Aftershocks

6

Sam Yeager swung up onto his horse with a certain amount-a certain large amount-of trepidation. “I haven’t done any riding since Hector was a pup,” he said. “Hell, I haven’t done any riding since I was a pup: not since I got off the farm, anyhow. That’s more than forty years ago now.”

His companion, a sun-blasted sheriff named Victor Watkins, let out a chuckle around a cigarette. “It’s like riding a bicycle, Lieutenant Colonel-once you figure out how to do it, you don’t forget. We could go further and faster in a Jeep, but four legs’ll take us where four wheels couldn’t, even if the wheels are on a Jeep. And I know where the critters are, and the stuff they’re grazing on.”

“Okay.” Yeager couldn’t remember the last time he’d heard anybody actually say critters. Maybe Mutt Daniels, his manager when the Lizards came to earth, had-Mutt was from Mississippi, and had a drawl thick as the mud there. Sam went on, “Seeing them is what I came here for, so let’s do it.”

“Right.” Sheriff Watkins urged his horse forward with knees and reins. Awkwardly, Sam followed suit. The horse didn’t give him a horse laugh, but it could have. It wasn’t like riding a bicycle. He wished he were riding a bicycle.

At a slow walk, they went south out of Desert Center, California, toward the Chuckwalla Mountains. Desert Center lived up to its name: it was a tiny town, no more than a couple of hundred people, on U.S. 70, a place for folks on the way to somewhere else to stop and buy gas and take a leak. Yeager couldn’t imagine living there; it was ever so much more isolated than the farm where he’d grown up.

He wiped sweat from his face before putting back on the broad-brimmed Stetson Watkins had lent him. “I can see how Desert Center got its name,” he said. “Weather only a Lizard could love.”

“Oh, I don’t know,” the sheriff said. “I like it pretty well myself-I’ve lived in these parts more than thirty years. Of course, I was born up in St. Paul, so I got sick and tired of snow in a big fat hurry.”

“I can see that.” Sam let out a small sigh. He’d never played in St. Paul; it belonged to the American Association, only one jump down from the majors, and one jump up from any league where he had played. If he hadn’t broken his ankle on that slide into second down in Birmingham… He sighed again. Plenty of ballplayers might have made the big leagues if they hadn’t got hurt. It was more than twenty years too late to worry about that now.

He yanked his mind back to the business at hand. Something-a small-“1” lizard? — scurried away from his horse’s hooves and disappeared into the shade under a cactus. When he looked up, he saw a few buzzards wheeling optimistically through the sky. Other than that, the land might have been dead: nothing but sagebrush and cacti scattered not too thickly over the pale yellow dirt. Their sharp-edged shadows seemed to etch themselves into the ground.

Somehow, the landscape didn’t look quite the way Sam had thought it would. After a couple of minutes, he put his finger on why. “None of those tall cactuses,” he said. “You know the kind I mean: the ones that look like a man standing there with his hands up.”

Victor Watkins nodded. “Saguaros. Yeah, you don’t see that many of ’em this side of the Colorado River. Over in Arizona, now, they’re all over the damn place.”

“Are they?” Yeager said, and the local nodded again. Sam went on, “Hardly seems as if anything much could live here.”

“Well, it’s after ten in the morning,” Sheriff Watkins said. “Pretty much all the critters are laying in burrows or under rocks or anywhere they can go to get out of the sun. Come here around sunup or sundown and you’ll see a lot more: jackrabbits and kangaroo rats and snakes and skunks and I don’t know what all. And there are owls and bobcats and coyotes”-he pronounced it keye-oats- “at night, and sometimes deer down from the mountains. In spring, after we get a little rain, it’s real pretty country.”

“Yeah?” Yeager knew he sounded dubious. Thinking of this country as pretty any time struck him as being on the order of thinking Frankenstein handsome because he’d put on a new suit.

But Watkins said, “Hell, yes. Flowers and butterflies all over the place. You even get toads breeding in the mud puddles and croaking away like mad.”

“If you say so.” Sam couldn’t really argue; he hadn’t been in these parts just after some rain. From what he could see, they didn’t get rain any too often. Something large enough to be startling buzzed past his nose. “What was that?” he asked as it zipped away. “June bug?”

“Nope. Hummingbird.” Watkins glanced over at Yeager. “Listen, remember to drink plenty of water. That’s what we’ve got it along for. Heat like this, it just pours out of you.” He swigged from one of his canteens.

Sam dutifully drank. The water had been cold back in Desert Center. It wasn’t cold any more. He pointed to a small cloud of dust a couple of miles ahead. “What’s that, if everything takes it easy in the middle of the day?”

“Lizard critters don’t,” the sheriff said. “Far as they’re concerned, this is like a day in the park. They like it fine-better’n fine. Mad dogs and Englishmen and these funny-lookin’ things.” They rode on a little while longer, heading toward the dust. Then Watkins pointed, too, at a plant Sam might not have noticed. “There. These started growing about the same time the critters showed up.”

Now that his attention was drawn to it, Yeager saw it was different from the others past which his horse had taken him. It wasn’t quite the right shade of green; it put him in mind of tarnished copper. He’d never seen any leaves that looked like these: they might almost have been blades of grass growing along its branches. It didn’t have flowers, but those red disks with black centers at the ends of some of the branches might have done the same job. Sam reined in. “Can I get a closer look at it?”

“That’s what we’re here for,” Watkins said.

Sam dismounted as clumsily as he’d boarded his horse. He walked over to the plant from the Lizards’ world, scuffing up dust at every step. When he reached out to touch it, he yelped and jerked his hand back in a hurry. “It’s like a nettle,” he said. “It’s got little sharp doohickeys”-a fine scientific term, that-“in between the leaves.”

“Found that out, did you?” Sheriff Watkins’ voice was dry.

Rubbing his hand, Yeager asked, “You ever see anything eating these plants?”

“Nope,” the sheriff answered. “Not unless you mean the Lizards’ animals. Nothin’ that oughta live here’ll touch ’em. Haven’t seen any bees go to those red things, either.”

“All right.” That had been Sam’s next question. He took a notebook from his pocket and scribbled in it. If bees wouldn’t visit these things, how did they get pollinated? Could they get pollinated-or whatever they used as an equivalent-here on Earth? Evidently, or this one wouldn’t be here.

