Second Contact

5

Mordechai Anielewicz rattled east across Poland on a train. The steam engine threw a black plume of coal smoke into the air; undoubtedly, it had been built before the Germans invaded, let alone the Lizards. The Race seemed horrified that such stinking survivals persisted. But trains moved people and goods more cheaply than Poland’s inadequate road network, and so they kept on running.

Sharing the compartment with him were a farmer; a salesman who kept trying to sell his fellow passengers cheese graters, egg slicers, potato peelers, and other cheap metal goods; and a moderately pretty young woman who might have been either Polish or Jewish. Anielewicz kept trying to decide till she got out a couple of stops past Warsaw, but came to no conclusion.

He stayed aboard all the way to Pinsk. The border with the USSR lay just a few kilometers east of the city. The first thing Mordechai did when he got off the train was swat a mosquito. The Pripet Marshes surrounded Pinsk. He sometimes thought every mosquito in the world lived in the marshes. He might have been wrong, though; maybe only some of them lived there, with the rest coming to visit on holidays.

Swatting still, he made for the privies in the station. He’d eaten black bread and drunk tea all the way across Lizard-occupied Poland, and a man could do only so much of that without reaching the bursting point. The privies stank of stale piss. He didn’t care. He left them much relieved.

Lizard soldiers prowled the streets of Pinsk. They were not happy Lizards. Twenty years of learning more about Lizards than he’d ever thought he would want to know had taught Anielewicz as much. They stalked along with furious delicacy, like cats that had been soaked with a hose.

He understood their language pretty well, and had long since mastered the art of listening without seeming to. “If I don’t come down with the purple itch or one of these horrible local fungi, it’s not because I haven’t been squelching through the mud the past four days,” one of them said.

“Truth,” another agreed with an emphatic cough. “Impossible to do a proper job of patrolling that swamp. We’d need ten times the sensors and twenty times the males to have a chance of doing it right.”

“We have to try,” a third male said. “If we didn’t patrol the paths, who knows how much worse the smuggling would be?”

“Right now, I don’t much care,” the first male said. “I want to get back to the barracks and-” He lifted a claw-tipped hand to his face. His tongue shot out for a moment. The other males’ mouths dropped open in laughter. They probably wouldn’t have minded a taste of ginger, either.

A lot of the signs in Pinsk were in the Cyrillic alphabet Byelorussians used. Mordechai was less at home with it than he was with the Lizards’ script. Some of the signs were in Yiddish. Pinsk had been in the Nazis’ hands only a few months before the Lizards landed. The Jews here had had a hard time of it, but not so hard as the ones farther west, who’d lain under the German yoke for two and a half years.

ROZENZWEIG’S BAKERY. That sign was written in Yiddish, Byelorussian, and, as an afterthought, in Polish in letters half the size of those of the other two languages. Anielewicz went in. The good smell of baking bread and cakes and rolls and muffins almost made him fall over. Saliva gushed into his mouth. He reminded himself he hadn’t been too hungry before he came inside. Remembering that wasn’t easy.

A gray-haired man with a bushy mustache looked up from the bagels he was dusting with poppy seeds. “You want something?” he asked in Yiddish.

“Yes,” Mordechai said. “My name is Kaplan. You’ve got a special order for me in the back, don’t you?”

The code phrase wasn’t fancy, but it did the job. The baker eyed Anielewicz, then nodded. “Yeah, it’s here,” he said. “You want to come look it over before you take it home?”

“I think I’d better, don’t you?” Anielewicz said. He wondered what the Russians wanted, to have summoned him across Poland to handle it. If it wasn’t important, he’d give the NKVD man or whoever his contact was a piece of his mind. He’d dealt with a good many Russians. He knew this one wouldn’t care what he did or said. But it would make him feel better.

“Here,” Rozenzweig said. “Talk. I don’t want to know what you’re talking about.” He turned and went back to his poppy seeds.

“Nu?” Mordechai asked the fellow sitting in the baker’s back room: a nondescript, rather scrawny man not far from his own age, with a thin face and dark, intelligent eyes. Another Jew, Anielewicz thought. He’d dealt with a good many who worked for the Soviets. Every one, without exception, acted as a Soviet first and a Jew second if at all.

“Hello, Mordechai. Been a long time, hasn’t it?” the man from the USSR asked in Yiddish that sounded as if it came from western Poland, not any part of the Soviet Union.

“Am I supposed to know you?” Anielewicz asked. He did his best to keep track of all the agents he met, but he’d met a lot of them. Every once in a while, he slipped up. He’d stopped worrying about it. He wasn’t perfect, no matter how hard he tried to be.

The Soviet laughed and cocked his head to one side. He looked sly, like a man convinced he was smarter than everyone around him. And, where Anielewicz hadn’t recognized him before, he did now.

“My God! David Nussboym!” he exclaimed. “I might have known you’d turn up again.” His mouth hardened. “Bad pennies usually do.”

“You shipped me off to the gulags to die, you and your collaborationist pals,” Nussboym said. “I wouldn’t be a tukhus-lekher for the Nazis, so you got rid of me.”

“You were going to sell us out to the Lizards,” Anielewicz said. “They might have won the war if you had. Where would we be then?”

They stared at each other with a loathing apparently undimmed since the fighting ended. Nussboym said, “The camps chew you up and spit you out dead. Russians, Jews, Lizards… it doesn’t matter. Some people get by, though. The first denunciation I signed, I was sick for a week afterwards. The second left the taste of ashes in my mouth. But do you know what? After a while, you don’t care. If you get the better rations; if you get the other bastard’s job; if, after a while, you get out of the camp-you don’t care any more.”

“I believe you don’t,” Mordechai said, looking at him as he might have looked at a cockroach in his salad.

Nussboym looked back steadily, without showing he was insulted, with a small, superior smile, as if to say, You haven’t been where I have. You don’t know what you’re talking about. And that was true. Anielewicz thanked God it was true. But he still thought that, even in the gulag, he would have found some way to fight back. Some people must have managed it.

He shrugged. It didn’t really matter. “So what do you want?” he asked harshly.

“I want you to know”-by which Nussboym meant his Russian bosses wanted Anielewicz to know-“the Germans were the ones who blew up the ships from the Lizards’ colonization fleet.”

“You brought me all the way over here to tell me that?” Mordechai didn’t laugh at him, but that took an effort. “You sneaked over the border to tell me that?” He was sure Nussboym hadn’t crossed officially. Had Nussboym done so, they wouldn’t have met in Rozenzweig’s bakery. “Why would it matter to me, even if it’s true?”

“Oh, it’s true.” David Nussboym sounded very sure. Of course, his job was to sound sure. He would be nothing but a recording, mouthing the words his bosses-NKVD men, probably-had impressed on him.

“I have contacts with the Nazis, too,” Anielewicz said.

“Of course you do.” Now heat came into Nussboym’s voice-he was speaking for himself here, not for his bosses. “Why do you think I couldn’t stomach working with you twenty years ago?”

“So you work for Molotov, who got into bed with Hitler and blew out the light-on Poland,” Mordechai said, and had the dubious pleasure of watching Nussboym’s sallow features flush. He went on, “The Nazis say Russia did it.”

