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“Good thing there is no female close by right now,” Fotsev said. “We would fight each other to get at her, and nobody would care what the Big Uglies are doing.”
Gorppet turned one eye turret toward him. “I would not mind fighting now, even if I cannot get my cloaca next to a female’s. Smelling the pheromones is plenty to put me on the edge of brawling.” A couple of other males made the hand gesture of agreement.
“I feel the same way,” Fotsev said, “but may the spirits of Emperors past turn their backs on me if I let the Tosevites know. They would laugh themselves silly, the miserable creatures, and then start plotting even more mischief than they get into already.”
He swung his own eye turrets from one male in the small group to another, defying his comrades to argue with him. None of them did. None of them would meet his glance, either. They might not be happy about agreeing with him, but they couldn’t argue.
“And another thing,” he said. “You want to be careful about sticking your own tongues too far into the ginger jar these days. Smelling females in heat makes us twitchy enough all by itself. Pile the herb on top of that and you have trouble waiting to happen.”
“Pile the herb on top of anything that puts too much strain on a male and you have trouble waiting to happen,” Gorppet said. His eye turrets turned every which way, to make sure no one outside the patrol, whether Big Ugly or male of the Race, could overhear. In a low voice, he went on, “That is what happened when things went bad up in the SSSR, or so they say.”
Fotsev wished he wouldn’t have mentioned mutiny, even obliquely. “Put ginger and females’ pheromones together and the trouble they had up in the SSSR is liable to look like hatchlings’ games,” he said.
Again, no one disagreed with him. The problem was, whenever trouble came, he wanted to taste ginger so he wouldn’t have to think about it any more. But that kind of not thinking was what could start troubles with females involved. He saw as much, and saw it clearly. He didn’t see what to do about it.
And then, abruptly, he stopped worrying about it. Along with the usual stenches of Basra, the breeze wafted to his scent receptors the tantalizing odor of a female in season. This was no distant, diffuse scent. It came from somewhere close by-only a few alleys over, if he was any judge. He let out a soft hiss. His head came up. So did the erectile scales on top of it. His mouth opened, not in a laugh but to let more air stream past his tongue and the scent receptors on it.
He wasn’t the only male to catch the scent, either. His comrades’ crests were rising, too. All of them tasted the breeze, ready to follow where it led them. Now they looked warily at one another, each fearing a sudden attack to keep him from getting what he craved.
Gorppet pointed. “That way,” he said, his voice rough.
“We all go together,” Fotsev said. “And we all be careful of what we do. Fighting with teeth and claws is one thing. Fighting with rifles and grenades, though, is a different business.”
Back on Home, they wouldn’t have had to worry about it. Back on Home, weapons were few and far between. No one needed them there, and no one except police and a few criminals could get hold of anything more lethal than knives. Fotsev wished Tosev 3 were like that. But it wasn’t. A male without weapons here was by the nature of things a male in danger. With females in heat around, however, a male with weapons was also likely to be a male in danger… from his own kind, similarly armed.
Its members still eyeing one another, the patrol picked its way through the maze of narrow, crowded lanes toward the females. Before long, they did not need their scent receptors alone to guide them. Shouts from a crowd of Big Uglies ahead told them they had to be getting close. “You speak some of this language,” Fotsev said to Gorppet. “What are they yelling?”
“For someone to pour water over them,” Gorppet answered. “That’s what they do when their domestic animals-you know, the yapping ones-couple in the street. So somebody’s mating up there.”
“Truth.” The rage and jealousy surging through Fotsev shocked him. He wanted that female, wherever she was, and he wanted her this instant. Of itself, his posture grew more upright. He noticed his fellow males were not leaning so far forward as they usually did.
He and the rest of the patrol came round the last corner just as the male finished with the female. The fellow, whose body paint proclaimed him an accountant, was from the colonization fleet. Instead of challenging the newcomers, he turned and skittered off, forcing his way through the crowd of laughing, jeering Tosevites. He must have fully sated himself, then.
The female remained in the mating posture. Her head near the ground, she spoke in a small, bewildered voice: “But I was not coming into heat. By the Emperor, I was not.” She cast down her eyes, not that they could look much farther down than they were already.
“You are in heat now,” Fotsev said. “We can smell it.” The female did not disagree. She remained in place, waiting for him and his comrades. The odor coming from her inflamed him. He clung to coherent thought as best he could. “We shall take turns,” he declared. “And those who are not mating shall stay alert, to make sure these Tosevites here cause no trouble.”
He knew about the new regulations about coupling where Big Uglies could watch, but knowing and remembering were two different things. One after another, he and the other males of the patrol coupled with the female, who remained compliant but perplexed. But, by the time each of them had mated once, the female said, “Enough,” and straightened up. With her pheromones still stimulating him, Fotsev would have liked to couple again. She showed no interest in further mating, though. “I feel so strange,” she muttered. “Just a little while ago, I was happy as I could be, as happy as I have ever been. Now… Now I just want to sink into the ground.”
“Sounds like she has been tasting ginger,” Shaspwikk observed.
“It does,” Fotsev agreed. “That would account for her coming into heat all at once, too.”
“I have not tasted ginger, and you need not talk about me as if I were not here,” the female said sharply. “That other male, wherever he went, the accountant, tried raising his scales at me a while ago. He said he smelled pheromones. Well, he did not smell mine. I got something to drink from one of these ridiculous creatures here. He asked for a sip. I gave him the cup. When he gave it back to me and I drank, my season came upon me without warning. But you know about that.”
“Yes, we know about that.” Now that he had mated once, Fotsev’s mind was working again, after a fashion. “Where is this cup?”
“Right there.” The female pointed.
Fotsev picked it up from the ground. He inhaled sharply, drawing air over his scent receptors. “I thought so,” he said. “The drink in here has ginger in it.”
Thinking along with him, Gorppet exclaimed, “That other male must have slipped it in there. He wanted to mate because he could smell pheromones off in the distance, the same as we did, b
ut this female was not in season, so he got her heated whether she wanted to be or not. What a sneaky fellow!” His emphatic cough said he half admired the vanished accountant.
“He did that to me? He deliberately did that to me?” The female did not sound admiring. She sounded furious, outraged. “He used this herb to make me do something I had no intention of doing, something I could not have done had he not given me the herb to bring me into my season. I do not even know his name, but curse him and all his ancestors from the first egg they hatched out of.”
“Back on Home, this could not have happened,” Fotsev said slowly. “Back on Home, females all come into their season at about the same time, and there are plenty to go around for the males. It is not like that here on Tosev 3.”
“I do not like the way it is here on Tosev 3,” the female said with an emphatic cough of her own. “He used me without my consent. He coupled with me against what would have been my will. That is not right.”
“I agree-that is not right,” Fotsev said. “I think that male committed a crime. I think he committed a new crime, a crime that would have been impossible back on Home. This is a crime that could only happen on Tosev 3.”
“What do we do about it?” Gorppet asked. “If female pheromones keep lingering in the air, more males will think to use ginger to get what they want from females who would not otherwise be ready to give it to them.”
“Truth.” Fotsev took his radio off his belt. “For now, we can only report it-report it and hope our superiors have better ideas than we do.” Even as he began to speak, he could see that neither Gorppet nor the female who’d been fed ginger thought the authorities would. He didn’t think so, either, but did his best not to show it.
Shpaaka looked out at his human students at the Russie Medical College. Along with the rest of the class, Reuven Russie stared at the male Lizard. He poised his pen to record whatever wisdom Shpaaka saw fit to dispense this morning.