Watkins said, “You put on leather gloves and try and yank that thing out, you’ll find out it’s got roots that go clear to China.”

“Why am I not surprised?” Yeager wrote another note. Back on Home, plants would have to suck up all the water they possibly could. It made sense for them to have roots like that. A lot of Earthly plants did, too. Sam suspected these would prove very efficient indeed.

Sheriff Watkins said, “Come on. These things are just the sideshow. You really want to see the animals, right?”

“I don’t know,” Sam said thoughtfully. “Do I? If these things start crowding out the stuff that used to grow here, what’ll the bugs and the kangaroo rats and the jackrabbits eat? If they don’t eat anything, what’ll the lizards and the bobcats eat? The more you look at things like this, the more complicated they get.” Remounting his horse proved pretty complicated, too, but he managed not to fall off the other side.

“Supposing you’re right,” Watkins said as they rode on toward the animals from Home. “Isn’t that reason enough to give the Lizards hell for what they’re doing to us? What they’re doing to Earth, I mean, not just to the USA.”

“They don’t want to listen,” Yeager answered. “They say we’ve got cows and sheep and dogs and cats and wheat and corn, and that’s what these things are to them: only natural they’ve brought ’em along.”

“Natural, my ass.” Watkins spat. “These critters are about the most unnatural-looking things I’ve seen in all my born days.” He pointed ahead. “Look for yourself. We’re close enough now.”

Sure enough, Sam could peer through the dust now and see what raised it. The Lizards’ domestic animals made him feel he’d been yanked back through seventy million years and was staring at a herd of dinosaurs. They weren’t as big as dinosaurs, and they had the Lizards’ turreted eyes, but that was the general impression. They were low-slung, went on all fours, and had, instead of horns, bony clubs on the ends of their tails. One of them whacked another in the side. The one that had been whacked bawled and trotted away.

“Those are zisuili,” Sam said. “The Lizards use them for meat and for their hides. Zisuili leather is top of the line, as far as they’re concerned.”

“Hot damn,” Watkins said sourly. “What do we do about ’em? Look how they eat everything right down to the ground. Worse’n goats, for Christ’s sake. There’s nothing but bare dirt left once they’ve gone through somewhere, and this land won’t take a whole hell of a lot of that.”

“I see what you’re saying,” Yeager answered. “It’s probably why they kick up so much dust.” He clicked his tongue between his teeth. “You were right, Sheriff-this is what I came to find out about, sure enough.”

“I’ve already found out more than I want,” Victor Watkins said. “Question is, like I said, what do we do about the goddamn things?”

The two men had no trouble getting close to the zisuili, though their horses didn’t much care for the alien animals’ smell. Neither odors nor sight of Earthly creatures and people bothered the beasts from Home. Noting that, Yeager said, “We shoot ’em whenever we see ’em. They aren’t shy of us, are they?”

“No, but when the shooting starts they run like hell,” Watkins replied. “A guy with a machine gun would get a lot more done than a guy with a rifle. Desert Center’s a rugged kind of place, but machine guns don’t exactly grow on trees around here.”

“Some machine guns can probably be arranged,” Sam said, but he wondered how many machine guns the USA would need from the Pacific to the Gulf of Mexico, and for how many miles north of the border. And machine guns couldn’t do anything about plants from Home. What could? Nothing he saw, short of an army of people pulling them up by the roots.

The Lizards were making themselves at home on Earth. Sam had read plenty of science-fiction stories about people reshaping other planets to suit themselves, but never one about aliens reshaping Earth for their convenience. He didn’t need to read a story about that. By all the signs, he was living it.

Neither he nor Watkins had much to say as they rode back to Desert Center. They passed another couple of plants from Home. However the things propagated, they’d sure as hell got here.

“We’ll do everything we can,” Sam promised as he got down from his horse and, with more than a little relief, headed for his car.

“You’d better,” the sheriff said. He walked off toward his office, not looking back.

Another car was parked by the Buick. It hadn’t been there before. A couple of men in business suits came out of the little cafe across the street and walked briskly toward Sam. “Lieutenant Colonel Yeager?” one of them called. When Sam nodded, both men produced revolvers and pointed them at him. “You’d better come along with us, sir,” the first one said. “Orders. Sorry, pal, but that’s how it is.”

Walter Stone stared out through the window of the Lewis and Clark’s control room in considerable satisfaction. “Amazing what you can do with aluminized plastic, isn’t it?” he said.

“Not so bad,” Glen Johnson agreed. “You put out a big enough mirror, you pick up plenty of sunshine for power and for heat and for I don’t know what all else.”

Stone looked sly. “Are you sure you don’t?”

Johnson looked sly, too. “Who, me?” They both grinned. A mirror that focused a lot of light down to one small point was a splendid tool. It was also a weapon. If that point of light ever suddenly swung across a Lizard spy ship…

With a sigh, Stone said, “The only trouble is, that would mean war back home, which we can’t afford.”

“I know.” Johnson grimaced. “It’s not just that we can’t afford it, either. We’d damn well lose.”

“Are you sure?” the senior pilot asked.

“You bet your ass I am,” Johnson said, and tacked on an emphatic cough. “Don’t forget, I’m the guy who flew all those orbital missions. I know what the Race has got out there; hell, I know half that hardware by its first name. Push comes to shove, we get shoved.”

“Okay, okay.” Half to Glen’s relief, half to his disappointment, Stone didn’t want to argue with him. He liked arguments he wouldn’t have any trouble winning. Stone waved at the mirror again. “One of the reasons we’re out here is to complicate the Lizards’ lives in all sorts of ways they haven’t even thought about yet. Having plenty of power and energy available is a long step in that direction.”

“Did I say you were wrong?” Johnson asked, and then, “Say, what’s this I hear about another ship heading this way before too long?”

Walter Stone suddenly looked a lot less like a buddy and a lot more like a pissed-off colonel. “Goddamn radio room here leaks like a goddamn sieve,” he growled. “They open their mouths any wider, they’ll fall right in.”

“Yeah, well, probably,” answered Johnson, who hadn’t heard the rumor from any of the radio operators. “But come on. Now that I’ve got some of the word, give me the rest of it. It’s not like I’m going to send the Race a postcard or anything.”

