“That could never happen,” Fotsev said with an emphatic cough. “If I do not remember him, spirits of Emperors past will forget me when I die.”
“How can you males of the conquest fleet remember anything?” the server asked. “Everything on this world seems topsy-turvy; nothing is the same from one moment to the next.”
“Truth there,” Fotsev agreed.
A female sitting at the table not far away turned an eye turret toward him. “How could you of the conquest fleet not give us a properly conquered planet?” she demanded. “Too many of these wild Big Ugly creatures are still running their own affairs, and even the ones that are supposed to be conquered are not safe. That is what everyone keeps shouting at us, anyhow.”
“Those creatures turned out not to be what we thought they were,” Fotsev answered. “They were much more advanced than we expected, and are still more advanced today.”
“When the conquest fleet came, they were less advanced than we are,” the server said. “Is that truth, or is it not?”
“It is,” Fotsev began, “but—”
“Then you should have defeated them,” the server broke in, as if the continued independence of some Tosevites were Fotsev’s fault and his alone. “That you failed speaks only of your own incompetence.”
“Truth,” the female said, and a couple of her companions made the affirmative hand gesture. “We came here to a world that was not ready for us, and whose fault is that? Yours!”
Fotsev finished his alcohol, slid off his seat, and left the establishment without another word. He had already seen that the colonists had a hard time fitting in when they came to Basra. But he’d never imagined the reverse might be true, that he might have a hard time fitting in when he came to the new town.
Tosev 3 had changed him. Tosev 3 had changed every male in the conquest fleet. The males and females of the colonization fleet remained unchanged. They might have been on Home yesterday. And he did not fit with them. What did that say? Nothing he wanted to hear. He took out the ginger after all, and had a big taste. With the herb coursing through him, he didn’t have to listen, whatever it was.
14
“Sorry, Lieutenant Colonel.” The first lieutenant with whom Glen Johnson was speaking couldn’t have been much more than half his age, but the fellow’s voice held brisk assurance. “No can do. Personally, I’d say yes, but I have my orders, and they leave me no discretion.”
“Pretty funny orders,” Johnson said. “All I want to do is pilot one cargo flight up to the space station and have a look around. I’m cleared for the controls—I’d better be; they’re a lot simpler than Peregrine’s. So what’s the trouble about putting me into the rotation during a stretch when I’m not patrolling? It’s not like I charge overtime.”
“Of course not, sir.” The lieutenant smiled to show what a good, patient, understanding fellow he was. “But you must know rotations are made up some time in advance, and are not casually revised.”
“What I know is, I’m getting the runaround,” Johnson said. The immovable young lieutenant looked hurt. Johnson didn’t care. He went on, “What I don’t know is why.”
He didn’t find out, either. The lieutenant sat there, prim and proper as a nineteenth-century Midwestern schoolmarm. Johnson muttered something about his ancestry, just loud enough to let him hear. He turned red, but otherwise did not change expression. Johnson muttered again, louder this time, and stalked out of the air-conditioned office.
Even early in spring, even so close to the coast, humidity made his shirt cling to him like a hooker who’d just spotted a C-note. Something bit him on the wrist: one of the nasty little gnats the locals called no-see-ums. He slapped and cursed. He sure hadn’t seen this one.
“When the going gets tough,” he muttered, “the tough get . . . plastered.” He wasn’t so sure about getting plastered, but damned if he couldn’t use a drink. Getting one seemed a far better idea than going off to his sterile little cubicle in the bachelor officers’ quarters and brooding.
In the bar, he spotted Gus Wilhelm. After snagging a scotch on the rocks, he sat down next to his friend. “What are you doing here?” Wilhelm said.
“I might ask you the same question, especially since you were here first,” Johnson answered.
“Sun’s got to be over the yardarm somewhere,” Wilhelm said. “And besides, it’s air-conditioned in here.” He eyed Johnson. “Looks like you could use the cool even more than me. If that’s not steam coming out of your ears, I’ve never seen any.”
“Bastards,” Johnson muttered, and gulped down half his drink.
“Well, yeah, a lot of people are,” Wilhelm said reasonably. He let very little faze him. “Which bastards are you talking about in particular?”