“And what would you expect?” Nussboym returned. “But we have the evidence. I could give it to you-”

“Why would you?” Anielewicz asked. “If you’ve got it, give it to the Lizards.”

Nussboym coughed a couple of times. “For some reason, the Lizards don’t always trust things they get straight from us.”

“Because you lie all the damned time, just like the Nazis?” Anielewicz suggested. David Nussboym did not dignify that with a reply; Mordechai hadn’t really expected that he would. The question he’d asked was a serious one, though, and Nussboym hadn’t answered it, either. That meant Anielewicz had to do some thinking on his own. “So you want the Lizards to get this from us, do you?”

“They would be likelier to believe you than us, yes,” Nussboym said.

“Well, what if they do?” Anielewicz knew he was thinking out loud; if his old rival didn’t like it, too bad. “That might embroil them against the Reich — probably would, as a matter of fact. You’d like that, wouldn’t you?” Without waiting for an answer, he went on, “And if they did go at it, the Nazis would do their best to wipe Poland off the face of the Earth. I thought Molotov liked having a buffer between him and the swastika.”

“I have not spoken with him about that,” Nussboym said.

Did that mean he had spoken with Molotov about other things? How important a cog in the machine had he become? How important a cog did he want Anielewicz to think he’d become? How much of a difference was there between those last two?

Those were interesting questions. They were also beside the point. Anielewicz had no trouble seeing what the point was: “You don’t care what the Reich does to Poland, because you want to make the Lizards jump on the Nazis with both feet. If they do, the Reich won’t be strong enough to worry you any more.”

He watched Nussboym closely. The skinny little man hadn’t given away much when Anielewicz knew him before. He gave away nothing whatever now; he might have been carved from stone. But his very immobility was an answer of sorts.

Nodding, Mordechai said, “I’m afraid you’re going to have to do your own dirty work on this one.”

Nussboym raised an eyebrow. “Do you mean to tell me you don’t believe the Nazis did it?”

Anielewicz shook his head. “As a matter of fact, I do believe it. Even with Hitler dead, they’re crazier than your bosses are. What I don’t believe is that you’ve got any evidence to prove they did it. If the Lizards haven’t been able to come up with any, how are you supposed to?”

“The Lizards are very good with science and machines and instruments,” Nussboym answered. “When it comes to people-no. We do that better.”

He was probably right. The Lizards had improved with people as time passed, but they weren’t good. They’d probably never be good. They weren’t people, after all. Even so… “You’ll have to do your own dirty work,” Anielewicz repeated. Nussboym studied him in turn, then got up and left the bakery without another word.

There were times when Straha wondered whether the Tosevites who lived in the not-empire called the United States and who, for a reason he’d never grasped, styled themselves Americans had any more sense when it came to larger matters. Reporters were a prime example. These days, his telephone rang constantly.

“Straha here,” the ex-shiplord would answer in his own language. He had, in fact, learned a fair amount of English. He used the language of Home as a testing gauge. His working assumption was that no one ignorant of it would be able to tell him anything worth hearing.

Some Big Uglies, hearing the Race’s hisses and pops, would hang up. That suited him fine. Some would try to go on in English. When they did, he would hang up. That also suited him fine.

But, even when reporters did know and used the language of the Race, they used it in a Tosevite fashion and for Tosevite purposes. “I greet you, Shiplord,” one of them said after Straha had announced himself. “I am Calvin Herter. I write for the New York Times. I would like to ask you a few questions, if I may.”

“Go ahead,” Straha said. Herter spoke his language fairly well-not so well as a real expert like Major Yeager, but well enough. “Ask. I will answer as best I can.” It would pass the time.

He regretted saying that a moment later, for the Big Ugly asked the same question all the others had: “Which not-empire do you think attacked the colonization fleet, and why?”

Having answered, How should I know, when I am not a Tosevite? any number of times already, Straha felt mischief stir in him. Had his character not had that streak, he wouldn’t have tried to overthrow Atvar and he likely wouldn’t have fled from the conquest fleet to the Tosevites. And I would be better off today, he thought, but not till after he had answered, “Why, this one, of course-the United States.”

“Really?” Herter said. “Why do you think that?”

“It stands to reason,” Straha answered. “Your not-empire could hurt the Race more easily than either the Reich or the Soviet Union, because fewer folk would expect you to try it.”

He heard faint scratching sounds as the reporter wrote that down; recorders were less common here than among the Race. “Really?” the Big Ugly repeated. “Well, that is something, by the Emperor! That will give me a front-page headline every other newspaper in the not-empire will envy. Let me ask you some more questions about this. Why-?”

“Wait,” Straha said. He did not care to hear the reporter swearing by the Emperor. The Tosevite cared nothing about the Emperor, and was probably using the only oath in the language of the Race he knew-and the Emperor assuredly cared nothing about the Tosevite. But that was only a detail. Straha asked, “You would print this in your newspaper?”

“Of course,” Herter answered. “This will be the biggest story since the attack on the fleet.”

“But I have accused the government of this not-empire of perpetrating that attack,” Straha said, wondering if the Big Ugly could speak the language of the Race himself but had trouble understanding what he heard in it. Straha’s English was sometimes like that.

But Herter did understand him. “Oh, yes,” the reporter said brightly. “That is what makes it such a big story. Now my next question is-”

“Wait,” Straha said again. “The government of this not-empire would never allow you to print such a story.”

“Of course they will,” Herter said. “This is not the Reich. This is not the Soviet Union. Here, we have freedom of the press.”

The phrase was in the language of the Race, but alien to it in spirit. Straha had heard it before, of course, but never in such a context as this: “Your not-emperor would allow you to print a story that criticizes him? I find it hard to believe.”

“It is truth,” Herter said with an emphatic cough. “We are a free not-empire. We are almost the only free not-empire left on the face of this planet. We have no censors telling us what goes in the newspapers and what does not.”

“None?” Straha had not really imagined the American passion for doing exactly as one pleased went so far as that.

“None,” the reporter answered. “We did during the fighting, but we got rid of them again after that.”

“Why would your government let ordinary males and females criticize it?” Straha asked in honest bewilderment. “What good does it do? What good do you imagine it does?” He could see none, not even turning both mental eye turrets in the direction of the problem.

But Calvin Herter could, and did: “How better to make sure the government does what the males and females of the United States want it to do than by giving them the right to criticize freely?”

“Governments do not do what males and females want them to do.” Straha spoke as if quoting a law of nature. As far as he was concerned, he was quoting a law of nature. “Governments do what governments want to do. How could it be otherwise, when they hold the power?”

“You have lived in America for a long time,” Herter said. “How have you lived here so long without getting a better idea of how the government of the United States works?”

“You count snouts,” Straha said. “Whichever side can persuade the most snouts to join it prevails. It does not have to be clever. It does not have to be wise. It only has to be popular.”

“There may be something to that,” Herter admitted. “But with any other way to run a government, a policy does not have to be clever or wise or popular. There is the drawback the Race faces-and the Nazis and Communists, too.”

