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He’d always known Yeager was a clever Big Ugly. Now he was seeing just how good the American officer’s instincts were. He still hadn’t the faintest idea what the USA was doing with its station. As far as he could tell, not a male or female of the Race knew the answer to that. But something strange-which presumably meant something illicit-was going on up there.
He wondered how many American Big Uglies knew what was going on at the space station. Not many, surely, or Yeager would have been one of them. That he wasn’t anyhow puzzled Straha. He’d been entrusted with important secrets before. Straha knew of some of them. For that matter, Straha was one of the important secrets with which Yeager had been entrusted. That a secret should be so much more important than he had been during the fighting wounded his vanity.
He would have asked more questions among the humans of his acquaintance had it not been for his driver. He feared that, whatever the formidable male heard, the U.S. government would hear in short order. His driver no doubt knew a good many secrets of his own. He might even know what the Americans were doing up at the space station. Straha did not have the nerve to ask him.
At the moment, Straha was catching up on the Race’s computer discussion about the station. A female named Kassquit kept asking leading questions, good ones. She showed unusual understanding of the Big Uglies. The experience Straha had gained in twenty long Tosevite years of living among them made him able to see that.
“Psychologist’s apprentice,” he muttered, looking at the way she described herself. “She ought to be an intermediate researcher by now, heading toward senior. By the Emperor, she would if I were in charge. But those fools up there are dim themselves, so they think everyone else must be, too.”
If I were in charge. Even now, after all these years of exile, the words still leapt to his mind. Atvar had bumbled along, doing the safe, doing the cautious, occasionally doing the stupid. And the Race had got by, as it had got by on Home for a hundred thousand years. Even snout-to-snout with the Big Uglies, the Race had got by. Atvar had made his share-more than his share-of mistakes, but the Tosevites had made their share, too, and disaster hadn’t come. Quite.
“Still,” Straha said, “I would have done better.” His pride was enormous. If only a few more males had gone with him at that climactic meeting after the Soviet Union touched off its first explosive-metal bomb. He would have ousted Atvar, and Tosev 3 would have looked… different.
The telephone rang, distracting him. Tosevite telephones were simple-minded machines, without screens and with only the most limited facilities for anything but voice transmission. Straha often missed the versatile phone he’d had before he defected. So many things he’d taken for granted…
“Hello?” he said in English, and then gave his name.
“I greet you, Shiplord,” a male said. “Ristin speaking. Ullhass and I will be holding another party on Saturday night”-the name of the day was in English-“and hoped you might join us.”
Straha started to decline; he hadn’t had that good a time at Ristin’s earlier gathering. Then he thought that he might meet interesting males there-former prisoners who had thrown in their lot with the American Big Uglies, perhaps even visitors from areas of Tosev 3 the Race ruled. Who could tell what he might learn from them?
And so he said, “I thank you. I believe I will come, yes.”
“I thank you, Shiplord.” Ristin sounded surprised and pleased. “I look forward to seeing you there.”
“I will see you then,” Straha said, and hung up. He didn’t particularly look forward to it. Having committed himself, though, he would go.
His driver greeted the news with something less than rapture. “A party?” the Tosevite said when Straha told him. “I was hoping to watch television that night.”
“You Tosevites did not even have television when you were a hatchling,” Straha told him. “You cannot find it as necessary as the Race does.”
“Who said anything about necessary?” the driver returned. “I enjoy it.” Straha said nothing. He stood and waited and looked at the driver with both eye turrets. The Big Ugly sighed. “It shall be done, Shiplord.”
“Of course it shall,” Straha said smugly. The driver gave him more trouble than a male of the Race with a similar job would have done. Big Uglies-especially American Big Uglies-did not understand the first thing about subordination. But the driver, having made his complaints, would now do what was required of him.
