Kassquit suspected Sam Yeager knew her better than she knew herself. She made the negative hand gesture. No. He knows what I would be, were I an ordinary Big Ugly.

  But wasn’t she some of that anyhow? She shrugged helplessly. How was she supposed to know?

  Reuven Russie had thought he knew a good deal about medicine. His father was a doctor, after all; he’d had the benefit of insight and training no one starting from scratch could hope to equal. And he’d attended the Moishe Russie Medical College, learning things from the Race that human physicians wouldn’t have discovered for themselves for generations. If that didn’t prepare him for practice, what could?

  After his first few hectic weeks of working with his father, he began to wonder if anything could have prepared him for the actual work of medicine. Moishe Russie laughed when he complained about that, laughed and remarked, “The Christians say, ‘baptism by total immersion.’ That’s what you’re going through?”

  “Don’t I know it?” Reuven said. “The medicine itself isn’t all that different from what I thought it would be. The diagnostic tests work the same way, and the results are pretty clear, even if the lab you use isn’t as good as the one attached to the college.”

  “Isn’t it?” Moishe Russie’s eyebrows rose in surprise.

  “Not even close,” Reuven told him. “Of course, the technicians are only human.” He didn’t realize how disparaging that sounded till he’d already said it.

  Now his father’s laugh held a wry edge. “You’d better get used to dealing with human beings, son. We mostly do the best we can, you know.”

  “Yes, I do,” Reuven said. He glanced around his father’s office, where they were talking. It was a perfectly fine place, with palm trees swaying in the breeze just outside the window; with Moishe Russie’s diplomas, one of them in the language of the Race, in frames on the wall; with shelves full of reference books; with a gleaming microscope perched on a corner of the desk.

  And yet, to Reuven’s eyes, it was as if he’d fallen back through time a century, maybe even two. The plaster on the walls was uneven and rough. It was at home, too, but he noticed it more here because he contrasted it to the smooth walls of the Moishe Russie Medical College. The microscope seemed hopelessly primitive next to the instruments he’d used there. And books . . . He enjoyed reading books for entertainment, but electronics were much better for finding information in a hurry. His father had access to some electronics, but didn’t display them where his patients could see them. He didn’t seem to want people to know he used such things.

  That was part of the problem Reuven had been having in adjusting: pretending to know less than he did. The other part lay in the patients themselves. He burst out, “What do I do about the little old men who come in every other week when there’s nothing wrong with them? What I want to do is boot them out on the street, but I don’t suppose I can.”

  “No, not really,” Moishe Russie agreed. “Oh, you could, but it wouldn’t do you much good. They’d come back anyhow: either that or they’d go bother some other doctor instead.”

  “I’ve been looking over the files,” Reuven said. “Looks like we’ve got some patients other doctors have run off.”

  “I’m sure we do,” his father said, nodding. “And they have some of ours, too—I try to be patient, but I’m not Job. Sometimes all the little old men and women really want is for someone to tell them, ‘Don’t worry. You’re really all right.’ And”—he grinned at Reuven—“you’re a hero to a lot of them, you know?’

  Reuven shrugged in some embarrassment. “Yes, I do know. I don’t think it’s worth making a fuss over.”

  “I know you don’t, but you have to remember: you grew up here in Jerusalem, not in Warsaw or Minsk or Berlin,” Moishe Russie said. “Being a Jew is easy here. It wasn’t so easy back in Europe, believe me. And a Jew who walks away from something important so he doesn’t have to go worship the spirits of Emperors past”—he used the language of the Race for the phrase—“deserves to have people notice.”

  “If we had advertisements, you could use it in them: ‘genuine Jewish doctor,’ I mean,” Reuven answered. “But it doesn’t make me any smarter. If it does anything, it makes me stupider.”

  His father shook his head. “It may make you a little more ignorant, but not stupider. And it makes you honest. That’s important for a doctor.”

  Reuven snorted. “If I were honest, I’d tell those people to geh kak afen yam.”

  “Well, you can’t be a hundred percent honest all the time.” Moishe Russie chuckled, but then sobered. “And the other thing to remember is, you can’t take anything for granted. Just the other day, I found a lump in Mrs. Berkowitz’s breast. She’s been coming in here three, four times a year for the past ten years, and I never noticed anything worse than varicose veins wrong with her up till then. But you have to be careful.”

