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“Superior female, that is a great truth,” Kazzop said. “It is also a truth few females or males of the colonization fleet ever realize. I am glad you have realized it, and I hope you will cling to the memory here.”
“I shall not forget,” Felless said. And then, as she sometimes did, she thought about the clutch of eggs she’d laid at Nuremberg. “I presume arrangements have been made to bring hatchlings out of the Reich.”
“I believe so, yes,” Kazzop said. “Some of us have to be responsible for them, or the species would perish, after all.”
“I suppose that’s true,” Felless agreed. “I have never felt the urge to any great degree myself. Slomikk, the science officer at the embassy, did a far better job with the hatchlings than I could have. As far as I am concerned, he is welcome to it. Adults, now, adults are interesting. Hatchlings?” After the interrogative cough, she used the negative hand gesture.
“Slomikk is a very capable male in many ways. I have known him for a long time,” Kazzop said. “I can see how he would be good with hatchlings. My own attitude, I confess, is more like yours. You do of course realize that the Tosevites are far more centered on their offspring than we are on ours.”
“I have gathered that, yes.” This time, Felless used the affirmative gesture. “I gather also that the reasons behind it are primarily biological. When the Big Uglies hatch, or rather, when they emerge from the bodies of the females who bear them”-Felless spoke with fastidious disgust-“they are much less developed, much less able to care for themselves, than are our hatchlings. If adult Big Uglies were not genetically programmed to care for them, they would perish in short order.”
“Just so,” Kazzop said. “These strong personal bonds permeate Tosevite society to a degree we can understand only intellectually, not emotionally. They are no small part of what makes the Big Uglies so vengeance-prone and so generally difficult to administer.”
“I have also heard this from Senior Researcher Ttomalss,” Felless said.
“Ah. Yes, I can see how you would have,” Kazzop replied. “Ttomalss is very sound, very sound indeed, when it comes to Tosevite psychology. Why, he might almost be a Big Ugly himself, he understands Tosevites so well.”
Having had her share of problems with Ttomalss, Felless did not care to hear him praised in such extravagant terms. “I have heard this about the Big Uglies,” she repeated, “but I am not altogether convinced it is truth. It seems a very foolish principle on which to organize a society.”
“But the Big Uglies use it constantly,” Kazzop said. “Take the Reich, for example. You must know that its ruling ideology holds the Deutsche to be superior to other Tosevites by reason of their genetics.”
“From every available bit of evidence, this is an ideology unsupported by truth,” Felless pointed out.
“Oh, of course,” the male from the conquest fleet said. “But the existence and popularity of an ideology are truths of their own, independent of the truth-if any-at the yolk of the ideology. And this one asserts that the Deutsche are part of a large family grouping descended from a common ancestor-derived, you see, from Tosevite family patterns.”
“Well, perhaps,” Felless admitted. “This is certainly not an organizing principle we would use for ourselves.”
“No, among us it would be madness,” Kazzop said. “Our matings are nonexclusive, after all. We could not tell family lines even if we wanted to, in most instances. But if you ignore the ways the Big Uglies differ from us, you will never come to a satisfactory understanding of them. That is where Ttomalss’ insights have proved so useful, so valuable.”
“Is it?” Felless said tonelessly.
Before she could add anything less complimentary to Ttomalss, and before Kazzop could further irritate her by praising him, the consul-general spoke over the intercom, his voice filling the entire building: “We must evacuate! We must evacuate! We can delay no longer. I am told negotiations between the Race and the Reich have broken down. It is no longer safe for us to remain here. We must evacuate.”
Kazzop sighed. “So many opportunities for research going to waste.”
“Oh, indeed,” Felless said. “And so many opportunities for getting killed now becoming available.” Kazzop started to answer, but thought better of it. Instead, he went off to see to his packing.
Felless had already seen to hers. She had little in the way of personal belongings, having pruned her possessions before coming from Nuremberg to Marseille. Body paint took up far less room than the wrappings traveling Tosevites had to bring with them. All the data she’d collected in the Greater German Reich had already gone into the Race’s electronic storage system; they were safer than she was. All she really had to worry about was…
She checked. As she’d thought, she had plenty of ginger. She wanted a taste, but restrained herself. She knew she would get in trouble if she started mating with males on the way out of Marseille. I can wait, she thought. I will not have to wait forever. The herb will be there when we get wherever we are going. She’d long since given up the idea of telling herself she would never taste again. It was a lie, as she knew all too well. Telling herself she would wait, though, worked well enough. Sooner or later, she could enjoy the herb she craved.
