Down to Earth (12 page)

“Fun,” she said aloud. “Amusement.” She went to a new area on the network, one that offered both of those: the area devoted to discussion of the best ways to nurture hatchlings. The conquest fleet had been all-male; not till the colonization fleet arrived did that area become necessary.

How do you make hatchlings not bite when you feed them?
someone—a harassed someone—had written since Kassquit last checked there.

Someone else, evidently a voice of experience, had given a three-word reply to that:
You do not.
The responder had also added the Race’s conventional symbol for an emphatic cough.

The next message was a glyph of an open mouth, the conventional symbol for laughter. Kassquit’s mouth fell open, too. She laughed like that when she remembered to. Sometimes, though, amusement made her yip the way a Big Ugly was biologically programmed to do.

A few messages further on, someone named Maargyees wrote,
This is my very first clutch of eggs. I wish I had never laid them. Not being able to talk to the hatchlings is driving me out of my scales. What do I do about that?

Live with it,
answered the cynic who’d replied to the earlier message.

We all do,
someone else added.
Sooner or later, they turn into civilized beings. We did, you know.

Maargyees wasn’t easily quelled.
Sure seems like later to me,
she wrote.

How is it that you are so ignorant of hatchlings and their ways?
a male asked.

Me?
Maargyees answered.
I was hatched in a barn myself I do not know anything. Know? I do not even suspect anything.

That sent several laughter signs up onto the computer screen. Kassquit added one of her own. Maargyees had a flippant, irreverent way of looking at the world, very different from the endless run of boring comments from most males and females. Kassquit hadn’t seen anything like it for quite a while. She hadn’t seen anything like it, as a matter of fact, since . . .

She paused with her artificial fingerclaws poised above the keyboard. “Since Regeya,” she said aloud. And she knew only too well who, or rather what, Regeya had turned out to be.

Could the obstreperous Big Ugly, having been booted off the network once, have found a new disguise under which to return? Kassquit decided to do a little checking. No messages from anyone named Maargyees appeared anywhere until some time after Regeya had been removed. That didn’t prove anything, but it was suggestive. Maargyees sounded more like a name a Rabotev should carry than one belonging to a female of the Race, but that didn’t prove anything, either—some members of the Race hatched on Rabotev 2 had local names.

As she had for the falsely named Regeya, Kassquit checked the records. Sure enough, a Maargyees had come with the colonization fleet—a Maargyees with a personal identification number different from the one this female was using.

“Well, well,” Kassquit murmured. She knew she ought to report the wild Big Ugly’s return to the network, but had trouble bringing herself to do it. Things had been dull since Regeya vanished from the network. And Kassquit had a hard time seeing how asking questions about hatchlings constituted any sort of danger for the Race.

She could always report the Tosevite later. For now, she sent him—him, not her—an electronic message:
I greet you, Maargyees. And how is the life of a senior tube technician these days?
That was the fictitious occupation the equally fictitious Regeya had said he used.

If she didn’t get an answer, Kassquit vowed she would report that the Tosevite was roaming the network again. But one came back before long:
I greet you, Kassquit. And how is the life of a snoopy nuisance these days?
With the words, he used the symbol suggesting he didn’t intend to be taken seriously.

Very well; I thank you,
Kassquit answered.
And have you truly laid eggs?

Oh, yes,
Regeya—so she thought of him—answered.
A big square green one and a little purple one with orange spots.

Kassquit stared at the words on the screen, imagining a Big Ugly producing such a preposterous clutch. She dissolved in Tosevite-style noisy giggles. The picture was too deliciously absurd for anything else.
I like you,
she wrote.
I really do.

You must,
Regeya wrote back.
Why else would you get me in so much trouble?
Kassquit cocked her head to one side. How in the name of the Emperor was she supposed to take
that
?

Straha jumped when the telephone rang. The exiled shiplord laughed at himself as he went to answer it. He’d been living in the United States more than forty years now: more than twenty of Tosev 3’s slow turns about its star. After all that time, ringing telephones could still sometimes startle him. By rights, phones were supposed to hiss, as they did back on Home.

