Down to Earth (19 page)

As he started for the market square, he laughed again. He wasn’t likely to have much immediate interest in animals from Home, and neither was any other Polish Jew. How likely were they to divide the hoof and chew a cud? Not very, which put them beyond the pale as far as he was concerned.

People and a few Lizards crowded the square. Since Mordechai wasn’t shopping, he ignored the frantic haggling in Yiddish and Polish and, every now and then, the hisses and pops of the language of the Race. He strode up to the building from which the Lizards administered this stretch of Poland—along with the shadow governments of the Jews and Poles. The guards in front of the building were alert, as they had reason to be. “What do you want?” one of them asked in passable Polish.

The male didn’t recognize him. Well, that was all right; he had trouble telling one Lizard from another. “I just saw an animal . . .” he began, also sticking to Polish—he could do a better job of describing the creature in that tongue than in the Race’s.

“Ah,” the guard said when he was through. “That is a beffel. They
will
run wild. ‘Crazy as a beffel on a leash’ is a saying in our language.”

“A beffel,” Mordechai repeated—now he had a name for the beast. “What good is it? Do you eat it, or is it just a pet?”

“Eat a beffel? What an ignorant Tosevite you are.” The guard’s mouth dropped open in amusement. So did his partner’s. “No. It is only a pet, as you say.”

“All right. I
am
ignorant—I’d never seen one till now. It was fighting a cat,” Anielewicz said. “Are they going to start running loose all over the place now?”

“I would not be surprised,” the guard replied. “They get to be nuisances back on Home. So do tsiongyu.”

“What’s a tsiongi?” Mordechai asked.

“Another kind of pet, larger,” the guard said. “You speak some of our language, to know the singular when you hear the plural.”

“Truth,” Anielewicz answered, shifting to the language of the Race. “So: are we to be overrun with animals from Home?”

“If we so choose,” the Lizard replied. “We rule this part of Tosev 3. We have the right to bring in the beasts on which we feed—and we are doing that, too—and the beasts that are our friends. What business do you have to say otherwise?”

That was a pretty good question, although the male sounded arrogant even for one of his kind. Mordechai didn’t try to answer it. Instead, he asked a question of his own: “How will your animals like the winters here in Poland?”

By the way both guards winced, he knew he’d struck a nerve. “We cannot know that until we find out by experiment,” said the one who was doing the talking. “The hope is that they will do well. I certainly hope this. Our beasts are better eating than your Tosevite animals.”

“Truth.” The other guard proved he could talk.

Anielewicz wondered if he needed to go inside and talk with Bunim. He decided he didn’t. He’d learned everything he needed to know from the regional subadministrator’s guards. Bunim wouldn’t stop bringing his kinds of animals into Poland just because Mordechai asked him to. Europeans had brought cows and pigs and dogs and cats to America and Australia. Why wouldn’t the Race bring its creatures to Earth? The Lizards had come to stay, after all.

And the Poles probably wouldn’t mind the new domestic animals one bit. They didn’t have to worry about keeping kosher. Mordechai chuckled, wondering how soon some strange meat would start turning up in Polish farmwives’ pots and how soon Polish leather makers would start tanning new kinds of hide.
Sooner than the Lizards expect,
he thought. Yes, the Poles were very likely to turn into—what did the Westerns imported from the United States call cattle thieves?
Rustlers,
that was it. And an old joke about the recipe for chicken stew floated through his mind.
First, steal a chicken.

“Do you need anything else?” the first guard asked.

If that wasn’t a hint for Anielewicz to clear out, he’d never heard one. “No. I thank you for your time,” he said, and made his way back across the Bialut Market Square. These days, he was always in the habit of keeping an eye open for possible assassins: amazing what a burst of submachine-gun fire through the door would do. Now, though, he also kept an eye out for befflem and tsiongyu. He wouldn’t have known a tsiongi if it walked up and bit him, not really, but any sort of alien animal that wasn’t a beffel would do for one till he knew better.

No doubt because he was on the lookout for the Race’s pets, he saw none as he went back to the flat. All the way there, though, he kept thinking about how the beffel had laid up that cat. Cats were tough; not many Earthly animals their size could take them on and win. What did that say about how rugged other beasts from Home were liable to be? Did it say anything at all? Nobody could predict a cow from a cat, so why was he trying to figure out what the Race’s equivalent of a cow would be like from extremely brief acquaintance with a beffel?

