Second Contact (19 page)

Was that what he was doing now? Or did he really think of her as nothing more than a creature he had taught to imitate some of the ways of the Race? Did that not betray the bond between superiors and subordinates, the bond on account of which superiors deserved deference?

Oblivious to her annoyance, oblivious to her worries, Ttomalss pointed to the computer screen and said to Felless, “As you see, she takes a keen interest in the events of the day.”

Kassquit coughed, trying to remind Ttomalss and Felless that she was there, that they were, in fact, standing in her chamber. Neither of them paid any attention to her. “And what is her perspective on these events?” Felless asked Ttomalss.

She might have asked Kassquit. She did not. Ttomalss might have let Kassquit speak for herself. He did not. He answered for her: “Why, the perspective of a female of the Race, of course.”

“Not the perspective of her own kind in any way?” Felless said. “How interesting. What an excellent job you have done.”

“I thank you, Senior Researcher,” Ttomalss said. Kassquit recognized the tones of a male seeking favor.

At last, Felless deigned to notice her again. “Since you have been studying the events of the day, what is your view on which band of Tosevites carried out this murderous attack against us?”

“My view, superior female, is that it matters very little, because all the Tosevite not-empires are bloodthirsty and murderous,” Kassquit replied. “My view is that they should all be chastised, no matter which of them actually did it. That would discourage them from doing such a thing again.” She eyed Felless with something less than warmth. “Only luck that your ship was not one of those targeted.” By her tone, she meant,
Only bad luck.

Felless did not read that tone accurately. “Only luck, yes,” she agreed. “We are too vulnerable to these bloodthirsty maniacs, as you said; far too vulnerable.”

Thanks to his greater experience with her, Ttomalss did recognize the tone. After a series of splutters, he said, “Indeed. It is most fortunate.”

Still feeling irritable, Kassquit eyed Felless and asked, “Superior female, why did you seek my opinion of what the Tosevites have done, when I have never met a Big Ugly and so can have only limited knowledge of the differences, if any, among their various groups?”

Again, Felless was slower on the uptake than she might have been. She began, “But you are a—”

“I am as much a female of the Race as I can possibly be,” Kassquit broke in. “This is, I daresay, more than certain other individuals can claim.”

Now Felless could not ignore the insult. Neither could Ttomalss, who said, “Kassquit . . .” in warning tones he had not used since she was a hatchling.

“What?” she flung back at him. Mortifyingly, her eyes began to fill with moisture, an emotional response built into her Tosevite body but alien to the Race. Sometimes the water would even spill down her face. By blinking rapidly—all she could do, since she had no nictitating membranes—she managed to keep that from happening now, though her nasal passages began to fill with mucus. “If I cannot receive my due from this female, if I cannot receive my due from you, from whom shall I receive it? The fleetlord?”

She had not been guilty of such an outburst since she was a hatchling. Back then, her eruptions had been pure emotion. This one had logic behind it, too. Ttomalss and Felless both stared at her in astonishment. At last, Felless said, “I think I may have been guilty of several false assumptions here. I apologize, Kassquit. You are more one of us and less a Tosevite than I had believed.”

“Ah,” Ttomalss said, finally understanding. “Yes, Kassquit is indeed as much a female of the Race as she can be.”

“I wish you would have treated me as a female of the Race,” Kassquit said to both of them.

Felless quietly quivered, which meant she was angry at being criticized. Her anger bothered Kassquit not at all. Kassquit was angry, too, and felt she had every right to be. Felless had treated her as if she were somewhere between a half-wit and an animal. And Ttomalss had not done much better.

Had Ttomalss quivered in anger, too, Kassquit would have despaired. But the male who had raised her said, “The point of this long exercise is, after all, to learn how much like one of us she can become. Since she has become so very much like us, we would be mistaken to treat her as if she were an uncultured Tosevite.”

“Truth,” Felless said, and then, with as much good grace as she could muster, “I truly do apologize, Kassquit. You are indeed more nearly of the Race than I had imagined you could be, as I told you just now. In a way, this is good, for it says there is indeed a fine chance of accommodating Tosevites within the Empire. In another way, though, it makes matters more difficult for my research. You are not a good subject; you are too much like one of us to make a good subject.”