He reached for the handset with a small, scornful hiss of his own. Tosevite telephones were good for little more than voice communication: not nearly so sophisticated as the flexible instruments the Race used.
This is what you get—this is part of what you get—for casting your lot with the local primitives,
he thought. But he’d been sure Atvar would give him worse had he stayed. Defying the fleetlord—defying him but not overthrowing him—had a price.

So did exile. He’d paid, again and again. He would go on paying till the day he died—and maybe after that, if the spirits of Emperors past turned their backs on him for his betrayal.

He picked up the telephone. “I greet you,” he said in his own language. By now, he spoke and understood English quite well, but his native hisses and pops went along way toward getting rid of annoying Big Uglies who wanted nothing more than to sell him something.

“I greet you, Shiplord, and hope you are well.” That was a Big Ugly speaking, all right, but one whose voice was familiar and welcome in Straha’s hearing diaphragm.

“I greet you, Sam Yeager,” Straha answered. Yeager might inhabit a Tosevite body, but he was good at thinking like a male of the Race—better than any other Big Ugly Straha knew. “And what would you like today?”

What do you want from me?
was really what he meant. As exiles had to do, he’d earned his keep by telling the rulers of his new home everything they wanted to know about his old one. He’d known he would have to do that when he fled the
206th Emperor Yower
in a shuttlecraft. He’d been doing it ever since.

But all Yeager asked was, “How does the Race ever manage to civilize its hatchlings? Far as I can see, predators are welcome to them.”

Straha laughed. “We do eventually improve. You Tosevites are liable to be less patient than we are, as your hatchlings develop language faster than ours. In every other way, though, ours are more advanced.”

“Shiplord, that is a big exception.” The Tosevite used an emphatic cough.

“I suppose so,” Straha said indifferently. “As for myself, I never had much interest in trying to civilize hatchlings. I never had much interest in trying to civilize anyone. Maybe that is why I have not had too much difficulty living among you Big Uglies.” He used the Race’s imperfectly polite name for the Tosevites without self-consciousness; when they were speaking English, Yeager called him a Lizard just as casually.

“You came down in the right not-empire, Shiplord—that is what it is,” Yeager said. “Suppose you had landed in the Soviet Union. Whatever sort of time you are having here, it would be worse there.”

“So I am given to understand,” Straha answered. “At the time, it was a matter of luck: I had a friend stationed in this not-empire, which gave me a plausible excuse for coming here, so I instructed Vesstil to bring me down not far from that other male’s ship. Had he been in the SSSR, I would have gone where he was.”

By everything he’d learned since, he would indeed have regretted that. The Russkis seemed interested in nothing but squeezing males dry and then discarding them. The Americans had squeezed him dry, but they’d rewarded him, too, as best they could. He had this house in the section of Los Angeles called the Valley, he had a motorcar and a Tosevite driver (who was also bodyguard and spy) at his disposal, and he had the society—such as it was—of other males of the Race living in this relatively decent climate. They weren’t exiles, but former prisoners of war who’d decided they liked living among the Big Uglies. They could, if they chose, travel to areas of Tosev 3 where the Race ruled. Straha couldn’t, not while Atvar remained fleetlord.

And he had ginger. The Americans made sure he had all he wanted. Why not? It was legal here. The local Big Uglies wanted him happy, and ginger made him that way—until he crashed down into depression, even into despair, as the effects of each taste wore off.

Thinking about tasting made him want to do it. It also made him miss a few words of what Yeager was saying: “—do not guess you are the right male to come to for advice about the little creatures, then.”

“No, I fear not,” Straha said. “Why are you suddenly interested in them, anyhow? As I said, I am not so very interested in them myself.”

“I am always curious about the Race and its ways,” the Tosevite replied, an answer that was not an answer. “You may find out more than that one of these days, but the time is not right yet. I hope you will excuse me now, but I have other calls to make. Goodbye, Shiplord.”

“Farewell, Sam Yeager.” Straha swiveled an eye turret in perplexity. Why was Yeager asking questions about hatchlings? The only time Straha had thought about them since coming to Tosev 3 was after he’d mated with a female who’d tasted ginger at a former prisoner’s home: he’d wondered if his genes would go on in the society the Race was building here on Tosev 3, even though he couldn’t.

