Second Contact (14 page)

“So it is,” Pshing answered. “You will have studied the conquests of Rabotev 2 and Halless 1, I take it?”

“Of course,” Felless said indignantly. “How else was I to prepare myself for this mission?”

“You had no better way, superior female; I am sure of that,” Pshing replied. “But have you not yet learned that what the Race experienced on the previous two planets we added to the Empire has very little to do with conditions here on Tosev 3?”

He’d granted her the title of superiority so he could rub her snout in the fact of her inadequate preparation without offending her. And, in fact, he hadn’t offended her . . . too much. Felless let one eye turret glide appraisingly in his direction. He was a clever male, no doubt about it. Any male who served as several digits of a fleetlord’s hand would have to be clever.

Felless took a deep breath before saying something. She regretted it, for it meant she sent a great lungful of air past her scent receptors. Cairo was full of an astounding cacophony of stinks. The odor of droppings was not quite the same as it would have been back on Home, but she had no trouble recognizing it. Piled on top of that solid foundation were other organic odors she had more trouble classifying. They probably came from the Big Uglies and their animals, who were certainly present in great profusion. A thin stream in the mix was odors of cookery, again different from but similar to those back on Home.

Pshing said, “All things considered, I think we have done reasonably well. We are spread far thinner than we expected to be. Not only have our casualties been much worse than anticipated, but this world was and is far more heavily populated than we had believed it would be. And we cannot be so hard on the Tosevites as we should prefer under other circumstances.”

“And why not?” Felless demanded indignantly. Too late, she realized she’d been foolish. “Oh. The autonomous not-empires.”

“They are not autonomous. They are independent. You must bear this in mind at all times, superior female.” Again, Pshing used the honorific to let her down easy after slapping her across the snout.

“I do try to bear it in mind,” she said, embarrassed. “But it is alien to everything the Race has known these past hundred thousand years.”

“Remember this, then: the USA, the SSSR, and the
Reich
can wreck this planet if they decide to do so,” Pshing said. “This is without our help in the process, you understand. I think any one of those not-empires could do it. With our help, Britain and Nippon might also manage. And is it not so that he who can destroy a thing holds great power over it?”

“Truth.” Felless heard the reluctance in her own voice.

If Atvar’s adjutant also heard it, he was too polite to give any sign. He said, “And so, when these not-empires exhort us to treat the Big Uglies of a certain area in a certain way, we are constrained to take such exhortations seriously.”

“Treating with those who know not the Emperor as equals . . .” Felless looked down at the grimy shingles, an automatic token of respect for her sovereign. “It knocks every standard of civilized conduct we have imbibed since hatchlinghood—since the hatchlinghood of the Race—onto its tailstump. How did things come to such a pass?”

She waved to show what she meant. From the roof of the building from which the Race administered the planet (it still kept its Tosevite name, Shepheard’s Hotel), she stared out at the swarming streets. Tosevites swaddled in their absurd mantlings—some white, some black, some various shades of brown and tan, with a few bright colors mixed in—went about their noisy business, crowding among beasts of burden and motorized vehicles that mostly belched smoke from burning petroleum distillates, not clean hydrogen, and so added one more note to the reek of the place.

And then, as if her outstretched arm were a cue, a shout began to rise in those narrow, winding, insanely crowded streets:
“Allahu akbar! Allahu akbar! Allahu akbar!”
It got louder at every repetition, as if more and more Tosevites were shouting it.

Felless turned to Pshing. “What does that mean?”

“It means trouble,” he answered in grim tones.

She did not fully grasp that grimness, not at first. “Why would a swarm of Big Uglies all start shouting ‘Trouble!’ at the same time?”

Pshing made an exasperated noise. “It means trouble for us, is what it means. Tosevites who shout that think we are evil spirits and have no business ruling them. They think that, if they die trying to kill us, they go straight to a happy afterlife.”

“That’s absurd,” Felless said. “How can their spirits rejoice when they are ignorant of the Emperors?”

“They have always been ignorant of the Emperors,” Pshing reminded her. “They are mistaken, of course, and misguided, but what they believe, they believe very strongly. This is true of most Tosevites most of the time. It is one of the things that makes them so delightful to administer.”

