by neetha Napew
He nodded. If this wasn't hell, what the hell was it?
The hospital ship 13th Emperor Poropss— the Merciful should have been a taste of Home for Ussmak. And so, in a way, it was: it was heated to a decent temperature; the light seemed right, not the slightly too blue glare that lit Tosev's third world, and, best of all, no Big Uglies were trying to kill him at the moment. Even the food was better than the processed slop he ate in the field. He should have been happy.
Had he felt more like himself, he might have been.
But when the Big Uglies blew the turret off his landcruiser, he'd bailed out of the driver's escape hatch into a particularly radioactive patch of mud. The detectors had chattered maniacally when males in protective suits got near him. And so here he was, being repaired so he could return to action and let the Tosevites figure out still more ways to turn him into overcooked chopped meat
Radiation sickness had left him too nauseated to enjoy the good hospital food at first By the time that subsided, his treatment was making him sick. He'd had a whole-blood-system transfusion and a cell transplant to replace his damaged blood-producing glands. The immunity-suppressing drugs and the others that resuppressed triggered oncogenes made him sicker than the radiation had. He'd spent a good many days being a very unhappy male indeed.
Now his body was beginning to feel as if it
might actually be part of the Race again. His spirit, however, still struggled against the most insidious hospital ailment of all: boredom. He'd done all the reading, played all the computer simulations he could stand. He wanted to go back to the real world again, even if it was Tosev 3 full of large ugly aliens with large ugly cannon and mines and other unpleasant tools.
Yet at the same time he dreaded going back. They'd just make him part of another patched-together landeruiser crew, another piece of a puzzle forced into a place where he did not quite fit. He'd already had two crews killed around him. Could he withstand that a third time and stay sane? Or would he die with this next group? That would solve his problems, but not in a way he cared for.
An orderly shuffled by, pushing a broom. Like a lot of the males who did such lowly work, he had green rings painted on his arms to show
he was being punished for a breach of discipline. Ussmak idly wondered what he'd done. These days, idle wondering was about the only sort in which Ussmak indulged.
The orderly paused in his endless round of sweeping, turned one eye toward Ussmak. "I've seen males who looked happier, friend," he remarked.
"So?" Ussmak said. "Last I heard, the fleetlord hadn't ordered everybody to be happy all the time."
"You're a funny one, friend, you are." The orderly's mouth fell open. The two males were alone in Ussmak's chamber. All the same, the orderly swiveled his eyes in all directions before he spoke again: "You want to be happy for a while, friend?"
Ussmak snorted. "How can you make me be happy?" Except by leaving, he added to
himself. If this petty deviationist kept bothering him, he'd say it out loud.
The orderly's eyes swiveled again. His voice fell to a dramatic half-whisper: "Got what you need right here, friend, you bet I do."
"What?" Ussmak said scornfully. "Cold sleep and a starship ride back Home? And it's right there in a beltpouch, is it? Tell me another one." He nodded slightly while opening his own mouth: a sarcastic laugh.
But he did not faze the other male. "What I've got, friend, is better than a trip Home, and I'll give it to you if you want it."
"Nothing is better than a trip Home," Ussmak said with conviction. Still, the fast-talking orderly stirred his curiosity. That didn't take much; in the middle of stultifyingly dull hospital routine, anything different sufficed to stir his curiosity. So he asked, "What do you
have in there, anyhow?"
The orderly looked all around again; Ussmak wondered if he expected a corrector to leap out of the wall and bring new charges against him. After that latest survey, he took a small plastic vial out of one of the pouches he wore, brought it over to Ussmak. It was filled with finely ground yellow-brown powder. "Some of this is what you need."
"Some of what?" Ussmak had guessed the male was somehow absconding with medications, but he'd never seen a medication that resembled this stuff.
"You'll find out, friend. This stuff makes you forgive the Big Uglies for a whole lot of things, yes it does."
Nothing, Ussmak thought, could make him forgive the Big Uglies either for the miserable world they inhabited or for killing his friends
and landcruiser teammates. But he watched as the orderly undid the top of the vial, poured a little powder into the palm of his other hand. He held that hand up to Ussmak's snout. "Go ahead, friend. Taste it— quick, before somebody sees."
Ussmak wondered again why the orderly was sporting green stripes— had he poisoned someone with the stuff? All at once, he didn't care. The doctors had been doing their level best to poison him, after all. He sniffed at the powder. The smell startled him— sweet, spicy... tempting was the word that sprang to mind. Of itself, his tongue flicked out and licked the fine grains off the scales of the orderly's hand.
The taste was like nothing he'd known before. The powder bit at his tongue, as if it had sharp little teeth of its own. Then the flavor filled his whole mouth; after a moment, it seemed to fill his whole brain as well. He felt
warm and brilliant and powerful, as if he were the fleetlord and at the same time in the bosom of the Race's deceased Emperors. He wanted to go out, hop into a landcruiser— by himself, for he felt capable of driving, gunning, and commanding all at the same time— and blast Big Uglies off their planet so the Race could settle here as it should. Getting rid of the Tosevites seemed as easy as saying, "It shall be done."
