“I greet you, Senior Researcher.” Felless’ voice was a scratchy parody of the way she usually sounded.
Ttomalss noticed. His eyes turrets went up and down her, noting the way she stood. “You have laid!” he exclaimed.
“Truth,” Felless said. “It is over. It is done.” She amended that: “Until the hatchlings break out of their shells, it is done. Then begins the task of civilizing them, which is never easy.”
“Yes, I know of this, although with a hatchling of a different sort,” Ttomalss said.
“Why, so you do,” Felless said. “In that, you are an unusual male. But now, if you want to keep talking with me, come along to the refectory.” She started that way herself.
“It shall be done.” Ttomalss fell into stride beside her.
“How does it feel to bear the burden of rearing a hatchling?” Felless asked. “Even if Kassquit is a hatchling of a very different sort, you are to be commended for your diligence. On Home, that is the work of females.”
“Kassquit is indeed a hatchling of a different sort,” Ttomalss said, “and she truly may have discovered a male of the Race of a different sort.” He told her more about Regeya, and about the cryptic message he’d had from Security.
“She still thinks he may be a Big Ugly masquerading as a male of the Race?” Felless said. “As I told you before, I find that very hard to believe.”
“The more I think about it, the more plausible I find it,” Ttomalss said. “Underestimating the Tosevites’ cleverness has hurt us countless times before.”
Felless said, “They are what they are. They cannot be what we are. They cannot.” She added an emphatic cough, then continued, “Can you imagine one of these Deutsch males with whom we have to deal carrying off such an imposture for even the time light takes to cross an atomic nucleus? The Reichs minister of justice, for instance-this Sepp Dietrich. I doubt he can even use a computer, let alone pretend he belongs to the Race on one.”
She snorted at the absurdity of the notion. But then she remembered Dietrich’s secretary. That male had spoken the language of the Race well, for a Tosevite. If he could somehow sneak onto the computer network, could he pass himself off as a male of the Race? She made the negative hand gesture. She couldn’t believe it.
Ttomalss said, “Kassquit has had trouble making anyone in authority think Regeya might be a Big Ugly. Investigators believe him more likely to be some sort of swindler, but analysis of his messages shows no attempt to defraud. Real interest in the question is minimal.”
“If the authorities do not believe Regeya is a Tosevite, how can Kassquit persist in opposing them?” Felless said. She was typical of the Race in that she trusted and followed those above her till they gave her some overwhelming reason not to.
“Perhaps, as you said, like calls to like,” Ttomalss suggested.
“I said she wished like called to like,” Felless pointed out.
He thought about it. “Truth: you did,” he admitted.
“Yes, I did,” Felless said. “And now, very loudly, food calls to me.” She hurried on toward the refectory, not caring in the least whether Ttomalss came along.
19
Little by little, Nesseref was getting used to her flat in the new town that had gone up east of the Tosevite hamlet called Jezow. The flat itself boasted all the conveniences she’d enjoyed back on Home. She had access to the Race’s computer network, which put her in touch with all of Tosev 3. Telephone and television service were also as good as they would have been on the world she’d left behind. She could find entertainment programs at the touch of a fingerclaw. They were all recordings, of course, but that mattered little to her. Over the course of a hundred thousand years, the Race had produced so much that one lifetime’s viewing couldn’t give a female even a smattering of it.
Only her furnishings told her she dwelt on Tosev 3. The pieces that had come from Home with the colonization fleet were of the lightest and most austere manufacture, nothing she would have had in her apartment there. The tables and chairs made locally did not look like work the Race would do. Even the ones that weren’t too tall and too large were… not so much wrong but alien in style and decoration. The very grains of the woods were strange, as were the gaudy fabrics the Polish Tosevites reckoned the height of style.
Also strange was the view out her window. It is all far too green, she kept thinking. The trees sprouted great profusions of leaves. Grass and shrubs grew lavishly, far more lavishly than most places on Home. Having rain drum against that window almost every other day also felt unnatural.