As she had not before, Felless did recognize sarcasm now. Before she could remark on it, gunfire broke out, somewhere not far enough away. Wincing, she said, “It sounds as if the war for the conquest of Tosev 3 is not yet over.”

“It is not,” Atvar’s adjutant replied. Then he said one of the saddest, gloomiest things Felless had ever heard: “It may never be over. Even after this world is colonized, it may never be over.”

“We are the Race,” she answered. “We have not failed yet. We shall not fail here. What would your fleetlord say if he heard you speak thus?”

“He would probably say I might be right,” Pshing answered. “We were lucky to gain a stalemate on this world. Had the conquest fleet delayed its departure another hundred years, the Tosevites would have been more than a match for us—unless they destroyed themselves before we arrived.”

Felless started to say that that was absurd, that the Race would surely have prevailed regardless of the fight the Big Uglies put up. A hundred thousand years of history and more argued that was true. Logic, though, argued against it. If the Big Uglies had come so far so fast, how far would they have advanced in another hundred years?
Unpleasantly far,
she thought.

A bullet cracked past her head. She needed a moment to realize what had happened. She was no soldier; she was a student of alien psychology. Save in those times when it chose to go conquering, the Race had no soldiers, only police. Till this moment, she had never heard gunfire.

Pshing said, “We would be wise to leave the roof now. This building is armored against small-arms fire. It is armored against a good deal more than small-arms fire, as a matter of fact. Almost any building the Race uses on Tosev 3 needs to be armored against more than small-arms fire.”

He spoke altogether matter-of-factly, though speaking of horror. Felless stared at him; his psychology was almost as alien to her as that of the Tosevites she’d been sent to study. Then another bullet zipped by, and another. Realization smote: she could die up here. She had all she could do to follow Pshing to the head of the stairs at a steady walk. She wanted to skitter as if pursued by a
bagana
or some other fearsome beast of prey.

Helicopters flew low, pouring gunfire into the Big Uglies. Above the racket, Pshing said, “I hope the Tosevites here have not managed to smuggle any rockets into Cairo, as they have in some other places. Helicopter crews are vulnerable to that kind of fire.”

Again, he spoke as he might have of a factory accident. Maybe that helped him deal with the dangers that accompanied his trade, dangers different from any Felless had ever known. Thoughtfully, she said, “I begin to understand why some of the males on this world turn to the local herb called ginger to escape its rigors.”

“Ginger will be a problem for the colonists, too,” Pshing said. “It creates too much pleasure for it to be anything else: so much, in fact, that it is severely destructive of order and discipline. We believe the worst mutinies on this planet were instigated by ginger-tasters.”

“Mutinies.” Felless shivered, though the stairwell, like the rest of the building, was comfortably warm. She had heard males from the conquest fleet complain endlessly about Tosev 3’s climate; much of the video she’d seen tended to bear them out. But Cairo seemed comfortable enough. She went on, “I cannot imagine males of the Race turning on duly constituted authority. I believe it happened— I have seen the records proving it happened—but I cannot imagine it.”

“You were not here to see for yourself the fighting that took place after the conquest fleet landed.” Pshing shivered, too, at bad memories Felless did not, could not, share. “We came closer than you can imagine to losing the war altogether. We almost had”—he swiveled his eye turrets, to make sure no one was close enough to overhear him—“we almost had our fleetlord cast down from his office as a result of shiplords’ dissatisfaction with the conduct of the war.”

“What?” Felless hadn’t seen anything about that—or had she? Pieces that hadn’t fit together now suddenly did. “That would explain why one of the shiplords defected to the Tosevites.” She’d seen that mentioned, but the data she’d seen made the shiplord out to be a treacherous idiot. Had he been a treacherous idiot, how had he managed to become a shiplord?

“Indeed it would.” Pshing sighed. “This world has had a corrosive effect on us, even after the fighting stopped. We have been too few, and have slowly begun to dissolve in the sea of Big Uglies all around us. Now that you folk have come, I hope we shall be able to reverse that trend, so that the Tosevites shall begin to be assimilated into the larger Empire, as should have begun from the outset. I hope we shall be able to do that.”

