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“He got… caught in the rioting last year,” Mrs. Radofsky-the widow Radofsky-said. As Reuven expressed sympathies, she asked Yetta, “And what do I owe you?” Reuven hoped the receptionist would give her a break on the bill, but she didn’t.
The Polish Tosevite named Casimir pointed proudly to the shuttlecraft port. He bowed to Nesseref: not the Race’s posture of respect but, she’d learned, an equivalent the Big Uglies often used. “You sees, superior female?” he said, speaking the language of the Race badly but understandably. “Field is ready for usings.”
“I see.” Nesseref tried to sound happier than she felt. Then she made the affirmative gesture. “Yes, it is ready for use. That is a truth, and I am very glad to see it.”
During the fighting, the Deutsche had done their best to render the shuttlecraft port unusable. By what the males from the conquest fleet said, their best was far better than it had been during the earlier round of combat. They’d plastered it with bomblets from the air, just as the Race might have done. Some of the bomblets were concrete-busters; others were antipersonnel weapons, and had had to be disposed of with great care-they could blow the foot off a male or female of the Race, or, for that matter, off a Big Ugly. Despite the Race’s best efforts, a couple of them had done exactly that. They lurked in the weeds off the edges of the port’s concrete landing area. Nesseref wasn’t altogether sure every single one of them had been disposed of even yet.
And, with resources so scarce after the fighting ended, Casimir’s construction crew had had to repair the landing field with hand tools rather than power machines. Nesseref had never imagined Big Uglies slapping hot asphalt into holes and smacking it down flat with shovels. That gave the shuttlecraft port a curiously mottled appearance, and contributed to her feelings of unease about it.
She had other reasons for feeling uneasy, too. Pointing, she said, “Your patches are not as strong as the concrete they replace-is that not also a truth?”
“It are, superior female,” Casimir admitted ungrammatically. “But the patchings will do well enough. One of this days, make all pretties again. Pretty not importants. Neat not importants. Working are importants.”
“There is some truth in what you say,” Nesseref admitted.
“Are much truthings in what I say,” Casimir answered.
Nesseref didn’t want to admit that. The locals’ whole way of doing things struck her as slipshod. They had a habit of fixing things just well enough to get by for a while: that well and no better. As a result, they were always mending, tinkering, repairing, where the Race would have done things right the first time and saved itself a lot of trouble.
Sometimes, work that was fast and sloppy, work that would last for a while but not too long, was good enough. Nesseref suspected that was the case here. Better repairs would come, but they could wait. For now, the shuttlecraft port was usable.
A male of the Race waved to Nesseref from the control building, off to one side of the patched concrete. She skittered off toward him without so much as turning an eye turret back toward Casimir. She wouldn’t have been so rude to a member of the Race, but that thought didn’t cross her mind till she’d gone a long way from the Big Ugly. She shrugged as she trotted along. It wasn’t as if he were a particular friend, as Mordechai Anielewicz was.
“Well, Shuttlecraft Pilot, are we operational?” the male asked. “Does everything meet with your approval?”
“Senior Port Technician, I believe we are,” Nesseref answered. “The field is not all it could be, but it can be used for operations.”
“Good,” the technician said. “This was also my opinion, but I am glad to have it confirmed by one who will actually fly a shuttlecraft.”
“It will be good to have shuttlecraft coming in and going out again, too,” Nesseref said. “This subregion has been cut off from direct contact with our space fleet for too long now. Air transport is all very well, but we did not come to Tosev 3 in aircraft.”
“Indeed,” the shuttlecraft technician said. “Unlimited access to space and its resources and the mobility it gives us are our principal remaining advantages over the Big Uglies.”
“I suppose you are right, but, if you are, that is a genuinely depressing thought,” Nesseref said. The technician only shrugged. Maybe that meant he didn’t find it depressing. More likely, it meant he did, but didn’t know what the Race could do about it. Nesseref shrugged. She didn’t know what the Race could do about it, either.