Going to the shuttlecraft port was always a relief. The facilities there were full of the Race’s gear, even if Big Uglies had erected them. Taking a shuttlecraft up into orbit was an even greater relief. The craft and the starships they served were pure products of the Race. Aboard them, she could almost forget she wasn’t orbiting Home.
Almost. For one thing, the world beneath her looked different. Waterlogged was the word that most readily came to mind. Those vast expanses of ocean seemed as wrong as the frequent rain. And, for another, the Race had to share orbital space with the Big Uglies. Their mushy voices, chattering in their languages and in hers, crowded the radio bands even worse than their hardware crowded space.
One piece of hardware in particular stood out. “What are the Big Uglies doing?” she asked as she floated weightless at the central docking hub of the 27th Emperor Korfass. “Are they building a starship of their own?”
“Do not be absurd,” answered the male she had come to ferry down to the surface of Tosev 3, a chemical engineer named Warraff. “They cannot hope to fly between the stars. They did not even travel beyond their own atmosphere until after the fighting stopped. That is only the space station of the not-empire called the Confederated-no, excuse me, the United-States.”
“Why is it so large?” Nesseref asked. “I am certain the Tosevites had nothing of that size in orbit when we first came to Tosev 3.”
“No one knows the answer to that,” Warraff replied. “No one of the Race, at any rate. The American Tosevites are doing something peculiar there; I would be the last to deny it. Keep an eye turret on the computer network to stay up with the latest gossip, but bear in mind it is only gossip.”
“I thought you told me it belonged to the United States,” Nesseref said. “Who are the Americans?”
Straightening out that misunderstanding took a little while. Nesseref had paid little attention to the lesser continental mass. She knew about the SSSR and the Reich because Poland lay sandwiched between them. But she’d had only radio contact with U.S. spacefliers and ground stations, and had forgotten those Big Uglies had an alternative name for themselves.
Several officials were waiting for Warraff when she brought him down to the shuttlecraft port outside the new Australian cities; he was, evidently, good at what he did. No one was waiting for Nesseref, no matter how good she was at what she did. She found transportation from the shuttlecraft port to the airfield not far away. Then she had to wait for the next flight to Poland, and then she had to endure the journey halfway round the planet.
By the time she walked into her flat, her body had no idea whether it was supposed to be day or night. Locally, it was late afternoon. She did know that felt wrong. Uncertain whether to eat breakfast or go to sleep, she chose the latter. When she woke up, it was the middle of the night, but she could not go back to sleep no matter how hard she tried.
She felt caged inside the flat. She’d spent too much time inside her shuttlecraft and inside the airplane that had brought her home. She rode the elevator down to the lobby of her building and then strode out into the street. This sort of thing had happened to her after other missions, too. Once more was an annoyance, not a catastrophe.
Few other males or females of the Race were on the street. Nesseref eyed the ones who walked or motored past with a certain amount of wariness, but only a certain amount. The Race was generally more law-abiding than the Big Uglies, and males and fem
ales chosen as colonists were generally law-abiding even by the standards of the Race. Still, every hatching ground held a few addled eggs.
Tosev 3 could do some addling of its own. A male sidled up to Nesseref, saying, “I greet you. How would you like to greet something nice for your tongue?”
“No,” Nesseref said sharply-all the more sharply because she did crave ginger. “Go away.” When the male did not move off fast enough to suit her, she added, “Very well, then, I will call the authorities,” and reached for her telephone.
That got the fellow moving at a better clip. Nesseref felt more regret and anger than satisfaction. She walked along the quiet streets. Loud metallic crashes sent her skittering forward to investigate. She found a couple of Big Uglies loading trash cans into a ramshackle truck of Tosevite design.
“We greet you, superior sir,” they said, lifting cloth caps from their heads in unison. Their accents were even worse than the foremale Casimir’s, and they couldn’t tell Nesseref was a female. But they acted as if they had every right to be where they were and do what they were doing.
