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That made Gorppet laugh again. Then he wondered why he was laughing. Betvoss had probably spoken a truth. Gorppet said, “The other thing being on the edge of wanting to mate all the time does to me is, it makes me mean. I want to claw something or bite something or shoot something.”
“Plenty of Big Uglies around,” Betvoss said. “Go ahead. I will not mind. None of your other squadmales will mind.” He lowered his voice a little. “Of course, that could be ginger talking, too.”
And he was right again. Twice in one day, Gorppet thought Who would have imagined it? Wanting to taste ginger made a male-or a female-jumpy. And when a male tasted ginger, he did things before he finished thinking about them, which also led to trouble.
Biting a Big Ugly, or even shooting one, felt tempting right now. After the riots and uprisings he’d helped quell, after the hatred the local Tosevites showed whenever they had to pay to enter their houses of superstition, he wished he could go off somewhere that had no Tosevites for a little while-say, for the next couple of hundred years.
A mechanized combat vehicle moved slowly and carefully through the market square. It had speakers mounted above it. Through the speakers came the recorded voice of a Tosevite. His voice boomed forth in the local language: “Come reverence the spirits of Emperors past! Next offering of reverence in one hour’s time. Come reverence the spirits…”
“Be ready,” Gorppet warned the males in his squad.
The warning was hardly necessary. Whenever the Big Uglies heard the recording, they pelted the combat vehicle with rocks and fruit and rotten eggs. Sometimes they did worse than that: sometimes they started shooting. That didn’t happen so often as it had, though, not when the Race hit back so hard.
“I wonder where the Big Ugly who made that recording is hiding,” Gorppet said. “If his fellow Tosevites ever find out who he is, his life expectancy is about as long as an azwaca rib’s at a feast.”
“What I wonder is why we bother with the combat vehicle,” Betvoss said. “How many Big Uglies come to reverence the spirits of Emperors past in this part of the world? How many of them live to come give reverence more than once?”
“Some,” Gorppet said. “Not many. Not enough. But our superiors say we have to keep trying.”
No sooner were the words out of his mouth than the radio on his belt hissed for attention. “Report to the shrine to the spirits of Emperors past,” said the male on the other end of the line. “We have heard there may be disturbances above and beyond the ordinary there today.”
“It shall be done, superior sir,” Gorppet said resignedly, and passed the order on to his squad. “We have to keep trying,” he repeated.
“Waste of time,” Betvoss grumbled. “Liable to be a waste of us, too.” But he obeyed Gorppet, as Gorppet had obeyed the dispatching officer. Gorppet wondered what would have happened had he told that officer he was sick of Big Uglies and would sooner go to Australia. He sighed. Either he needed another taste of ginger or his wits were addling from all the tastes he’d already had.
The shrine for giving reverence to the spirits of Emperors past was a bit of Home dropped down not far from the center of Baghdad: a plain cube of a building, looking achingly familiar against the masonry and mud brick of local Tosevite architecture. But the razor-wire perimeter around the building did not come from Home; it was an effort to keep hostile Big Uglies far enough away so they couldn’t use truly large weapons against the building.
Despite what Betvoss had said, a few Tosevites had passed through the perimeter and were heading toward the shrine when the squad got there. Many more, though, crowded up against the wire, aiming curses and abuse and occasional bits of offal at those who presumed to follow the ways of the Empire instead of their own preposterous superstition. It was, in fact, a pretty typical day.
“I wonder what the males heard to make them think there would be extra trouble here,” Gorppet said.
“For all we know, it may be a drill,” Betvoss said. “They like to keep us half addled all the time.”
“It could be,” Gorppet agreed. But, though he didn’t waste time arguing with Betvoss, he doubted it. A lot of males had come from all over Baghdad and were prowling along the perimeter. It didn’t have the feeling of a drill, though Gorppet supposed that could have been intentional on the part of the officers who’d called it.
He watched not only the males from the conquest fleet but also the Big Uglies. He wanted to have every chance he could of shooting first if this wasn’t a drill-or even if it was and things got out of hand.
His squadmales were doing the same. “All these cursed Tosevites look alike,” Betvoss complained.
“Not alike, exactly,” Gorppet said. “But certainly similar.” Males of the Race had always had trouble telling one Tosevite from another. That male with the gray hair growing out of his face, for instance, looked a good deal like the badly wanted preacher named Khomeini, but how likely was he to be the fearsome Big Ugly male in fact?