“I can only be what I am,” Kassquit said. “I wish I could be like a female of the Race in all things. Since I cannot, I can only strive to be as much like a female of the Race as this body permits.”

Before, Felless’ apologies had seemed grudging. Now the researcher said, “Your words do you great credit. Surely the Emperor would be proud if he could listen to them with his own hearing diaphragms.”

“I thank you, superior female,” Kassquit said softly, and cast down her eyes. They were small and absurdly immobile, but they were what she had. Everything she had was at the service of the Emperor, at the service of the Empire.

“And I thank you, Kassquit, for what you have taught me today,” Felless said. One of her eye turrets turned toward Ttomalss and then toward the doorway. Ttomalss took the hint. The two of them left together, discussing Tosevite psychology.

As soon as they were gone, Kassquit darkened the chamber again. She sat in front of the computer screen, listening to the male there talking about preparations for landing some of the ships of the colonization fleet. As long as she just listened to him and didn’t think about herself or look at her soft, scaleless body, she could pretend she was fully a part of the Race . . . until her right hand wandered toward her private parts once more.

Smoke rose from the Tosevite city outside of which Nesseref intended to land her shuttlecraft. From what she’d seen, smoke often rose from Tosevite cities. Instead of nuclear energy and clean-burning hydrogen, the Big Uglies used the combustion of an astonishing variety of noxious substances to provide energy.

But, even for a Tosevite city, this one showed an uncommon amount of smoke. The Big Uglies were not merely burning their usual nasty fuels. They were burning a large stretch of their city, too, doing their best to burn it down around the males of the Race who occupied it. The more Nesseref saw of Tosev 3 and the Big Uglies, the gladder she was that she hadn’t been part of the conquest fleet. They hadn’t had an easy time of it, hadn’t and still didn’t.

“Shuttlecraft, this is Cairo Ground Control,” a male said. “Your trajectory is on track for landing.”

“Acknowledged, Cairo Ground Control,” Nesseref said, and then, “Tell me, will the site where I land be safe?”

She meant the question sardonically, which only proved she was new to Tosev 3. The male on the ground answered in all seriousness: “It should be safe enough. We will have helicopter gunships patrolling at a radius to make small-arms or mortar attacks unlikely.”

“Thank you so much.” Nesseref meant that sardonically, too, but in an altogether different way. “How have you males on the ground managed to stay alive since you got here?”

She meant that to be sympathetic. She thought it was sympathetic. But it was not sympathetic enough to suit the male on the ground, who replied, “A lot of us have not,” and underlined with an emphatic cough how many hadn’t.

Then she stopped worrying about fine shades of meaning, for black puffs of smoke began appearing out of nowhere in the air around her. A couple of clangs and bangs announced metal fragments ricocheting from or piercing the skin of the shuttlecraft. “Ground Control, I am under attack!” she said urgently. She couldn’t maneuver. All she could do was hope none of those bursting projectiles hit the shuttlecraft squarely.

The male with whom she’d been speaking cursed. “The local Tosevites cannot build these weapons for themselves—they are too ignorant. But they are excellent smugglers, and the not-empires that can manufacture antiaircraft guns are more than happy to bring them in and make our lives more miserable than they were already.”

“I do not care about any of that,” Nesseref said furiously. “All I want is not to get shot down. Make them stop firing at me!”

“We are trying to do that.” The male sounded perfectly calm. Part of that calm doubtless came because no one was shooting at him. And part was that he had done this before. Nesseref wondered how many times he had done it before, and if the Big Uglies had ever succeeded in shooting down a shuttlecraft. No sooner had that thought occurred to her than she wished it hadn’t.

Regardless of whether the Big Uglies shot her down, she had to pay attention to what she was doing or she would end up killing herself. A fingerclaw stabbed a control. Her braking rockets lit, pressing her against her couch.

The Big Uglies had been tracking her descent by eye. When it slowed, they fired several rounds along the path she would have taken, then got her range again. She hissed something pungent. There she was, hanging in the sky like a fruit on a tree branch, all but shouting at the Tosevites to knock her down.