The first shuttlecraft that had come into western Poland since the fighting stopped landed the next day. It disgorged a new regional subadministrator to replace Bunim, who was now only radioactive dust. The female, whose name was Orssev, looked around in disapproval verging on horror. “What a miserable place to find oneself,” she said. “Is it always so cold here?”
Listening to her carp, Nesseref began to understand why males from the conquest fleet complained about males and females from the colonization fleet. Nesseref was a female from the colonization fleet herself, of course, but even she could see that Orssev was not inclined to give Poland a fair chance.
And she knew things Orssev didn’t. “Superior female,” she said, “this is the end of the period of relatively good weather in this area. We shall have most of a year of truly bad, truly freezing weather on the way-a year of Home’s, I mean.”
“Tell me you are joking,” Orssev said. “Please tell me so. What did I do to deserve such a fate?”
Nesseref didn’t know the answer to that question, either, and wasn’t much interested in finding out. Orssev was plainly a prominent female, or she wouldn’t have had the rank of regional subadministrator. But she might well have got her post here because she’d offended someone even more prominent; Poland’s weather was not of the sort to which administrators were drawn. And Nesseref could not tell a lie about that. “I am sorry, but I spoke the truth,” she said. “Winter in this subregion is unpleasant in the extreme.”
“I shall protest to Fleetlord Reffet,” the new regional subadministrator said. “I am being used with undeserved cruelty.”
“I wish you good fortune,” Nesseref said, as neutrally as she could. She didn’t want to come right out and call Orssev an idiot addled in her eggshell; offending the prominent was rarely a good idea. But, however prominent she was, Orssev wasn’t very bright. The males of the conquest fleet, not those from the colonization fleet, kept administrative appointments firmly in their fingerclaws. That made sense; they knew the Big Uglies better than the colonists did. Nesseref didn’t think the fleetlord of the colonization fleet would be able to get Orssev’s assignment changed, even if he were inclined to do so.
Orssev went into the control building, presumably to start pulling whatever wires she could to try to leave Poland. The shuttlecraft pilot who’d brought her down also went into the control building, which meant the shuttlecraft wasn’t scheduled to fly out again right away. Nesseref hoped it also meant she would be assigned to take it wherever it did need to go next.
Technicians swarmed over the shuttlecraft, inspecting
and adjusting. Lorries rolled out and topped up its hydrogen and oxygen tanks. No one shouted Nesseref’s name and told her to be prepared at short notice. She concluded she could go back to her apartment and get ready before she was summoned to duty once more.
Getting ready consisted largely of making sure Orbit had enough food and water to keep him happy while she was gone. The tsiongi ran in his wheel. He’d run in it enough to give it a squeak. Nesseref thought that reprehensible; it seemed more like the slipshod manufacturing Big Uglies might do than anything she would have expected from the Race. She sprayed the hub of the exercise wheel with a lubricant. Orbit didn’t care for the odor, and hopped out and lashed his tail till it diminished.
No sooner had Nesseref put away the container of lubricant than the telephone hissed. “I greet you,” she said.
“And I greet you, Shuttlecraft Pilot,” a male from the shuttlecraft port replied. “Your first assignment has come in.”
“I am prepared,” she answered-the only possible response from a pilot. “Where am I to go?”
“This continental mass, the eastern subregion known as China,” the male said. “Burn parameters and time are already in the shuttlecraft’s computer. Anticipated launch time is-” He named the moment.
“I shall be there,” Nesseref said. “Do I have a passenger, or will I fly this mission by myself?”
“You have a passenger,” the male at the port answered. “She is a physician named Selana. Her specialty is skin fungi: Tosevite bacteria and viruses do not trouble us, but some of these organisms find us tasty. This problem appears to be more severe in China than elsewhere.”
“Very well,” said Nesseref, who thanked the spirits of Emperors past that such fungi had never troubled her. She snatched up the small bag she always took on shuttlecraft flights-since she didn’t use cloth wrappings, her needs while on a journey were less than those a Big Ugly would have had in similar circumstances.
The jolt of acceleration, the weightlessness that followed, felt like old friends that had been away too long. Once weightlessness began, she had a chance to make small talk with Selana. “Why are these skin fungi so common in China, Senior Physician?” she asked.
