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“How? By biting your father?” Karen said. “That would have done it, all right. He’s the ambassador, after all, not just an ambassador’s flunky like yours truly.”
“Well, I’m just an ambassador’s flunky, too,” Jonathan said, a little uneasily. Comparisons with his father made him nervous. He was good enough to get here. His father was good enough to head up the American embassy. Not a lot of difference, but enough. He shook his head. That wasn’t what he wanted to think about right now. He went on, “I had something else in mind. What if the crazy Lizard had bitten Kassquit?”
“Kassquit?” Karen thought about it, then started to giggle. “Yes, that would have been a hoot, wouldn’t it? Poor Lizard is angry at the Big Uglies because his friends got killed during the fighting, and then he would have hauled off and bitten the only Big Ugly who wishes she were a Lizard and has the citizenship to prove it? That would have been better than man bites dog.”
The Lizard’s story was pathetic, if you looked at it from his point of view. Here he’d nursed his grief and his grudge all these years-it would have been close to eighty of the Earthly variety since he got the bad news-and what had he got for it? One snap-at a human who hadn’t been more than a baby when the fighting stopped. Oh, yes: he’d got one more thing. He’d got all the trouble the Race could give him. They’d lock him up and eat the key, which was what they did instead of throwing it away.
Jonathan didn’t worry about going into Sitneff even after his wife’s unfortunate incident. His guards asked him about it once. He said, “Any male of the Race who bites me will probably come down with acute indigestion. And, in my opinion, he will deserve it, too.”
That startled the guards into laughing. One of them said, “Superior Tosevite, do you taste as bad as that?”
“Actually, I do not know,” Jonathan answered. “I have never tried to make a meal of myself.”
The guards laughed again. They didn’t try to restrict his movements, and keeping them from doing that was what he’d had in mind.
Like Karen, he prowled bookstores. He read the Race’s language even better than he spoke it. Words on a page just sat there. They could be pinned down and analyzed. In the spoken language, they were there and gone.
Since word of the conquest fleet’s arrival on Tosev 3 got back to Home, the Lizards had spent a good deal of time and ingenuity writing about humans, their customs, and the planet on which they dwelt. Much of that writing was so bad, it was almost funny. Jonathan didn’t care. He bought lots of those books. No matter how bad they were, they said a lot about what the Lizard in the street thought of Big Uglies.
The short answer seemed to be, not much. According to the Race’s writers, humans were addicted to killing one another, often for the most flimsy of reasons. Photographs from the Reich and the Soviet Union illustrated the point. They were also sexually depraved. Photographs illustrated that point, too, photographs that wouldn’t have been printable back on Earth. Here, the pictures were likelier to rouse laughter than lust. And humans were the ones who grew ginger.
Ginger had spawned a literature of its own. Most of that literature seemed intended to convince the Lizards of Home that it was dreadful stuff, a drug no self-respecting member of the Race should ever try. Some of it put Jonathan in mind of Reefer Madness and other propaganda films from before the days he was born-his father would talk about them every now and again. But there were exceptions.
One Life, One Mate was by the defiant female half of a permanently mated Lizard pair: permanently mated thanks to ginger and what it did to female pheromones. The pair was, for all practical purposes, married, except the idea hadn’t occurred to the Lizards till they got to Tosev 3. The female described all the advantages of the state and how it was superior to the ordinary friendships males and females formed. She was talking about love-but, again, that was something the Lizards hadn’t known about till they bumped into humanity.
She went on almost endlessly about how the mixture of friendship and sexual pleasure produced a happiness unlike any she’d known at Home (the ginger might have had something to do with that, too, but she didn’t mention it). Rhetorically, she asked why such an obvious good should be reserved for Big Uglies alone. She complained about the Race’s intolerance toward couples that had chosen to create such permanent bonds with ginger. The biographical summary at the back of the book (it would have been the front in one in English) said she and her mate were living in Phoenix, Arizona. Jonathan knew not all permanently mated pairs were expelled from the Race’s territory these days. The author and her partner, though, had done as so many others had before them, and found happiness as immigrants in the USA.