“Bad security,” Stone said. Johnson gave him a look. It must have been an effective look, because the senior pilot turned red and muttered under his breath. At last, with very poor grace, he went on, “Yeah, it’s true. They’re building it out in orbit now. Next opposition, or somewhere fairly close to then, it’ll head out here, and we’ll see some new faces.”

“Good,” Johnson said. “I’m sick of seeing your old face.” That earned him a glare from Stone’s old face. Grinning, he probed some more: “How many people will they be sending out?”

“All I know is, the complement is supposed to be larger than the crew of the Lewis and Clark,” Stone answered. Johnson nodded, glad of the news; that was more than he’d known. Stone went on, “Two reasons. First, they won’t have as long a trip, so they can bring more people with the same resources. And second, they’ll have improved the design of the new ship.”

“How?” Johnson asked eagerly. This was the stuff he wanted to hear, all right.

But Stone said, “How? How the devil should I know? Matter of fact, I don’t know that for a fact.” He paused, listened to himself, and shook his head in annoyance before continuing, “I’m just assuming there will be. We’re not Lizards, after all; we don’t think our designs are set in cement.”

“Neither do they, not exactly,” Johnson said. “It’s just that we’ve been refining our designs for fifty years-a hundred, tops-and they’ve been doing it for fifty thousand. After that long, they don’t find the need to make a whole lot of changes.”

“Don’t teach your grandma to suck eggs,” Stone said irritably. “I know all that as well as you do, and you know I know it, too.”

“Yeah, but you’re cute when you’re angry,” Johnson said, which won him another glare from the senior pilot. He grinned again and went on, “With more people, we’ll be able to spread out a lot farther. The Lizards won’t be able to keep an eye on us so easy.”

“Which is the point of the exercise,” Stone said, as if to an idiot.

“No kidding.” Johnson grinned once more, refusing to let the other man get his goat. Then he let his imagination run away with him. “One of these days, maybe, we’ll have a regular fleet of ships going back and forth between Earth and the asteroid belt.” His eyes and voice went far away. “Maybe, one of these days, we will be able to go home again.”

But Walter Stone shook his head again, this time in flat negation. “Forget about it.” His tone brooked no contradiction. “If a ship comes out here, it’ll stay out here for good. We haven’t got enough to let us afford to send anything back, especially not a big ship. Nice to dream about, yeah, but it won’t happen.”

Johnson thought it over and discovered he had to nod. “Might have done poor Liz Brock some good, though,” he said.

“No.” Again, Stone wasn’t taking any arguments. “For one thing, you die with cancer of the liver back on Earth, too. And for another, the point is to make it so we don’t need to go back to Earth for anything. We’re supposed to be figuring out how to do everything we need here without going back to Earth. That’s the plan, and we’re going to make it work.”

“It’s only part of the plan,” Johnson said.

“Well, of course.” Stone sounded surprised he had to mention that.

A chime from the ship’s PA system announced the hour. Johnson said, “I’m off.” His shift was done. Stone’s still had two hours to go. Adding, “Don’t let anybody steal the chairs while I’m gone,” Johnson glided out of the control room.

Since the chairs, like all the furniture, were bolted down, that didn’t seem likely. As a parting shot, though, it could have been worse. Johnson brachiated to the galley. He ate strawberries, beans, potatoes-plants from the ever-growing hydroponics section. He also gulped vitamin pills. Not a whole lot of food that had come up from Earth was left; it was mostly reserved for celebrations. He missed meat, but less than he’d thought he would when it disappeared from the menu.

Some people were still complaining about that. The dietitian fixed one of them with a fishy stare and said, “It’s healthy. It’ll help you lose weight.”

“I’m already weightless,” the irate technician answered. “If I lose any more, I’ll invent antigravity.”

“There, you see?” said the dietitian, who didn’t realize her leg was being pulled. “That would be worthwhile, wouldn’t it?”

“That would be impossible, is what it would be,” the technician snarled. “Christ, I’d eat a lab rat by now, but we haven’t got any more of those left, either.” He took his food and glided off in high dudgeon.

Johnson was dutifully chewing his beans and wondering if the methane they made people generate was put to good use-he supposed he could ask somebody from the life-support staff about that-when Lucy Vegetti came floating into the galley. When the geologist saw Glen, she smiled and waved. So did he. He would have flown over and given her a big hug, but men didn’t make moves like that, not by the rules that had sprung up, for the most part informally, aboard the Lewis and Clark. Since men outnumbered women about two to one, women had all the choice. Johnson didn’t necessarily like it, but he knew better than to fight city hall.

After Lucy got her food, she came over to him and gave him a hug. That was in the rules. “How you doing?” he asked. “I didn’t know you’d gotten back from Ceres.”

“They don’t need me down there, not for a while,” she answered. She was short and stocky and very definitely looked Italian. On Earth, she might have been dumpy, but nobody sagged in space. She ate some potato and sighed. “God, I miss butter. But anyhow, I’m here for a while. The ice miners are a going concern on the asteroid, so pretty soon they’ll send me out prospecting somewhere else. Meanwhile, I get to come back to the big city and look at the bright lights for a while.” Her wave encompassed the Lewis and Clark.

“God help you,” Johnson said. “All that time away has softened your brain.” They both laughed. But he knew what she meant. There were more people aboard the Lewis and Clark than anywhere else for millions of miles. Seeing faces she hadn’t set eyes on for a while-not seeing the faces she’d been cooped up with for weeks-had to feel pretty good. Glen added, “You need somebody to drive your hot rod for you, just let me know.”

“I’d do better to let Brigadier General Healey know,” she said, and he nodded with regret altogether unfeigned. His opinion of the spaceship’s commandant was not high; the commandant’s opinion of him was, if anything, even lower. Had Healey had his druthers, he would have flung Johnson out the air lock when he came aboard the Lewis and Clark. Unlike the others here, Johnson hadn’t intended to come out to the asteroid belt in the first place. He’d just been curious about what was going on at the orbital space station. He’d found out, all right. Lucy’s smile changed. She lowered her voice and went on, “I like riding with you.”

His ears heated. So did certain other relevant parts. He and Lucy had been lovers before the water-mining project took her away. Now that she was back, he hadn’t known whether she would be interested again. All a guy on the Lewis and Clark could do was wait and hope and look cute. He snorted when that crossed his mind. He’d never been real good at cute.

