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If she went walking with a man, they might soon find something else to do. Liu Han knew that perfectly well. If Liu Mei didn’t, it wasn’t because Liu Han hadn’t told her. “Who is he?” Liu Han snapped.
Liu Mei’s eyes blazed in her expressionless face. “Whoever he is, he’s none of your business,” she said. “Are you going to be a bourgeois mother worrying about a proper match? Or are you going to be an upper-class mother from the old days and bind up my feet till I walk like this?” She took several tiny, swaying, mocking steps. Her face might not show expression, but her body did.
“I am your mother, and I will thank you to remember it,” Liu Han said.
“Treat me like a comrade, if you please, and not the way the keeper in a traveling beast show treats his animals,” Liu Mei said.
“Is that what you think I do?” Liu Han demanded, and her daughter nodded. She threw her hands in the air. “All I want is for you to be happy and safe and sensible, and you always have-till now.”
“All you want is to keep me in a cage!” Liu Han shouted, and tears streamed down her face. She stormed off. Liu Han stared after her, then started to cry herself. Everything she’d worked for lay in ruins around her.
18
Much as he would have liked to, Straha hadn’t passed on to the Race what he’d learned about the hatchlings Sam Yeager was raising. In an odd sort of way, he was loyal to the United States. After all, if this not-empire hadn’t taken him in, Atvar would have given him a very hard time. And Yeager was a friend, even if he was a Big Ugly.
But those weren’t the main reasons he’d kept quiet about that business. His main concern was that he wouldn’t get the reward he most desired: a return to the society of the Race. After all, his own kind had done the same sort of thing with a Tosevite hatchling. How could they condemn the Americans without condemning themselves at the same time?
His driver walked into the kitchen. “I greet you, Shiplord,” he said casually. “Looks as if the sun is finally coming out.”
“You knew!” Straha said angrily. “You knew all along, and you said not a thing-not a single, solitary thing.”
Had the Big Ugly asked what he was talking about, Straha thought he would have taken a bite out of him. But his driver didn’t bother affecting innocence. “I was following the orders of my superiors, Shiplord. They wanted this secret kept, and so it was. I am surprised Sam Yeager obtained permission to have you visit his home, as a matter of fact.”
“How do you know he even asked permission?” Straha asked. “I do not know that he did,” the driver answered. “I know that he should have. If he did not, it will be one more black mark in the book against him.”
That was an English idiom, translated literally into the language of the Race. Straha had little trouble figuring out what it meant. He said, “Yeager is a good officer. He should not have difficulties with his superiors.”
“If he obeyed orders, if he did as he was told to do, he would not have difficulties with his superiors,” the Big Ugly said. Then he let out a couple of grunts of Tosevite laughter. “Of course, if he acted in that fashion, he might not be such a good officer, either.”
Straha would have reckoned a perfectly obedient officer a good officer. Or would he? He thought of himself as a good officer, and yet he was one of the most disobedient males in the history of the Race. This planet corrupts everyone, he thought.
His driver dropped into English. “You know what Yeager’s problem is, Shiplord? Yeager’s got too goddamn much initiative, that’s what.”
“Initiative is desirable, isn’t it?” Straha switched to English, too.
“Yes and no,” his driver replied. “Yes if you’re going after what your superiors tell you to go after. No if you go off on your own. Especially no if you keep sticking your nose into places they told you to stay away from.”
“Yeager does this?” Straha made a mental leap of his own. “Is that why he has had trouble with Tosevites trying to harm him and his family?”
“I really couldn’t tell you anything about that,” his driver said. “It might just be a run of bad luck, you know.”
Like any male of the Race, Straha read Big Uglies imperfectly. But he’d been associating with this one for a longtime. He had a fair notion when the Tosevite tried to lie by misdirection. This felt like one of those times.
He started to press his driver, to try to learn more from him: for he was sure the Big Ugly knew more. Instead, though, he left unuttered the questions he might have asked. He doubted the driver would have told him much; the Tosevite’s first loyalty was to his American superiors, not to Straha. And if word got back to them that Straha had been asking such questions, Sam Yeager might land in more trouble still. The exiled shiplord didn’t want that.