Jonathan’s guards had a low opinion of One Life, One Mate. “Bad enough to be a pervert,” one of them said. “Worse to brag about it.”
“Meaning no offense, superior Tosevite,” another added. “This kind of mating behavior is natural for you. We of the Race thought it was peculiar at first, but now we see that is an inescapable part of what you are. But our way is as natural for us as yours is for you. Would any Tosevites want to imitate our practices?”
Hordes of lust-crazed women not caring who joined with them, panting and eager for the first man who came along? Dryly, Jonathan said, “Some of our males might not mind so very much.”
“Well, it would be unnatural for them,” the second guard insisted. “And your way is unnatural for us. Next thing you know, this addled female will want each pair to take care of its own eggs and hatchlings, too.” His mouth fell open and his jaw waggled back and forth in derisive laughter.
“That is how we do things,” Jonathan said.
“Yes, but your hatchlings are weak and helpless when they are newly out of the egg,” the guard said, proving he’d done some-but not quite all-of his homework about Big Uglies. “Ours need much less care.”
“Truth,” the first guard said.
Was it the truth? The Race took it as gospel, but Jonathan wasn’t so sure. His folks-and then he and Karen-had raised Mickey and Donald as much as if they were human beings as possible. The little Lizards had learned to talk and to act in a fairly civilized way much faster than hatchlings seemed to do among the Race. Maybe giving them lots of attention had its advantages.
And maybe you don’t know what the devil you’re talking about, Jonathan thought. Mickey and Donald were no more normal Lizards than Kassquit was a normal human. With her example before them, the Americans had gone ahead anyway. Jonathan had been proud of that when the project first began. He wasn’t so proud of it any more. His family had done its best, but it couldn’t possibly have produced anything but a couple of warped Lizards.
He had more sympathy for Ttomalss than he’d ever dreamt he would. That was something he intended never to tell Kassquit.
“I have a question for you, superior Tosevite,” the second guard said. “Ginger is common and cheap on your world. Suppose all the males and females of the Race there fall into these perverted ways. How will we deal with them? How can we hope to deal with them, when they have such disgusting habits?”
The question was real and important. It had occurred to humans and to other members of the Race. The answer? As far as Jonathan knew, nobody had one yet. He tried his best: “I do not believe all members of the Race on Tosev 3 will change their habits. More of them use ginger there than here, yes, but not everyone there does-far from it. And those who keep to their old habits on Tosev 3 have learned to be more patient and respectful toward those who have changed their ways. Perhaps members of the Race here should learn to do the same. Sometimes different is only different, not better or worse.”
All three of his guards made the negative gesture. The one who had not spoken till now asked, “How do you Tosevites treat the perverts among you? I am sure you have some. Every species we know has some.”
“Yes, we do,” Jonathan agreed. “How do we treat them? Better than we used to, I will say that. We are more tolerant than we were. Perhaps you will find that the
same thing happens to you as time goes by.”
“Perhaps we will, but I doubt it,” that third guard said. “What is right is right and what is wrong is wrong. How can we possibly put up with what anyone sensible can tell is wrong with a single swing of the eye turret?” His companions made the affirmative gesture.
“Your difficulty is, the Race’s society has not changed much for a very long time,” Jonathan said. “When anything different does come to your notice, you want to reject it without even thinking about it.”
“And why should we not? By the spirits of Emperors past, we know what is right and proper,” the guard declared. Again, his comrades plainly agreed with him. Jonathan could have gone on arguing, but he didn’t see the point. He wasn’t going to change their minds. They were sure they already had the answers-had them and liked them. He’d never thought of the Lizards as Victorian, but he did now.
14
The Race didn’t arrest Walter Stone after he returned their scooter to them. Glen Johnson assumed that meant whatever ginger had been aboard was removed before they got it back. Stone said, “What would you do if I told you they didn’t even search the scooter?”
“What would I do?” Johnson echoed. “Well, the first thing I’d do is, I’d call you a liar.”