  “All right,” Reuven said. By the unhappy expression on his father’s face, he suspected that Moishe Russie wished he’d found the lump sooner. Knowing his father, he’d probably been kicking himself ever since he did discover it. Reuven continued, “And it feels strange to have a chaperone of some sort in the room whenever I examine a woman, even if she’s older than the Pyramids.”

  “You have to be careful,” his father repeated, this time in a different tone of voice. “I know a couple of men who ruined their careers because they weren’t. Why take chances when you don’t have to.”

  “I don’t,” Reuven answered, knowing his father would land on him like an avalanche if he did. “It still seems like something out of the Middle Ages, though.”

  “Maybe it is, but that doesn’t mean it’s not real,” Moishe Russie said. “Our Arab colleagues have a harder time with it than we do. Sometimes they can’t touch their female patients at all. They have to do the best they can by asking questions. If they’re lucky, they get to ask the woman. If they’re not, they have to ask her husband.”

  “Yes, I know about that,” Reuven said. “There’s a fellow named Nuqrashi who resigned from the college about the same time I did. He’s back in Baghdad now, I suppose, getting his practice going. I wonder if he’s having those kinds of troubles.”

  “Worse troubles than those in Baghdad nowadays,” his father said. “Sometimes they spill over here, too. If I never hear anybody shouting ‘Allahu akbar!’ again, I won’t be sorry.” Moishe Russie’s eyes went far away. “Not long after we first came to Palestine, I tried to help a wounded Arab woman in the streets of Jerusalem, and an Arab man thought I was going to violate her. He did change his mind when he realized what I was doing, I will say that.”

  “What happened to her?” Reuven asked.

  His father looked bleak. “She bled to death. Torn femoral artery, I think.”

  Before Reuven could answer that, the receptionist tapped on the door and said, “Dr. Russie—young Dr. Russie, I mean—Chaim Katz is here for his appointment. He’s complaining about his cough again.”

  “Thanks, Yetta.” Reuven got to his feet. As he started for the examination room, he glanced back at his father, who was lighting a cigarette. In disapproving tones, he said, “Katz would do a lot better if he didn’t smoke like a chimney. As a matter of fact, you’d do better, too.”

  Moishe Russie looked innocent. “I’d do better if Katz didn’t smoke? I don’t see that.” He inhaled. The end of the cigarette glowed red.

/>   “Funny,” Reuven said, though he thought it was anything but. “You know what the Lizards have found out about what tobacco does to your lungs. They think we’re meshuggeh for using the stuff.”

  “Among other reasons they think we’re meshuggeh.” His father breathed out smoke as he spoke. He looked at the cigarette between his index and middle fingers, then shrugged. “Yes, they’ve found out all sorts of nasty stuff about tobacco. What they haven’t found is how to make somebody quit using the stuff once he’s got started.” He raised an eyebrow. “They haven’t figured out how to make themselves stop using ginger, either.”

  That struck Reuven as more rationalization than reasoned defense, but he didn’t have time to argue—not that arguing was likely to make his father stub out that cigarette and never smoke another one. All he said was, “You can’t be having as much fun with tobacco as the Lizards do with ginger.” Moishe Russie laughed.

  In the examination room, Chaim Katz was working a cigarette down to a tiny butt and coughing between puffs. He was about sixty, stocky, bald, with a gray mustache and tufts of gray Hair sprouting from his ears. “Hello, Doctor,” he said, and coughed again.

  “Hello?” Reuven pointed to an ashtray. “Will you please put that out and take off your shirt? I want to listen to your chest.” He reached for his stethoscope, which hung beside his father’s. Even as he set the ends in his ears, be knew he wouldn’t be hearing everything he might. The Race had electronically amplified models.

  He didn’t need anything fancy, though, to dislike what he heard in Chaim Katz’s chest. He marveled that the older man got any air into his lungs at all: wheezes and hisses and little whistling noises filled his ears. “Nu?” Katz said when he put the stethoscope away.

  “I want you to make an appointment with Dr. Eisenberg for a chest X ray,” Reuven told him. Back at the medical college, he could have sent the man for an X ray then and there, and learned the results in a few minutes. Unfortunately, things weren’t so simple here. “When I see the film, I’ll have a better idea of where we stand.” I’ll find out whether you’ve got a carcinoma in there, or just a running start on emphysema.