He did not sound sure the Race would be able to do that. “Of course they will be assimilated,” Felless declared. “That is why we have come. That is why I am here: to learn how best to integrate the Tosevites into the structure of the Empire. We did it with the Rabotevs and Hallessi. We shall do it here.”

“One difference, superior female,” Pshing said, which meant he was going to contradict her.

“And that is?” She gave him the chance.

“You must always remember that the Tosevites, unlike the Rabotevs or Hallessi, are also trying to learn how to integrate us into their structures,” Pshing said. “They are skilled at the art, having practiced it so much among themselves. We have more strength—we will have more still, now that the colonization fleet is here. They, however, may well have more skill.”

Felless shivered again. Maybe the building wasn’t so warm after all.

Atvar studied the latest set of reports scrolling across his computer screen. “This is not satisfactory,” he said, and paused a moment to wonder how many times he had said that since coming to Tosev 3.
Too many
was the answer that immediately sprang to mind.

“Exalted Fleetlord?” Pshing inquired.

“Unsatisfactory,” Atvar repeated. Saying it gave him a certain amount of pleasure. Doing something about it gave him more. He got that larger pleasure less often than he would have liked. “The Tosevites have been doing altogether too much maneuvering with their accursed satellites lately.”

“To which not-empire shall we protest, Exalted Fleetlord?” his adjutant asked.

“They are all doing it,” Atvar said peevishly. “I think they are doing it deliberately, to confuse us. Whether they are trying to confuse us or not, they have certainly succeeded. By now, we are not altogether certain whose satellites are in which orbits. This distresses me.”

“It could be worse,” Pshing said. “The more fuel they use up in these maneuvers, the sooner they will have none left.”

“Truth.” Atvar hissed sadly. “The other truth, worse luck, is that the Big Uglies will either refuel them or send new ones up to take their place. Maybe we would have been wiser to forbid them from going into space at all.” He hissed again. “They made it all too plain that they were ready to resume fighting if we enforced that prohibition. They meant it. Indeed, they meant it.”

“Yes, Exalted Fleetlord.” Pshing’s job was not to disagree with Atvar.

Before the fleetlord could say anything else, something hit the building a thunderous blow. The floor shook under Atvar’s feet; little bits of plaster and plaster dust floated down from the ceiling. Atvar snatched up a telephone and clawed in the code he needed.

“Security,” the male on the other end said.

“Not enough of it, evidently,” Atvar said, acid in his voice. “What was it that just impacted on us?”

The male in Security paused a moment, no doubt to check his caller’s code. When he realized to whom he was speaking, he got deferential in a hurry. “Exalted Fleetlord, that was a small, I would say locally made, rocket detonating against our armored façade here. No casualties, minimal damage. A lot of smoke, a lot of noise. Maybe the Big Uglies will think they really did something. They did not, and I will take an oath by the Emperor’s name on it.”

“Very well. Thank you.” Atvar broke the connection. He turned an eye turret toward Pshing. “The fanatics, as you could have guessed for yourself. I wonder which of the Deutsche or the Russkis or the British stirred them up to this latest round of madness.”

“Exalted Fleetlord, did anyone necessarily stir them up?” Pshing asked. “They are Tosevites, and so quite able to stir themselves up.”

“I wish I could say you were wrong,” Atvar said mournfully. “But you are correct, as we have seen again and again to our sorrow. And the male in Security believes it to have been a locally made rocket. Perhaps that is just as well. One of the independent not-empires might well have furnished the fanatics with something more lethal.”

He wished Tosev 3 had been as the Race fondly believed it would be. Had that been so, he would now have been turning over his duties to the fleetlord of the colonization fleet. He would have gone down in the records of four worlds as Atvar the Conqueror. For tens of thousands of years to come, hatchlings of four races would have learned of him in their lessons. Conquerors were rarer by far than Emperors, and more likely to stay in a student’s memory.

He hissed softly. He would go down in history, all right. He would go down as the first male the Emperor had designated a Conqueror to succeed incompletely. He hoped the landing of the colonization fleet would succeed in bringing Tosev 3 firmly within the Empire. On good days, he had some confidence that that would happen. On bad days, he wondered if the Big Uglies wouldn’t end up overwhelming the Race instead.