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“They are the most cynical beings I have ever known,” Veffani replied. “They know we did not free them from the Deutsche for their benefit, but for our own. And our efforts to use Big Uglies as soldiers against other Big Uglies have been far less successful than we would have wished. Let them be independent. Let them be neutral. Let their not-empire be a safe haven. It was not during the fight against the Deutsche.”
“Well, that is a truth,” Felless said, and then, “Tell me, superior sir, what is the cause of the latest crisis with the not-empire of the United States? I thought that, except for such peculiarities as snoutcounting, it was relatively civilized.”
“I know the answer to your question, Senior Researcher, but security forbids me from telling you,” Veffani replied. “Negotiations with the USA are still in progress; there is some hope that this war may be prevented. That will be more difficult if reasons for the crisis become too widely known. Even we are not immune from being forced to actions we might otherwise not take.”
“But will the Big Uglies of the USA not bellow these reasons to the sky?” Felless asked. “That not-empire is notorious for telling everything that should stay secret.”
“Not always,” Veffani said. “The American Big Uglies concealed the launch of their spaceship to the belt of minor planets in this solar system very well. And they have more reason to conceal this-believe me, they do.” He used an emphatic cough. “They would not bellow unless they wanted a war with us in the next instant.”
“I am not sure I understand, superior sir,” Felless said-an understatement, because she was annoyed Veffani wouldn’t trust her with whatever secret he knew, “but I shall obey, and shall arrange to return to Marseille as soon as I can.”
“You are wise to do so,” Veffani told her. “Now you colonists are beginning to get some notion of the delights we of the conquest fleet faced when we first came to Tosev 3. For you, though, these delights are less a surprise.”
He broke the connection before Felless could tell him how utterly mistaken he was. Everything about Tosev 3 had been a horrible surprise to the males and females of the colonization fleet. Felless remembered waking from cold sleep weightless, in orbit around what she’d thought would be the new world of the Empire, to be informed that nothing she’d believed on setting out from Home was true.
I will go back to Marseille, she though. I will go back to Marseille-after I enjoy myself one more time here. She still had more ginger in her luggage than she knew what to do with. No, that wasn’t true-she knew exactly what to do with it. She set out to taste as much as she could in one day.
Normally, a ginger-taster rode from exhilaration to depression and back again. Intent on tasting all she could, Felless didn’t wait for one taste to wear off before enjoying another. She stayed strung as tight as the herb would make her.
When a female she telephoned to arrange an early return to France pointed out a couple of difficulties in her revised schedule, Felless screamed insults. The other female said, “There is no reason to snap my snout off.”
“But-” Felless began. She seemed to have the Race’s entire aircraft schedule at the tips of her fingerclaws. But, when she tried to access the information with the thinking part of her mind, she discovered she couldn’t.
Yes, ginger makes you believe you are smart, she reminded herself. It does not really make you smarter, or not very much. It also made her far more vulnerable to frustration than she would have been otherwise.
“Here.” The female proposed another schedule. “Will this do?”
Felless examined it. “Yes,” she said, and the other female, with every sign of relief, vanished from her screen. Felless took another taste. She wasn’t sure the departure time would be late enough to let her stop producing pheromones by then. With so much ginger coursing through her, she didn’t care.
She cared the following day. For one thing, the depression that followed her binge was the worst she’d ever known. For another, she hadn’t stopped pumping out pheromones. She mated in the hotel lobby, in the motorcar that took her to the airfield, and in the terminal waiting to board the aircraft.
“A good holiday,” the last male said, with an emphatic cough.
And Felless answered, “Truth.” The pleasure of mating was different from that of the herb, but it was enough to lift her partway out of the shadows in which she’d walked since taking her tongue out of the ginger vial.
She wondered if she would lay a clutch of eggs. If I do, I do, she thought, and then, But if I do, Veffani had better not find out about it. The ambassador would not be pleased. He might even be angry enough to send her back to the Reich.
Fortunately, she was able to board the aircraft without stirring up a commotion. That could have been dangerous, especially if the flight crew had males in it. But her fellow passengers paid her no special heed. She settled down for the long, dull flight to Cairo, where she would board another aircraft for the return to Marseille.
Not so bad, she thought. She wished the holiday had been longer. That would have let her taste more. But she’d made up for a lot of lost time even so. Maybe she really was ready to get back to work.
Liu Han and Liu Mei sat side by side in an insanely crowded second-class car as the train of which it was a part rattled north. Children squealed. Babies screamed. Chickens squawked. Ducks quacked. Dogs-likelier headed for the stew pot than for the easy life of a pet-yelped. Several young porkers made noises even more appalling than those that came from the human infants. The smells were as bad as the racket.
“Can we get any fresh air?” Liu Mei asked her mother.
“I don’t know,” Liu Han answered. “I’ll try.” She was sitting by the window. She had to use all her strength to get it to rise even a little. When it did, she wasn’t sure she was glad it had. The engine was an ancient coal-burner, and soot started pouring in as the stinks poured out.
Liu Mei got a cinder in the eye, and rubbed frantically. Once she’d managed to get rid of it, she said, “Maybe you ought to close that again.”
“I’ll try,” Liu Han repeated. She had no luck this time. What had gone up refused to come down. She sighed. “We knew this trip wouldn’t be any fun when we set out on it.”
“We were right, too.” Liu Mei coughed. Several people had lit up cigarettes and pipes so they wouldn’t have to pay quite so much attention to the pungent atmosphere they were breathing. Their smoke made the air that much thicker for everyone else.
One of the babies in the carn-or possibly one of the dogs-had an unfortunate accident. Liu Han sighed. “I wouldn’t have enjoyed walking back to Peking, but I’m not enjoying this, either. You, at least, you’re going home.”
Liu Mei leaned toward Liu Han so she
could speak into her ear: “We’re going back to begin the revolutionary struggle again. The struggle is our home.”
“Well, so it is.” Liu Han glanced over at her daughter. Liu Mei could think of the struggle as home. She was young. Liu Han was getting close to fifty. Trapped in this hot, smelly, packed car, she felt every one of her years. There were times when she wished she could settle down somewhere quiet and forget about the revolution. She generally got over that once she’d had a chance to rest for a while, but she found it happening more and more often these days.
The dialectic said the proletarian revolution would succeed. For many years, that had kept Liu Han and her comrades working to overthrow the imperialist little scaly devils despite all the defeats they’d suffered. It had kept them confident of victory, too. But now the dialectic made Liu Han thoughtful in a different way. If the revolution would inevitably succeed, wouldn’t it succeed just as inevitably without her?
She didn’t say anything like that to Liu Mei. She knew it would have horrified her daughter. And she supposed that, once she got to Peking, the fire of revolutionary fervor would begin to burn in her own bosom once more. It always had. Still, there were times when she felt very tired.
I’m getting old, she thought. Her skin was still firm and her hair had only a few threads of silver in it, but Chinese showed their age less readily than round-eyed devils did. She’d seen that on her visit to the United States. But whether she showed her age or not, she felt it. This miserable car made everyone feel her age, and twenty years older besides.
Brakes squealing, the train stopped in a small town. A few people left her car. More tried to crowd on. Nobody wanted to make room for anybody else. Men and women pushed and shouted and cursed. Liu Han had ridden enough trains to know things were always like that.
Hawkers elbowed their ways through the cars, selling rice and vegetables and fruit juice and tea. They didn’t do a whole lot of business; most people had the sense to bring their own supplies with them. Liu Han and Liu Mei certainly had. Only the naive few riding a train for the first time gave the hawkers any trade.
