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Coffey shook his head, then remembered to use the negative hand gesture. “I am not,” he said. “We have our own name for the Race, you know, which is no more flattering to them than ‘Big Uglies’ is to us. And besides, I have been called worse things than a Big Ugly in my time.”
“Have you?” Kassquit said. This time, Coffey remembered right away to use the Race’s affirmative gesture. She asked him, “Do you mean as an individual? Why would anyone single you out as an individual? You do not seem much different from any other wild Tosevite I have met.”
“In some ways, I am typical. In other ways, I am not.” The Big Ugly tapped his bare left forearm with the first two fingers of his right hand. “I was not so much singled out as an individual. I was singled out because of this.”
“Because of what? Your arm?” Kassquit was confused, and did not try to hide it.
Frank Coffey laughed in the loud, uproarious Tosevite style. So did the other American Big Uglies. Coffey was so uproarious, he almost fell off the foam-rubber chair on which he was sitting. Shaped chunks of foam made a tolerable substitute for the sort of furniture Big Uglies used. The Race’s stools and chairs were not only too small but also made for fundaments of fundamentally different shape.
“No, not on account of my arm,” Coffey said when at last he stopped gasping and wheezing. “Because of the color of the skin on it.”
He was a darker brown than the other wild Big Uglies on Home, who had a good deal more pale tan and pink in their complexions. Kassquit was darker than they were, too, though not to the same degree as Frank Coffey. She said, “Ah. I have heard about that, yes. But I must say it puzzles me. Why would anyone do such an irrational thing?”
“How much time do you have?” Coffey asked. “I could tell you stories that would make your hair as curly as mine.” The rest of the wild Big Uglies took their leave, one by one. Maybe they had heard his stories before, or maybe they didn’t need to.
Kassquit’s hair was straight. She had never thought about it much one way or the other. The dark brown Big Ugly’s hair, by contrast, grew in tight ringlets on his head. She had noticed that before, but, again, hadn’t attached any importance to it. Now she wondered if she should. “Why would a story make my hair curl?” she asked. Then a possible answer occurred to her: “Did you translate one of your idioms literally into this language?”
Coffey made the affirmative gesture. “I did, and I apologize. Stories that would appall you, I should have said.”
“But why?” Kassquit asked. Then she held up a hand in a gesture both the Race and the Big Uglies used. “Wait. During the fighting, the Race tried to recruit dark-skinned Big Uglies in your not-empire. I know that.”
“Truth,” Coffey said. Kassquit was not expert at reading tone among Big Uglies, but she thought he sounded grim. His next words pleased her, for they showed she hadn’t been wrong: “They were able to do that because Tosevites of that race-that subspecies, you might say-had been so badly treated by the dominant lighter group.”
“But the experiment failed, did it not?” Kassquit said. “Most of the dark Tosevites preferred to stay loyal to their own not-empire.”
“Oh, yes. They decided being Tosevite counted most of all, or the large majority of them did, and they deserted the Race when combat began,” Frank Coffey said. “But that they joined the Race at all says a lot about how desperate they were. And, although we in the United States do not like to remember it, some of them did stay on the Race’s side, and they fought against my not-empire harder than the soldiers from your species did.”
Was he praising or condemning them? Kassquit couldn’t tell. She asked, “Why did they do that?”
Coffey’s expression was-quizzical? That would have been Kassquit’s guess, again from limited experience. He said, “You have never heard the word ‘nigger,’ have you?”
“Nigger?” Kassquit pronounced the unfamiliar word as well as she could. She made the negative gesture. “No, I never have. It must be from your language. What does it mean?”
“It means a dark-skinned Tosevite,” Coffey answered. “It is an insult, a strong insult. Next to it, something like ‘Big Ugly’ seems a compliment by comparison.”
“Why is there a special insulting term for a dark-skinned Tosevite?” Kassquit asked.
“There are special insulting terms for many different kinds of Tosevites,” Frank Coffey said. “There are terms for those with different beliefs about the spirit. And there are terms based on what language we speak, and those based on how we look. The one for dark-skinned Tosevites… One way to subject a group is to convince yourself-and maybe that group, too-that they are not fully intelligent creatures, that they do not deserve to share what you have. That is what ‘nigger’ does.”
“I see.” Kassquit wondered if she did. She pointed to him. “Yet you are here, in spite of those insults.”
“So I am,” the wild Tosevite said. “We have made some progress-not enough, but some. And I am very glad to be here, too.”
“I am also glad you are here,” Kassquit said politely.
5
Though Sam Yeager had not gone to the South Pole, there were times when he wanted to see more of Home than the Race felt like showing him. Because the Lizards had insisted on him as ambassador when the Doctor didn’t wake up, they had a hard time refusing him outright. They did do their best to make matters difficult.
Guards accompanied him wherever he went. “There are many males and females here who lost young friends on Tosev 3,” one of the guards told him. “That they should seek revenge is not impossible.”
He wished he could afford to laugh at the guard. But the female had a point. Friendship ties were stronger among the Race than in mankind, family ties far weaker. Save in the imperial family, kinship was not closely noted. In a species with a mating season, that was perhaps unsurprising.
Going into a department store was not the same when you had a guard with an assault rifle on either side of you. Of course, Sam would have stood out any which way: he was the alien who was almost tall enough to bump the ceiling. But that might have made members of the Race curious had he been alone. As things were, he frightened most of them.
Their department stores frightened him-or perhaps awed would have been the better word. Everything a Lizard could want to buy was on display under one roof. The store near the hotel where the Americans were quartered was bigger than any he’d ever seen in the USA: this even though Lizards were smaller than people and even though there was no clothing section, since the Race-except for the trend setters and weirdos who imitated Big Uglies-didn’t bother with clothes. If the Lizards wanted a ball for a game of long toss, a fishing net (what they caught weren’t quite fish, but the creatures did swim in water), a new mirror for an old car, something to read, something to listen to, something to eat, something to feed their befflem or tsiongyu, a television, a stove, a pot to put on the stove, a toy for a half-grown hatchling, an ointment to cure the pu
rple itch, a sympathy card for someone else who had the purple itch, a plant with yellow almost-flowers, potting soil to transplant it, body paint, or anything else under Tau Ceti, they could get what they needed at the department store. The proud boast outside-WITH OUR MART, YOU COULD BUILD A WALL AROUND THE WORLD-seemed perfectly true.
The clerks wore special yellow body paint, and were trained to be relentlessly cheerful and courteous. “I greet you, superior sir,” they would say over and over, or else, “superior female.” Then they would add, “How may I serve you?”
Even in the face of a wild Big Ugly flanked by guards with weapons rarely seen on Home, their training did not quite desert them. More than one did ask, “Are you a male or a female, superior Tosevite?” And a couple of them thought Sam was a Hallessi, not a human. That left him both amused and bemused.
“I am a male, and the ambassador from the not-empire of the United States,” he would answer.
That often created more confusion than it cleared up. The clerks did not recognize the archaic word. “What is an ambassador?” they would ask, and, “What is a not-empire?”
Explaining an ambassador’s job wasn’t too hard, once Sam got across the idea of a nation that didn’t belong to the Empire. Explaining what a not-empire was proved harder. “You make your choices by counting snouts?” a clerk asked him. “What if the side with the most is wrong?”
“Then we try to fix it later,” Sam answered. “What do you do if the Emperor makes a mistake?”
He horrified not only the clerk but also his guards with that. “How could the Emperor make a mistake?” the clerk demanded, twisting his eye turrets down to the ground as he mentioned his sovereign. “He is the Emperor!” He looked down again.