"You like that, friend?" the orderly asked, his voice sly. He put the vial of powder back into the pouch.
Ussmak's eyes followed it all the way. "I like that!" he said.
The orderly laughed again— he really was a funny fellow, Ussmak thought. He said, "Figured you would. Glad you found out it doesn't have to be a mope in here." He made a few haphazard swipes with his broom, then
went out into the hallway to clean the next healing cubicle.
Ussmak reveled in the strength and might the Tosevite— herb, he supposed it was— had given him. He desperately wanted to be out and doing, not cooped up here as if he were being fattened for the stewpot He craved action, danger, complication... for a while.
Then the feeling of invincibility started to fade. The harder he clung to it, the more it slipped between his fingers. Finally, too soon, it was gone, leaving behind the melancholy awareness that Ussmak was only himself (all the more melancholy because he so vividly remembered how he'd felt before) and a craving to know that strength and certainty once more.
Dull hospital routine was all the duller when set against that brief, bright memory. The day advanced on leaden feet. Even meals, till now
the high points on Ussmak's schedule, seemed hardly worth bothering over. The orderly who took away Ussmak's tray— not the same male who'd given him his moments of delight— made disapproving noises when he found half the food uneaten.
Ussmak slept poorly that night. He woke up before the daytime bright lights in the ceiling went on. He lay tossing in the gloom, imagining time falling off a clock until at last the moment for the broom-pushing orderly to return arrived.
When that moment came, however, he was not in his cubicle. The doctors had trundled him into a lab for another in a series of metabolic and circulatory tests. Before he tasted the Tosevite powder, he hadn't minded being poked, prodded, and visualized by ultrasound and X-rays. None of it hurt very much, and it was more interesting than sitting around all day like a long-unexamined
document in a computer storage file.
Today, though, he furiously resented the tests. He tried to get the technicians to hurry through them, snapped when they sometimes couldn't, and had them snapping back at him. "I'm sorry, landcruiser driver Ussm
ak," one of the males said. "I didn't realize you had an appointment with the fleetlord this forenoon."
"No, it must be an audience with the Emperor," another technician suggested.
Fuming, Ussmak subsided. He was so upset, he almost forgot to cast down his eyes at the mention of his sovereign. As if to punish him, the males at the lab worked slower instead of faster. By the time they finally let him go back to his cubicle, the orderly with the green rings on his arms was gone.
Another desolate day passed. Ussmak kept trying to recapture the sensation the powder
had given him. He could remember it, and clearly, but that wasn't the same as— or as good as—feeling it again.
When the orderly did show up at last, Ussmak all but tackled him. "Let me have some more of that wonderful stuff you gave me the other day!" he exclaimed.
The orderly put up both hands in the fending-off gesture the Race used to show refusal. "Can't do it" He sounded regretful and sly at the same time, a combination that should have made Ussmak see warning lights.
But Ussmak wasn't picking up subtleties, not at that moment "What do you mean, you can't do it?" He stared in blank dismay. "Did you use it all up? Don't tell me you used it all up!"
"As a matter of fact, I didn't" The orderly nervously turned his eyes this way and that. "Keep your voice down, will you, friend? Listen
— there's something I didn't tell you about that stuff the other day, and you better hear it"
"What?" Ussmak wanted to grab the cutpurse or malingerer or whatever he was and shake the truth— or at least some more powder— out of him.
"Here, come on, settle down, friend." The orderly saw— would have needed to be blind to miss— his agitation. "Well, what you need to know is, this stuff— the Big Uglies call it ginger, so you know that, too— anyhow, this stuff is under ban by order of the fleetlord."
"What?" Ussmak stared again. "Why?"
The orderly spread clawed bands. "Am I the fleetlord?"
"But you had this— ginger, did you say?— before," Ussmak said. Suddenly, breaking regulations seemed a lot less heinous than it
had.
"The ban was in force then, too." The orderly sounded smug. Of course, he had the green arm stripes to show what he thought of regulations be found inconvenient in one way or another.
Up until the moment his tongue touched ginger, Ussmak had been a law-abiding male, as most males of the Race were. Looking back on things, he wondered why. What had obeying laws and following orders ever gained him? Only a dose of radiation poisoning and the anguish of watching friends die around him.
But breaking a lifetime of conditioning did not come easy. Hesitantly, he asked, "Could you get me some even if— even if it is banned?"
The orderly studied him. "I might—just might, you understand— be able to do that, friend—"
"Oh, I hope you can," Ussmak broke in.
"— but if I do, it's gonna cost you," the orderly finished, unperturbed.
Ussmak was confused. "What do you mean, cost me?"
"Just what I said." The orderly spoke as if he were a hatchling still wet with the liquids from his egg. "You want more ginger, friend, you're gonna have to pay me for it. I'll take commissary scrip, voluntary electronic transfer from your account to one I have set up, Big Ugly souvenirs that I can resell, all kinds of things. I'm a flexible male; you'll find that out"
"But you gave me the first bit of ginger for nothing," Ussmak said, confused more than ever and hurt now, too. "I thought you were just being kind, helping me get through one of those endless days."