But Lucy had made the first move, so he could make the next one: “Any time, babe. More fun than the exercise bike-I sure as hell hope.”

She laughed again. “Now that you mention it, yes. Not that it’s the highest praise in the world, you know.” Later, in the privacy of his tiny cubicle, she gave him praise of a more substantial nature. Weightlessness wasn’t bad for such things, except that the people involved had to hang on to each other to keep from coming apart: no gravity assist there. Johnson found nothing at all wrong with holding Lucy tightly.

When he peeled off his rubber afterwards, though, he had a thought foolish and serious at the same time. “What the devil will we do when we run out of these things?” he asked.

Lucy gave him a practical answer: “Anything but the real thing. We can’t afford to have any pregnancies till we build a spinning station to simulate gravity, and we can’t stand the drain on our medical supplies that a lot of abortions would cause.”

“I hear they’ve already had one or two,” he said, not much liking the idea. But none of the animal research suggested that getting pregnant while weightless was a good idea for people.

“I’ve heard the same thing,” Lucy said, nodding. “But nobody’s named names, which is probably just as well.”

“Yeah.” Johnson reached out and caressed her. Sure as hell, in the absence of gravity nothing sagged. Pretty soon, Lucy was caressing him, too. He wasn’t so young as he had been, but he wasn’t so old as he would be, either. He rose to the occasion, and he and Lucy spent the next little while trying not to get her pregnant again.

Straha woke one morning to find the weather exasperatingly chilly. “It is going to be autumn again before long,” he said to his driver at breakfast, as if the Big Ugly could do something about that. “I shall have to endure the worst of this planet’s weather.”

“In Los Angeles? No such thing, Shiplord,” the driver replied, shaking his head. As an afterthought, he used the Race’s negative gesture, too. “If you wanted to go to Siberia, now…”

“I thank you, but no,” Straha said with dignity. “This is quite bad enough; I do not require worse.”

“And remember,” his driver went on after another forkful of scrambled eggs, “winter here only comes half as often as it does on Home.”

“That is a truth,” Straha admitted. “The inverse truths are that it lasts twice as long and is more than twice as bad, even here.”

His driver let out several yips of Tosevite laughter. “We would call this weather perfect, or close enough. You really need to go to someplace like Arabia to make you happy. That is one place the Race is welcome to.”

“Although the Race may be welcome to Arabia, I am not welcome in Arabia,” Straha said. “That will be true for as long as Atvar lives, and our medical care is quite good.”

“Then go out to the desert here,” his driver said. “It will be cooler than it was in high summer, but not so cool as it is here.”

“Now that,” Straha said, “that is almost tempting. And have I heard that certain of our animals and plants have begun making homes for themselves in that area?”

“That is a truth, Shiplord,” the Big Ugly agreed. “It is not a truth we are very happy about, but I do not know what we can do about it.”

“Is not Sam Yeager investigating this truth you find so unfortunate?” Straha enjoyed mentioning Yeager’s name every now and again, for no better reason than to make his driver jumpy.

Today it worked as well as it ever did. “How do you know that?” the driver demanded, his voice sharp.

“Because he told me,” Straha answered. “I did not and do not think that was any great secret. Azwaca and zisuili are not beasts easily confused for anything Tosevite. Your newspapers and your television shows have been full of reported sightings and speculations-some clever, some anything but-about what their effect on the landscape will be.”

“Speculations about the beasts from your planet are one thing,” his driver answered. “Speculations about Sam Yeager are something else again, something a good deal more sensitive.”

Straha started to ask why, then checked himself. He knew why. His driver had spelled it out for him before: Yeager was the sort of Tosevite who kept sticking his snout where it didn’t belong. Hidden in a safe place in the house were papers Yeager had entrusted to him, the results of that snout-sticking. Straha had fairly itched to learn what those papers contained ever since the Big Ugly gave them to him. But Yeager was his friend, and had asked him not to look at them except in case of his death or sudden disappearance. He would have obeyed such a request from a friend who was a member of the Race, and he had obeyed it for the Tosevite, too. That didn’t mean he wasn’t curious.

His driver went on, “One of these days, I fear that Yeager will go too far for his superiors, if indeed he has not gone too far already. When that happens, saying you are his friend will do you no good. Saying you are his friend may end up doing you a good deal of harm.”

“Is it as bad as that?” If it was as bad as that, maybe he would have to arrange to warn Yeager again.

“It is not as bad as that, Shiplord,” his driver answered, now in tones of somber relish. “It is a great deal worse than that. He has done quite a lot to upset those superior to him.”

“Really?” Straha said, as if he couldn’t imagine such a thing. “How did matters come to such a pass?”

“Because he would not leave well enough alone,” the Big Ugly answered. “If you fail to listen to warnings for long enough, no more warnings come. Things start happening to you instead. Unfortunate things. Very unfortunate things.” He spoke the proper words, but he did not sound as if he thought such things were unfortunate-to the contrary, in fact.

“What could he have learned that was so dreadful?” Straha asked, now seriously alarmed.

His driver’s mobile Tosevite face twisted into an expression Straha recognized as annoyance. “I do not know,” the Big Ugly said, adding, “I do not want to learn. It is none of my affair.” Now pride filled his voice. “I am not like Yeager-I obey my orders. If my superiors were to order me to put my hand in the fire, I would do it.” To show he meant what he said, he took out a cigarette lighter and flicked the wheel to produce a flame.

“Put that thing away,” Straha exclaimed. “I believe you. You do not need to demonstrate.” He was speaking the truth, too. Big Uglies, far more than the Race, reveled in such displays of fanaticism.

Another click closed the lighter. “You see, Shiplord? You are my superior, and I obey you, too.” The driver laughed again.

“I thank you.” Straha tried to hold irony out of his voice. Which of them was the superior varied from day to day, sometimes from moment to moment. Straha’s rank meant little here; his utility to the American government counted for more, and his driver, these days, was much more consistently useful than he was.

The Big Ugly dropped into English: “I’m going outside to fiddle with the car for a while. I can’t get the timing quite the way I like it. These hydrogen engines are a lot harder to monkey with than the ones that use gasoline.”

“I hope you enjoy yourself, Gordon,” Straha answered, also in English. Some males and females of the Race had the same fondness for tinkering with machinery. Straha had never understood it himself. Tinkering with the way males and females worked had always been more interesting to him.

