Down to Earth (50 page)

The door opened. There stood Barbara Yeager. She briefly bent into the posture of respect. “I greet you, Shiplord,” she said in the language of the Race. “How are you?”

“Fine, thanks,” Straha answered in English. “And you?”

“We are also well,” Sam Yeager’s mate answered. She shifted to English, too: “Sam! Straha’s here.”

“I’m coming, hon,” Yeager called. Straha listened with mingled amusement and perplexity. Despite having lived so long among the Big Uglies, he didn’t—by the nature of things, he couldn’t—fully understand the way their family relationships worked. Neither the Race, the Rabotevs, nor the Hallessi had anything similar, so that was hardly surprising. The former shiplord found endearments like the one Yeager had used particularly hard to fathom. They struck him as informal honorifics, a contradiction in terms if ever there was one. But the Big Uglies didn’t seem to find it a contradiction; they used them all the time.

Sam Yeager came into the front room. “I greet you, Shiplord,” he said, as his mate had before. “I hope things are not too bad.”

“No, not too,” Straha answered. With Sam Yeager, he stuck to his own language; more than with any other Big Ugly, even his driver, he felt as if he were talking with another male of the Race. That
I hope things are not too bad
proved how well Yeager understood his predicament. Any other Tosevite would have said,
I hope things are good.
Things weren’t good. They couldn’t be, not in exile. They could be not too bad.

“Come on into the kitchen, then,” Yeager said. “I have a new kind of salami you might want to try. I have rum and vodka—and bourbon for Barbara and me. And I have ginger, if you care for a taste.”

“I shall gladly try the salami,” Straha said. “If you pour me the glass of rum, I expect it will manage to empty itself. But I shall decline the ginger, thank you.”

“Whatever suits you,” Sam Yeager said, turning and walking through the front room and dining room toward the kitchen. His mate and Straha followed. Over his shoulder, Yeager went on, “Shiplord, you had better know by now that I do not mind if you taste ginger, any more than I mind if you drink alcohol. No Prohibition here.” The second word of the last sentence came out in English. By Yeager’s chuckle, it was a joke.

Straha didn’t get it. “Prohibition?” he echoed, confused.

“When I was young, the United States tried to prohibit the drinking of alcohol,” Yeager explained. “It did not work. Too many Tosevites like alcohol too well. I wonder if that will happen with the Race and ginger.”

Addicted to the Tosevite herb though he was, Straha said, “I hope not. I can drink a little alcohol and have my mood slightly altered, or I can drink more for greater changes. Ginger is not like that. If I taste ginger, I
will
enjoy the lift it gives me, and I
will
suffer the depression afterwards. I have far less control with it than I do with alcohol, and the same holds true for other tasters.”

“All right,” Yeager said. “That makes better sense than a lot of things I have heard.” Once in the kitchen, he got out glasses, poured rum into Straha’s, and put ice and whiskey into the ones for his mate and himself. He raised his in salute. “Mud in your eye.” That was in English, too.

The Race also used informal toasts. After drinking to Yeager’s, Straha returned one: “May your toeclaws tingle.” Yeager drank to that, then started slicing salami. Straha went on, “I never have understood why you Big Uglies do not freeze up, what with all the ice you use.”

He had been teasing the Yeagers about that for a long time. “We like it,” Barbara said. “If you are too ignorant to appreciate it, that only leaves more for us.”

“We have no reason to like ice,” Straha said. “If this planet did not have so much snow and ice, we would have had a better chance of conquering it. Of course, if I had been made fleetlord instead of failing in my effort to overthrow Atvar, we would also have had a better chance of conquering it.”

After more than twenty Tosevite years, he seldom let his bitterness show so openly. Sam Yeager said, “We Big Uglies are glad you failed, then. Here, see how you like this.” He gave Straha a plate full of salami slices.

After trying one, the ex-shiplord said, “It is certainly salty enough. Some of the Tosevite spices I enjoy, while others are harsh on my tongue.” He turned an eye turret toward the wrapper in which the salami had come. He found English spelling a masterpiece of inefficiency even by Tosevite standards, but he could read the language well enough. “Hebrew National?” he asked. “Hebrew has to do with the Big Uglies called Jews, is it not so? Is this salami brought into the United States from regions the Race rules?”