Underestimating a Big Ugly’s wits rarely paid. The Tosevites were not stupid and, whatever else one said about them, were inspired argufiers. But Straha knew he was on solid ground in this dispute, and fired back: “Often policies that are clever or wise are not popular. A snoutcounting government cannot use them, because not enough snouts will line up behind them. This is the drawback the United States faces.”

“No system is perfect,” Herter said.

“Our system is perfect-for us,” Straha said. “I do not know that it would be perfect for Tosevites. But I do not know that it would not be, either. I am willing to believe-I am more than willing to believe-that Tosevites have yet to establish a social system perfect for themselves.” He let his mouth fall open at the neatness with which he had squelched Herter.

But, like so many other Big Uglies, Herter refused to stay squelched. “If we are so imperfect, Shiplord, how is it that we, with our short history, fought the Race to a standstill even though you have a long history?”

Straha started to slap him down for his insolence: his first, automatic, response, as it would have been for any self-respecting male of the Race. Before he spoke, though, he realized what most other males of the Race would not have-the Big Ugly had a point. With a sigh, he answered, “Scholars of the Race-and perhaps Tosevite scholars as well-will be studying that question for thousands of years to come. I do not believe it to be one with a simple answer.”

“You are probably right about that,” the reporter said. “Now, can we return to the question I asked you before: Why do you believe the United States was the not-empire that exploded the ships from the colonization fleet?”

He was serious. Straha would not have believed it, and still did not want to believe it. But he had no choice but to believe it. That being so, he said, “I do not really believe that. I find it highly unlikely. I wanted to place a biting pest on your tailstump, to watch you leap in the air when its proboscis pierced your skin. Do you understand what I am saying?”

“I think so,” Herter replied. “In English, we call that a practical joke.” The two key words were in his own language.

“A practical joke,” Straha repeated. Thinking back on it, he’d heard Sam Yeager use the phrase a couple of times. If anything, the Big Uglies seemed fonder of the thing than the Race was. He went on, “Yes, I suppose that is what it was. I did not imagine you would publish it, so I said it to see what you would do.”

“Not funny, Shiplord. Not funny at all,” Calvin Herter said with another emphatic cough. “You might have touched off a war between the United States and the Race. That goes too far for a practical joke.”

“I suppose so,” Straha said, at the same time wondering whether a war between the United States and the Race-one in which the Race wrecked the United States, of course-would be enough to allow him to return to the society of his own kind, assuming he survived it.

He had his doubts. As long as Atvar lived, nothing was likely to allow him to return to the society of his own kind. When the fleetlord got a grudge, he kept it.

Maybe Atvar would get killed in a war between the United States and the Race. As far as Straha was concerned, that would improve the Race’s chances of winning such a war. Atvar would have been the ideal fleetlord for the conquest of the Tosev 3 the Race thought it would find. He was careful, methodical, and probably could have completed the job without losing a male. As things were…

As things were, Straha realized Herter had said something, but he had no idea what it was. “Please repeat that,” he said. Speaking with another male of the Race, he would have been embarrassed. To a certain degree, he was embarrassed anyhow, but only to a certain degree.

“I asked whether, once the colonization fleet lands, you will be glad to have females with you once more,” the reporter said.

“In the sense that their arrival means we will be able to plant new generations of the Race on Tosev 3, yes,” Straha replied. “In the sense that we will be wild for mating, as you Tosevites might be, of course not. Our nature is different.” For which I am heartily glad, he added to himself.

“You of the Race miss a lot of the spark in life, or so it seems to me,” Herter said.

“You Tosevites let your mating habits drive you wild, or so it seems to me,” Straha replied. “I am content-more than content-to be as I am.”

“Me, too,” Herter said with an emphatic cough.

“I believe you,” Straha said. He wondered what sort of progress the Race’s scientists had made since his defection toward unraveling the connection between the Big Uglies’ sexual patterns and their society. Signals intercepts and conversations with other defectors and prisoners who had stayed in the USA did not tell him everything he wanted to know. He asked, “Have you any further questions?”

“Shiplord, I have not,” the reporter answered. “And if I did, how would I know you were telling the truth?”

Straha’s mouth fell open. “How would you know?” he echoed. “You would not. That is part of the risk you run when you speak with me.”

To his surprise, Calvin Herter let out several yips of barking Big Ugly laughter. “Shiplord, we will make a Tosevite of you yet,” he said. Straha hung up in some indignation. The reporter had no business insulting him that way.

Kassquit put on the artificial fingerclaws that made handling the Race’s equipment so much easier for her. She turned on the computer terminal in her chamber, then turned off the overhead light. Sitting there in the darkness, her own body hidden from her eyes, she could pretend for a while that she was a female of the Race like any other female of the Race.

News bulletins told her the Race still did not know which Tosevite faction had dared raise its hand against the ships of the colonization fleet. “Punish them all,” Kassquit whispered fiercely. “They all deserve it. Of course they deserve it. They are Big Uglies.”

Her hands folded into fists in her anger at the natives of Tosev 3. As they did so, the artificial fingerclaws poked the soft, smooth flesh of her palms. She let out a long, misery-filled sigh. Even in the darkness, she could not escape what she was. Her flesh was the flesh of the natives of the world below.

“I cannot help that,” she said in the language of the Race, the only language she knew. “I may be flesh of their flesh, but I am not spirit of their spirit. When they die, they will be gone. They will be gone forever. When I die, spirits of Emperors past will cherish me.”

She cast down her eyes in reverence for the Emperors who still watched over the Race, even though so many were tens of millennia dead. She also dared hope her spirit, when at last it was freed from the unfortunate form it bore, would resemble those of other females of the Race. Even if this flesh was not what it should be, surely no one and nothing could condemn her to be different forever.

She had sometimes thought of ending her life, to escape the prison of the body she was forced to wear. But she knew her existence helped the Race learn more about the perfidious Tosevites. If she ended it prematurely, she was all too likely to forfeit the good opinion of Emperors past. She dared not take the risk. If she were to be no more than a Big Ugly even after she was dead… how could she be expected to endure such a misfortune throughout eternity?

Of itself, her right hand strayed toward the joining of her legs. She noticed only when one of those fingerclaws scraped the skin of her inner thigh. She took the fingerclaws off that hand. The sole refuge she had from a difficult world was the sensation she could evoke from her Tosevite body.

But before she was well begun, the speaker beside her closed door emitted a hiss, the signal the Race used when someone wanted to enter. She jerked her hand away and flipped on the lights. “Who is it?” she asked, removing the fingerclaws from her left hand as well.

“Ttomalss,” came the answer, as she had expected. He did do his best to treat her as if she were a proper part of the Race, for which she respected and admired him hardly less than she did the Emperor back on Home. When she was a hatchling, he had come and gone as he pleased. Now that she approached adulthood, though, he used her with all due courtesy: “May I enter?”

“Of course,” she answered, and put one fingerclaw back on to touch the control that slid the door open. She folded herself into the posture of respect. “I greet you, superior sir.” As he did not usually do, Ttomalss had someone with him. Kassquit remained in the posture of respect. “And I greet you as well, superior female.”

