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The strange gesture made him seem wilder than Jonathan Yeager. He looked wilder, too. He was hairy all over, with short, thick, brown hair streaked with gray growing on his cheeks and chin as well as the top of his head. No one had given him a razor. And he spoke the Race’s language with an accent different from, and thicker than, Jonathan Yeager’s.
He seemed to be trying not to study her body, which was covered only by the body paint of a psychological researcher’s assistant. Kassquit remembered both Jonathan and Sam Yeager behaving the same way at their first meeting. Coming right out and staring was evidently impolite but difficult to avoid.
He said, “They told me I would another Tosevite visitor be having. They did not bother telling me you would a female be.”
“Tosevite sexes and sexuality are matters of amusement and alarm to the Race, but seldom matters of importance,” Kassquit answered. “And, though I am of Tosevite ancestry, I am not precisely a Tosevite myself. I am a citizen of the Empire.” Pride rang in her voice.
Johannes Drucker said, “I understand the words, but I do not think I understand the meaning behind them.”
“I have been raised in this starship by the Race from earliest hatchlinghood,” Kassquit said. “Until quite recently, I never so much as met wild Big Uglies.” She hardly ever said Big Uglies around Jonathan Yeager. When speaking to this much wilder Tosevite, it came out naturally.
“I… see,” the captive said. His mouth twisted up at the corners: the Tosevite expression of amusement. “Now that you have started us meeting, what do you think?”
Kassquit couldn’t imitate that expression, try as she would. She answered, “The ones I have met are somewhat less barbarous than I would have expected.”
With a loud, barking laugh, the Deutsch captive said, “Danke schon.” Seeing that Kassquit didn’t understand, he returned to the language of the Race: “That means, I thank you very much.”
“You are welcome,” Kassquit answered. Only after the words were out of her mouth did she stop and wonder whether he’d been sarcastic. To cover her confusion, she changed the subject, saying, “I am told you came close to destroying this starship.”
“Yes, that is a truth, superior female,” he agreed.
“Why?” she asked. War, whether carried on by the Race or by Big Uglies, still seemed very strange to her. “No one aboard this ship was trying to do the Reich any particular harm. Most males and females here are researchers, not combatants.”
She thought that a paralyzingly effective comment. The wild Big Ugly only shrugged. “Do you think all of the Tosevites in the Deutsch cities on which you dropped explosive-metal bombs were doing nothing but fighting the Race?”
Kassquit hadn’t really thought about that at all. To her, the Deutsche had been nothing but the enemy. Now that Johannes Drucker pointed it out, though, she supposed most of them had just been going on with their lives. That made her examine her own side in a way she hadn’t before. “Why?” she said again.
“Anything that the enemy serves a fair target is,” Johannes Drucker replied. “That is how we fight wars. And we have seen that the Race is not very different. No one invited the Race to come here and try to conquer Tosev 3. Do you think it is any wonder that we as hard as we could fought back?”
“I suppose not,” admitted Kassquit, who hadn’t tried to look at things from the Tosevite point of view. “Do you not think that you would be using explosive-metal bombs on one another if we had not come?”
“We?” The wild Big Ugly raised an eyebrow in what she’d come to recognize as a gesture of irony. “Superior female, you have no scales that I can see.”
“I am still a citizen of the Empire,” Kassquit replied with dignity. “I would rather be a citizen of the Empire than a Tosevite peasant, which I surely would have been had the Race not chosen me.”
“How do you know?” Johannes Drucker asked. “Are you happy here aboard this starship, living with nothing but males and females of the Race? Would you not be happier among your own kind, even as a peasant?”
Kassquit wished he hadn’t asked the question that particular way. The older and the more conscious of her alienness she’d become, the less happy she’d grown. Some of the males and females of the Race were only too willing to rub her snout in that alienness, too. She answered, “How can I know? How does one find an answer to a counterfactual question?”
“Carefully,” the wild Tosevite said. For a moment, Kassquit thought he hadn’t understood. Then she realized he was making a joke. She let her mouth drop open for a moment to show she’d got it. He went on, “Everyone’s life is full of counterfactuals. Suppose I this had done. Suppose I that had not done. What would I be now? Dealing with the things that are real is hard enough.”
That was also a truth. Kassquit made the affirmative gesture. She said, “I am told you do not know what has happened to your mate and your hatchlings. I hope they are well.”
“I thank you,” Johannes Drucker answered. “I wish I knew, one way or the other. Then I would also how to go ahead know. Now I can only at the same time hope and worry.”
“What will you do if they are dead?” Kassquit asked. Not until the question was out did she think to wonder whether she should have asked it. By then, of course, it was too late.
Though still imperfectly familiar with the facial expressions wild Big Uglies used, she was sure Johannes Drucker’s did not show delight. He said, “The only thing I can do then is try to put my life back together one piece at a time. It is not easy, but it happens all the time. It is certainly all the time in the Reich happening now.”
“Males and females of the Race are also having to rebuild their lives,” Kassquit pointed out. “And the Race did not start this war. The Reich did.”
“No matter who started it, it is over now,” the wild Big Ugly said. “The Race won. The Reich lost. Putting the pieces back together is always easier for the winners.”
Was that a truth or only an opinion? Since Kassquit wasn’t sure, she didn’t challenge it. She asked, “If your mate is dead, will you seek another one?”
“You have all sorts of awkward questions, is it not so?” Johannes Drucker laughed a loud Tosevite laugh, but still did not seem amused. Kassquit did not think he would answer, but he did: “I cannot tell you that now. It depends on how I feel, and it also depends on whether I meet a female I find interesting.”
“And what makes a female interesting?” Kassquit asked.
The wild Big Ugly laughed again. “Not only awkward questions, but questions different from the ones the males of the Race, the military males, have asked. What makes a female interesting? Ask a thousand male Tosevites and you will have a thousand answers. Maybe two thousand.”
“I did not ask a thousand male Tosevites. I asked you,” Kassquit said.
“So you did.” Instead of mocking her, Johannes Drucker paused and thought. “What makes a female interesting? Partly the way she looks, partly the way she acts. And part of it, of course, depends on whether she me interesting finds, too. Sometimes a male will find a female interesting, but not the other way round. And sometimes a female will want a male who does not want her.”
“I think the Race’s mating season is a much tidier, much less stressful way of handling reproduction,” Kassquit said.
“I am sure it is-for the Race,” the wild Big Ugly said. “But it is not how Tosevites do things. We can only what we are be.”
Confronting her own differences from the Race, Kassquit had seen that, too. Culture went a long way toward minimizing those differences, but could not delete them. She wondered whether to ask Johannes Drucker if he found her attractive, and whether to use an affirmative answer, if she got one, to initiate mating. In the end, she decided not to ask. None of his words showed he might be interested. Neither did his reproductive organ, which was liable to be a more accurate-or at least less deceitful-indicator. As she left the compartment, she wondered if her decision would please Jonathan Yeager.
&nbs
p; He was quiet when she returned to the compartment. He did not ask her whether she’d mated with the Deutsch captive. It was as if he did not want to know. He did not have much to say about anything else, either. Kassquit didn’t care for that. She’d grown used to talking with the wild-but not too wild-Tosevite about almost everything. She felt empty, alone, when he responded so little.
At last, she decided to confront things directly. “I did not mate with Johannes Drucker,” she said.
“All right,” Jonathan Yeager answered, still not showing much animation. But then he asked, “Why not?”
“He did not show much interest,” Kassquit replied, “and I did not want to make you unhappy.”
