Second Contact (42 page)

One day, she was heading back from the galley when she almost collided with a male named Tessrek, who skittered around a corner straight into her path. She barely managed to stop in time. Had she failed, the collision would of course have been her fault. “I beg your pardon, superior sir,” she said from the posture of respect.

“Watch where you plant your large, homely, flat feet,” Tessrek snapped. He had never cared for her. Ttomalss had told her Tessrek hadn’t cared for the previous Tosevite infant he’d tried to rear, either.

“It shall be done, superior sir,” Kassquit replied now. All she wanted to do was end the conversation and return to the lonely peace of her compartment.

But Tessrek was in no mood to let her off so easily. “ ‘It shall be done, superior sir,’ ” he echoed, imitating her intonation as best he could with his different mouthparts. “Down on Tosev 3, they have animals that can be trained to talk. How do I know you are not just another such animal?”

“By whether what I say makes sense,” Kassquit answered, refusing to let Tessrek see he had made her angry. “I can imagine no other way to do it, superior sir.” Sometimes a soft reply made him give up his attempts to disconcert or simply to hurt her.

It didn’t work this time. “You are only a Big Ugly,” Tessrek said. “No one cares about your imaginings. No one cares about your kind’s imaginings.”

A female from one of the ships of the colonization fleet walked past as Kassquit was doing her best to come up with another polite answer instead of telling Tessrek to flush himself down the waste-disposal opening in his compartment. “My imaginings, such as they are, are not typical of those of Big Uglies, superior sir,” she said. “They are much closer to those of the Race, because . . .”

Her voice trailed away as she realized, a little slower than she should have, that Tessrek was no longer paying her any attention. Both his eye turrets were fixed on the female who had just gone by. The scales on top of his head rose into a crest, something Kassquit had never seen before on any male. He stood up straight—unnaturally straight for a male of the Race, almost as straight as Kassquit herself. With a peculiar wordless hiss, he hurried after the female.

Her eye turrets swiveled so she could look back at him. She hissed, too, a lower, softer sound than his, and bent into a posture similar but not identical to the posture of respect, a posture that left her head low and her rump high. Tessrek moved into place behind her. Kassquit got a brief glimpse of an organ that, like the male’s erectile scales, she had never seen before. It reminded her a little of the sort of organ male Tosevites possessed. And Tessrek used it rather as she had seen male Tosevites use theirs in the recordings that fascinated and disgusted her at the same time.

No sooner had Tessrek made yet another sound that was not a word than another male came hurrying along the corridor. He also had eyes only for the female. With every step he took, he strode more nearly upright. Like Tessrek, he had a row of scales standing upright on his head.

“Back,” Tessrek snarled at him, and stressed the word with an emphatic cough. But the other male paid him no attention. Tessrek let out a shriek and sprang at him before he could reach the female, who still stood waiting with her head near the floor.

They thrashed and twisted, biting and clawing at each other. Kassquit had to spring back to keep from being dragged into the fight. “Help!” she cried. “These two males have gone mad!”

Her shout brought a couple more males out to see what was going on. But both of them immediately displayed the same excitement as Tessrek and his opponent had shown. One, in fact, promptly joined in the brawl. The other nimbly dodged around it and began to couple with the compliant female.

Kassquit stared in astonished horror. She had never dreamt males of the Race could behave thus. Ttomalss had never talked much about what males and females were like during the breeding season. Kassquit had got the idea even thinking about it made him—and all the other males she’d known—nervous. Now, all at once, she understood why.

Males kept running along the corridor. They either piled into the fight or tried to mate with the female. A new fight soon hatched because of that. Kassquit backed away. None of the males showed the slightest interest in her. Unlike the females of their own kind, she did not smell exciting to them. She couldn’t imagine what she would have done if she had.

After backing along the corridor to another one that intersected it, she made her way back to her own compartment by a roundabout route. Once there, she made sure the door would not open without her authorization. Then she sat down—rather uncomfortably, in a chair too small and made for a backside with a tailstump—and put her face in her hands. That was not a gesture the Race used, but it seemed appropriate. Her mind whirled. For as long as she could remember, Ttomalss and other males had mocked the Tosevites’ mating habits. Had the Big Uglies been able to see what she had just witnessed, Kassquit was sure they would have been able to do some mocking of their own.

