Aftershocks (54 page)

There. She’d topped her own earlier understatement. She hadn’t thought she could.

“You knew when Jonathan Yeager came to the starship that his relation with you would be only temporary,” Ttomalss reminded her. “It was as much an experiment from his perspective as from yours—an experiment prolonged because of the fighting that broke out against the Deutsche. Perhaps it would have been better had the experiment not been prolonged.”

“Yes, perhaps it would have,” Kassquit said. “But I cannot do anything about that except try to adjust as well as I can to the consequences of what did happen. Learning to experience this intensely pleasurable emotion and then having it taken away has been difficult.” Another fine understatement.

“I have asked you before if you wanted me to find you another Tosevite male,” Ttomalss said. “If you wish me to do so, I will do my best to provide you with one who will be pleasing.”

“I thank you, superior sir, but that is still not what I want,” Kassquit said. “For one thing, I have no certainty of matching the pleasure I received from Jonathan Yeager, pleasure both sexual and emotional. For another, suppose I should. That liaison would also necessarily be temporary, and I would go into another fit of depression after it ended. From what I am given to understand, this is rather like the emotional cycle ginger tasters experience.”

“Perhaps it is. I cannot speak there from personal experience, and I am glad I cannot,” Ttomalss said. “I can say that some ginger tasters appear to enjoy the cycle between pleasure and gloom, while others wish they could escape it and escape from their use of the herb.”

“But what am
I
to do?” Kassquit asked, though Ttomalss was hardly in a position to be able to tell her.

He pointed that out: “Your two choices are to remain as you are and to regret the one sexual and emotional relationship you had or to embark on another and then come to regret that, too. I would be the first to admit that neither of these strikes me as ideal.”

“They both strike me as disastrous.” Kassquit’s fingerclaws were short and wide and blunt. They bit into the soft flesh of her palms even so. “And yet, superior sir, I see no others, either.”

“We shall do what we can for you, Kassquit. On that you have my word,” Ttomalss said. Kassquit wondered how much his word would be worth, and whether it would be worth anything. But she did believe he would try. He went on, “Soon I shall see you in person. I look forward to it. For now, farewell.”

“Farewell,” Kassquit echoed, and Ttomalss’ image vanished from the monitor.

She looked around her cubicle and sighed again. For most of her life, this little space had been her refuge against the males—and, later, the females—of the Race who’d scorned her. Now it seemed much more like a trap. What could she do here by herself? What could she do anywhere here by herself? And how, among the males and females of the Race, could she ever feel as if she weren’t by herself? Her hand shaped the negative gesture. It was impossible.

After shaping that gesture, she scratched her head. It felt rough and a little itchy. She should have shaved it the day before, but she hadn’t felt like taking the trouble. The next time she washed, though, she would have to do it.

Why bother?
she wondered. The answer leaped into her mind as soon as the thought formed:
to look more as if I were a member of the Race.

Kassquit walked over to the built-in mirror in the cubicle. As always, she had to stoop a little to see herself in it; it was made for a member of the Race, not a Big Ugly. She looked at her flat, vertical, short-snouted, softskinned, eye-turretless face with the fleshy sound receptors to either side.

“What difference would hair make?” she said aloud. Try as she would, she’d never look like a member of the Race. Then a new thought occurred to her. “Rabotevs and Hallessi do not look like members of the Race, either, but they are citizens of the Empire. I am a Tosevite citizen of the Empire. If I want, I can look like a Tosevite.”

Wild Big Uglies—except the ones like Jonathan Yeager, who also imitated the Race—let their hair grow. Even Jonathan Yeager had shaved only the hair on his scalp and face, not that on the rest of his body. And, from what he had said, most females, even among those who imitated the Race, let the hair on their scalps grow.

That female with whom he will be mating, that Karen Culpepper, probably has hair,
Kassquit thought. At first, that struck her as a good argument for shaving. But then she hesitated. Perhaps hair increased sexual attractiveness, in the same way that, among the Race, a male’s upraised scaly crest helped prompt a female to mate with him.

I am a Big Ugly. I cannot help being a Big Ugly. Even after this world becomes part of the Empire, Tosevite citizens of the Empire will probably go right on letting their hair grow. Why should I not do the same? I cannot be a female of the Race, but I can be a Tosevite female who is a citizen of the Empire. In fact, I cannot be anything else.