Then he paused, smiling in spite of himself. The Lizardy creature had squeaked most endearingly. He wondered what sort of pet a beffel would make for a human being. Would it accept a person as a master, or would it think he was a large, fearsome wild animal?

His son Heinrich would like to know the answer to that question, too. Heinrich couldn’t see a stray dog without saying, “Can we keep it?” The answer, in a flat none too big for the people who lived in it, was inevitably no, but that didn’t keep him from asking.

Over supper—chicken soup with dumplings—Mordechai talked about the beffel. Sure enough, Heinrich exclaimed, “What a great-sounding animal! I want one! Can we get one, Father?”

Before Anielewicz could answer, Heinrich’s older sister Miriam said, “A thing that looks like a little Lizard? That’s disgusting! I don’t want anything that looks like a Lizard here.” She made a horrible face.

“A beffel looks about as much like a Lizard as a cat or a dog looks like a person. It’s about so long”—Mordechai held his hands thirty or forty centimeters apart—“and goes on all fours.”

“Like a regular lizard—not like one of the Race, I mean?” His daughter sounded no happier. “That’s even worse.”

“No, not like a regular lizard, either,” Anielewicz said. “Sort of like what a dog or a cat would be if a dog or a cat had scales and eye turrets.” Predictably, that entranced Heinrich and even interested his older brother David, but left Miriam cold.

“There’s no point in worrying about these creatures now,” Bertha Anielewicz said, spreading warning looks all around. “We don’t have them, and as far as we know, we can’t get them. We don’t even know”—she eyed Heinrich—“if we’d want one.”

“
I
know!” her younger son exclaimed.

“You’ve never even seen one,” Bertha said.

But that was the wrong way to go about things, and Mordechai knew it. “For now, I don’t think people can have befflem, so there’s nothing we can do about that,” he told Heinrich. “Anyhow, I just saw this one by luck. I don’t know if I’ll ever see another one, so there’s no point worrying about it, is there?”

“If I find one, can I keep it?” Heinrich asked.

“I don’t think you’re going to,” his mother said, “but all right.” Heinrich grinned from ear to ear. Bertha looked confident. Mordechai wished she would have given him the chance to speak first. But she hadn’t, and now they were both stuck with her answer.

Kassquit was as happy as the anomalous combination of her birth and her upbringing let her be. She hadn’t fully realized how much she missed Ttomalss till he returned from the Greater German
Reich.
Of all the males of the Race, he came closer to understanding her than any other. Having him around, having him here to talk to, was far better than staying in touch by telephone and electronic message.

“In a way, though,” he said as they sat down together in the starship’s refectory, “my absence may well have helped you mature. You might not have confronted Tessrek had I been here, for instance; instead, you would have left the disagreeable task to me. But you did it, and did it well.”

“Only because I had to,” answered Kassquit, who would indeed have preferred not to confront a male of superior years and rank.

“Exactly my point.” Ttomalss picked up his tray. “And now I hope you will excuse me. I have many reports to organize and write. My stay among the Deutsche proved most informative, if not always very pleasant.”

“I understand, superior sir.” Kassquit did her best to hide her disappointment. She was not a hatchling any more, and could not hope to monopolize Ttomalss’ time as she had when she was smaller and more nearly helpless. She could not hope to, but she could wish.

After Ttomalss left, she finished her meal in a hurry. She did not enjoy the company of large numbers of the Race; seeing so many males and females together always acutely reminded her of how different she was. Back inside her cubicle, she was simply herself, and did not need to make comparisons.

She was simply herself on the electronic network, too. What she looked like, what she sounded like, didn’t matter there. Only her wit mattered—and that, she had seen, was a match for those of most males and females. No wonder she spent so much time in front of the screen, then.

She was heading toward the area where males and females discussed the new generation of the Race that had been hatched on Tosev 3 when the telephone attachment hissed for attention. With a sigh, she arrested her progress on the network and activated the phone connection. “Kassquit speaking. I greet you.”