Maybe the Big Ugly had expected Straha to ask such questions. Eyeing him, the Tosevite asked, “Is there anything else, Shiplord?” He returned to the language of the Race, and with it to formality.
“No, nothing else,” Straha replied, also in his own language. “How you Big Uglies conduct your affairs is of no great consequence to me.”
That made his driver relax. Males of the Race-and females, too, these days-had a reputation among the Big Uglies for being contemptuous of everything pertaining to Tosev 3. Straha was contemptuous of a great deal about the Tosevites, but not of everything, and not about all Big Uglies. But he used the reputation to his own advantage here, to conceal a genuine interest.
With a laugh, his driver said, “After all, it’s not as if Yeager were a male of the Race,”
“It certainly is not,” Straha agreed. The driver nodded and went off making the small, somewhat musical noises the Big Uglies called whistling. That was a sign he was amused and unconcerned and happy.
Or maybe he wanted Straha to think it was a sign he was amused and unconcerned and happy. Big Uglies could be devious creatures. Straha knew from experience that his driver could be a devious creature. If he were to pick up the telephone now and call Sam Yeager, he had no doubt the driver would listen to every word he said. He wouldn’t have been surprised if the Americans listened to every word he said whenever he picked up the telephone.
He waited till he was using the limited access to the Race’s computer network a fellow male in exile had illicitly obtained for him before sending an electronic message to Maargyees, the false name Sam Yeager used on the network. In case you did not know it, your own curiosity has amused curiosity in others, he wrote. Yeager was a clever male. He would have no trouble figuring out what that meant.
Having written the message, Straha erased it from his own computer. It would, of course, remain in the network’s storage system, but the Americans didn’t have access to that. He hoped with all his liver that the Americans didn’t have access to it, anyhow. They’d known next to nothing about computers when the Race first came to Tosev 3. They knew a great deal more than that these days, worse luck.
The Race had phased in computers ever so gradually in the couple of millennia following the unification of Home. Devices with such important influence on society had to be phased in gradually, to minimize disruption. That was the way the Race looked at things, anyhow. The Big Uglies had other ideas.
Straha didn’t suppose he should have been surprised. When the Tosevites found a new technology, no matter what it was, they
always felt they had to do as much with it as they could as soon as they could. Even if the troubles that would hatch as a result of rapid change were obvious, they went ahead all the same. They’d done as much with computers in a generation as the Race had in centuries.
Not all American Tosevites had the education they needed to use computer systems to best advantage-or at all. That didn’t deter the Big Uglies. Those of them who could use the new technology did… and flourished. Those who didn’t might as well have stayed inside their eggshells. Their failure, their falling behind, bothered the others not at all.
And if upheaval followed because some Tosevites gained more advantages than others-they didn’t seem to care. That struck Straha as madness, but it was as much dogma to the Americans as reverencing the spirits of Emperors past was to the Race. Straha knew an American saying: look out for yourself and let the devil take the hindmost. To him, that was individualism to the point of addlement, survival of the fittest made into a law of society. To the Americans, it seemed common sense. Those who succeeded in the United States succeeded spectacularly. Those who failed-and there were, by the nature of things, many who did-failed the same way.
“And, all things considered, I am one of the ones who have succeeded,” Straha murmured. He had less than he would have had back on Home, but he had everything with which the Big Uglies could supply him.
The sliding glass door at the back of the house was open. The spring air was chillier than he found ideal, but no worse than a brisk winter’s day back on Home. He didn’t even bother bundling up before he pushed open the sliding screen that kept little flying and crawling pests out of the house and walked out into the backyard.
He looked around with a certain amount of pride. Bare ground and sand and succulents, some smooth, some spiky, put him in mind of a landscape back on Home, though details differed. Here, even more than inside — the house, he’d shaped things to suit himself. Inside, the place was built to suit Tosevites, and many of the devices he used every day-telephone, stove, refrigerator-were perforce of American manufacture, different from and usually inferior to their equivalents on his native world. They always reminded him what an alien he was.