She ran a hand over her scalp, wondering how long the hair would take to grow to a respectable length. Then she let that hand slide down between her legs. She would grow hair there, too, and under her arms as well. She wondered whether she ought to keep shaving those areas even if she left her scalp alone. Then she shrugged. Jonathan Yeager hadn’t shaved around his private parts, or under his arms, either. She decided to let the hair grow. If she decided she didn’t like it, she could always get rid of it later.

The hair on her scalp quickly became noticeable. After she’d ignored the razor only a few days, the researcher named Tessrek spoke to her in the refectory: “Are you trying to look like a wild Big Ugly? If so, you are succeeding.”

He’d never liked her, not even when she was a hatchling. She didn’t like him, either, not even a little. She answered, “Why should I not look like a Tosevite, superior sir? As you never tire of pointing out, it is what I am.”

“High time you admit as much, too, instead of trying to act like a photocopy of a member of the Race,” he said, but warily—she’d already proved she could hold her own in a war of wits.

“Civilization does not depend on shape or appearance,” she said now. “Civilization depends on culture. You certainly prove that.”

“I thank you,” he said, before realizing she didn’t mean it as a compliment. A couple of males at the table with him were quicker on the uptake. Their laughter told Tessrek he’d made a fool of himself. He sprang to his feet and angrily skittered away. Kassquit ran her hand over her now fuzzy scalp. It itched a little. So did her underarms and private parts. Even so, she thought she might learn to enjoy having hair.

When Jonathan Yeager’s father got off the telephone, he was laughing fit to burst. “What’s funny, Dad?” Jonathan asked.

“We’ve got ourselves something brand new, that’s what,” his father answered. “We’re going to accept a couple of Lizards—and I do mean a couple, in every sense of the word—who aren’t just political refugees. They’re sexual refugees, too. Sexual outlaws, you might even say.”

“Outlaws?” That intrigued Jonathan, as his dad must have known it would. “Why? What have they done?” He tried to imagine what sort of sex crime a Lizard—no, two Lizards—could commit. Imagination, unfortunately, failed him.

Grinning, Sam Yeager said, “They’ve fallen in love, and they want to get married. And so the Lizards are throwing them right out of their territory and letting us worry about ’em. They’d tar ’em and feather ’em and ride ’em out of town on a rail, too, except they think feathers are just about as strange and unnatural as falling in love.”

Jonathan didn’t think falling in love was unnatural. He enjoyed it. But it hadn’t occurred to him that Lizards might do the same. “How on earth did that happen?” he asked. Before his father could answer, he held up a hand. “It’s got something to do with ginger, doesn’t it? It would have to.”

“Sure enough.” His father nodded. “The female Lizard and her male friend would mate whenever she tasted ginger, and she tasted a lot. After a while—from what I heard over the phone just now, they were best friends before she got the habit—they decided they wanted to stay together all the time. And boy, did they get in trouble when they told their local mayor or whomever it was they told what they wanted.”

“I bet they would,” Jonathan exclaimed. He tried to look at things from the point of view of a Lizard official. Having done so, he whistled softly. “It’s a wonder they didn’t lock ’em in jail and throw away the key.”

“Truth,” his father said in the language of the Race, and added an emphatic cough. “Maybe they figured this pair would be a bad influence even in jail. I don’t know anything about that. What I do know is, the Race let ’em ask for asylum here in the United States, and we’ve granted it. They expect to settle in California, as a matter of fact.”

“We’ve probably got the biggest expatriate community in the country—either Los Angeles or Phoenix,” Jonathan said.

His father laughed again. “Not a whole lot of them move to Boston or Minneapolis,” he agreed. “They don’t much fancy the weather in places like those. I grew up not all that far from Minneapolis. I don’t much fancy the weather there, either.”

Having lived most of his life in Los Angeles, Jonathan had trouble imagining the sort of weather Minneapolis got. He didn’t waste his time trying. Instead, he asked, “May I tell Karen about this? She’ll think it’s funny, too.”

“Sure, go ahead,” his dad answered. He walked across the kitchen and set a hand on Jonathan’s shoulder. “And thanks for asking before you talked with her, too. This one isn’t classified, but it could’ve been.”