“I greet you, Kassquit,” Felless said. “I greet you indeed. It is good to see you again. You will be very valuable to my investigations.”

“I am glad to hear it, Senior Researcher,” Kassquit replied. “Being useful to the Race is my goal and my purpose in life.”

Felless turned both eye turrets toward Ttomalss. “Truly, she speaks the language as well as one could expect a Tosevite to do,” she said, “and you have trained her well in the subordination due her superiors.”

Kassquit hid her anger. She did not like the way Felless talked about her as if she were not there, or as if she were too stupid to understand anything that was said about her. She glanced toward Ttomalss-he was not so far away from Felless that she had to embarrass herself by turning her whole head to do it-hoping he would reprove the researcher fresh from Home.

He said, “I thank you, Senior Researcher. The effort involved has been considerable, but I agree that the result has been worthwhile.”

That was praise for Kassquit, if she chose to take it the right way. She was not inclined to take it the right way, not now. She did not want Ttomalss, who had raised her from earliest hatchlinghood, to speak of her as if she were only an experimental animal. He had always been her buffer, the one who eased the strain between her and other members of the Race.

Was that what he was doing now? Or did he really think of her as nothing more than a creature he had taught to imitate some of the ways of the Race? Did that not betray the bond between superiors and subordinates, the bond on account of which superiors deserved deference?

Oblivious to her annoyance, oblivious to her worries, Ttomalss pointed to the computer screen and said to Felless, “As you see, she takes a keen interest in the events of the day.”

Kassquit coughed, trying to remind Ttomalss and Felless that she was there, that they were, in fact, standing in her chamber. Neither of them paid any attention to her. “And what is her perspective on these events?” Felless asked Ttomalss.

She might have asked Kassquit. She did not. Ttomalss might have let Kassquit speak for herself. He did not. He answered for her: “Why, the perspective of a female of the Race, of course.”

“Not the perspective of her own kind in any way?” Felless said. “How interesting. What an excellent job you have done.”

“I thank you, Senior Researcher,” Ttomalss said. Kassquit recognized the tones of a male seeking favor.

At last, Felless deigned to notice her again. “Since you have been studying the events of the day, what is your view on which band of Tosevites carried out this murderous attack against us?”

“My view, superior female, is that it matters very little, because all the Tosevite not-empires are bloodthirsty and murderous,” Kassquit replied. “My view is that they should all be chastised, no matter which of them actually did it. That would discourage them from doing such a thing again.” She eyed Felless with something less than warmth. “Only luck that your ship was not one of those targeted.” By her tone, she meant, Only bad luck.

Felless did not read that tone accurately. “Only luck, yes,” she agreed. “We are too vulnerable to these bloodthirsty maniacs, as you said; far too vulnerable.”

Thanks to his greater experience with her, Ttomalss did recognize the tone. After a series of splutters, he said, “Indeed. It is most fortunate.”

Still feeling irritable, Kassquit eyed Felless and asked, “Superior female, why did you seek my opinion of what the Tosevites have done, when I have never met a Big Ugly and so can have only limited knowledge of the differences, if any, among their various groups?”

Again, Felless was slower on the uptake than she might have been. She began, “But you are a-”

“I am as much a female of the Race as I can possibly be,” Kassquit broke in. “This is, I daresay, more than certain other individuals can claim.”

Now Felless could not ignore the insult. Neither could Ttomalss, who said, “Kassquit…” in warning tones he had not used since she was a hatchling.

“What?” she flung back at him. Mortifyingly, her eyes began to fill with moisture, an emotional response built into her Tosevite body but alien to the Race. Sometimes the water would even spill down her face. By blinking rapidly-all she could do, since she had no nictitating membranes-she managed to keep that from happening now, though her nasal passages began to fill with mucus. “If I cannot receive my due from this female, if I cannot receive my due from you, from whom shall I receive it? The fleetlord?”

She had not been guilty of such an outburst since she was a hatchling. Back then, her eruptions had been pure emotion. This one had logic behind it, too. Ttomalss and Felless both stared at her in astonishment. At last, Felless said, “I think I may have been guilty of several false assumptions here. I apologize, Kassquit. You are more one of us and less a Tosevite than I had believed.”

“Ah,” Ttomalss said, finally understanding. “Yes, Kassquit is indeed as much a female of the Race as she can be.”

“I wish you would have treated me as a female of the Race,” Kassquit said to both of them.

Felless quietly quivered, which meant she was angry at being criticized. Her anger bothered Kassquit not at all. Kassquit was angry, too, and felt she had every right to be. Felless had treated her as if she were somewhere between a half-wit and an animal. And Ttomalss had not done much better.

Had Ttomalss quivered in anger, too, Kassquit would have despaired. But the male who had raised her said, “The point of this long exercise is, after all, to learn how much like one of us she can become. Since she has become so very much like us, we would be mistaken to treat her as if she were an uncultured Tosevite.”

“Truth,” Felless said, and then, with as much good grace as she could muster, “I truly do apologize, Kassquit. You are indeed more nearly of the Race than I had imagined you could be, as I told you just now. In a way, this is good, for it says there is indeed a fine chance of accommodating Tosevites within the Empire. In another way, though, it makes matters more difficult for my research. You are not a good subject; you are too much like one of us to make a good subject.”

“I can only be what I am,” Kassquit said. “I wish I could be like a female of the Race in all things. Since I cannot, I can only strive to be as much like a female of the Race as this body permits.”

Before, Felless’ apologies had seemed grudging. Now the researcher said, “Your words do you great credit. Surely the Emperor would be proud if he could listen to them with his own hearing diaphragms.”

“I thank you, superior female,” Kassquit said softly, and cast down her eyes. They were small and absurdly immobile, but they were what she had. Everything she had was at the service of the Emperor, at the service of the Empire.

“And I thank you, Kassquit, for what you have taught me today,” Felless said. One of her eye turrets turned toward Ttomalss and then toward the doorway. Ttomalss took the hint. The two of them left together, discussing Tosevite psychology.

As soon as they were gone, Kassquit darkened the chamber again. She sat in front of the computer screen, listening to the male there talking about preparations for landing some of the ships of the colonization fleet. As long as she just listened to him and didn’t think about herself or look at her soft, scaleless body, she could pretend she was fully a part of the Race… until her right hand wandered toward her private parts once more.

Smoke rose from the Tosevite city outside of which Nesseref intended to land her shuttlecraft. From what she’d seen, smoke often rose from Tosevite cities. Instead of nuclear energy and clean-burning hydrogen, the Big Uglies used the combustion of an astonishing variety of noxious substances to provide energy.

But, even for a Tosevite city, this one showed an uncommon amount of smoke. The Big Uglies were not merely burning their usual nasty fuels. They were burning a large stretch of their city, too, doing their best to burn it down around the males of the Race who occupied it. The more Nesseref saw of Tosev 3 and the Big Uglies, the gladder she was that she hadn’t been part of the conquest fleet. They hadn’t had an easy time of it, hadn’t and still didn’t.