Body paint perfect-he had spent considerable time touching it up-Straha went off to the gathering with something approaching eagerness. Ristin and Ullhass had had good ginger at their house. If nothing else came of the evening, he could always taste till he’d sated himself. He could do that here, too, but the experience was different in company.
“Have a good time,” the driver said as he halted the motorcar in front of the house Ristin and Ullhass shared. “I will keep an eye turret on things out here.” The Race’s idiom sounded grotesque in his mouth, but keep an eye on things, the English usage, would have been equally strange in Straha’s language.
As at the last gathering, Ristin met him in front of the door. The ex-infantrymale’s red-white-and-blue prisoner-of-war body paint was as carefully tended as Straha’s official coat. (Straha chose not to dwell on the fact that, having deserted, he wasn’t entitled to the fancy body paint he still wore.) “I greet you, Shiplord,” Ristin said. “Alcohol and ginger in the kitchen, as before. Help yourself to anything you fancy. Plenty of food, too. Make yourself at home; you are one of the first ones here.”
“I thank you.” Straha went into the kitchen and poured himself a small glass of vodka. Ginger could wait for the time being. He also took some thinly sliced ham, some potato chips, and some of the little, highly salted fish the Big Uglies used to spice up dishes. Like most males of the Race, Straha found them delicious by themselves. And Ullhass and Ristin had laid in another delicacy he did not see often enough: Greek olives. He let out a small, happy hiss. Regardless of what sort of company the night yielded, the food was good.
He carried his plate and glass out into the main room, where Ullhass, who’d been talking with a couple of other males, greeted him. Like Ristin, Ullhass wore American-style body paint instead of what the Race authorized. The other guests were more conventional. They also seemed astonished to see a shiplord there. Then they realized which shiplord Straha had to be, and were astonished again in a different way. Straha had seen that before. He’d heard the whispered, “There is the traitor,” before, too. He sat down and relaxed. In a while, with alcohol and ginger in them, they’d grow less shy of him.
His eye turrets scanned the shelves of books and videos along the walls of the main room. “Some of these are new, are they not?” he asked Ullhass. “New since the conquest fleet left Home, I mean?”
“Yes, Shiplord,” the male answered. “We have had visitors from the colonization fleet here before. We expect some tonight, in fact.”
“I thought you might,” Straha said. “I wonder if, some time or another, I might borrow some of these, to see what they were doing on Home after we went into cold sleep.”
“I would be pleased if you did,” Ullhass told him. That might be more polite than sincere, but Straha intended to take him up on it.
Sure enough, some males and a couple of females from the colonization fleet, in Los Angeles on a trade mission, joined the gathering. They exclaimed in pleasure at the delicacies. Seeing Straha’s body paint, they began to fawn on him till Ristin took one of them aside and spoke quietly. After that, they didn’t seem to know what to make of the self-exiled shiplord.
After a while, he did get into a conversation with one of them, a male whose body paint proclaimed him a foods dealer. “It must be strange living here,” the fellow remarked.
“It is,” Straha agreed. “At times, I feel as out of place as the American space station in orbit not far from the ships of the colonization fleet.”
He threw out the comparison to see if the foo
ds dealer would rise to it. “That thing!” the male said with an indignant hiss. “A big, ugly construction from the Big Uglies.” His mouth fell open in appreciation of his own wit. He went on, “I hear they are building a separate section onto it, well removed from the main body. It will be even uglier than it is now.”
“That is difficult to imagine,” Straha said. It was also something he had not heard before. He wondered if Sam Yeager knew about it. He would have to remember to pass it on to the Tosevite. Maybe Yeager would have some better idea of what it meant than he did.
After drinking some more vodka, he went back into the kitchen to get his first taste of ginger. One of the females from the trade delegation was in there. She had an almost empty glass of vodka or rum in her hand, and was laughing a wide-mouthed, foolish laugh. Pointing to the bowl of ginger on the counter, she said, “In any proper land”-by which she meant any land the Race ruled-“I would be punished for standing even this close to that herb.”