“The ones who don’t want to let me go up there and have a look at our space station,” Johnson answered. He could feel the scotch; he didn’t usually drink before noon. “I’m a taxpayer, dammit. Christ, I’m even a taxpayer with a security clearance. So why won’t they let me fly a load up there?”
“Ah,” Gus Wilhelm said, and nodded wisely. “I tried that not so long ago. They wouldn’t let me go, either.”
“Why the hell not?” Johnson demanded.
Wilhelm shrugged. “They wouldn’t say. C’mon, sir—if they started telling people why, what kind of service would this be?”
Before Johnson could respond to that, another officer came into the bar: a large, good-looking, easygoing fellow who wore his brown hair as long as regulations allowed, and then maybe half an inch longer. He was one of the pilots who regularly took loads up to the space station. Johnson waved to him, half friendly, half peremptory. “Over here!” he called.
Captain Alan Stahl peered his way, then grinned and nodded. “Let me grab myself a beer, sir,” he said, his accent balanced between Midwest and South: he was from St. Louis. After corralling the Budweiser, he ambled over to the table where Johnson and Wilhelm were sitting. “What can I do for you gents?”
“Leave me out of it,” Wilhelm said. “I’m just here to drag the bodies away.”
Stahl gave him a quizzical look. “How much of a start have you got on me?”
Instead of answering that, Johnson asked a question of his own: “What are you bus drivers hauling up to the space station, anyhow, that makes it so precious ordinary working stiffs like me can’t get a peek come hell or high water?”
Stahl’s open, friendly face closed like a slamming door. “Now, sir, you know I’m not supposed to talk about that,” he said. “I don’t ask you how you run your business. Isn’t polite to ask me how I run mine, especially when you’ve got to know I can’t answer.”
“Why the devil can’t you?” Johnson snarled. He didn’t like being balked. Nobody who had the temperament to climb into the cockpit of a fighter plane took well to frustration. But Alan Stahl didn’t give him anything else; he just sipped his Bud and kept his mouth shut.
Gus Wilhelm put a hand on Johnson’s arm. “You may as well give it up. You aren’t going to get anywhere.”
“Well, what the hell are people hiding up there?” Johnson said.
“Sir, if more people know, the Lizards are likelier to know, too,” Stahl said. “And now I’m talking too much, so if you’ll excuse me—” He gulped down his beer, nodded—he was always polite—and hurried out of the bar.
“Well, you spooked him,” Wilhelm remarked.
“I already said once, I’m a taxpayer with a security clearance,” Johnson said. “What am I going to do, step into a telephone booth and call the fleetlord? Radio whatever the hell I find out down to a Lizard ground station next time I ride Peregrine? Not too damn likely, I don’t think.”
“Oh, a lot of security’s nothing but nonsense—I know that as well as the next guy,” Wilhelm answered. “But you might say some little thing to somebody, and he might say something to somebody, and on down the chain, and somewhere down there whatever you said might bounce off a Lizard’s hearing diaphragm. And you’re su
re as hell a taxpayer, but maybe your security clearance isn’t high enough for whatever’s going on upstairs.”
“A bus driver like Stahl knows, and I don’t?” That wasn’t fair to the other pilot, but Johnson was in no mood to be fair.
“Give it up,” Wilhelm said again. “That’s the best advice I’ve got for you. Give it up. If you don’t, you’re going to end up in more trouble than you can shake a stick at. If Stahl reports you, you may be there already.”
“Screw him,” Johnson muttered, but he did his best to calm down; he knew it was good advice, too. He thought about buying himself another drink, then decided not to. If he got smashed now, or even high, he would end up in trouble. He could feel it, the way fellows with old wounds or broken bones could feel bad weather before it happened.
When Johnson got to his feet without another word and without waving to the bartender, Gus Wilhelm let out a not quite silent sigh of relief. Wilhelm misunderstood. Johnson hadn’t given up—far from it. But, plainly, he couldn’t do any more here and now. His friend knew no more than he did, and wasn’t curious. The bird who did know something had flown the coop.