The orderly's mouth dropped open. "Why shouldn't the first taste be free? It shows you what I've got. And you want what I've got, don't you, friend?"
Ussmak hated to be laughed at The orderly's arrogant assumption of superiority also angered him. "Suppose I report you to the discipline-masters? We'll see bow you laugh then, by the Emperor."
But the orderly retorted, "Suppose you do? Yeah, I'll draw some more punishment, and likely worse than this, but you, friend, you'll never taste ginger again, not from me, not from anybody else, either. If that's how you want it, you go ahead and make that call."
Never taste ginger again? The idea appalled Ussmak so much, he never wondered if the orderly was telling the truth. What did he know about ethics, or lack of ethics, among ginger sellers? Quickly, he said, "How much do you
want?"
"Thought you'd be sensible." The orderly ticked off rates on his claws. "If it's just another taste you want, that'll cost you half a day's pay. But if you want a vial like the one you saw the other day, with enough ginger in it for maybe thirty tastes, that's a tenday's worth of pay. Cheap at the price, eh?"
"Yes." With little to spend his money on, Ussmak had most of it banked in the fleet's payroll accounting system. "Let me have a vial. What's your account code, so I can make the transfer?"
"Transfer it to this code." The orderly gave him the number, written down on a scrap of paper. "I'll be able to use it, but the computer won't pick up that it's mine."
"How did you manage that?" Ussmak asked, genuinely curious. Males could be bought,
perhaps, but how did you go about bribing a computer?
The orderly let his mouth fall open again, but only a little: he wanted Ussmak to share the joke. "Let's say there's somebody who works in payrolls and likes ginger just as much as you do. I'm not gonna tell you any more than that, but I don't need to tell you any more than that, do I? You're a clever male, friend; I don't have to draw you a circuit diagram."
Well, well, Ussmak thought He wondered how long this clandestine trade in ginger had been going on, how widely its corruption had spread among the Race, and whether anyone in authority had the slightest notion it was there.
Those were all interesting questions. None, though, was as urgent to Ussmak as getting his tongue on some of the preious powdered herb. Like any compartment in a starship, his
cubicle had a computer terminal. He used his own account code to access his payroll records, transferred a tenday's salary to the code the orderly had given him. "There," he said. "Now, when do I get my ginger?"
"Eager, aren't you?" the orderly said. "Let's see what I can do."
Naive though he was, Ussmak belatedly realized the orderly might keep his money and give him nothing in return. If that happened, he resolved to tell the authorities about the ginger trade and take the cheater down into punishment with him. But the orderly, with the air of a stage magician producing a bracelet from someone's snout, handed him a vial full of what he craved.
He wanted to pop it open and start tasting it right then. Somehow, though, he didn't feel easy about doing it in front of the orderly: he didn't want the fast-talking male to see what a
hold he had on him. He knew that was probably foolish; how could the orderly not have a good notion of how much he desired ginger? He held back even so.
He wondered about something else. "Suppose I start running out of pay but still want more ginger? What do I do then?"
"You could do without" The cold, callous ring in the orderly's voice chilled Ussmak. Then the fellow said, "Or you can find friends of your own to sell it to, and use what you make to buy more for yourself."
"I— see." Ussmak wondered about that. It might work for a while, but before too long, it seemed to him, every male in the invasion fleet would be selling ginger to every other male. He started to ask the orderly about that— the fellow certainly acted as if he had all the answers— but the male, having made his profit, left the healing cubicle without so
much as a farewell.
Ussmak opened the plastic vial, poured a little ginger onto his palm as he'd seen the orderly do. His tongue flicked the precious powder into his mouth. And again— for a while— he felt powerful, clever, capable. As the wonderful sensation faded, he realized he'd do whatever he had to do to keep on having it as often as he could. Against that stark need, the careful planning that had been a hallmark of the Race for millennia s
uddenly was of small import. If getting more ginger for himself meant peddling it to his friends... he hesitated. After the disasters that had befallen his landcruisers, few friends were left alive. But if he had to, he'd make more friends and then sell ginger to them.
He nodded to himself, pleased. He could still plan after all. Deliberately or not, he turned both eyes away from the shape of his plan.
Liu Han looked down at her belly. It did not bulge, not yet, but it would. Her homage to the moon had failed. Her breasts would never be large, but they felt tight and full; a new tracery of veins showed just below the skin. Her appetite was off. She knew the signs. She was with child.
she didn't think Bobby Fiore had noticed the absence of her monthly courses. She wondered if telling him she was pregnant was a good idea. She had no doubt the baby was his— given the way she was caged here, how could she? But she remembered how even her true husband had lost interest in her while she was carrying their child. If a Chinese treated her so, how would a round-eyed foreign devil react? She was afraid to have to find out.