“Shuttlecraft, this is Cairo Ground Control,” a male said. “Your trajectory is on track for landing.”

“Acknowledged, Cairo Ground Control,” Nesseref said, and then, “Tell me, will the site where I land be safe?”

She meant the question sardonically, which only proved she was new to Tosev 3. The male on the ground answered in all seriousness: “It should be safe enough. We will have helicopter gunships patrolling at a radius to make small-arms or mortar attacks unlikely.”

“Thank you so much.” Nesseref meant that sardonically, too, but in an altogether different way. “How have you males on the ground managed to stay alive since you got here?”

She meant that to be sympathetic. She thought it was sympathetic. But it was not sympathetic enough to suit the male on the ground, who replied, “A lot of us have not,” and underlined with an emphatic cough how many hadn’t.

Then she stopped worrying about fine shades of meaning, for black puffs of smoke began appearing out of nowhere in the air around her. A couple of clangs and bangs announced metal fragments ricocheting from or piercing the skin of the shuttlecraft. “Ground Control, I am under attack!” she said urgently. She couldn’t maneuver. All she could do was hope none of those bursting projectiles hit the shuttlecraft squarely.

The male with whom she’d been speaking cursed. “The local Tosevites cannot build these weapons for themselves-they are too ignorant. But they are excellent smugglers, and the not-empires that can manufacture antiaircraft guns are more than happy to bring them in and make our lives more miserable than they were already.”

“I do not care about any of that,” Nesseref said furiously. “All I want is not to get shot down. Make them stop firing at me!”

“We are trying to do that.” The male sounded perfectly calm. Part of that calm doubtless came because no one was shooting at him. And part was that he had done this before. Nesseref wondered how many times he had done it before, and if the Big Uglies had ever succeeded in shooting down a shuttlecraft. No sooner had that thought occurred to her than she wished it hadn’t.

Regardless of whether the Big Uglies shot her down, she had to pay attention to what she was doing or she would end up killing herself. A fingerclaw stabbed a control. Her braking rockets lit, pressing her against her couch.

The Big Uglies had been tracking her descent by eye. When it slowed, they fired several rounds along the path she would have taken, then got her range again. She hissed something pungent. There she was, hanging in the sky like a fruit on a tree branch, all but shouting at the Tosevites to knock her down.

But the shellbursts stopped coming. She noticed new smoke rising from the edge of the city, smoke with flame at the base. She set the shuttlecraft down, as smoothly as if no one on Tosev 3 had ever heard of antiaircraft guns.

When I have time, she thought, I will have a case of the fidgets. I do not have time right now. She said that to herself over and over, till she eventually began to believe it.

As she descended from the shuttlecraft, a landcruiser pulled up alongside it. “Get in,” a male called from the turret. “We shall take you to the administration building. If you go in this, you’ll make it there.”

“By the Emperor!” she said, and was almost too angry to lower her eye turrets. “I thought the fighting was supposed to be over.” She scrambled down from the shuttlecraft and then up and into the landcruiser.

She was even more cramped inside the traveling fortress than she had been coming down from the 13th Emperor Makkakap. Once she was settled as well as she could be, the landcruiser commander said, “Everything was quiet-well, pretty quiet-till the colonization fleet got here. That addled the Big Uglies’ eggs good and proper.”

“Why?” Nesseref asked. “They must have known we were coming.”

“Oh, they did,” the landcruiser commander said. “They knew, but they did not fret or plan much. They are not forethoughtful, not the way we are.”

“I guess not,” Nesseref said. After a moment, she brightened. “Then we should not have much trouble figuring out which Big Uglies gave these Big Uglies the cannon they used to shoot at me.”

“No,” the male said regretfully. “That is not right. The Tosevites are not forethoughtful, but they have their own kind of cleverness. Each not-empire will often give away guns it does not manufacture, to make it harder for us to blame outrages on any one group.”

Before Nesseref could answer, something clanged off the metal-and-ceramic hide of the landcruiser. “What was that?” she asked nervously.

“Only a stone,” the male said. “I ignore those. The Tosevites really pitch fits when we shoot them up for anything as small as a thrown stone. These Egyptian Big Uglies are very touchy that way.”

Nesseref asked, “If this is what the Big Uglies give you, how did you stand the time between when you got here and when the colonization fleet finally came?”

“As I told you, we did not have too much to do after the fighting stopped, not until your fleet arrived.” The landcruiser commander paused to peer out through the periscopes mounted inside his cupola, then resumed: “Besides, we would have been even more bored if Tosev 3 had been the sort of place we thought it was when we came here. Then the Big Uglies would not have been able to do anything but throw stones at us.”

“You enjoy fighting?” Nesseref said in some surprise.

“I am a soldier. I was chosen in a Soldiers’ Time.” Sure enough, the voice of the male from the conquest fleet held pride. “I have the honor of serving the Emperor by adding a new world to those he rules.”

“So you do.” As far as Nesseref was concerned, the landcruiser commander and his comrades were welcome to that honor. The Race had no standing army, only documentation on how to create one in time of need. Everything had gone as planned when the Rabotevs were conquered, and then again when the Hallessi became part of the Empire. On Tosev 3, not everything had gone as planned. On Tosev 3, as far as Nesseref could see, nothing had gone as planned. As if to underscore that, another rock crashed against the landcruiser’s armored skin.

“It is a good thing we did not wait another few hundred years to start this conquest,” the landcruiser commander said, taking the conversation in a new direction, “or the Big Uglies might have come to Home instead. We talk about that a lot here. It would have been very bad. It would mean all the time would become a Soldiers’ Time.”

“That would be a change,” Nesseref said-to a male or female of the Race, sufficient condemnation in and of itself.

The landcruiser clanked to a halt. Over the intercom, the driver announced, “Superior sir, superior female, we are here.”

“Good.” The commander opened the turret hatch, turning one eye turret toward Nesseref as he did. “You should be fairly safe inside this compound. Once you are inside the building itself, you will be as safe as you can be in Cairo. I will await you and your passenger and return you to the shuttlecraft.”

“I thank you,” Nesseref said, and got out of the landcruiser. She hurried toward the building. If she had to be anywhere in Cairo, the safest place in the city struck her as a good choice. She was no soldier. She had no desire to make a Soldiers’ Time-by its very nature, a temporary part of the Race’s history-into a permanent condition. Idly, she wondered if the Big Uglies had permanent Soldiers’ Times. Could even they be so foolishly wasteful of resources?

When she got inside, a male at a desk read her body paint and asked, “What do you require, Shuttlecraft Pilot?”

“I seek Pshing, adjutant to Atvar, fleetlord of the conquest fleet,” she replied. “I am ordered to bring him into the presence of Reffet, fleetlord of the colonization fleet.” Her opinion was that Pshing and Reffet could have conferred perfectly well by radio or video link. No one, however, had asked her opinion.

“I will inform him that you have arrived,” the male said, and spoke into a microphone in front of his snout. He turned an eye in Nesseref’s direction. “He tells me to tell you he will be here directly.”