Deciding he ought to do something useful with his time, Johnson went over to the big hangar where Peregrine was being fixed up between flights. He shot the breeze with the technicians, examined the latest pieces of modified equipment they were installing, and shot the breeze some more. Some of the modifications were undoubted improvements; others looked to be change for change’s sake.
“All right,” he said, “it’s a digital clock, not one with hands. Is it more accurate?”
“Not so you’d notice,” the fellow who’d installed it answered cheerfully. “But the numbers are supposed to be easier to read.” Johnson wasn’t convinced, but didn’t see how the new clock would do any lasting harm, either. He held his peace.
After lunch, he did go back to his cubicle. He was rereading The War of the Worlds and reflecting, not for the first time, that Wells’ Martians would have been a hell of a lot easier to lick than the Lizards when somebody knocked on his door. He stuck a three-by-five card in the book to keep his place and got up off the bed to see who it was.
His visitor had three stars on his shoulder straps. Johnson stiffened to attention; the Kitty Hawk base commandant was only a major general. He hadn’t known any higher-ranking officer was on the base. He couldn’t imagine why a lieutenant general wanted to see him.
The officer in question, a bulldog-faced fellow whose name tag read LeMAY, didn’t keep him in suspense for long. He stabbed out a stubby forefinger and tapped Johnson in the chest, forcing him back a pace. “You have been asking questions,” he growled in a voice raspy from too many years of too many cigarettes.
“Sir! Yes, sir!” Johnson replied, as if back in Parris Island boot camp. Gus Wilhelm had warned he might get into trouble. Gus hadn’t dreamt how much trouble he might get into, or how fast. Neither had Johnson.
“You have been asking questions about things that are none of your business,” Lieutenant General Curtis LeMay said. “People whose business they are told you they were none of yours, but you kept on asking questions.” That forefinger probed again. Johnson gave back another pace. One more and he’d be backed up against the bed. LeMay strode after him. “That’s not smart, Lieutenant Colonel. Do you understand me?”
“Sir! Yes, sir!” Johnson had to work to keep from shouting it out, as he would have to a drill instructor. Rather desperately, he said, “Permission to ask a question, sir?”
“No.” The lieutenant general turned even redder than he had been. “You’ve already asked too goddamn many questions, Johnson. That’s what I came here for: to tell you to button your lip and keep it buttoned. And you will do it, or you will regret it. Have you got that?’’
For a moment, Johnson thought LeMay was going to haul off and belt him. If the lieutenant general tried that, he resolved, the lieutenant general would get a hell of a surprise. But LeMay mastered himself and waited for an answer. Johnson gave him the one he wanted: “Sir! Yes, sir!”
Still breathing hard, LeMay rumbled, “You’d damn well better.” He turned and stomped out of the BOQ.
“Jesus.” Glen Johnson’s legs didn’t want to hold him up. Facing his furious superior was harder than going into battle had ever been. It was as if one of his own wingmen had started shooting at him along with the Lizards. “What the hell have I stumbled over?” he muttered as he sank down onto the bed.
Whatever it was, Gus Wilhelm had been dead right: it was a lot more secret than his security clearance could handle. The United States trusted him to fly a spacecraft armed with explosive-metal missiles. What didn’t his own government trust him to know? If he tried to find out, he was history. Curtis LeMay had made that more than perfectly clear. Crazy, he thought. Absolutely goddamn crazy.
“Where to, Shiplord?” Straha’s Tosevite driver asked him as he got into the motorcar.
“Major Yeager’s, as you no doubt know already,” the ex-shiplord replied. “I have had the appointment for several days.” The driver said nothing, but started the motorcar’s engine. He put the machine in gear and rolled away from Straha’s house in the Valley.
Yeager lived in Gardena, a toponym presumably derived from the English word garden. The place did not look like a garden to Straha, though Yeager had told him fruit trees grew there before houses went up. It looked like most other sections of Los Angeles and the surrounding suburbs. As for the toponym Los Angeles . . . Straha did not believe in angels, even in Spanish, and never would. When he imagined winged Big Uglies, he imagined them flying through the air and voiding on the heads of the Race down below. Tosevites would find that sort of thing very funny. That he might find it funny himself only meant he’d been associating with Tosevites too long.
