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At last, when his weight felt about the way it should have, the Lizard guides stopped using stairs and led his father and him along a corridor to a chamber with an open doorway. “The female Kassquit awaits within,” he said.
“We thank you,” Jonathan’s father replied in the language of the Race. He dropped back into English for Jonathan: “Let’s do it.”
“Okay, Dad,” Jonathan said, also in English. “You go in first-that’s how they do things.” He was pleased he remembered some of what he’d learned.
“Right.” His father squared his shoulders and entered the chamber. As Jonathan followed, his father went back to the language of the Race: “I greet you, superior female. I am Sam Yeager; here with me is my hatchling, Jonathan Yeager.”
“I greet you, superior female,” Jonathan echoed. He had to work to hold his voice steady, but thought he managed. He’d known Kassquit would be naked, but knowing and experiencing were two different things, especially since she wasn’t just naked but shaved, not only her head but on all of her body.
“I greet you,” she said. She took her nudity altogether for granted. Her face showed nothing of what she thought. “How strange to make the acquaintance of my own biological kind at last.” She pointed to the body paint on Jonathan’s chest. “I see you are now wearing the marking of a psychological researcher’s assistant.”
“Yes,” Jonathan answered. “It is a true marking, for I assist my father here.” He tried to eye her paint without eyeing her breasts. “It is not much different from yours.”
“It is an accurate marking,” Kassquit said. “But it is not a true marking, for the Race did not give it to you.” She was as fussily precise as any real Lizard Jonathan had ever met.
His father asked, “How do you feel about meeting real Big Uglies at last?”
“Sore,” Kassquit replied at once. Jonathan was wondering whether he’d understood her correctly when she went on, “I had to be immunized against many Tosevite diseases before taking the risk of physical contact.”
“Ah,” Sam Yeager said. “Yes, you wrote to me about that. I respect your courage. I hope we bring you no diseases.”
“So do I,” Kassquit said. “I have never known illness, and have no desire to make its acquaintance.”
Jonathan gaped. He couldn’t help himself. She’d never been sick a day in her life? That hardly seemed possible. He wondered what his father was thinking-his father who’d almost died in the influenza epidemic of 1918, and who complained these days that colds hung on a lot longer than they had when he was younger. Not wanting to contemplate his father’s mortality, he wondered if Mickey and Donald would grow up disease-free, too, because they wouldn’t meet any adult Lizards. He also wondered how many diseases Lizards had. They had doctors-he knew that much.
Kassquit said, “And what do you Big Uglies think of me?”
“You are an attractive young female,” Jonathan’s father answered. Jonathan would have agreed with that. His generation was a lot more relaxed about showing skin than his old man’s had been, but not so altogether oblivious about its even being an issue as Kassquit was. He had to work to keep his eyes on her face, not her breasts or the shaved place between her legs. His father went on, “The biggest differences between you and a wild Big Ugly are that you shave all your hair and that your face does not move much.”
“Your hatchling also shaves his hair,” Kassquit said.
“Uh-not as much of it as you do,” Jonathan said, and felt his face heat in a way that had nothing to do with the temperature of the chamber. “I try to look like a member of the Race.”
“So do I-with rather more reason than you.” Kassquit could be tart when she chose. She went on, “As for my face, my caregiver, Ttomalss, speculates that I needed to see moving faces when newly hatched to learn to move mine as wild Tosevites do. Since his face cannot move, I never acquired the art myself. I do not miss it.” She shrugged. Her breasts were so small and firm, they hardly jiggled. Jonathan couldn’t help noticing that.
His father asked, “From what you know of life down on Tosev 3, what do you miss about it?”
“Nothing!” Kassquit used an emphatic cough. “Except genetically, I am not of your kind.”
“But that is a large exception,” Jonathan’s father said. “It means you can never be fully of the Race, either. What is it like, staying forever betwixt and between?”
What was going on behind Kassquit’s impassive mask? Jonathan couldn’t tell. At last, she said, “I was made to be a bridge between my kind and Big Uglies.” She pointed at Jonathan. “He-your hatchling-is a bridge between your kind and the Race. So are you, Sam Yeager-or should I say, Regeya? We reach from opposite sides toward each other.”
“To the Race, you are a Big Ugly, too,” Jonathan’s father pointed out.
Kassquit shrugged again. “I am of the Empire. You are not. Males and females of the Race, Rabotevs, Hallessi-they are my kind. You are not.”
“Look in a mirror,” Jonathan suggested. “Then try to say that. See if it is truth.”
For the first time, Kassquit raised her voice. “This interview is over,” she said sharply, with another emphatic cough. She strode out of the chamber through a side door Jonathan hadn’t noticed till she used it. He glanced over at his father, wondering if he’d horribly botched things. Only when his dad winked back at him did he relax-a little.
If Ottawa wasn’t the end of the line, you could see it from there. So thought David Goldfarb, at any rate, as he and his family stayed and stayed and stayed at the detention center for immigrants about whom the Canadians weren’t certain. People who’d come in after the Goldfarbs had already gone on their way, but the authorities remained dissatisfied with him.
He was dissatisfied with them, too, and with their country. Ottawa lay six degrees of latitude south of London, ten degrees south of Belfast. But, as 1964 drifted toward 1965, he thought he’d chosen to emigrate to Siberia. He’d never known such cold as he found every time he stuck his nose outdoors. Schoolchildren learned about what the Gulf Stream did for Britain’s climate, but he’d never had to think about it outside of school till now.
“How long?” Naomi asked one day after the children had gone to sleep. “How long can they keep us like this in-in purgatory, is that the word?”
“That’s the word, all right,” Goldfarb told his wife. It was, all things considered, not the worst of purgatories-the flat where they’d been installed was bigger and boasted more amenities than the one they’d had in married officers’ quarters back in Belfast. Still… “I just wish they’d let me g
et on with my life, dammit.” He’d wished that since summer. It hadn’t happened yet.
“Can your friend Jones do nothing about this?” she asked.
“If he could, I think he would have by now,” Goldfarb answered gloomily. “It’s not that I haven’t written him, you know. Trouble is, I haven’t just got friends in high places. I’ve got enemies there, too-too bloody many of them.”
“We’re here,” Naomi said. “I will thank God for that. There is no Canadian fascist party, and I will thank God for that, too. Canada looks to the USA, not to the Reich. I have been through pogroms once in my life. Once is too often.”
“I know,” he said. “Believe me, I know. I went to Poland during the fighting, remember. And I saw Marseille, and what was left of the synagogue there.”
“But you didn’t see how things turned,” Naomi told him. “When I was a little girl in Germany, before Hitler, having a different religion wasn’t anything special-well, not too special, anyhow. And things… everything changed. I don’t want our children to go through that. And my family got out before the worst.” Her laugh was shaky. “If we hadn’t got out before the worst, we wouldn’t have got out at all.”
“That won’t happen here,” Goldfarb said. “That’s something. Whenever I feel the walls closing in around me, I remind myself we got out of Britain. Sooner or later, they have to get sick of holding us here and turn us loose.” He wondered if he was whistling in the dark. He’d been saying the same thing for months now, and it hadn’t happened yet.
Before Naomi could answer, the telephone jangled in the front room. “I’ll get it,” she said; her side of the bed was closer to the door. “Who could be calling at this hour?” Flannel nightgown swirling around her, she hurried away. Goldfarb came up with several possibilities, none of them pleasant. His wife returned a moment later. “It’s for you-someone from the RCAF.”