“It is not against the law in this not-empire,” Ristin said. “If you want to taste, go ahead.” He gestured invitingly.
“It smells good.” The female laughed again, even more foolishly than before. “I think I will.” She scooped up about four tastes’ worth. Her tongue flicked in and out, in and out, till the herb was gone. “Oh.” Her voice went soft with wonder. “I did not think it would be like this.”
Remembering his own first taste of ginger, Straha empathized with her-and his hadn’t been nearly so monumental as this one. But then, a moment later, he almost stopped thinking altogether as his scent receptors caught the pheromones the ginger released in the female. Sam Yeager had offered to get him a female who’d tasted ginger. He’d turned the Big Ugly down. What an addled egg he’d been! The long scales of his crest rose.
He straightened into his mating posture as the female bent into hers. Ristin started for her, too, but Straha’s display of crest, outspread fingerclaws, and colorful body paint made the other male yield to him. He took his place behind the female. Their bodies joined. Not much later, he let out a loud, ecstatic hiss.
When he stepped back from the female, Ristin took his place. Other males crowded the kitchen, drawn by the female’s pheromones as surely as Tosevite flying pests were drawn by light. A couple of males got clawed; one got bitten badly enough to draw blood. Straha, satiated, withdrew. He knew he was supposed to tell Sam Yeager something, but for the life of him couldn’t remember what.
Felless was glad she was in the Race’s embassy in Nuremberg when the urge to lay her eggs became overwhelming. She and the Race would have been embarrassed if the urge had struck her while she was interviewing some Deutsch functionary with preposterous ideas. And she might not have-she probably would not have-found a proper place in which to lay had she been out among the Big Uglies.
Inside the embassy, though, Slomikk the science officer had prepared a chamber to which gravid females could go when their time came. It had a deep layer of sand on the floor, and plenty of rocks and dry branches the females could use to conceal their clutches. In the chamber, of course, such concealment didn’t matter. But it would have mattered very much to the Race’s primitive ancestors, and the urge to conceal remained strong.
Slomikk had also given the chamber extra shielding against local background radiation. That wouldn’t have mattered to Felless’ primitive ancestors, but she was glad of it.
When she went inside, she looked around warily to make sure she was alone-another triumph of instinct over reason. The door to the laying chamber clicked shut behind her. She was, as far as she knew, the first female to use it. Few others, here or anywhere, had tasted ginger as early as she had. Few others had mated as early as she had. And few others had become gravid as early as she had.
She scurried over to a corner of the chamber half screened from the doorway by branches and rocks. All her instincts shouted This is the place! to her. She could not have found anywhere better to lay her eggs. She was sure of it, sure in a way that transcended reason. This place felt right.
Splaying her legs apart, she bent forward and scooped a hollow in the sand. No one had ever told her how deep to make the hollow, but she knew: the knowledge was printed on her genes. Had the sand been warmer, she would have dug deeper; had it been cooler, the hole would have been shallower. Again, she knew that at a level far below the conscious.
With an effort, Felless straightened up enough to take a couple of short, spraddle-legged steps. That positioned her cloaca just above the hollow she’d dug. She bore down hard-and in absolute silence. At any other time, in any other place, she would have grunted and hissed with the effort she was making. Not here, not now. Grunts and hisses might have drawn predators to her, and to her clutch.
Her two eggs were far bigger than the waste that usually passed through her cloaca. At first, she did not think they wanted to come at all. She was sure the leading one had got stuck inside her body, and would obstruct everything behind it till she perished. Logically, she knew that was unlikely, but she wasn’t thinking logically at the moment.
Still silent, she bore down again. The pain of making that first egg move inside her threatened to tear her in two from the inside out. And the egg would not move. Maybe it really was impacted. After every mating season back on Home, a handful of females needed surgery to remove impacted eggs. Wouldn’t that be just her luck, to have a medical emergency here in the middle of the Reich? They’d have to take her away then.