“Wait for me,” he told the driver as the motorcar pulled to a stop in front of Major Yeager’s home. He knew it was an unnecessary order as soon as he gave it, but, though he commanded no one any more, he still liked to see things clawed down tight.
“It shall be done,” the driver said, and took out a paperbound book. The cover showed an intelligent being unlike any with which Straha was familiar. Seeing Straha’s eye turrets turn toward it, the driver remarked, “Science fiction.” In the language of the Race, it would have been a contradiction in terms. But Straha remembered that Yeager was also addicted to the stuff, and claimed it had helped give him his unmatched insight into the way the Race thought. Straha reckoned that one more proof of how strange the Big Uglies were.
“I greet you, Shiplord,” Yeager said as Straha came to the door. “The two emissaries from the Chinese People’s Liberation Army will be coming in an hour or so. I hope you do not mind.”
“Would it matter if I did?” Straha asked before remembering his manners: “I greet you, Major Yeager.”
Not directly answering the exile’s bitter question, Yeager said, “I hoped you might be able to tell them useful things about how the Race conducts itself, things they could take back to their homeland with them. They will be returning soon.”
“It is possible,” Straha said. “I do not claim it is likely, but it is possible. And what shall we discuss before these other Big Uglies arrive?”
“Come into the study,” Yeager said obliquely. “Make yourself comfortable. Can I get you alcohol? Can I get you ginger?”
“Alcohol, please—rum.” Straha used an English word. “Ginger later, perhaps. I have been trying to cut back on my tasting lately.” He hadn’t succeeded, but he had been trying.
“Rum. It shall be done.” Yeager attended to it. He had some himself, with cubes of ice in it. Straha did not care for drinks so cold. After they had both sipped, the Tosevite asked, “And have you heard anything new about who might have attacked the ships of the colonization fleet?”
“I have not,” Straha answered, “and, I admit, this perplexes me. You Big Uglies are not usually so astute in such matters. The incentive here, of course, is larger than it wou
ld be in other cases.”
“Yes, I would say so,” Yeager agreed. “Whoever did it, the Race will punish—and whoever did it deserves to be punished, too. I wonder if your contacts with males—maybe even with females now, for all I know—in the occupied parts of Tosev 3 had brought you any new information.”
“As far as who the culprit may be, no,” Straha said. “I have learned that one of the ships destroyed carried most of the specialists in imperial administration. Whether the guilty party knew this in advance or not, I cannot say. My sources cannot say, either. I would be inclined to doubt it, but am without strong evidence for my doubt.”
“I think you are right. The attack came too soon for Tosevites to have known such details about the colonization fleet—I believe,” Major Yeager said. “But it is an interesting datum, and not one I had met before. I thank you, Shiplord.”
“You are welcome.” Straha drank more rum. Another minor treachery to his kind. After so many larger acts of treason, one more was hardly noticeable.
Yeager did not scorn him as a traitor, not where it showed. He did not think Yeager scorned him at any deeper level. The Big Ugly was too interested in the Race in general to do anything of that sort: one more part of his character that made him so unusual.
Before too long, the Chinese Tosevites came. Yeager introduced them as Liu Han and Liu Mei. They spoke the language of the Race fairly well, with an accent different from the American’s. Straha noted that Yeager’s son, who had paid little attention to his own arrival despite fascination with the Race, joined the group and made polite conversation for a time after the new Big Uglies arrived.
From their voices, both of them were female. Did Jonathan Yeager find one of them sexually attractive? If so, which? After a while, Straha remembered that Liu Mei was Liu Han’s daughter. Since Jonathan was younger than Sam Yeager, that made him more likely to be interested in Liu Mei—or so Straha thought. The subtleties of Tosevite behavior patterns were lost on him, and he knew it.
Presently, Sam Yeager spoke in English: “Enough chitchat—time to talk turkey.” Straha didn’t follow the idiom, but Jonathan evidently did, for he left. Liu Mei stayed. Maybe that meant she didn’t find him attractive. Maybe it meant she put duty above desire, which Straha found admirable. Or maybe it just meant the exiled shiplord didn’t fully grasp the situation.
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