She wondered why the female had gone into heat, and why no others seemed to have done so with her. As Kassquit had understood things, all females back on Home had their season at about the same time and, once it was done, it was done for another year. That didn’t seem to be what had happened here.

She heard shouts in the corridor outside her compartment. Someone slammed into the door, hard. That wasn’t a knock; it was a male—she assumed it was a male—getting hurled into the metal panel. To her vast relief, the door held. The shouts went down the corridor.

“By the Emperor!” Kassquit burst out. “Are they all addled?” As far as she could tell, they were. She turned on the computer to find out what the Race made of the madness sweeping through it.

But the continuous news broadcast she listened to for a while said nothing about females suddenly entering their season or about males clawing and biting one another in their frenzied eagerness to couple. Instead, the newscaster spent most of his time condemning the ginger habit and everything associated with it. “Were it not for ginger,” he declared, “the Race would be far more tranquil and secure than it is today.”

Kassquit laughed out loud, as a Tosevite would have. That embarrassed her, but not so much as it might have done; at the moment, she was embarrassed for the Race. “Only proves how much you know,” she said, and used an emphatic cough.

She went through the other media channels, trying to find one that would admit the Race was faced with females coming into season at what seemed to be an unexpected time. She could not. Everywhere she checked, though, commentators were inveighing against the insidious Tosevite herb called ginger.

She was about ready to pitch something through the screen when the computer announced she had an incoming telephone call from Ttomalss. “Will you accept?” the electronic voice inquired.

“Yes,” Kassquit said, and had to remind herself not to add on another emphatic cough, which would have confused the machinery. Ttomalss’ image appeared on the screen in front of her. “Superior sir, I am
so
glad to see you!” she burst out, and did append that second emphatic cough after all.

“I am always glad to see you, Kassquit,” Ttomalss said, solemn as usual.
He is steady,
Kassquit thought.
He is reliable.
He went on, “And why are you so particularly glad to see me now?”

“Because madness is going through the ship right now,” she answered, and explained what sort of madness she meant.

“Oh,” Ttomalss said when she’d finished. After that, he said nothing for a little while.
He is embarrassed by my speaking frankly,
Kassquit thought. But Ttomalss was embarrassed for other reasons than that, as he showed when he spoke again: “I must tell you, this problem of females’ apparently untimely coming into season has also occurred here in Nuremberg and elsewhere on the surface of Tosev 3. I myself have succumbed to the mating urge.”

“You have?” Logically, Kassquit knew she had no right, no reason, to feel betrayed. She did nonetheless. “Superior sir, how could you?”

“No. The question is, how could I not? The answer is, there was no way I could not, not after the female’s pheromones reached my scent receptors,” Ttomalss replied. “I must also tell you that it appears as if ingesting ginger triggers females to release the pheromones indicating they are in season. This is not yet confirmed, but appears likely.”

“I see,” Kassquit said, and she did. When the commentators condemned ginger, they’d known what they were doing after all. She found the next question right away: “How much confusion will that cause in the Race?”

“I do not know,” Ttomalss answered. “I do not know if anyone knows. I do not even know if proper projections can be drawn, or whether data on ginger use are too inaccurate to permit such extrapolation. In my own instance, I believe it was the first time Senior Researcher Felless had ever tasted—”

“Felless?” Kassquit broke in, her narrow eyes wide with horror. “You mated with
Felless
?” Ttomalss’ mating with any other female of the Race she could have tolerated. That one? The one who treated her like a specimen and, by her example, made Ttomalss go halfway toward doing the same? “Oh, I hate you!” Kassquit cried, and ended the connection. Water poured from her eyes and ran altogether unheeded down her face.

Fotsev was jumpy as he patrolled the narrow, stinking streets of Basra. Every other male in his group was jumpy, too. He could see that by the way his comrades moved. And it was a different sort of jumpiness from the one they’d had before the ships of the colonization fleet started coming. That had been a simple, rational concern about fanatical Tosevites starting to screech
“Allahu akbar!”
and opening up on them with automatic weapons.

