AllFreeNovel
Share Us
“To keep the Big Uglies who know what they are doing from blowing up any more of them?” Gorppet suggested.
“Because the weather here is better than it is in most places on Tosev 3?” another male added.
Fotsev hissed in annoyance; those were both good answers. In his mind, though, they weren’t good enough. He said, “That madmale Khomeini is still stirring up the local Big Uglies. How much do you want to bet that they manage to wreck a colonization ship or two? They are so addled, a lot of them do not care whether they live or die.”
“It is that business of thinking they will get a happy afterlife if they die fighting us,” Gorppet said. “We have given enough of them the chance to find out whether they are right or wrong lately, and that is truth.”
A male Tosevite came out of his house. Speaking the language of the Race with a rasping, guttural accent, he said, “He is not here. Go away.”
“You do not tell us what to do,” Fotsev said. “We tell you what to do.” The Big Uglies had had many years to figure that out. That they hadn’t was, in Fotsev’s view, a telling proof of their stupidity.
“He is not here,” the Big Ugly repeated. Swathed in his robes, he looked as much like a ragpile as an intelligent being.
“If a Big Ugly says something is not so, that makes it more likely to be so,” Gorppet said.
“You are right, of course,” Fotsev said. “We had better search that house.”
The Big Ugly let out a howl of protest. Fotsev and the other males of the Race ignored it. Fotsev, as orders required, radioed back to the barracks that he and his comrades were entering a building. If they needed help, they would get it in a hurry. If they needed help, they would, very likely, get it too late no matter how fast it arrived. Fotsev chose not to dwell on that.
He pointed his personal weapon at the Tosevite. “Open the door and go in ahead of us,” he ordered-if the local spoke his language, he was going to take advantage of it. “If you have friends in there with guns, you had better tell them not to shoot, or they and we will surely shoot you.”
Against the Race, that would have been a perfect threat. Against a Big Ugly, it was a good one, but not, Fotsev knew, perfect. Too many Big Uglies all over Tosev 3 had proved themselves ready to die for what they reckoned important.
Without another word, the Tosevite turned and threw the door wide. Only after he had gone inside did he turn back and say, “Here, do you see? There is no danger. And the male you seek is not here, as I told you before.”
Fotsev’s mouth fell open in bitter laughter. No danger? He had been in danger every moment since coming down to the surface of Tosev 3-and he had not been in the worst of the fighting. But he never expected to know another instant in which he was not looking now this way, now that, always anxious lest trouble see him before he saw it. The Emperor had called for a Soldiers’ Time, and soldiers he had got. Fotsev did not think even the Emperor had the power to make soldiers back into ordinary males of the Race. He and his fellows had seen too much, done too much, had too much done to them, for that.
Such gloomy reflections did not keep him from doing his job. As he searched the house, he turned one eye turret back toward Gorppet and asked, “Can you imagine living like this?”
“I would rather not,” his friend replied.
No computers. No televisor screens. Not even a radio receiver. No electricity of any sort; the walls held brackets for torches, and were stained black with soot above them. Fotsev saw only one book, printed in the sinuous squiggles of the alphabet used hereabouts. He knew what that book would be, too: the instruction manual for the local superstition. Most of the Big Uglies in this part of Tosev 3 who could read at all had that book and no others.
A couple of female Tosevites-even more thoroughly muffled in cloth wrappings than the males-squealed as males of the Race came into the kitchen. Fotsev looked at the pot bubbling over the fire. He could see the marks of hammering on it; it had been made by hand. The stew inside smelled good. Whatever had gone into it, though, hadn’t been refrigerated beforehand, and Tosevite pests would have been free to walk over it and lay their eggs in it. No wonder so many Big Uglies die sooner than they might, he thought.
His scent receptors caught the tangy odor of ginger in the stew. It was just a cooking spice to the Big Uglies, not a drug. Fotsev pitied them for that, as for many other things. He was no fiend for ginger; he’d seen too many males endanger themselves and their comrades because they couldn’t keep their tongues out of the ginger jar. The herb and duty simply did not mix. But, when he didn’t have to go anywhere or do anything for a while…
He made himself ignore that temptingly delicious scent. A couple of other males seemed to be looking for excuses to get near the stew pot. One of the female Big Uglies hefted a large iron spoon in what was plainly a warning gesture; the Tosevites did not have so much food as to take lightly the idea of losing any.
Fotsev said, “We are not here to steal. We are not here to stick out our tongues. We are here to see if that miserable Khomeini male is anywhere close by. Remember it, or else you will have something else to remember.”
His small group did as thorough a job as it could of ransacking the house. He did not think a male of the Race could have hidden from them, let alone one of the larger Tosevites. They did not discover the hairy Big Ugly who had stirred up so much hatred and unrest against the Race.
“Do you see?” said the Big Ugly who had asserted Khomeini was not there. “I told the truth. And what did I get for it? You have torn my home to pieces.”
“You Tosevites have done plenty to us,” Fotsev replied. “You cannot blame us if we want to keep you from doing more.”
“Cannot blame you?” The Tosevite yipped out the laughter of his kind. “Of course we can blame you. We will blame you for a thousand years. We will blame you for ten thousand years.” He added an emphatic cough.
However emphatic he was, he spoke as if a thousand years were a very long time, ten thousand years an impossibly long time. Even if the years by which they reckoned were twice as long as those of the Race, Fotsev knew perfectly well that that was not so. “Twenty thousand years from now,” he said, “your descendants will be contented subjects of the Empire.”
The Big Ugly’s small, deeply set eyes went as wide as they could. He said several things in his own tongue that did not sound like compliments. Then he returned to the language of the Race: “You are as wrong as you were wrong when you thought the great Khomeini was here.”
“Our descendants will know.” Fotsev raised his voice: “The Big Ugly male who preaches is not in this house. Let us go and see if we can find him elsewhere.” He doubted they would. But they did have some hope of keeping order in Basra, which was also important.
When he and his small group went out into the street, helicopters rumbled overhead. Alarm ran through him-what had the Big U
glies gone and done now? Then he heard and saw killercraft, some roaring low over the city, others high enough to scribe vapor trails in the upper atmosphere.
“What now?” Gorppet demanded. “They have not needed killercraft in this part of Tosev 3 for a long time.”
Before Fotsev could answer, a new and different rumble filled his hearing diaphragms: a great endless roar of cloven air. He had not heard the like for many years. He looked into the sky. Sure enough: what he had thought he would see, he saw. At first, those specks were at the very edge of visibility, but they swelled rapidly. Before long, even if they never came too close to Basra, they swelled enough to let him gauge how truly huge they were.
“Ah,” Gorppet said.
“Yes.” Fotsev watched the globes descend toward bare ground south and west of the town. “Whether in wisdom or not, the colonization fleet begins to land.”
6
David Goldfarb studied the radar screen with something between admiration and horror. He’d known how immense the Lizards’ colonization fleet was, of course; he’d been seeing the echoes of those ships since they first began going into orbit around the Earth. But he’d grown used to them up in high orbit: they made a sort of background noise on his set. When they started dropping out of orbit, one detachment at a time, they actively impinged on his awareness once more.
“Will you look at the bloody things?” he exclaimed as yet another squadron, bound for Poland, passed over his station in Northern Ireland. “How many Lizards have they got packed in each of those ships? Enough so they’ll be stepping on each other’s toes, I shouldn’t wonder.”