He went to the computer and turned it on. Using the Race’s network to send and receive electronic messages was risky. He was only illicitly present on the network; the more he did anything but passively read, the more likely he was to draw the system’s notice and to be expelled from it. But this was the one safe way he had to communicate with Sam Yeager. Sometimes risks had to be calculated. His telephone might be monitored, and so might the Big Ugly’s. The same went for the mail.

As I have warned you before, he wrote, I am once more given to understand that the authorities from your not-empire are seriously concerned with your putting your snout where they wish it would not go. I trust you will do nothing so rash as to cause them to have to punish you. He studied the message, made the affirmative gesture, and sent it. When he walked out to the front room once more, he saw his driver still bent over the engine of his motorcar.

Sam Yeager usually responded very promptly to his electronic messages. Here, though, a couple of days went by with no answer. That puzzled Straha, but he could hardly ask anyone what it meant.

When a reply did come, he knew at once that Yeager had not written it. His friend had some odd turns of phrase, but handled the language of the Race about as well as any male. This message was formal and tentative, and had a couple of errors in it that Sam Yeager wouldn’t have made. My father has not come to home for several days now, it read. We have a message that new duties call him away, but we have not heared from him. We are worried. Jonathan Yeager.

Straha stared at that. He stared at it most unhappily, wondering how much trouble Sam Yeager was in and whether his Tosevite friend still remained alive to be in trouble. His driver had known what he was talking about. But if he had intended Straha to deliver another message, it came too late.

And Yeager had delivered a message to Straha. If the Big Ugly disappeared, the ex-shiplord was to read the papers with which he’d been entrusted. He’d wanted to do that ever since he got them. Now that he could, his eagerness felt oddly diminished. Some things, he discovered, were more desirable before they were attained than afterwards.

And, now that he felt free to look at those papers, he had to wait for the chance. His driver stuck annoyingly close to home for the next several days, as if he knew something was going on under his snout but couldn’t put a fingerclaw on what.

Eventually, though, the Tosevite discovered errands he had to run. When he drove off, Straha hurried to his bookshelves and pulled out a fat volume full of pictures of the Fessekk Pass region of Home, one of the most scenic spots on the whole planet. The volume was a gift from a male of the colonization fleet who’d visited Straha; he’d glanced at it once and set it aside. But its size made it perfect for concealing the papers Yeager had given him. His driver, who cared nothing for the Fessekk Pass, had walked by it hundreds of times without paying it the least attention. So, for that matter, had Straha.

He sighed as he opened the envelope. The papers inside were liable to be the only memorial his Tosevite friend would ever have. He took them out and began to read.

They were, of course, in English. Straha understood the spoken language well enough. He read it only haltingly. Its spelling drove him mad. Why did this set of Big Uglies need several different characters to symbolize the same sound, and why did they let the same character represent several different sounds? Because they are egg-addled idiots, Straha thought resentfully.

But, after a little while, as he realized just what Sam Yeager had given him, he stopped fretting about the vagaries of English spelling. He stopped fretting about anything at all. He read on, spellbound, to the last page.

That last page was a note from Yeager. If you are reading this, I am dead or in deep trouble, the Tosevite wrote in Straha’s language. If you can get this to the Race, I expect it will be plenty for them to let you back into their territory in spite of everything you have done. I know you have often been unhappy here in the United States. Everyone deserves as much happiness as he can get. Grab with both hands. The signature below was written twice, once in English, once in the characters of the Race.

“He is right,” Straha whispered in slow astonishment. “With this, I truly could restore my good name.” He had not the tiniest bit of doubt about it.

He’d dreamt of returning to the eggshell of the Race since very shortly after defecting to the United States. He had known it would take a miracle as long as Atvar remained fleetlord. Now, here in his hands, he held a miracle.

The next question was, did he want to use it? He had never imagined that question might arise with a miracle, but here it was. He could take this to the Race’s consulate in Los Angeles and be assured of reconciliation, forgiveness, acceptance. He could see the new towns. He could live in one of them, in the society of his own kind.

But what else would happen if he did?

After the little scaly devils’ prison camp, Liu Han didn’t mind living in a peasant village, not in the least. She’d hated the idea after living in Peking for a good many years. Nieh Ho-T’ing laughed at her when she said that out loud. He answered, “It proves everything is in the yardstick you use to measure it.”

“You’re probably right,” she answered. “What yardstick do we use to measure the little scaly devils’ imperialism?”

That got his attention, and also his thought. Slowly, he said, “In China, they are worse than the Japanese and worse than the round-eyed devils from Europe. What other yardstick is there?”

“None, I suppose,” Liu Han admitted, not much liking the thought. “And how do we measure our struggle against the little devils?”

To her surprise, Nieh brightened. He said, “There I have good news.”

“Tell me,” Liu Han said eagerly. “We could use some good news.”

“Truth,” he said in the little devils’ language. Liu Han made a face at him, almost as if they were still lovers. Laughing, Nieh Ho-T’ing returned to Chinese. “Our fraternal socialist comrades in the Soviet Union have seen fit to increase their arms shipments to the People’s Liberation Army. They have seen fit to increase them by quite a bit, in fact.”

Liu Han clapped her hands. “That is good news! Why, when the Russians have kept us half starved for so long?”

“Well, I don’t know for certain. I don’t think anyone knows for certain what goes through Molotov’s beady little mind,” Nieh said, which made Liu Han laugh in turn. The People’s Liberation Army officer went on, “I meant that seriously. Mao understood Stalin; he could think along with him. But Molotov?” He shook his head. “Molotov is inscrutable. I’ll tell you what I think, though.”

“Please.” Liu Han nodded.

“Remember not long ago the Soviet Union gave Finland an ultimatum? And the Finns, instead of knuckling under to the Russians, ran under the wing of the scaly devils like a duckling running to its mother?”

Finland, as far as Liu Han was concerned, was so far away, it might as well have been on the world the little scaly devils came from. She wasn’t sure she’d even heard of it till the Soviet Union pressured it. Even so… She nodded again. “I understand. This is the Russians’ revenge. If they cannot get what they want from Finland”-she had to pronounce the unfamiliar name with care-“they will do what they can do to make the little devils sorry elsewhere-and we happen to be the elsewhere.”