“What is going on here?” Nesseref asked.
She had little experience in judging Tosevite expressions, but needed little to realize they found the question stupid. So did she, once she thought about it. One of the Tosevites said, “Taking trashes away, superior sir. Race not wanting to do. Paying us to doing instead.”
“Very well,” Nesseref said, and the Big Uglies resumed their noisy, smelly work. Indeed, it was labor no male or female of the Race would want to perform. Paying the Tosevites to do it made perfect sense.
The truck rumbled off down the street, leaving a cloud of noxious fumes in its wake. Nesseref coughed a couple of times, and did her best not to breathe till the cloud dispersed. Yes, paying Big Uglies to haul trash made sense. But Big Uglies also made trucks. If they did that more cheaply than members of the Race could, would paying them for such manufacturing also make sense? Nesseref didn’t know. She did know some of the colonists were industrial workers. If they didn’t manufacture, say, trucks, what would they do?
If the trucks they did make were better but at the same time more expensive than those of the Big Uglies, what would the Race do? What should the Race do? She was glad she didn’t have to decide things like that.
She prowled the streets of the new town, now and then looking up through the scattered clouds at the stars. She knew the constellations well; they didn’t look a great deal different from the way they would have in the northern hemisphere back on Home, though of course they rotated about a different imaginary axis.
Little by little, the eastern sky turned pale with the approach of day. Before the star Tosev came up, a mist rose on the fields and meadows around the settlement the Race had built. Tendrils flowed through the streets, leaving the air damp and clammy. Despite that and despite the unpleasant chill, Nesseref stayed out, watching in fascination. Such mists occurred in only a few places back on Home, and then but seldom; the air usually stayed too dry to support them. They seemed common enough here in Poland, but still intrigued her.
This one, like most, hugged the ground. When Nesseref looked up through it, she had no trouble seeing the tops of taller buildings. But when she turned her eye turrets down to street level, so that she peered along the layer of water droplets, the lower stories of nearby structures blurred, while those farther away-and not much farther away, at that-disappeared altogether. She might have been alone in the center of a small, clear circle, the rest of the planet (for all she could prove, the rest of the universe) shrouded in fog. Even the sounds that reached her hearing diaphragms were distant, muffled, attenuated.
When Tosev rose, the mist let her look at it without protection. That seemed even stranger to her than the fog itself. As a shuttlecraft pilot, she’d grown used to harsh, raw sunlight, unfiltered even by atmosphere, let alone by these billions of droplets. Even a glimpse of a sun should have been enough to make her automatically turn her eye turrets away. But no, not here. She could look at Tosev with impunity-and she did.
With sunrise, the town began to come to life around her. Males and females trooped out of their apartment buildings. Off they went, to whatever work they had. A couple of them turned curious eye turrets in her direction. She wasn’t going anywhere. She was only standing and watching. That made her not fit in. She kept on doing nothing but standing and watching, too, which left the curious no excuse to ask her any questions. That suited her fine.
Now she didn’t know that she felt like breakfast, but she didn’t know that she felt like any different meal, either. She did feel like something, and breakfast would do. She had to look around to see where she was; she’d walked through the night almost at random. But the new town wasn’t large enough to make getting lost easy. Before long, she found herself in an eatery she’d already visited several times.
“Ham and eggs,” she told the male behind the counter. Ham she esteemed, as did most of the Race; the only thing better she’d found on Tosev 3 was ginger, and ginger she stubbornly refused. The local eggs tasted different from those of Home-rather more sulfurous-but weren’t bad when flavored with enough salt.
As the male gave her the meal, he remarked, “Before long, they will start bringing down our own domestic animals. Then we shall have proper eggs and more kinds of meat worth eating.”
“Good,” Nesseref said, handing him her identification card so he could charge her credit balance. “Yes, that will be very good indeed. Little by little, we may be putting down roots on this world after all. Perhaps our settlement here will work out, even if not in the way we thought it would before leaving Home.”