Gorppet stopped. That male looked very much indeed like Khomeini. Gorppet had a photograph of Khomeini with him. He examined it, then turned an eye turret toward the male. No, he thought. Impossible. But the higher-ups had had a warning of trouble, and so.
He hissed to his squadmales-not a hiss with words in it, in case any nearby Big Uglies understood the Race’s language, but one to draw their attention. Once he had it, he gathered the males together so he could speak in a low voice: “By the Emperor, I think that fellow there in the black robe with the white head rag is the accursed Khomeini. We are going to seize him. We are going to hustle him into the shrine. We are going to shoot any Tosevite who tries to stop us. Have you got that?”
“What if that is not the fearsome Khomeini?” Betvoss asked.
“Then our superiors will turn him loose,” Gorppet answered. “But if it is, we are all heroes, every one of us, and we do the Race a great service by stopping his poison. Now come on. Back me.”
After making sure he had a round in the chamber of his rifle and the safety off, he hurried up to the gray-whiskered Big Ugly. In Arabic, he said, “You are under arrest. Come with me.”
“What?” The tufts of hair above the Tosevite’s eyes were still black. They leaped upward, a sign of surprise or alarm. “I have done nothing.”
“You will be questioned. If you have done nothing, you will be freed.” Gorppet went back to the language of the Race: “Seize him-and then on to the entranceway.”
Before the Big Ugly could move, the squad of soldiers swarmed over him. Though he was bigger than any of them, together they hustled him toward the guarded entry. A couple of Tosevites who’d been with him shouted and made as if to try to rescue him, but Gorppet and the other males pointed their rifles at them and they fell back.
“What is this?” asked a trooper at the entranceway.
“I think it is Khomeini,” Gorppet answered, which made the other male’s eye turrets jerk in surprise. “We will find out. This building is secure, not so?”
“Considering what it is and where it is, it had better be,” the trooper said. “Everyone in this city wants to destroy it, but it is the most secure building here.”
Gorppet waited to hear no more. “Come on, you,” he said in Arabic, and gestured to the males in his squad to get the Big Ugly moving again. As they hurried him down the covered way toward the shrine, cries of fury rang out among the Tosevites beyond the razor-wire barriers. They made Gorppet begin to hope he really had seized Khomeini. Would the Tosevites have got so excited for anyone less?
The shrine, Gorppet discovered, had an arm
ored door. In spite of that, peace flowed through him when he walked in and saw the tiny holographic images of all the Emperors who had reigned since the unification of Home. The interior was Home, or felt like it, and the presence of a few Tosevites didn’t change that.
A male came hurrying up to the squad. “You should not enter this place bearing weapons,” he said, as if to a half-trained hatchling.
“We would not have, superior sir, did I not believe this Big Ugly here to be the agitator named Khomeini,” Gorppet replied.
As it had at the entrance to the perimeter around the shrine, that name worked wonders. Several males came hurrying forward. They took charge of the Tosevite. Very much as an afterthought, one of them added, “You soldiers wait here while we attempt to identify this fellow.”
“It shall be done, superior sir,” Gorppet said. His eye turrets flicked from one Emperor’s image to another. So many Emperors to enfold and cherish his spirit when it finally left his body.
And then the males came back, far more excited than they should have been inside the shrine. “It is!” one of them exclaimed. “We were almost certain ourselves, and then one of our Tosevite converts positively identified him for us. It is Khomeini.” Awe of a new and different sort washed over Gorppet. He’d never been a hero before, nor thought he wanted to be. Now he discovered it wasn’t so bad.
Over the weeks since fleeing from Peking, Liu Han had discovered how much she’d forgotten about farming and about farming villages since leaving her own village near Hankow. What she’d forgotten mostly involved two things: how uncomfortable village life was and how much work it involved.
She’d thought she remembered, but she was wrong. Memory had failed to warn her about how exhausted she would be, staggering home from the fields at sunset every evening. Maybe that was because they grew wheat and barley and millet in these northern lands, not the rice that had sprung up in the paddies around her old village. Maybe, but she doubted it. More had to do with memory’s being like opium and blurring how bad things had been. And more still was her being twice as old as she had been back then. Things she could have done easily in those days left her stiff and sore and aching now.