But the shellbursts stopped coming. She noticed new smoke rising from the edge of the city, smoke with flame at the base. She set the shuttlecraft down, as smoothly as if no one on Tosev 3 had ever heard of antiaircraft guns.

When I have time,
she thought,
I will have a case of the fidgets. I do not have time right now.
She said that to herself over and over, till she eventually began to believe it.

As she descended from the shuttlecraft, a landcruiser pulled up alongside it. “Get in,” a male called from the turret. “We shall take you to the administration building. If you go in this, you’ll make it there.”

“By the Emperor!” she said, and was almost too angry to lower her eye turrets. “I thought the fighting was supposed to be over.” She scrambled down from the shuttlecraft and then up and into the landcruiser.

She was even more cramped inside the traveling fortress than she had been coming down from the
13th Emperor Makkakap
. Once she was settled as well as she could be, the landcruiser commander said, “Everything was quiet—well, pretty quiet—till the colonization fleet got here. That addled the Big Uglies’ eggs good and proper.”

“Why?” Nesseref asked. “They must have known we were coming.”

“Oh, they did,” the landcruiser commander said. “They knew, but they did not fret or plan much. They are not forethoughtful, not the way we are.”

“I guess not,” Nesseref said. After a moment, she brightened. “Then we should not have much trouble figuring out which Big Uglies gave these Big Uglies the cannon they used to shoot at me.”

“No,” the male said regretfully. “That is not right. The Tosevites are not forethoughtful, but they have their own kind of cleverness. Each not-empire will often give away guns it does not manufacture, to make it harder for us to blame outrages on any one group.”

Before Nesseref could answer, something clanged off the metal-and-ceramic hide of the landcruiser. “What was that?” she asked nervously.

“Only a stone,” the male said. “I ignore those. The Tosevites really pitch fits when we shoot them up for anything as small as a thrown stone. These Egyptian Big Uglies are very touchy that way.”

Nesseref asked, “If this is what the Big Uglies give you, how did you stand the time between when you got here and when the colonization fleet finally came?”

“As I told you, we did not have too much to do after the fighting stopped, not until your fleet arrived.” The landcruiser commander paused to peer out through the periscopes mounted inside his cupola, then resumed: “Besides, we would have been even more bored if Tosev 3 had been the sort of place we thought it was when we came here. Then the Big Uglies would not have been able to do anything but throw stones at us.”

“You enjoy fighting?” Nesseref said in some surprise.

“I am a soldier. I was chosen in a Soldiers’ Time.” Sure enough, the voice of the male from the conquest fleet held pride. “I have the honor of serving the Emperor by adding a new world to those he rules.”

“So you do.” As far as Nesseref was concerned, the landcruiser commander and his comrades were welcome to that honor. The Race had no standing army, only documentation on how to create one in time of need. Everything had gone as planned when the Rabotevs were conquered, and then again when the Hallessi became part of the Empire. On Tosev 3, not everything had gone as planned. On Tosev 3, as far as Nesseref could see, nothing had gone as planned. As if to underscore that, another rock crashed against the landcruiser’s armored skin.

“It is a good thing we did not wait another few hundred years to start this conquest,” the landcruiser commander said, taking the conversation in a new direction, “or the Big Uglies might have come to Home instead. We talk about that a lot here. It would have been very bad. It would mean all the time would become a Soldiers’ Time.”

“That would be a change,” Nesseref said—to a male or female of the Race, sufficient condemnation in and of itself.

The landcruiser clanked to a halt. Over the intercom, the driver announced, “Superior sir, superior female, we are here.”

“Good.” The commander opened the turret hatch, turning one eye turret toward Nesseref as he did. “You should be fairly safe inside this compound. Once you are inside the building itself, you will be as safe as you can be in Cairo. I will await you and your passenger and return you to the shuttlecraft.”

“I thank you,” Nesseref said, and got out of the landcruiser. She hurried toward the building. If she had to be anywhere in Cairo, the safest place in the city struck her as a good choice. She was no soldier. She had no desire to make a Soldiers’ Time—by its very nature, a temporary part of the Race’s history—into a permanent condition. Idly, she wondered if the Big Uglies had permanent Soldiers’ Times. Could even they be so foolishly wasteful of resources?