Maybe directly meant something different for Pshing from what it meant to Nesseref. In her view, he took his time. She could not tell him so, not when a word from him whispered onto Atvar or Reffet’s hearing diaphragm might blight her chances to advance. Such things were not supposed to happen, but they did. “Let us go,” she said crisply when he did arrive, “assuming, that is, that the shuttlecraft remains intact.”

She thought that might faze him, but it didn’t. “The odds favor us,” he said. “Even with smuggled weapons, the local Big Uglies are not outstanding soldiers. Some of them are suicidally courageous, which can make them difficult to defend against, but raw ferocity has its limits.”

“I suppose so,” she said, and then vented a little more exasperation: “Is this travel truly necessary, superior sir?”

“It is,” Pshing declared. “The Tosevites have grown altogether too good at intercepting and decrypting our communications.” Nesseref sighed silently; they’d used the same excuse in Warsaw. Pshing went on, “Details as to when and where ships from the colonization fleet are to land must for obvious reasons remain secure until the last possible moment.”

“Truth,” Nesseref said, however little she wanted to. “Very well, then-we had best be off, to take advantage of the next launch window.”

The landcruiser was even more crowded with two passengers than with one. The gunner kept bumping into Nesseref, which did nothing to improve her temper. More stones thudded into the machine as it made its slow way through Cairo.

Nothing had happened to the shuttlecraft while Nesseref was gone. Praising Emperors past, she lifted on schedule and delivered Pshing to his meeting with Reffet.

When she opened her belt pouch in her own quarters aboard the 13th Emperor Makkakap later that day, she found a small vial that hadn’t been in there before. It was half full of finely ground brownish powder, and had a tiny note stuck to it. A couple of tastes for when you get bored, the note said.

Ginger, Nesseref thought. It has to be more ginger. She supposed the landcruiser driver had slipped the Tosevite spice in there. It hadn’t got in there by itself, that was certain. It was, she knew, very much against regulations, even if males of the conquest fleet kept giving it to her. But she wasn’t bored right now. She thought about throwing it away, then didn’t. She hadn’t thrown away the first vial, either. She might get bored one of these days. Who could say?

Rance Auerbach wondered whether he hated the Lizards worse for wrecking his life or for patching him up after they’d shot him as full of holes as a colander. People said both shooting the enemy and caring for him if you captured him were the right ways to go about making war. He wondered if any of those people had ever gone through close to twenty years of continuous pain. Better he should have bled out on the Colorado prairie southeast of Denver than put up with this.

But he hadn’t bled out, which meant he still had the chance to pay the Lizards back for the unfavor they’d done by saving his life. “And I will get even with them, if it’s the last thing I ever do,” he muttered. Getting even with them as the last thing he ever did struck him as poetic justice. He would die happy if he could die knowing he’d hit them a good lick.

He sat down at the kitchen table, the closest thing to a desk his miserable little apartment boasted. His leg complained when he bent it to sit. It would complain again, a little louder, when he got up once more. He shifted on the chair a couple of times, and it half settled down.

He resumed the letter he’d begun the night before, writing, And so I say again that I hope the Lizards never do figure out who blew up their ships. Let them fear all of us. Let them know we are all dangerous. And if they retaliate, kick ’em in the balls again. He looked it over, nodded, and scrawled his signature. Then he put it in an envelope and stuck on an overseas airmail stamp.

“Let’s hear it for airmail,” he said, and clapped his hands together a couple of times. Telephones and telegrams and telexes were too easy to monitor. The mail, though, the mail went through. Nobody would bother opening one envelope among hundreds, thousands, tens of thousands.

He started another letter, this one in German. He’d learned the language at West Point, then promptly forgotten it. Over the years, though, he’d brought it out of mothballs again, at least as far as reading and writing went. He knew a lot of people-classmates, men with whom he’d served when he could serve-and they knew people, too, people all over the world.

“Krauts better not hear me tryin’ to talk their lingo, though,” he said with a raspy chuckle. German and a Texas twang hadn’t gone together back at the Military Academy. They still didn’t: even less so now.

But he understood how the grammar worked, and he knew what he wanted to say. He also knew his correspondent would agree with him when he said the same sorts of things he had to his English friend. Yeah, the Nazis were bastards, but they had the right idea about the Lizards.

“Kick ’em in the balls,” he said aloud. “They don’t even have balls to kick.”

The colonization fleet would be bringing lady Lizards. You couldn’t very well have a colony-even the Lizards couldn’t-without both sexes being there. Rance imagined a Lizard in a frilly bra and fishnet stockings held up by a garter belt. He laughed like a loon, so hard that he had trouble getting enough air into his poor, battered chest cavity. He knew the Lizards didn’t really work that way; when the females weren’t in season, the males didn’t care. But it made a hell of a funny picture just the same.

He was addressing the envelope to his German associate when the telephone rang. It was back in the bedroom; getting to it took a while. Sometimes it would stop ringing just before he made it to the nightstand. He hated that. Even more, though, he hated making the long, painful trip-any trip for him was long and painful-to have a salesman try to get him to buy a new electric razor or a set of encyclopedias. He cussed those bastards up one side and down the other.

This time, the phone kept ringing long enough for him to answer it. “Hello?”

“Rance?” A woman’s voice. He raised an eyebrow. He didn’t get that many calls from women. “That you, Rance?”

“Who is this?” Whoever she was, she didn’t come from Texas. Her voice held the flat, harsh tones of the Midwestern farm belt. And then, even though he hadn’t heard it in more than fifteen years, he recognized it, or thought he did. “Christ!” he said, and sweat sprang out on his forehead that had nothing to do with either heat or pain-not physical pain, anyhow. “Penny?”

“It’s not the Easter Bunny, Rance; I’ll tell you that right now,” she answered. Now that Auerbach heard more than four words from her, he wondered how he’d known who she was by her voice. It spoke of a lot of cigarettes, a lot of booze, and probably a lot of hard times. She asked, “How are you doing, Rance?”

“Not too goddamn well,” he answered. The telephone trembled in his hand. If it hadn’t been for Penny Summers, he might not have lived after the Lizards shot him up. They’d known each other before the Lizards’ last big push toward Denver. The Race had scooped her up in Lamar, Colorado, before they wounded and captured him. Along with helping to keep him alive, she’d found ways to improve his morale no male nurse could have used. They’d stayed together for a while after the fighting ended, and then… “How much trouble are you in, Penny?”

Her breath caught. “How in God’s name did you know I’m in trouble?”

He laughed again, pulling pain and mirth from his chest at the same time. “If you weren’t, darling, you sure as hell wouldn’t be calling me.”

That should have struck her funny, too, but it didn’t. “Well, I’d be a liar if I said you was wrong.” Every word she spoke seemed chiseled from stone. Auerbach had grown very used to the lazy sounds of Texas English. Hearing those Kansas r’s again made the hair prickle up at the back of his neck.

He knew he had to say something. “Where are you calling from?” he asked. The question was innocuous enough that he didn’t have to deal with the larger one of whether he hated her for helping to keep him alive.

“I’m in Fort Worth,” she answered.

“Thought so,” he said. “The connection’s too good for a longdistance call. What do you want me to do?”