“Exactly so.” Nieh eyed her with respect. “The Party was lucky when you joined us and got an education. You see very clearly; you would have wasted your life as an oppressed peasant woman.”

But Liu Han laughed at him this time. “This has nothing to do with education. If a strong peasant loses a quarrel with a stronger one, what does he do? Not fight him again-he would lose again, and lose face doing it. No: he sows hatred against his enemy in the other people in the village, so the other man will have trouble wherever he goes.”

“Eee!” Nieh said, a high-pitched sound of glee. “You are right. You are so very right. That’s just what the Russians are doing. So Comrade Molotov thinks like a peasant, does he? I’m sure he would be offended to hear it.”

“What kind of weapons are we getting?” Liu Han was sure that would be answered at the next Central Committee meeting, but she didn’t want to wait. She had one particular question: “Will the Russians send us anything that we can use to wreck the scaly devils’ landcruisers?” That last was a word Chinese had adapted from the language of the Race; the Japanese had had only a few of the fearsome vehicles, while those of the scaly devils roamed everywhere, deadly and all but unstoppable.

Nieh Ho-T’ing was smiling again. “Yes. For once, the Red Army truly is opening its storehouse to us. The Russians are sending us plenty of their mines with the wooden casings, the ones even the little devils have trouble detecting. Bury those on roadways and in fields, and the landcruisers will be most unhappy.”

“Good,” Liu Han said. “They deserve to be unhappy. But mines are not enough. What about rockets, so we can take the fight to the little devils instead of waiting for them to come to us?”

“You know what the Russians always say about those things,” Nieh answered. “That has not changed while we were imprisoned.”

Liu Han made another face, a sour one this time. “They say they cannot send us anything like that, because it would let the little scaly devils know where the weapons came from. But I thought you said they truly opened their storehouse to us.”

“They did.” Nieh was grinning again. “After the fighting in Europe, they somehow got hold of a lot of German antilandcruiser rockets. I don’t know how-maybe these were rockets the Germans gave them instead of surrendering them to the little devils, or maybe they got them from one of the German puppet regimes. However they got them, they have them-and they are sending them to us.”

“Ahhh.” Liu Han bowed to Nieh as if he’d been responsible for getting the rockets rather than just for giving her the news about them. “Are these weapons only promised, or are they really on the way?”

“The first caravan has already crossed the Mongolian desert,” he answered. “The weapons, or some of them, are in our hands.”

Liu Han did not have sharp teeth like a tiger’s, but her smile would have sent any tiger with a drop of sense scurrying back into the undergrowth. She’d been fighting the little scaly devils most of her adult life, fighting them with a hatred not only ideological and nationalistic but personal. If the People’s Liberation Army had the chance to strike them a heavy blow, that delighted her on every one of those levels.

Before she could say as much, a woman’s cry of anger and, a moment later, a man’s cry of pain burst from a peasant hut not far away. She whirled in surprise. So did Nieh Ho-T’ing. A heartbeat later, the man himself burst from the hut, running for all he was worth. He might have run faster had he not been yanking up his trousers with one hand.

“Ten million little devils!” Liu Han exclaimed. “Who has Hsia Shou-Tao tried to outrage now?”

No sooner had she spoken than her own daughter came out of that hut. Liu Mei was carrying a chamber pot. Her expressionless face was even more frightening than it would have been had fury filled it. She flung the pot with both hands, as a man might fling a heavy stone. The pot flew through the air and smashed against the back of Hsia’s head. He fell forward onto his face and lay motionless, as if shot. Blood poured from his scalp. So did urine and night soil; the chamber pot had been full.

Eyes blazing in her dead-calm countenance, Liu Mei said, “He tried to take what I did not want to give him. First I stamped on his foot, then I kicked him, then I did this, and now I’m going to kill him.”

“Wait!” Nieh Ho-T’ing got between Hsia Shou-Tao and Liu Mei, who plainly meant exactly what she’d said: she’d drawn a knife and was advancing on the officer and Communist Party dignitary she’d felled.

Hsia groaned and tried to roll over. Liu Han had wondered if the flying chamber pot smashed in the back of his skull. Evidently not. Too bad, she thought. “You know how he is with women,” she said to Nieh. “You know he’s always been that way with women. He tried to outrage me, too, you know, back in Peking not long after the little devils came. I’m not pretty enough for him any more, so now what does he do? He tries to molest my daughter. If you ask me, he deserves whatever Liu Mei gives him.”

A crowd had gathered, drawn by the commotion. Several women laughed and jeered to see Hsia Shou-Tao bleeding and filthy on the ground. If that didn’t mean Liu Mei was far from the only one he’d tried to molest, Liu Han would have been astonished.

But Nieh still held up a hand, ordering Liu Mei to stop. “You have punished him as he deserves,” the People’s Liberation Army general said. “He is a good officer. He is a bold officer. He is fierce against the little scaly devils.”

Liu Mei did stop, but she didn’t put away the knife. “He is a man. You are a man,” she said. “He is an officer. You are an officer. He is your friend. He has been your aide. No wonder you take his side.”

The women, most of them peasants but some lesser Party functionaries, yelled raucous agreement. One of them threw a stone at Hsia. It thudded into his ribs. He writhed and grunted; he still wasn’t more than half conscious.

“No!” Now Nieh spoke sharply, and set a hand on the pistol in his belt. “I say enough. Hsia may be subject to self-criticism and revolutionary justice, but he will not be mobbed. The revolutionary struggle needs him.”

His words probably wouldn’t have stopped the angry women. The pistol did. Liu Han wondered if the struggle between men and women would end before the struggle against the little scaly devils. She doubted it; she wasn’t sure even the coming of perfect Communism would make men and women get along.

“Mother!” Rage still filled Liu Mei’s voice. “Will you let this, this man protect his friend so?”

No, the struggle between the sexes surely had a long way to go. With great reluctance, Liu Han nodded. “I will. I do not like it, but I will. Let revolutionary justice see to him from here on out. We will remember him smeared with blood and night soil. We will all remember him like that. He won’t trouble you again-I’m sure of it.”

“No, but he will touch someone else,” Liu Mei said grimly. “I didn’t knock out enough of his brains to keep him from doing that.”