I’ll try once more, she thought, and then I’ll shout for a physician. Unlike the arid plains on which the Race had evolved, the laying chamber was equipped with a telephone on the far wall. If Felless needed help, she could get it.
She took a deep, deep breath, as if filling her lung with air could somehow help force the egg out of her and into the sand. And maybe it did, for she felt the accursed thing shift inside her. That made her redouble her effort to force it out. It also redoubled her pain, but somehow she hardly noticed.
The egg came forth and dropped into the sand. With it came a sense of relief and determination that surely sprang from some hormonal source, not the reason on which she usually relied. Still straddling the hollow in the sand, she bore down again.
She had an easier time with the second egg than she’d had with the first. Maybe the first had helped stretch the way for the one that came after it. Before long, two yellowish, speckled eggs-colored to match the sand in which her ancestors laid them-rested in the hollow.
She covered them with the sand she’d scooped aside. Her motions were sure and deft; her body knew how much sand to put over them. Then, on top of the sand, she voided a little. That was as instinctive as the rest of her laying behavior.
As soon as she’d done it, she took several quick steps away from the place where her eggs rested. Any other female of the Race who sought to lay in that spot would be similarly repulsed by the pheromones in the dropping. So would the females of several species of predators back on Home. Females of the Race rarely had to worry about them these days, but evolution didn’t know that.
Felless made her way out toward the door of the laying chamber. Those first few voluntary steps told her how worn she was: her legs didn’t want to bear her weight. She felt empty inside; the eggs growing within her had compressed the rest of the innards, which now seemed to have more room than they knew what to do with.
She wanted to hurry to the refectory, but could not-she couldn’t hurry anywhere. She could only walk slowly, her legs still wide apart. Her cloaca smarted-worse than smarted-from having been stretched far more than it had to open at any other time in her life.
There was ham in the refectory. Felless approved of ham. It was one of the few Tosevite foods of which she did approve. She ate several slices, went back, and ate several more. It seemed to give her ballast. When she came back again for a third helping, the server gave her a dubious look. Voice sardonic, he inquired, “What did you do, just lay four eggs?”
“No, only two,” Felless an
swered, which made the would-be wit retreat in as much embarrassment as the Race had known in retreating from England.
After she’d eaten, Felless went to her quarters. She knew what she wanted to do there, and she did it: she lay down and fell asleep. When at last she woke, she was ravenously hungry. A glance at the chronometer showed why: she’d been asleep for a day and a half.
Still feeling logy and slow, she checked her messages. Only one mattered enough to answer right away. Since I am a male, I had to do my best in preparing the laying chamber, Slomikk had written. Was it satisfactory?
In every respect, she wrote back, and sent the message. The science officer had done as well as any female might have.
After the message went out, one of Felless’ eye turrets slid down to a locked drawer in her desk. In that drawer, Veffani’s warnings notwithstanding, rested a vial with several tastes of ginger. She wanted a taste. She was sure the herb would help ease her post-laying exhaustion. As far as she was concerned, ginger eased everything.
But, with a small hiss of regret, she made herself move away from her desk. She couldn’t be tasting ginger if she was going out in public-and she was going out in public, because she was starving again. She didn’t want to have to pause to mate on the way to the refectory. She didn’t want to pause at all on the way to the refectory, and she didn’t want to get in trouble for using ginger. Most of all, she didn’t want anything, even something so small as a male’s reproductive organ, entering her cloaca.
She hissed again. No matter what common sense told her, she still craved ginger. She had far fewer chances to taste these days than she would have liked. For a while, she’d hoped her craving would ebb because she could safely taste but seldom. That hadn’t happened. If anything, her desire for the herb grew stronger because she had so few chances to satisfy it.
Out into the uncaring world of the embassy she went. Ttomalss was just coming out of his quarters, too-as well she hadn’t tasted. “I greet you, superior female,” he said.