“Report to the front entrance immediately!” the intercom bellowed, adding a loud emphatic cough. “Repeat, report to the front entrance immediately! Ground transportation to our aircraft is now waiting.”
Armed and uniformed Big Uglies stood guard outside the consulate. Felless had seen their like in Nuremberg. They put her in mind of trained tsiongyu waiting to bite anyone who went where he shouldn’t. One after another, the males and females from the consulate boarded buses and motorcars under their cold, watchful stares.
And a good many males and females of the Race who were not part of the consular staff were also boarding those buses and motorcars. Kazzop said, “If anyone wants to know my opinion, we ought to leave most of those fast-talking cheats and thieves behind. They come to Marseille to buy ginger and to sell drugs to the Big Uglies. Even if an explosive-metal bomb vaporized them all, the Race would be just as well off, and probably better.”
Felless knew she would have felt the same way if she weren’t a ginger taster herself. She said, “Some of them may have legitimate business here. We cannot be sure which ones are criminals and rogues?”
“Few who have only legitimate business come to Marseille,” Kazzop replied. But he said no more than that. The fast-talking males and females got aboard, which made all the vehicles taking the Race out of Marseille more crowded than they would have been otherwise. Deutsch soldiers on motorized cycles that made a dreadful racket escorted the procession to the aircraft waiting at the field outside the city.
Because so many interlopers were fleeing Marseille, the aircraft was as crowded as the ground transportation had been. But it had no trouble taking off. Felless let out a long, happy sigh. “Going back to civilization at last,” she murmured. The male sitting next to her made the affirmative gesture. She laughed. Going off to somewhere I can taste again, too. From looking at that male, she thought he would have agreed with her, but she didn’t try to find out.
Walter Stone looked pleased with himself as he peered out from the control room of the Lewis and Clark. “We’re spreading out.” he said, as if he’d done all the spreading himself, possibly with a manure cart.
Most times, Glen Johnson would have laughed at the senior pilot. Now he just nodded. “The more spread out we are, the more working bases we’ve got on every little chunk of rock near Ceres, the better off we’ll be, because every separate base makes it that much harder for the Lizards to wipe us off the map.”
“We always knew we’d be up against that,” Stone said.
Johnson nodded. “Oh, yeah,” he agreed. “But we didn’t figure we’d be up against it so hard so soon. Stupid goddamn Nazis.”
“Those bastards seem bound and determined to go out in a blaze of glory, don’t they?” Stone said.
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“They’ve sure got a wild hair up their ass about Poland, anyhow, if half of what we hear on the radio is true,” Johnson said. “And I’ll tell you something else: I wouldn’t give you a plug nickel to be aboard the Hermann Goring right now, either.”
Stone’s chuckle was not a happy sound. “Me, neither. Can you say ‘bull’s-eye’? How many missiles do you suppose the Lizards have aimed at that baby?”
Remembering his conversation with Mickey Flynn, Johnson answered, “Enough to do the job-and probably about another ten more besides.”
“That sounds about right,” Stone agreed. “The Race doesn’t like doing things by halves-which is one reason it’s God’s own miracle they didn’t finish the fight back in the Forties.”
“It was a question of who’d finish who,” Johnson said. “They wanted the colonization fleet to have a planet worth landing on.” His chuckle didn’t show much in the way of good humor, either. “So now they can blow things up with the colonists here. Hot damn.”
“Hot damn is right,” Stone said. “Real hot.”
“What worries me is, they might decide to go after us if they’re going after the Hermann Goring,” Johnson said. “In for a penny, in for a pound, you know what I mean? As long as they’ve got a war on their hands…”
“It’d be a lot bigger one if they’re fighting us, too,” Stone said. “Yeah, but if you’re a Lizard, the other question is, how big is too big if you’re already fighting the Nazis?” Johnson said. “The only answer I can think of is, if it’s big enough to blow up the planet, it’s probably too big. Otherwise, who knows?”