“This is not such a bad place,” the male answered. “Cold and wet, but we already knew that. If only there were fewer Big Uglies running around loose with weapons.”
“Truth,” Nesseref said. Did the Tosevite called Anielewicz have an explosive-metal bomb? Even if he didn’t, did it matter? The Reich and the SSSR and the United States had them. She was sure the countermale had meant Tosevites with rifles and submachine guns. They were the visible danger. But the ones with bombs were worse.
Atvar was feeling harassed. He should have been used to the feeling, after so much time on Tosev 3. In fact, he was used to the feeling. But he had less chance than usual to make the male addressing him regret it, because Reffet was every bit as much a fleetlord as he was.
“By the Emperor, Atvar,” Reffet snarled now, looking most unhappy indeed on Atvar’s screen, “what are these accursed American Big Uglies playing at with their preposterous space station? The miserable thing bloats like a tumor.”
“I do not know what they are doing,” Atvar answered. What he was doing was trying to hold his temper. Being an equal, Reffet was entitled to use his unadorned name. Equal or not, the fleetlord of the colonization fleet wasn’t entitled to use his name in that tone of voice. “Whatever it is, I doubt it means danger to us. When Big Uglies plan something dangerous, they rarely let us see any of it beforehand.”
“They have no business planning anything we do not know about in advance,” Reffet said. “They have no business being in space at all. It is preposterous”-he liked that word-“that we have to endure their presumption.”
“You must adapt,” Atvar said, knowing full well he could give no more infuriating advice to a male of the Race, especially one newly come to Tosev 3. “We have been over this ground before. They were on the point of developing this technology themselves when we arrived. Much of what they use is independently invented.”
“Much also is stolen from the Race.” Reffet’s tone suggested Atvar had personally handed over the engineering drawings.
“They developed rockets on their own. They were in the process of developing explosive-metal bombs when the conquest fleet came,” Atvar said. “They made it plain they would go to war and wreck this planet if we sought to keep them from doing what they had the ability to do. The colonization fleet would have had a thin time of it then.”
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“Had the conquest fleet done its job properly, we would not be having this discussion now,” Reffet snapped.
Atvar wanted to bite him. All at once, he understood how Straha must have felt when he, as fleetlord, rejected the ambitious shiplord’s schemes one after another. For the first time, he even got some inkling of understanding why Straha had defected to the Big Uglies. At the moment, he felt rather like defecting himself. Then he wouldn’t have to deal with fools like Reffet, too hidebound to shed his own skin.
“You were not here at the time,” he said. “No doubt we could have benefited from your wisdom.”
“Truth,” Reffet said, not recognizing sarcasm. “Now we have to make the best of this bad situation. And I tell you this: even some from the conquest fleet are growing alarmed. My Security personnel and I have been bombarded with messages from a female named Kassquit, urging some sort of action against this space station.”
“Have you been tasting ginger, Reffet?” Atvar demanded. “You know perfectly well that the conquest fleet had no females.” Yet the name Kassquit was familiar to him. He checked the computer records, then started to laugh. By the time it was through, that laugh was so enormous, it looked as if he were taking the bite he so desired out of the other fleetlord.
“That is an offensive expression on your face,” Reffet said angrily, “and I will have you know for a fact, Atvar-for a fact, do you hear? — that no Kassquit with that identity number came from Home aboard the colonization fleet. Therefore, she must have come with you. I do not know how she did it, but I do know that she did it.”
Atvar laughed harder and wider than ever. Almost shaking with mirth, he said, “I will have you know for a fact-for a fact, Reffet, do you hear? — that you are an idiot, addled in your eggshell before you hatched. Do you have any notion who this Kassquit is?”
“One of yours,” Reffet answered. “One of yours, by the Emperor, which is all that matters to me. Try to evade it as you will, you-”
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