“And I greet you, superior female.” No image appeared on the screen; the conversations remained voice-only. The male on the other end of the line—a male with a voice of odd timbre—went on, “I needed to do a little of this and a little of that before I was able to call you, but I managed.”

“Who is this?” Kassquit asked in some annoyance. Whoever he was, he had a very strange voice: not only deeper than it had any business being, but also mushy, as if he were talking with his mouth full.

“What?” he said, and somehow managed to make his interrogative cough sound sarcastic. “You mean you do not recognize the voice of your old not-quite-friend, the senior tube inspector?”

Ice and fire chased each other through Kassquit. “Oh, by the Emperor,” she whispered, and cast down her eyes. “You are a Tosevite.” She was talking with a wild Big Ugly. Somehow, he’d found her telephone code and arranged access to a phone connected to the Race’s communication system.

“I sure am,” answered the Big Ugly male she thought of as Regeya. “I bet you could tell the instant I opened my mouth. I cannot make some of your sounds the way . . .” His voice trailed off. With dull horror, Kassquit knew what was coming next. Regeya was no fool. He’d heard her speak. She reached for the recessed key that would break the connection, but her hand faltered and stopped. The tongue was out of the mouth any which way. If the worst was coming, she might as well hear it. And it was. In slow wonder, Regeya went on, “You have trouble with the same sounds I do. Are you by any chance a Tosevite yourself, Kassquit?”

Kassquit thought she spoke much better than the wild Big Ugly. Not only did he have trouble with some of the pops and special hisses of the Race’s tongue, but he also spoke it with an odd syntax and accent: shadows, no doubt, of his own Tosevite language. But that had nothing to do with anything. “I am a full citizen of the Empire,” she answered proudly.

Despite the pride, it was an evasion, and Regeya recognized as much. “You did not answer my question,” he said. “
Are
you a Tosevite?” He answered it himself: “You must be. But how did it happen? What made you throw in your lot with the Race?”

He thought she was a Tosevite traitor, as some males of the Race from the conquest fleet had turned traitor after the Big Uglies captured them. She proceeded to disabuse him of the notion. “I would not be anything but a citizen of the Empire,” she declared. “The Race has raised me since earliest hatchlinghood.”

Regeya said something in his own language that she didn’t understand, then let out several barking yips of Tosevite laughter. When at last he returned to the language of the Race, his only comment was, “Is that a fact?”

“Yes, it is a fact,” Kassquit said with more than a little irritation. “Why in the name of the Emperor”—calling on him made her feel more secure—“would I waste my time lying to you? You are on the surface of Tosev 3, while I orbit above it. Since you must remain there, what can you possibly do to me?”

She’d nipped the Big Ugly’s pride, but not quite as she’d expected. “I have been farther from Tosev 3 than you,” he answered, “for I have walked on the surface of the moon. So I might visit you one day.”

I hope not,
was the first thought that went through Kassquit’s mind. The idea of coming face to face with a wild Big Ugly terrified and horrified her. Nor would she tolerate Regeya’s scoring points off her. “You may have gone from Tosev 3 to its moon,” she said, “but the Race has come from its sun to the star Tosev.”

“Well, that is a truth,” the Big Ugly admitted. “Pretty proud of the Empire, eh?” That last grunt was almost an interrogative cough in its own right.

“I am part of it. Why should I not feel pride in it?” Kassquit said.

“All right—something to that, too,” Regeya said. “How old are you, Kassquit? How old were you when the Race took you from the female who bore you?”

“I was taken away when I was newly hatched,” Kassquit answered. “Had I been brought up as a Big Ugly, even in part, I would have had more trouble becoming as fully a part of the Race as I have. The male who raised me began the project not long after the fighting stopped.”

“So you would be close to twenty now?” Regeya said, half to himself. Kassquit began to correct him, but then realized he naturally reckoned by Tosevite years rather than those of the Race. Laughing again, he went on, “Well, well, quite a head start.” Kassquit didn’t know what that meant. Regeya was still talking: “Did the male who raised you tell you that you were not his first attempt?”

“Oh, yes,” Kassquit replied at once. “He had to return one hatchling to the Tosevites because of political considerations, and was kidnapped while seeking to obtain another. With me, however, he succeeded.”
As much as he could, as much as anyone could,
she thought. But she would not let the Big Ugly see what lay in her mind.