“No, we have plenty of Jews here, too,” Yeager told him. “This salami is made only with beef. Jews are not supposed to eat pork.”

“One more superstition I shall never understand,” Straha said.

Yeager shrugged. “I am not a Jew, so I cannot say I understand it, either. But they follow it.”

Back in the days before the Empire unified Home—long before the Empire unified Home—males and females of the Race had held such preposterous beliefs. They’d all been subsumed in the simple elegance of reverencing the spirits of Emperors past. Only scholars knew any details of the ancient beliefs. But here on Tosev 3, the Big Uglies had developed a formidable civilization while keeping their bizarre hodgepodge of superstitions. It was a puzzlement.

Before Straha could remark on what a puzzlement it was, he heard a loud thump from down the hall, and then another. “What was that?” he asked.

“That?” Sam Yeager said. “That was . . . a research project.”

“What kind of research project goes thump?” Straha asked.

“A noisy one,” the Big Ugly answered, which was no answer at all. After yet another thump, Yeager added, “A very noisy one.”

Straha was about to insist on some sort of real explanation when he got one, not from Sam Yeager but again from down the hall. Though they came only faintly, as if through a door, the hisses and squawks he heard were unmistakable. “You have other males or females of the Race here!” he exclaimed. “Are they prisoners?” He cocked his head to one side, listening intently. Try as he would, he could make out no words. Then he realized there were no words to make out. “Hatchlings! You have hatchlings!”

Sam and Barbara Yeager looked at each other. That was much more obvious among Big Uglies than in the Race, for the Tosevites had to turn their whole heads. In English, Barbara Yeager said, “I told you we should have put them out in the garage.”

“Yeah, you did,” Sam answered in the same language. “But the neighbors might have seen them when we moved them, and that would have been worse.” He swung back toward Straha. “The shiplord here, he’s a soldier. He knows how to keep secrets.”

His tone implied that Straha had better know how to keep secrets. Straha hardly noticed. He was still too astonished. “How did you get hold of hatchlings?” he asked. “Why did you get hold of hatchlings?”

Sam Yeager regathered his composure and returned to the language of the Race: “I cannot tell you how we got the eggs, for I do not know myself. You understand that, Shiplord: what I do not know, I cannot betray. Why? So we can raise them as Big Uglies, or see how close they can come to being like us.”

Just for a moment, Straha felt as if he were a shiplord of the Race once more. To have his own kind raised by these Tosevite barbarians, never to know their own heritage . . . “It is an outrage!” he shouted, tailstump quivering with fury.

“Maybe it is,” Yeager said, which surprised him. The Big Ugly went on, “But if it is, how is it anything different from what you have done with Kassquit?”

“But these are ours,” Straha said automatically. Even he realized that wasn’t a good enough answer. Some of the blind anger that had filled him began to seep away. He was glad he hadn’t tasted ginger. If he had, he probably would have bitten and clawed first and talked later, if at all.

“We are free. We are independent. We have as much right to do this as you do,” Sam Yeager said. Logically, he was right.

But logic still had a hard time penetrating. “You have robbed them of their heritage,” Straha burst out.

“Maybe,” Yeager said, “but maybe not, too. We have had them a little more than two of your years, and they are already starting to talk.”

“What?” Straha stared. “That is impossible.”

“It is a truth,” Sam Yeager said, and the ex-shiplord found him impossible to disbelieve.

Another realization exploded within Straha: his driver had known about this all along. He’d known, and never said a word. No, not quite never. Now some of the things he’d said that hadn’t made sense to Straha did. Straha wondered what he could do to take revenge on the Big Ugly. Nothing came to mind, not right away, but something would, something would. He was sure of that.

“This is all quite astonishing,” he said at last.

“I would sooner you had not learned,” Yeager said, “but they got too boisterous.” He ruefully spread his hands. “And you understand security, so it is not so bad.” Was he trying to convince himself? Probably.

“Yes, I understand security,” Straha agreed. But his thoughts were far away. He knew he would need something approaching a miracle to get back into Atvar’s good graces and be allowed to rejoin the Race. Reporting a couple of hatchlings kidnapped by the Big Uglies . . . would that be enough? He didn’t know. He couldn’t know—but it was worth thinking about.