“I don’t know.” She sounded harried and worn. “I don’t know if anybody can do anything. But I didn’t know who else to call.”

“That’s too bad,” Rance said. If, after so much time, she hadn’t been able to find anybody on whom she could rely… “You’re as big a loser as I am,” he blurted. He wouldn’t have said that to many people, no matter how down-and-out they might have seemed, not after he’d made the acquaintance of the Lizard machine gun. But the Lizards had blasted her father to red rags right before her eyes, and she didn’t sound as if she’d gone uphill since.

“Maybe I am,” she said. “Can I see you? I didn’t want to just knock on your door, but-” She broke off, then resumed: “Christ, I hate this.” She’d come a long way from the farm girl she’d been before the Lizards swept through western Kansas, and most of it down roads she wouldn’t have dreamt of traveling then.

More than anything else, that bitterness decided Auerbach. “Yeah, come on ahead,” he said: like called to like. “You know where I’m staying?”

“You’re in the phone book-if I found your number, I found your address, too,” Penny answered, which left him feeling foolish. “Thanks, Rance. I’ll be there in a little bit.” The line went dead.

Auerbach listened to the dial tone for a few seconds, then hung up the phone. “Jesus Christ,” he said, with more reverence than he was accustomed to using. In similar tones, he went on, “What the hell have I gone and done?”

He made his slow, creaky way out into the living room, where he stopped and looked around. The place wasn’t in the worst shape in the world. It wasn’t in the best, though, nor anywhere close. He shrugged. Penny didn’t sound as if she was in the best shape, either. And if she didn’t like the way he kept house, she could damn well leave.

Hobbling into the kitchen, he checked there, too. Bread on the counter, cold cuts in the refrigerator. He could make Penny sandwiches. If it meant he lived on oatmeal for a bit, till he had a hot day at the poker table or his next pension check came, then it did, that was all. And he had whiskey. He had plenty of whiskey. He didn’t need to check to be sure of that.

He waited. “Hurry up and wait,” he murmured, a phrase from his Army days. It still held truth. His heart thudded in his chest: more in the way of nerves than he’d known in years. He sat down. Maybe she wouldn’t come. Maybe she’d get lost. Maybe she’d change her mind, or maybe she was playing some sort of practical joke.

Footsteps in the hall: sharp, quick, authoritative. The whole building shook slightly; it had been run up after the fighting stopped, and run up as quickly and cheaply as possible. He doubted they were her footsteps. She hadn’t walked that way when he’d known her. But he hadn’t known her for a long time. The footsteps stopped in front of his door. The knock that followed had the same abrupt, staccato quality to it.

Auerbach heaved himself up and opened the door. Sure enough, Penny Summers stood in the hall, impatiently tapping her foot on the worn linoleum and sucking on a cigarette. He stared at her with a surprise that he realized was completely absurd. Of course she wouldn’t be the fresh-faced farm girl he’d more or less loved when he was young.

Her hair was cut short and dyed a brassy version of the blond it had been. Her skin stretched tight across her cheekbones and over her forehead. Powder didn’t hide crow’s-feet at the corners of her eyes and couldn’t cover the harsh lines that ran like gullies from beside her nose to the corners of her mouth. The flesh under her chin sagged. Her pale eyes were faded and wary.

She took a last drag on the cigarette, threw it down, and ground it out under the sole of her shoe. Then she leaned forward and pecked Rance on the lips. Her mouth tasted of smoke. “For God’s sake, darling, get me a drink,” she said.

“Water?” Auerbach asked as he limped back to the kitchen. She wasn’t young any more. She wasn’t sweet any more. Neither was he, but that had nothing to do with anything. He knew what he was. She’d just ruined some of his memories.

“Just ice,” she said. The couch creaked as she sat down. He carried the glass out to her, with one of his own in his other hand. Her skirt was short and tight and had ridden up quite a ways. She still had good legs, long and smooth and muscular.

“Mud in your eye,” he said, and drank. She knocked back her whiskey at a gulp. He looked at her. “What’s going on? And what do you think I can do about it? I can’t do much about anything.”

“You know people in the RAF.” It wasn’t a question; she spoke with assurance. “I got involved in a… business deal that didn’t quite turn out the way it was supposed to. Some folks are mad at me.” She gave an emphatic cough. Maybe some of the folks she meant had scales, not hair.

“What am I supposed to do about it?” But that wasn’t really what Auerbach wanted to ask. He wasn’t shy about coming out with it. He wasn’t shy about anything these days. “Come on, Penny-why should I give a damn? You walked out on me a long time ago, remember?”

“Maybe I wasn’t as smart as I should have been,” she said. Maybe she was buttering him up now, too, but he didn’t say anything. He just waited. She went on, “Once I did, though, I couldn’t make it like it never happened. So-will you let a couple of your friends over in England know I’m trying to make things right? And will you let me stay here for a little while, till the heat in Detroit dies down?”

He hadn’t known she’d been in Detroit. “You know who you want me to write to?” he asked, and wasn’t surprised when she nodded. She knew about him, whether he knew about her or not. “Okay, I can write the letters,” he said, “if you’re not lying to me, and you really will fix this up.” He stuck his tongue in the palm of his hand, as if he were a Lizard tasting ginger.

“Good guess,” Penny said. “All I need is a little time to straighten it out. I swear to God that’s the truth.”

Once upon a time, she’d read the Bible a lot. Now… now he judged she’d swear whatever was convenient, same as most people. He shrugged, which hurt a little, then came to the point again: “Only one bed in the bedroom.”

“That’s all right,” she said. “That’s what I’m paying for, isn’t it? — room and broad, I mean?” Her smile was a lot harder, a lot more knowing, than it had been in the old days. Auerbach laughed even so.

“I hate this,” Fotsev said. “How are we supposed to find one male Big Ugly among all the ones who live here? For all we know, the miserable fanatic does not live here any more. If he has any sense, he does not.”

“If he had any sense, he would not be a miserable fanatic,” his friend Gorppet pointed out, a point with which Fotsev could hardly disagree. “For that matter, if he had any sense, he would not be a Tosevite.”

Fotsev couldn’t disagree with that, either, and didn’t. His eye turrets swept the Basra street along which he and his small group were advancing-a narrow, stinking, muddy track between two rows of buildings, some whitewashed, more not, made from mud themselves. They showed only slits for windows, and had the look, though not really the strength, of fortresses.

“He is a crazy Big Ugly for preaching the way he does,” Fotsev said, “and the rest of the Big Uglies are just as crazy for listening to him. And I can tell you somebody else who is crazy, too.”

“Who is that?” Gorppet asked.

Before Fotsev could answer, sudden movement from around a corner made him swing the muzzle of his personal weapon to cover it. A moment later, he relaxed. It was only one of the four-legged hairy creatures, part scavenger, part companion, that the Big Uglies kept as symbionts. It sat back on its haunches and yapped at him and his comrades.

“Miserable creature,” Gorppet said. “I do not like dogs at all. Up in the SSSR, they used to train them to run under landcruisers with explosives on their backs. Nasty to use animals that way. They do not know what they are doing.” He paused. “But you were going to tell me who else is crazy. That is always worth hearing.”