She was bound to be right. Liu Han wouldn’t have minded seeing Hsia dead, not personally, not even a little bit. But Nieh said, “He will also trouble the scaly devils again, and that is more important.”

“Not to me,” Liu Mei said. “He didn’t put his filthy hands inside your trousers.” She didn’t advance on Hsia any more, though, and she did put the knife away. A couple of people drifted back toward their huts. The worst was over. Hsia Shou-Tao wouldn’t get all of what was coming to him, but Liu Mei had already given him a good piece of it.

Hsia groaned again. This time, he managed to sit up. Something like reason was in his eyes. His hand went to the back of his head. When he found it was wet, he jerked it away. When he found what the moisture was, he frantically rubbed his hand in the dirt beside him.

“I should have cut it off you when I had the chance,” Liu Han told him. “If I had, this wouldn’t have happened to you.”

“I’m sorry,” Hsia said vaguely, as if he couldn’t quite recall why he should be apologizing.

“Sorry you got hurt. Sorry you got caught,” Liu Han said. “Sorry for what you did? Don’t make me laugh. Don’t make us all laugh. We know better.” The women who were still watching Hsia wallow in filth and blood clapped their hands and cried agreement. Liu Han found a smile stretching wide across her face. Russian arms for the People’s Liberation Army, Hsia Shou-Tao humiliated-it was a very good day indeed.

Reuven Russie walked slowly and glumly to the office he shared with his father. The sun shone hot and warm in Jerusalem even in early autumn, making the yellow limestone from which so much of the city was built gleam and sparkle like gold. The beauty was wasted on him. So was the sunshine.

His father had to keep slowing down so as not to get ahead. About halfway there, Moishe Russie remarked, “You could have gone to Canada.”

“No, I couldn’t, not really.” Reuven had already wrestled with himself a great many times. “Emigrating would have been too easy. And if I had, my children probably would have ended up not being Jewish. I didn’t want that, not after we’ve been through so much to hold on to what we are.”

His father walked on a few paces before reaching out to set a hand on his shoulder for a moment. “That’s a fine thing to say, a fine thing to do,” he observed, “especially when you think about the woman you were giving up.”

Don’t remind me, was the first thing that went through Reuven’s mind. He’d miss Jane’s lush warmth for… he didn’t know how long, but it would be a while. After a few silent steps of his own, he said, “I’m going to be thirty before too long. If I’d had to decide the same thing six or eight years ago, who knows how I would have chosen?”

“Maybe that has something to do with it,” Moishe Russie admitted. “On the other hand, maybe it doesn’t, too. Plenty of men your age, plenty of men my age-gevalt, plenty of men my father’s age, if he were still alive-would think with their crotch first and worry about everything else later.”

That was probably true. That was, in fact, undoubtedly true. And, as far as Reuven was concerned, anyone who didn’t think with his crotch around Jane Archibald had something wrong with him. After a bit, he said, “Too easy,” again.

His father understood him, as his father generally did. “Being a Jew in Canada, you mean?” he said. “Well, maybe. But, once more, maybe not. It is possible to be a Jew in a country where they don’t persecute you for it. Up until just a little while ago, remember, the Race didn’t charge us anything for the privilege of worshiping in our own synagogues.”

Reuven nodded. “I know. But people take it more seriously now, don’t they? Because they see it’s endangered.”

“Some do,” his father said. “Maybe even most do. But some don’t take anything seriously-for a while, when you were a little younger, I was afraid you might be one of those, but I think every young man makes his father worry about that.” He let out a wry chuckle, then sighed. “And some-a few-go to this temple the Lizards put up and give reverence to the spirits of Emperors past.”

“Jane went,” Reuven said. “She had to, if she wanted to stay in the medical college. She always said it wasn’t anything bad-said the atmosphere put her in mind of a church, as a matter of fact.”

“I never said it was bad-for the Race,” Moishe Russie replied. “Or even for people, necessarily. But it’s not a place for Jews. A church isn’t bad. A mosque isn’t bad. But they’re not ours.” He paused. “You know the word apikoros?”

“I’ve heard it,” Reuven answered. “It’s as much Yiddish as Hebrew, isn’t it? Means somebody who doesn’t believe or doesn’t practice, doesn’t it?”

His father nodded. “Usually a particular kind of person who doesn’t believe or practice: the kind who thinks it’s unscientific to believe in God, if you know what I mean. Comes from the name of the Greek philosopher Epicurus. Now, I happen to think Epicurus was a good man, not a bad one, though I know plenty of rabbis who’d have a stroke if they heard me say that. But he wasn’t ours, either. Back in the days of the Maccabees, ideas like his led too many people away from being Jews. These shrines to the spirits of Emperors past are another verse of the same song.”

“I suppose so,” Reuven said after some thought. “A good education will make you an apikoros sometimes, too, won’t it?”

“It can,” Moishe Russie agreed. “It doesn’t have to. If it did, you’d be in… where in Canada did Jane end up?”

“Somewhere called Edmonton,” Reuven answered. She’d sent a couple of enthusiastic letters. He’d written back, but she’d been a while replying now. As she’d said she would, she was busy making a new life for herself in a land where the Lizards didn’t rule.

“Canada,” his father said in musing tones. “I wonder how she’ll like the winters there. They aren’t like the ones in Jerusalem, or like the ones in Australia, either, I don’t think. More like Warsaw, unless I miss my guess.” He shuddered. “The weather is one more thing I don’t miss about Poland.”

Almost all of Reuven’s childhood memories of the land where he’d been born were of hunger and fear and cold. He asked, “Is there anything you do miss about Poland?”

His father started to shake his head, but checked himself. Quietly, he answered, “All the people the Nazi mamzrim murdered.”

Reuven didn’t know what to say to that. In the end, he didn’t say anything directly, but asked, “Has Anielewicz had any luck finding his family?”

“Not the last I heard,” his father answered. “And that doesn’t look good, either. The fighting’s been over for a while. Of course”-he did his best to sound optimistic-“a country’s a big place, and I doubt even the verkakte Germans could keep proper records while the Lizards were pounding them to pieces.”

“Alevai you’re right, and alevai they’ll turn up.” Reuven walked around the last corner before their office. “And now we’ve turned up, too.”

After the grim talk, Moishe Russie put on a smile. “Bad pennies have a way of doing that. I wonder what we have waiting for us today.”