“I know better than to run my mouth, Dad,” Jonathan said righteously. After a moment, though, he admitted, “I did tell her about what you’d found out—but only after those goons grabbed you. Looking back, I don’t suppose I was doing her any big favor.”

“No, I don’t think you were, either,” his father said. “But you were trying to make sure people didn’t get away with what they’d done to the Race. And, incidentally, you were trying to save my neck, so I guess I’ll forgive you.”

“Okay.” Jonathan walked over to the phone. “I’m going to call her now, if that’s okay with you. The people she works with’ll think that’s funny, too.”

Because of his time up on the space station, he still had a couple of quarters left at UCLA. After Karen graduated, she’d landed a job at a firm that adapted Lizard technology to human uses. Jonathan dialed her work number. When she answered, she didn’t go,
Borogove Engineering—Karen Culpepper speaking,
the way she had the day before. What she did say was, “Hello, Jonathan. How are you today?”

“I’m fine,” he answered automatically. Then he blinked. “How’d you know it was me? I didn’t say anything.”

“We’ve just got a new gadget—we’re sublicensing it from a company up in Canada,” she answered. “It reads phone numbers for calls you get and displays them on a screen.”

“That’s hot,” Jonathan said. “Somebody had a real good idea there. Anyway, the reason I called . . .” He repeated the story he’d heard from his father.

When he finished, Karen gurgled laughter. “Oh, I do like that,” she said. “That’s
funny,
Jonathan. I wonder what the Race will think of us from now on. The United States of America, the place where they can dump their perverts.”

“Yeah.” Jonathan laughed, too, but not for long. “You know, that might not be so good. If they start looking at us that way, it’s liable to make them start looking down their snouts at us, too.”

“Maybe you ought to say something about that to your dad,” Karen said.

“I think I will,” he answered. “You still want to go to Helen Yu’s for dinner tonight?”

“Sure,” Karen said. “It’s Friday, so we can do something afterwards, too—we don’t have to get up in the morning. Come get me around half past six, okay? That’ll let me hop in the shower after I get home.”

“Okay. See you at six-thirty. ‘Bye.” He hung up and turned to his father. “Dad . . .”

“I know what you’re going to want from me.” Sam Yeager pulled his wallet out of his hip pocket. “Twenty bucks do the job?”

“Thanks. That’d be great.” Jonathan took the bill and stuck it in his own pocket. “But that wasn’t the only thing I had in mind.”

His father laughed at him. “That’s a line you’re supposed to use with Karen, not with me.” Jonathan’s ears burned. Sometimes his dad could be very crude. Sam Yeager went on, “I’ll bite. What’s so important besides money?”

“Something Karen said,” Jonathan answered, and explained her reaction to what the Race might think about America sheltering the two Lizards who wanted to get married.

“That
is
interesting,” his father said. “But we’re a free country, and we keep getting freer a little bit at a time. If we can start giving our own Negroes a fair shake, I expect we’ll be able to find room for a few Lizards who do strange things. The Race already thinks we’re too free for our own good.”

“All right,“ Jonathan said. “If you’re not going to worry about it, I won’t, either.”

“I expect you’ve got other things on your mind right now, anyway,” his dad said. Jonathan did his best to look innocent. His father laughed some more, so his best probably wasn’t very good.

He pulled up in front of Karen’s house at six-thirty on the dot. Since they were engaged, he could even give her a quick kiss in front of her parents. When they got to Helen Yu’s, on Rosecrans near Western, only a couple of spaces in the lot were empty. Jonathan grabbed one. Yu’s was one of the oldest and most popular Chinese restaurants in Gardena—actually, just outside the city limits.

They ate egg-flower soup and sweet-and-sour pork ribs and chow mein and crunchy noodles and drank tea, something neither of them did outside a Chinese restaurant. After a while, Karen said, “I wonder what Liu Mei would think of the food here.”

“She’d probably say it was good,” Jonathan replied. “I don’t know how Chinese she’d think it was.” That question had occurred to him before. He’d sensibly kept his mouth shut about it. When Liu Mei visited the States with her mother, he’d had something of a crush on her. Karen had known it, too, and hadn’t been very happy about it. But now that she’d asked the question, he could safely answer it.