“Truth,” one of their comrades said. “Who else is crazy, Fotsev?”

“The shiplord of the colonization fleet,” Fotsev answered. “With the Big Uglies on this part of the planet all stirred to a boil, why does he think he needs to bring any ships from the colonization fleet down here?”

“To keep the Big Uglies who know what they are doing from blowing up any more of them?” Gorppet suggested.

“Because the weather here is better than it is in most places on Tosev 3?” another male added.

Fotsev hissed in annoyance; those were both good answers. In his mind, though, they weren’t good enough. He said, “That madmale Khomeini is still stirring up the local Big Uglies. How much do you want to bet that they manage to wreck a colonization ship or two? They are so addled, a lot of them do not care whether they live or die.”

“It is that business of thinking they will get a happy afterlife if they die fighting us,” Gorppet said. “We have given enough of them the chance to find out whether they are right or wrong lately, and that is truth.”

A male Tosevite came out of his house. Speaking the language of the Race with a rasping, guttural accent, he said, “He is not here. Go away.”

“You do not tell us what to do,” Fotsev said. “We tell you what to do.” The Big Uglies had had many years to figure that out. That they hadn’t was, in Fotsev’s view, a telling proof of their stupidity.

“He is not here,” the Big Ugly repeated. Swathed in his robes, he looked as much like a ragpile as an intelligent being.

“If a Big Ugly says something is not so, that makes it more likely to be so,” Gorppet said.

“You are right, of course,” Fotsev said. “We had better search that house.”

The Big Ugly let out a howl of protest. Fotsev and the other males of the Race ignored it. Fotsev, as orders required, radioed back to the barracks that he and his comrades were entering a building. If they needed help, they would get it in a hurry. If they needed help, they would, very likely, get it too late no matter how fast it arrived. Fotsev chose not to dwell on that.

He pointed his personal weapon at the Tosevite. “Open the door and go in ahead of us,” he ordered-if the local spoke his language, he was going to take advantage of it. “If you have friends in there with guns, you had better tell them not to shoot, or they and we will surely shoot you.”

Against the Race, that would have been a perfect threat. Against a Big Ugly, it was a good one, but not, Fotsev knew, perfect. Too many Big Uglies all over Tosev 3 had proved themselves ready to die for what they reckoned important.

Without another word, the Tosevite turned and threw the door wide. Only after he had gone inside did he turn back and say, “Here, do you see? There is no danger. And the male you seek is not here, as I told you before.”

Fotsev’s mouth fell open in bitter laughter. No danger? He had been in danger every moment since coming down to the surface of Tosev 3-and he had not been in the worst of the fighting. But he never expected to know another instant in which he was not looking now this way, now that, always anxious lest trouble see him before he saw it. The Emperor had called for a Soldiers’ Time, and soldiers he had got. Fotsev did not think even the Emperor had the power to make soldiers back into ordinary males of the Race. He and his fellows had seen too much, done too much, had too much done to them, for that.

Such gloomy reflections did not keep him from doing his job. As he searched the house, he turned one eye turret back toward Gorppet and asked, “Can you imagine living like this?”

“I would rather not,” his friend replied.

No computers. No televisor screens. Not even a radio receiver. No electricity of any sort; the walls held brackets for torches, and were stained black with soot above them. Fotsev saw only one book, printed in the sinuous squiggles of the alphabet used hereabouts. He knew what that book would be, too: the instruction manual for the local superstition. Most of the Big Uglies in this part of Tosev 3 who could read at all had that book and no others.

A couple of female Tosevites-even more thoroughly muffled in cloth wrappings than the males-squealed as males of the Race came into the kitchen. Fotsev looked at the pot bubbling over the fire. He could see the marks of hammering on it; it had been made by hand. The stew inside smelled good. Whatever had gone into it, though, hadn’t been refrigerated beforehand, and Tosevite pests would have been free to walk over it and lay their eggs in it. No wonder so many Big Uglies die sooner than they might, he thought.

His scent receptors caught the tangy odor of ginger in the stew. It was just a cooking spice to the Big Uglies, not a drug. Fotsev pitied them for that, as for many other things. He was no fiend for ginger; he’d seen too many males endanger themselves and their comrades because they couldn’t keep their tongues out of the ginger jar. The herb and duty simply did not mix. But, when he didn’t have to go anywhere or do anything for a while…

He made himself ignore that temptingly delicious scent. A couple of other males seemed to be looking for excuses to get near the stew pot. One of the female Big Uglies hefted a large iron spoon in what was plainly a warning gesture; the Tosevites did not have so much food as to take lightly the idea of losing any.

Fotsev said, “We are not here to steal. We are not here to stick out our tongues. We are here to see if that miserable Khomeini male is anywhere close by. Remember it, or else you will have something else to remember.”

His small group did as thorough a job as it could of ransacking the house. He did not think a male of the Race could have hidden from them, let alone one of the larger Tosevites. They did not discover the hairy Big Ugly who had stirred up so much hatred and unrest against the Race.

“Do you see?” said the Big Ugly who had asserted Khomeini was not there. “I told the truth. And what did I get for it? You have torn my home to pieces.”

“You Tosevites have done plenty to us,” Fotsev replied. “You cannot blame us if we want to keep you from doing more.”

“Cannot blame you?” The Tosevite yipped out the laughter of his kind. “Of course we can blame you. We will blame you for a thousand years. We will blame you for ten thousand years.” He added an emphatic cough.

However emphatic he was, he spoke as if a thousand years were a very long time, ten thousand years an impossibly long time. Even if the years by which they reckoned were twice as long as those of the Race, Fotsev knew perfectly well that that was not so. “Twenty thousand years from now,” he said, “your descendants will be contented subjects of the Empire.”

The Big Ugly’s small, deeply set eyes went as wide as they could. He said several things in his own tongue that did not sound like compliments. Then he returned to the language of the Race: “You are as wrong as you were wrong when you thought the great Khomeini was here.”

“Our descendants will know.” Fotsev raised his voice: “The Big Ugly male who preaches is not in this house. Let us go and see if we can find him elsewhere.” He doubted they would. But they did have some hope of keeping order in Basra, which was also important.

When he and his small group went out into the street, helicopters rumbled overhead. Alarm ran through him-what had the Big Uglies gone and done now? Then he heard and saw killercraft, some roaring low over the city, others high enough to scribe vapor trails in the upper atmosphere.

“What now?” Gorppet demanded. “They have not needed killercraft in this part of Tosev 3 for a long time.”

Before Fotsev could answer, a new and different rumble filled his hearing diaphragms: a great endless roar of cloven air. He had not heard the like for many years. He looked into the sky. Sure enough: what he had thought he would see, he saw. At first, those specks were at the very edge of visibility, but they swelled rapidly. Before long, even if they never came too close to Basra, they swelled enough to let him gauge how truly huge they were.

“Ah,” Gorppet said.

“Yes.” Fotsev watched the globes descend toward bare ground south and west of the town. “Whether in wisdom or not, the colonization fleet begins to land.”