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Nodding at his words, Gromyko said, “We have come through the first crisis since the arrival of the colonization fleet well enough-not perfectly, but well enough. May we likewise weather the storms ahead.”
“We shall not merely weather them. We shall prevail,” Molotov said. “The dialectic demands it.” His colleagues solemnly nodded.
7
Just watching the way some of the newly defrosted colonists strolled around Basra made Fotsev’s scales itch. “By the Emperor, they are asking to get killed,” he burst out. “Some of them will get what they are asking for, too.”
“Truth,” Gorppet said. “I do not know whether they think the Big Uglies are civilized, the way the Rabotevs and Hallessi are, or whether they just figure they are tame, like meat animals.”
“Whatever they think, they are wrong,” Fotsev said. “I am just glad this ‘Allahu akbar!’ business has died down for the time being. If it had not, you would need to be addled to let colonists into Basra at all.”
He watched and listened to a revived female dickering with a Tosevite over an ornately decorated but useless brass ornament. She had not the faintest idea how to bargain, and paid three times the going rate for such a trinket. Gorppet sighed and said, “Everything is going to get more expensive for all of us.”
“So it is,” Fotsev agreed unhappily. “They do not know anything, do they?” One eye turret turned toward a male who was wandering around photographing everything he saw. Fotsev couldn’t imagine why; Basra wasn’t much, even by the minimal standards of Tosev 3.
The male noticed him watching and called, “Is it always so chilly here?”
“Does not know anything,” Fotsev repeated in a low voice. Aloud, he answered, “For Tosev 3, this is good weather. You will never see frozen water falling out of the sky here, for instance.”
“They told us about that,” the colonist said. “I do not believe it.”
“Have you see the videos?” Fotsev demanded.
“I do not care about videos,” the newcomer said. “You can make a video look like anything. That does not mean it is true.” Off he went, camera in hand.
“Ought to send him up to the SSSR,” Gorppet muttered. “He would learn something there-or else he would freeze to death. Either way, he would shut up.”
“That is cruel.” Fotsev thought about it. His mouth fell open in a nasty laugh. “I do wonder how he would make out in that snow stuff up past his head, with the Big Uglies sliding along over it on boards. How would he like that? How much ginger do you suppose he would taste to keep himself from thinking about it?”
“Enough to make him mutiny, by the Emperor,” Gorppet exclaimed.
Fotsev eyed him warily. So did the other males in their small group. The last time he and Fotsev had spoken of mutiny, they’d been alone together. That was how males from the conquest fleet usually spoke of mutiny, when they spoke of it at all. Fotsev didn’t think there was a male who was ignorant of the mutinies some troops had raised against their superiors. Talking much about them was something else. Like a lot of things on Tosev 3-the death factories of the Deutsche sprang to mind-they were usually better ignored.
Gorppet looked defiantly at his comrades. “They happened. We all know they happened.” But he lowered his voice before going on, “Would not surprise me a bit if some of the officers deserved what they got, too.”
“Careful,” Fotsev said, and added an emphatic cough. “If you go around saying things like that, people will say you think like a Tosevite, and that will not do you any good.”
“I do not think like a stinking Big Ugly,” Gorppet said. “I am no snoutcounter. Nobody whose brains are not in his cloaca is a snoutcounter. But I will tell you this: when I have officers over me, I want them to know what they are doing. Is that too much to ask?”
“A lot of the ones who did not know what they were doing are dead now,” Fotsev said. “The Big Uglies took care of them. We did not need mutineers.” The word felt odd coming off his tongue. Back on Home, no one had used it in tens of thousands of years, not unless he was creating a drama about the distant times before the Empire was unified.
Gorppet refused to spit it out and walk away from it. “Truth-the ones who did not know what they were doing are dead now. But how many perfectly good males went to meet the spirits of Emperors past because of their bungling?”
Too many was the answer that hatched in Fotsev’s mind. He didn’t say it. He didn’t want to think about it. It, too, was better left unexamined.
Before Gorppet could say anything more, a male from the colonization fleet came running toward the small group. In the years since coming to Tosev 3, Fotsev had fallen out of practice in reading civilians’ body paint. He thought this fellow was a mid-senior cook, but wasn’t quite sure.
Whatever the male was, he was excited. “You soldiers!” he shouted. “To the rescue! I need you!”
“For what?” Fotsev asked. Turning an eye turret in the direction from which the cook had come, he saw no Tosevites pounding after him with knives and pistols in their hands. By local standards, that meant things couldn’t be too bad.
“For what?” the male from the colonization fleet cried. “For what? Why, back around that corner yonder, one of these native creatures, these untamed native creatures everyone keeps warning us about, is carrying a gun twice the size of the one you have there.”
“Did he shoot you with it?” Gorppet asked. “Does not look that way, on account of you are still here.”
“You do not understand!” the cook said. ?
??A wild native is walking these filthy streets with a gun. Go take it away from him.”
“Did he try to shoot you?” Fotsev asked.
“No, but he could have,” the newly revived colonist answered. “What kind of world is this, anyhow?”
All the males in the small group began to laugh. “This is Tosev 3, that’s what,” Fotsev said. “This is the kind of world where that Big Ugly probably will not try to shoot you unless you give him some sort of reason to want you dead. It’s also the kind of world where, if we try to take his rifle away, everybody in this town will be shrieking ‘Allahu akbar!’ and trying to kill us faster than you can flick your nictitating membrane across your eyeball.”
“You are crazy,” the other male said. His eye turrets swung to look over the males who accompanied Fotsev. “You are all crazy. You have spent too much time with the horrible creatures that live here, and now you are as bad as they are.” Hissing in disgust, he stalked off, tailstump rigid with fury.
“Tell you what,” Gorppet said. “If I had a choice, I would sooner act like a Big Ugly than like him.”
No one argued with him. The patrol made its way through Basra. Fotsev turned at the corner around which the excitable cook had come. Sure enough, there stood a Big Ugly with a rifle on his back. He was eating some of the fruits that grew on the local trees that looked like dusting tools. When he saw the soldiers of the Race, he bobbed his head up and down in a Tosevite gesture of greeting. Fotsev showed his empty right hand, palm out. That motion, unlike most, meant about the same thing to the Big Uglies as it did to the Race.
As Fotsev walked on, he did turn an eye turret back toward the Big Ugly to make sure he didn’t have anything treacherous in mind. The Tosevite went on eating the small brown fruits-they looked rather like turds, but tasted sweet-and spitting the seeds into the dust of the street.
“Oh, he is dangerous, all right,” Gorppet said, and laughed again.