Well, if Yeager had got an itch under his scales, that was his problem, not Straha’s. Big Uglies had more curiosity than they knew what to do with. What Straha had was a yen for ginger.

The house in which he lived was built to Tosevite scale, which meant it was large for a male of the Race. He kept his supply of the powdered herb at the back of a high cupboard shelf. If he didn’t want a taste badly enough to go to the trouble of climbing up onto a chair and then onto a counter to get the jar, then he would do without.

He was perfectly willing to go clambering today. A breathy sigh of anticipation escaped him as he got down and set the jar on the counter. He took a small measuring spoon out of a kitchen drawer, then undid the lid to the jar. He sighed again when the ginger’s marvelously spicy aroma floated up to his scent receptors. One hand trembled a little as he took a spoonful of the herb from the jar and poured it into the palm of his other hand.

Of itself, his head bent. His tongue shot out and lapped up the ginger. Even the flavor was wonderful, though it was the least part of why he tasted. Almost before he knew it, the herb was gone.

And, almost before he knew it, the ginger went straight to his head. Like that of mating, its pleasure never faded. He felt twice as tall as a Big Ugly, full of more data than the Race’s computer network, able to outpull a landcruiser. All that (or almost all of it—he really did think, or thought he thought, faster with the herb than without it) was a ginger-induced illusion. That made it no less enjoyable.

Experience had taught him not to try to do too much while he was tasting. He really wasn’t infinitely wise and infinitely strong, no matter what the herb told him. During the fighting, a lot of males had got themselves and their comrades killed, for ginger made them think they could do more than they really could.

Straha simply stood where he was, eyeing the ginger jar. Before long, the herb would leave his system. Then he would feel as weak and puny and miserable as he felt wonderful now. And then, without a doubt, he would have another taste.

He was still feeling happy when the telephone rang again. He picked it up and, speaking as grandly as if he were still the third most senior male in the conquest fleet rather than a disgraced exile, he said, “I greet you.”

“And I greet you, Shiplord.”

This time, the telephone wire brought Straha the crisp tones of a male of the Race. “Hello, Ristin,” he said, grandly still. “What can I do for you?”

Ristin had been one of the first infantrymales captured by the Americans. These days, he might almost have been a Big Ugly himself, so completely had he taken on Tosevite ways. He said, “No, Shiplord, it is what I can do for you.”

“Ah? And what is that?” Straha asked. He did not altogether like or particularly trust Ristin. While he himself lived among the Big Uglies, he had not abandoned the ways of the Race: he still kept his body paint perfect, for instance, and often startled males and females who saw him without realizing for a moment which shiplord he was. Ristin, by contrast, wore and wore proudly the red, white, and blue prisoner-of-war body paint the Big Uglies had given him in Hot Springs, Arkansas. His housemate Ullhass was the same way. Straha found them in large measure unfathomable.

But then Ristin said, “Shiplord, I can get you several prime ssefenji cutlets. Are you interested?”

“I am. I cannot deny it, and I thank you,” Straha said. “I had heard that the colonization fleet was beginning to bring down domestic animals, but I did not know the meat was available yet. Ssefenji!” He let out a soft exclamation redolent of longing. “I have not tasted ssefenji since before we left Home.”

“Neither had I,” Ristin answered. “It is as good—well, very nearly as good—as I remembered, too. I have some in the freezer. I will bring it to you today or perhaps tomorrow. May you eat it with enjoyment. And may you eat it with Greek olives—they go with it very well.”

“I shall do that. I have some in the house,” Straha said.

“I thought you would,” Ristin said.

Straha made the affirmative hand gesture, though the other male couldn’t see that, not over a primitive, screenless Tosevite telephone. Males—and females—of the Race found a lot of the food Big Uglies ate on the bland side. Ham, salted nuts, and Greek olives were welcome exceptions. Straha said, “So there are herds of ssefenji roaming Tosev 3 now, eh? And azwaca and zisuili, too, I should not wonder.”