“Something interesting, maybe?” Reuven suggested, holding the door open for his father. “When I started practice, I didn’t think so much of it would be just… routine.”

“That’s not always bad,” his father said. “The interesting cases are usually the hard ones, too, the ones that don’t always turn out so well.”

“Did you become a doctor so you could sew up cut legs and give babies shots and tell people with strep throats to take penicillin?” Reuven asked. “Or did you want to see things you’d never seen before, maybe things nobody else had seen, either?”

“I became a doctor for two reasons: to make sick people better, and to make a living,” Moishe Russie answered. “If I see a patient who’s got something I’ve never seen before, I always worry, because that means I haven’t got any knowledge to fall back on. I have to start guessing, and it’s easier to guess wrong than it is to guess right.”

“You’d better be careful, Father,” Reuven said. “You sound like you’re in danger of turning into a conservative.”

“Some ways maybe,” Moishe Russie said. “That’s what general practice does-it makes you glad for routine. Consider yourself warned. If you wanted to stay radical your whole life long, you should have gone in for surgery. Surgeons always think they can do anything. That’s because they get to play God in the operating room, and they have trouble remembering the difference between the One Who made bodies and the ones who try to repair them.”

They went into the office. “Good morning, Dr. Russie,” Yetta the receptionist said, and then, “Good morning, Dr. Russie.” She smiled and laughed at her own wit. Reuven smiled, too, but it wasn’t easy. He’d heard the same joke every third morning since starting in practice with his father, and he was bloody sick of it.

His father managed a smile that looked something like sincere. “Good morning,” he said, a good deal more heartily than Reuven could have done. “What appointments have we got today?”

Yetta ran down the list: a woman with a skin fungus they’d been fighting for weeks, another woman bringing in her baby for a booster shot, a man with a cough, another man-a diabetic-with an abscess on his leg, a woman with belly pain, a man with belly pain… “Maybe we can do both of those at once,” Reuven suggested. “Two for the price of one.” His father snorted. Yetta looked disapproving. She liked her own jokes fine, no matter how often she repeated them. A doctor making jokes about medicine was almost as bad as a rabbi making jokes about religion.

“All right, we’ll have enough to do today, even without the people who just drop in,” his father said. “We’ll have some of those, too, I expect; we always do.” Some people, of course, got sick unexpectedly. Others didn’t believe in appointments, any more than Reuven believed in Muhammad as a prophet.

He got to see the woman with the stubborn skin fungus, a Mrs. Kratz. Yetta stayed in the room to make sure nothing improper occurred, as she did with all female patients. Custom aside, she could have stayed out. Reuven had no lecherous interest in Mrs. Kratz, and would have had none even without the fungus on her leg. She was plump and gray and older than his father.

“Here,” he said, and handed her a little plastic tube. “This is a new cream. It’s a sample, about four days’ worth. Use it twice a day, then call and let us know how it’s doing. If it helps, I’ll write you a prescription for more.”

“All right, Doctor.” She sighed. “I hope one of these creams works one of these days.”

“This one is supposed to be very strong,” Reuven said solemnly. The active ingredient, one new to human medicine, was closely related to the chemical the Lizards used to fight what they called the purple itch. He didn’t tell that to Mrs. Kratz. He judged her more likely to take offense than to be delighted.

After she left, the man with a cough came in. Reuven’s nose wrinkled. “How much do you smoke, Mr. Sadorowicz?” he asked; the aroma that clung to the fellow’s clothes gave him a head start on etiology here.

“I don’t know,” Mr. Sadorowicz answered, coughing. “Whenever I feel like it. What’s that got to do with anything?”

Reuven delivered his standard lecture on the evils of tobacco. Mr. Sadorowicz plainly didn’t believe a word of it. He didn’t want to get an X-ray when Reuven recommended one, either. He didn’t want to do anything Reuven suggested. Reuven wondered why the devil he’d bothered coming in. Mr. Sadorowicz departed, still coughing.

Yetta came in again. “Here’s Mrs. Radofsky and her daughter, Miriam. She’s here for Miriam’s tetanus booster.”

“All right,” Reuven answered. Then he brightened: Mrs. Radofsky was a nice-looking brunette not far from his own age, while Miriam, who was about two, gave him a high-wattage little-girl smile. “Hello,” Reuven said to her mother. “I’m afraid I’m going to make her unhappy for a little while. Her arm may swell up and be tender for a couple of days, and she may run a bit of a fever. If it’s anything more than that, bring her back and we’ll see what we can do.” It wouldn’t be much, but he didn’t say that.

He rubbed Miriam’s arm with an alcohol-soaked cotton swab. She giggled at the sensation of cold, then shrieked when he injected her. He sighed. He’d known she would. He taped a square of gauze over the injection site.

Mrs. Radofsky cuddled and comforted her daughter till she forgot about the horrific indignity she’d just suffered. “Thank you, Doctor,” she said. “I appreciate that, even if Miriam doesn’t. I want to do everything I can to keep her well. She’s all I’ve got to remember her father by.”

“Oh?” Reuven said.

“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.

“I believe it is the astonishing amount of excrement in everyday use there,” the other female answered. “The local Big Uglies use it for manure and fuel and sometimes, mixed with mud, as a building material as well. Facilities for disinfecting bodily waste, as you may imagine from that, are for all practical purposes nonexistent.”

“I am sorry I asked,” Nesseref said. Weightlessness did not nauseate members of the Race, as it sometimes did Tosevites, but disgust could do the job. Another thought occurred to her. “How do any Tosevites raised in such an environment survive? Their burden of disease must be far worse than ours.”

“It is, and a great many of them do not survive,” Selana said. “This takes me back to the most primitive days of the Race, at the very dawn of ancientest history. We once lived something like this, though the greater abundance of water in China creates a more unsanitary situation than we ever knew over such a wide area.”

Nesseref did not want to believe that the Race had ever lived in such close conjunction to filth. Such a thought would damage the sense of superiority she felt toward the Big Uglies. She said, “Spirits of Emperors past be praised that we do not live in such appalling conditions any more.”

“Truth,” Selana said, and added an emphatic cough. “But, here on Tosev 3, we are forced to do so because the natives do so. This creates difficulties of its own.”

“Senior Physician,” Nesseref said, “the Big Uglies do nothing but create difficulties.” Selana did not argue with her.