Second Contact (43 page)

He wasn’t the only male to catch the scent, either. His comrades’ crests were rising, too. All of them tasted the breeze, ready to follow where it led them. Now they looked warily at one another, each fearing a sudden attack to keep him from getting what he craved.

Gorppet pointed. “That way,” he said, his voice rough.

“We all go together,” Fotsev said. “And we all be careful of what we do. Fighting with teeth and claws is one thing. Fighting with rifles and grenades, though, is a different business.”

Back on Home, they wouldn’t have had to worry about it. Back on Home, weapons were few and far between. No one needed them there, and no one except police and a few criminals could get hold of anything more lethal than knives. Fotsev wished Tosev 3 were like that. But it wasn’t. A male without weapons here was by the nature of things a male in danger. With females in heat around, however, a male with weapons was also likely to be a male in danger . . . from his own kind, similarly armed.

Its members still eyeing one another, the patrol picked its way through the maze of narrow, crowded lanes toward the females. Before long, they did not need their scent receptors alone to guide them. Shouts from a crowd of Big Uglies ahead told them they had to be getting close. “You speak some of this language,” Fotsev said to Gorppet. “What are they yelling?”

“For someone to pour water over them,” Gorppet answered. “That’s what they do when their domestic animals—you know, the yapping ones—couple in the street. So somebody’s mating up there.”

“Truth.” The rage and jealousy surging through Fotsev shocked him. He wanted that female, wherever she was, and he wanted her this instant. Of itself, his posture grew more upright. He noticed his fellow males were not leaning so far forward as they usually did.

He and the rest of the patrol came round the last corner just as the male finished with the female. The fellow, whose body paint proclaimed him an accountant, was from the colonization fleet. Instead of challenging the newcomers, he turned and skittered off, forcing his way through the crowd of laughing, jeering Tosevites. He must have fully sated himself, then.

The female remained in the mating posture. Her head near the ground, she spoke in a small, bewildered voice: “But I was not coming into heat. By the Emperor, I was not.” She cast down her eyes, not that they could look much farther down than they were already.

“You are in heat now,” Fotsev said. “We can smell it.” The female did not disagree. She remained in place, waiting for him and his comrades. The odor coming from her inflamed him. He clung to coherent thought as best he could. “We shall take turns,” he declared. “And those who are not mating shall stay alert, to make sure these Tosevites here cause no trouble.”

He knew about the new regulations about coupling where Big Uglies could watch, but knowing and remembering were two different things. One after another, he and the other males of the patrol coupled with the female, who remained compliant but perplexed. But, by the time each of them had mated once, the female said, “Enough,” and straightened up. With her pheromones still stimulating him, Fotsev would have liked to couple again. She showed no interest in further mating, though. “I feel so strange,” she muttered. “Just a little while ago, I was happy as I could be, as happy as I have ever been. Now . . . Now I just want to sink into the ground.”

“Sounds like she has been tasting ginger,” Shaspwikk observed.

“It does,” Fotsev agreed. “That would account for her coming into heat all at once, too.”

“I have not tasted ginger, and you need not talk about me as if I were not here,” the female said sharply. “That other male, wherever he went, the accountant, tried raising his scales at me a while ago. He said he smelled pheromones. Well, he did not smell mine. I got something to drink from one of these ridiculous creatures here. He asked for a sip. I gave him the cup. When he gave it back to me and I drank, my season came upon me without warning. But you know about that.”

“Yes, we know about that.” Now that he had mated once, Fotsev’s mind was working again, after a fashion. “Where is this cup?”

“Right there.” The female pointed.

Fotsev picked it up from the ground. He inhaled sharply, drawing air over his scent receptors. “I thought so,” he said. “The drink in here has ginger in it.”

Thinking along with him, Gorppet exclaimed, “That other male must have slipped it in there. He wanted to mate because he could smell pheromones off in the distance, the same as we did, but this female was not in season, so he got her heated whether she wanted to be or not. What a sneaky fellow!” His emphatic cough said he half admired the vanished accountant.

“He did that to me? He deliberately did that to me?” The female did not sound admiring. She sounded furious, outraged. “He used this herb to make me do something I had no intention of doing, something I could not have done had he not given me the herb to bring me into my season. I do not even know his name, but curse him and all his ancestors from the first egg they hatched out of.”

“Back on Home, this could not have happened,” Fotsev said slowly. “Back on Home, females all come into their season at about the same time, and there are plenty to go around for the males. It is not like that here on Tosev 3.”

“I do not like the way it is here on Tosev 3,” the female said with an emphatic cough of her own. “He used me without my consent. He coupled with me against what would have been my will. That is not right.”

“I agree—that is not right,” Fotsev said. “I think that male committed a crime. I think he committed a new crime, a crime that would have been impossible back on Home. This is a crime that could only happen on Tosev 3.”

“What do we do about it?” Gorppet asked. “If female pheromones keep lingering in the air, more males will think to use ginger to get what they want from females who would not otherwise be ready to give it to them.”

“Truth.” Fotsev took his radio off his belt. “For now, we can only report it—report it and hope our superiors have better ideas than we do.” Even as he began to speak, he could see that neither Gorppet nor the female who’d been fed ginger thought the authorities would. He didn’t think so, either, but did his best not to show it.

Shpaaka looked out at his human students at the Russie Medical College. Along with the rest of the class, Reuven Russie stared at the male Lizard. He poised his pen to record whatever wisdom Shpaaka saw fit to dispense this morning.