Gorppet wasn’t so sure he’d been smart in coming to South Africa after all. It was a lot more easygoing than his longtime former posting, that was certain. Of course, that would have been true of anywhere the Race ruled. But the weather, as far as he was concerned, left a lot to be desired. In what was allegedly summer in this hemisphere, it was tolerable, he supposed, but what would winter be like? Not good—he was sure of that. He hoped it wouldn’t be as bad as the SSSR. The males stationed here said it wouldn’t, but Gorppet had learned the hard way not to trust what others said without testing it.

He sighed as he tramped through the streets of Cape Town’s District Six. However atrocious the Big Uglies in the district known as Iraq had been, he’d enjoyed the weather there. Every so often, he’d even felt hot. He didn’t think he would do that here.

Black and brown and pinkish-tan Big Uglies filled the streets around him. They chattered in several languages he didn’t understand. Learning Arabic had come in handy in Iraq, but did him no good here. Even this script was different from the one they’d used there. He hadn’t been able to read Arabic writing, but he’d got used to the way it looked. These angular characters seemed wrong somehow.

He paused at a street corner. More motorized vehicles were on the streets here than in Basra or Baghdad—many more driven by Big Uglies. More bicycles were on the road, too. They were ingenious contraptions, and made individual Tosevites into little missiles.

A male Big Ugly came up to the corner at a slow limp, leaning on a stick. “I greet you, Gorppet,” he said, speaking the language of the Race with a thick accent.

“And I greet you, Rance Auerbach,” Gorppet replied. “How are you today?”

“Bad,” Auerbach answered, as he usually did. He used an emphatic cough, and then several that showed nothing but infirmity. “Very bad. That hurts.”

“I believe it. It sounds as if it should,” Gorppet said. “A wound from the fighting, you told me?”

“That is right.” Auerbach nodded. “One of your miserable friends put a couple of bullets in me, and I have never been the same since.” He shrugged. “And some of your friends may limp on account of bullets I put in them back then. That is how things were. I only wish the male would have missed me.”

“I can understand that.” Gorppet liked Rance Auerbach, liked him better than he’d expected to like any Big Ugly. Auerbach was able to greet him and deal with him without rancor in spite of what had happened during the fighting. Gorppet thought he himself would have been able to do the same with the Soviet Tosevites he’d faced then. They’d all been doing what they’d been told to do, and doing it as best they could. How could you hate anyone who’d only been doing his best?

Auerbach said, “Come on. Let us go to the Boomslang. Penny and Frederick will be waiting for us.”

“All right,” Gorppet said. “I will listen to what all of you have to say.” He paused, then added, “I am less sure I would listen to the others if you were not with them.”

“Me?” Auerbach said, and Gorppet knew he’d startled the Big Ugly. “Why me? Penny found you. Of all of us involved in the deal, I am the least.”

Gorppet made the negative hand gesture. “No. You are mistaken. I understand you in ways I do not understand the female and the black-skinned male. We have been through many of the same things, you and I. It gives us something of a bond.”

“Maybe.’’ Auerbach didn’t sound convinced.

But Gorppet wanted to convince him. “It is a truth,” he said earnestly. “Did you never feel, back in those days, that you had more likenesses to the males you fought than to your own high officers and to the Tosevites who were not fighting?”

Rance Auerbach stopped walking so abruptly, Gorppet took a couple of paces before realizing the Big Ugly wasn’t with him any more. The male turned an eye turret back toward Auerbach. Hoarsely, the Tosevite said, “I had that feeling more times than I could count. I did not know it worked the other way.”

“Well, it did,” Gorppet said. “We were sent here, to a world about which, as it turned out, we knew less than nothing. We were told conquering it would be easy, a walk in the sand. We were told all sorts of things. Not one of them turned out to be truth. Is it any wonder that we were not always happy with those who led us and those who sent us forth?”

“No wonder at all,” Auerbach said with another emphatic cough. This time, he managed not to add any involuntary coughs of his own.

When he and Gorppet walked into the Boomslang together, the place got very quiet all at once. It was a dangerous sort of quiet. Having come from Basra and Baghdad, Gorppet knew that sort of quiet all too well. He let a finger slide toward the safety on his rifle. If anyone wanted trouble, he was ready to give plenty.