Yes, this was different. It was anything but rational, as Fotsev—rationally—knew. He didn’t want to put what it was into words. If he did, he knew he would only think about it more.

His friend Gorppet wasn’t so shy. He let his tongue loll out into the open, which made the scent receptors on it more sensitive. “Put me in cold sleep and ship me Home if I do not smell a ripe female around here somewhere,” he said.

All the males in the patrol sighed at the same time. All of them, for a couple of paces, walked more nearly erect, as if beginning to assume their half of the mating posture. “Whoever she is, wherever she is, she is nowhere near,” Fotsev said, as if reminding himself, calming himself.

“Truth,” Gorppet said, “but I still want her.”

“I wish you had not said that,” Fotsev told him. “Now I am going to be thinking about her instead of about what I am supposed to be doing on patrol, and that is liable to get me killed.”

A stocky veteran named Shaspwikk said, “Does not seem right, smelling a female but not being able to get at one.”

“Truth.” The whole patrol spoke as one male. Fotsev added, “Back on Home, the streets are crazy during the season. So are the corridors of any good-sized building, come to that. And the smell of females gets so thick, you can poke an eating tong into it. And then it is over, and everything gets back to normal again.”

“Shaspwikk said it,” Gorppet agreed. “The way it is on Home, that is the way it ought to be. You smell a female, you go and mate, and that is that. What will it be like if we keep smelling females all the time but there are none in heat close by? We will get as addled as the Tosevites are.”

“It is a wonder we can smell anything here except the stinks the Big Uglies make,” Shaspwikk said.

“Smelling out females—that is different somehow,” Fotsev said. “I would know those pheromones through all the stinks the Big Uglies make all over Tosev 3.”

“Truth,” Gorppet said. “Of course, if we could not smell those pheromones no matter what, we would get no eggs, and after a while there would be no more Race.”

“But when I do smell them, I want to mate, by the Emperor,” Shaspwikk said.

“Good thing there is no female close by right now,” Fotsev said. “We would fight each other to get at her, and nobody would care what the Big Uglies are doing.”

Gorppet turned one eye turret toward him. “I would not mind fighting now, even if I cannot get my cloaca next to a female’s. Smelling the pheromones is plenty to put me on the edge of brawling.” A couple of other males made the hand gesture of agreement.

“I feel the same way,” Fotsev said, “but may the spirits of Emperors past turn their backs on me if I let the Tosevites know. They would laugh themselves silly, the miserable creatures, and then start plotting even more mischief than they get into already.”

He swung his own eye turrets from one male in the small group to another, defying his comrades to argue with him. None of them did. None of them would meet his glance, either. They might not be happy about agreeing with him, but they couldn’t argue.

“And another thing,” he said. “You want to be careful about sticking your own tongues too far into the ginger jar these days. Smelling females in heat makes us twitchy enough all by itself. Pile the herb on top of that and you have trouble waiting to happen.”

“Pile the herb on top of anything that puts too much strain on a male and you have trouble waiting to happen,” Gorppet said. His eye turrets turned every which way, to make sure no one outside the patrol, whether Big Ugly or male of the Race, could overhear. In a low voice, he went on, “That is what happened when things went bad up in the SSSR, or so they say.”

Fotsev wished he wouldn’t have mentioned mutiny, even obliquely. “Put ginger and females’ pheromones together and the trouble they had up in the SSSR is liable to look like hatchlings’ games,” he said.

Again, no one disagreed with him. The problem was, whenever trouble came, he wanted to taste ginger so he wouldn’t have to think about it any more. But that kind of not thinking was what could start troubles with females involved. He saw as much, and saw it clearly. He didn’t see what to do about it.

And then, abruptly, he stopped worrying about it. Along with the usual stenches of Basra, the breeze wafted to his scent receptors the tantalizing odor of a female in season. This was no distant, diffuse scent. It came from somewhere close by—only a few alleys over, if he was any judge. He let out a soft hiss. His head came up. So did the erectile scales on top of it. His mouth opened, not in a laugh but to let more air stream past his tongue and the scent receptors on it.