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His experts had run projections. He’d run secret projections of his own, too. They differed in detail, depending on just what assumptions went into them. The broad outlines, though, were startlingly, dismayingly, similar: before too long, the Big Uglies’ technology would be more advanced than that of the Race.
Most of the projections said the Race would still enjoy a breathing space after that: the Big Uglies would need a while to realize what they’d achieved. Sooner or later, though, they would. They couldn’t help it.
What would happen then? There too, the projections differed. Nothing good for the Race, though, was the theme that ran through them.
And I can’t even destroy those not-empires, Atvar thought, not without destroying the whole planet, which means destroying the colonization fleet. One of the ideas haunting him was that such destruction might be worthwhile in spite of the cost: it might mean saving the Race as a whole.
Pshing pointed at something moving across the barren countryside, for which distraction Atvar was thoroughly glad. “What are those things, Exalted Fleetlord?” his adjutant asked.
“Tosevite life of some sort, I suppose,” Atvar answered. “If you have a monocular, you will be able to tell more.”
“I do, Exalted Fleetlord.” Pshing took the magnifier from a belt pouch, turned one eye turret toward the distant creatures, and raised the magnifying lenses. He let out a startled hiss. “How peculiar! Are those Big Uglies? No, they cannot be. But still…” He gave Atvar the monocular. “See for yourself, Exalted Fleetlord.”
“I will.” Atvar brought the little tube up to one of his own eyes. The creatures on the plain seemed to leap much closer. “They are funny-looking.”
“They certainly are.” Pshing added an emphatic cough. “I thought almost all Tosevite life forms except the Big Uglies themselves were quadrupeds, not bipeds.”
“I seem to recall reading that this island continent had an ecosystem long isolated from others on Tosev 3,” Atvar said. “Maybe that accounts for these peculiar things. They look almost like a cross between the Big Uglies and ourselves, don’t they? — though their tails are long.”
Just then, something must have startled the Tosevite creatures, which went bounding off at a very respectable turn of speed. “Well!” Pshing said. “I did not think they could move like that.”
“A lot of Tosevite creatures are deceptive, all the way up to the Big Uglies,” Atvar said. Suddenly, one of the animals crashed to the ground and lay kicking. The fleetlord could not see why until a Big Ugly emerged from concealment and ran over to the downed creature. “Will you look at that!” Atvar exclaimed, and passed the monocular back to his adjutant.
“Yesss.” Pshing drew the word out into a hiss of his own. “Not all Tosevites have moved forward from where the probe found them, have they?”
“By no means,” Atvar answered. The Big Ugly he’d been watching was naked, his dark brown hide filthy and daubed here and there with mud of various colors.
“He is bashing in the animal’s head with a rock,” Pshing reported. “I think his knife is metal, though. Looking at him, I do not think he could have made it for himself.”
“Perhaps he got it in trade from the more advanced Australians,” Atvar said, “the ones whose principal cities we bombed so as to take possession of this continent.”
“It could be so,” Pshing agreed. “That strikes me as more likely than his having made it for himself.”
“Speak to the folk hereabout-I want him captured and brought before me,” Atvar said on sudden, almost Tosevite-like, impulse.
“It shall be done, Exalted Fleetlord.” Pshing got out his radio and spoke into it.
It was done, but only barely. When the Tosevite saw males and females of the Race approaching, he disappeared. That was how it seemed to Atvar, at any rate. One instant he was there in plain sight, running away; the next, he might have vanished off the face of Tosev 3.
His pursuers caught him nonetheless. Pshing, who was listening to their calls back and forth, said, “One of them has an infrared detector, Exalted Fleetlord. Without it, I do not think they could have found him.”
The Big Ugly kept struggling for all he was worth. The males and females of the Race had to tie him before they could bring him in to Atvar. By then, the fleetlord wished he hadn’t put them to so much trouble. To avoid disappointing them, he didn’t show it, but praised them extravagantly.
Shouts poured from the Tosevite’s throat, in whatever unintelligible language he spoke and then, to Atvar’s surprise, in English, a speech he recognized even if he’d never learned to use it. Pshing had no trouble finding a male from the conquest fleet who understood it. The fellow said, “Exalted Fleetlord, he says you mate with your own mother and also says you mate at an inappropriate orifice-the Big Uglies have more than we do, you know. He intends these as insults.”
“Ask him how he lives in this country,” Atvar said.
“It shall be done,” the male replied, and began speaking English. The dark-skinned Big Ugly kept yelling the same phrases he had used before. After a while, the male turned back to Atvar, saying, “Exalted Fleetlord, I do not think he knows any more of this language than these few words.”
“How strange,” Atvar murmured. “
Why would anyone go to the trouble of learning insults in a language without learning any more in it? Having to try to understand more than one speech is bad enough as it is.” The language of the Race united three worlds, and had for time out of mind. Tosev 3 had even more languages than it had had empires and not-empires before the Race arrived.
“What shall we do with him, Exalted Fleetlord?” Pshing asked, pointing to the Tosevite. “He is not going to tell us anything, I don’t think.”
“He is also not going to harm us, for which spirits of Emperors past be praised,” Atvar said. “He cannot harm us, being too ignorant-and how I wish that were true of every member of his species.” He turned to the male who spoke English. “Take him well away from this starship. Give him a knife of ours, to make up for the one he no longer has, and let him go.”
“It shall be done, Exalted Fleetlord,” the male replied. “May I give him some food, too? We have had some of these savages come around begging before; they mostly know how to pull the lid off a tin.”
“Yes, do that,” Atvar said. “Otherwise, he might come back to rob rather than to beg. I want the Big Uglies to be dependent on us; I do not want them making worse nuisances of themselves than they have already.”
“Any Big Ugly is-or can be-a nuisance,” the male said. He and the ones who had brought the Tosevite to Atvar got him up on his feet in spite of his hoarse shouts and his efforts to bite and kick. As they led him away, he voided liquid waste.
“Disgusting,” said Pshing, who was fastidious even for a male of the Race.
“Big Uglies commonly are,” Atvar said. “Some, though, are disgusting and dangerous. This one, fortunately, is not.”
“Even with the colonization fleet, will we be able to do all we want on Tosev 3?” Pshing asked. “The natives will outnumber us to a far greater extent than anyone knew they would when we left Home.”
“I understand that, but we cannot expect more colonists for many years,” Atvar said. “And, with the Big Uglies so thick on the ground most places, too large a colonization might exceed the carrying capacity of the land.”