Instead of beginning his lecture in the usual way, though, Shpaaka said, “I think I must call on you Tosevites for assistance today.”

A low buzz of surprise went through the chamber. Shpaaka did nothing to check it. That was surprising, too. The male usually took sardonic pleasure in inveighing against Tosevite rudeness and lack of self-control when what he reckoned to be those things manifested themselves in his lecture hall. Reuven raised a hand and waited to be recognized. Jane Archibald came straight out and asked a question: “What is the difficulty, superior sir?”

Shpaaka did not discipline her. He did not even reprove her for the breach of decorum. “The difficulty, I daresay, is one with which you are already familiar,” he replied. “You are intelligent; you have good sources of information. Surely it will not come as any great surprise when I say that the Tosevite herb known as ginger has a pharmacological effect on females of the Race both unexpected and disconcerting.”

It was no surprise to Reuven, not when Atvar had summoned his father to Cairo to confer with him about the problem. Looking around the hall, he saw that his classmates didn’t look astonished, either. Stories of Lizards seen coupling in the streets of Jerusalem had been making the rounds at the medical college for the past few days. Some students had doubted them. Reuven knew better.

Now Jane showed proper etiquette: “Superior sir, permission to ask another question?”

“Granted,” Shpaaka said. “The search for understanding proceeds through questions. It can proceed no other way.”

“How do you believe we Tosevites can help you, superior sir?” Jane asked. Reuven knew what she thought of the Race, and of what the Race had done to Australia. None of that showed in her speech as she went on, “We know little or nothing about the reproductive behavior of the Race. We have had no chance to learn about it until now, when females have come to Tosev 3. In what way, then, can we possibly assist you?”

“This is a good question, a cogent question,” Shpaaka said. “But I must tell you, the reproductive behavior the Race has begun exhibiting here on Tosev 3 is not similar to that which we display on Home.” He sighed, an amazingly humanlike sound. “Very little the Race does on Tosev 3 appears to be similar to what we do back on Home.” An emphatic cough stressed that.

After a moment during which he seemed to gather himself, he went on, “Back on Home, virtually all females come into their season within a short time. Virtually all males are stimulated by the pheromones they release and have the opportunity to mate with at least one of them. That is normality.”

It was normality for most life on Earth, too. Reuven understood that perfectly well. He also understood it was not normality for humans. Glancing over at Jane Archibald, he was glad things worked the way they did, even if he hadn’t had the chance to put all the theory into practice.

Maybe Jane felt his eye on her. She looked his way and impudently stuck out her tongue. He laughed and looked toward Shpaaka again.

The Lizard physician had needed another pause to marshal his thoughts. After that second—embarrassed?—hesitation, he said, “Here on Tosev 3, it appears that ginger causes females almost immediately to enter their season, and to emit the pheromones showing males they have done so. But only a relatively small number of females taste ginger. More males are apt to scent the pheromones than have an in-season female readily accessible to them. This causes tension and frustration of a sort we are not used to.

“Furthermore, females—and males—do not taste ginger only during one short season of the year, but continuously. This means pheromones showing females to be in season are, or will be, released into the air throughout the year. Sexual tension of the sort I previously mentioned will likewise be continuous.

“Now, this runs contrary to all our long-established instinctual patterns. It is, however, the paradigm of normality for you Big Uglies. Your insights on how we are to cope with it will be greatly appreciated.”

Atvar had made the identical appeal to Reuven’s father. Reuven wondered if, all over the world, Lizards were asking such questions of humans they thought they could trust. He pitied them and laughed at them at the same time. They’d been smugly superior for a long time. Now, abruptly, things weren’t so simple for them.

With sudden indignation, Shpaaka added, “We have even had a couple of incidents where a male, smelling a distant female’s pheromones, has surreptitiously given an adjacent female ginger so he could mate with her. This is a depth of iniquity to which I doubt even you Tosevites have ever plunged.”

The lecture hall erupted in loud Tosevite laughter. Reuven joined in. He couldn’t help himself. Even after twenty years on Earth, after twenty years of intensive research on human beings, the Lizards remained painfully naive. They were likely to be right, too: they would need human help in dealing with problems of sexuality. Reuven doubted they could do it on their own.

Shpaaka looked out at his students. “Perhaps I was mistaken,” he said, his voice dry. “Do you find it amusing that your kind may be more iniquitous than I had previously imagined?”

“Yes, superior sir,” they chorused, which touched off another round of raucous laughter.

Shpaaka laughed, too, in the silent manner of his kind. “Very well, perhaps it is amusing,” he said. “But tell me, how do we prevent more such unfortunate incidents in the future?”

That was a serious question, seriously meant. After a little thought, Reuven raised his hand. When Shpaaka recognized him, he said, “Superior sir, I do not know if you will be able to prevent them altogether. We cannot; we have never been able to. We do work to keep them to a minimum.”

“You Tosevites are, in many circumstances, more readily satisfied than we would be,” Shpaaka returned. Reuven glowered; the Lizard had asked for advice, but then what had he done with it? Mocked it, nothing else. Shpaaka seemed to realize his discontent, saying, “In matters pertaining to desire, perfect success may be more difficult to obtain than elsewhere.”

“Permission to speak, superior sir?” an Argentine student named Pedro Magallanes asked. When he got it, he said, “Do the other races in your Empire ever have, ah, problems of this sort?”

“Only in rare instances, due to one hormonal imbalance or another,” Shpaaka replied. “The same holds true for the Race. Until becoming acquainted with you Tosevites, we thought it must necessarily hold true for any intelligent species. Now we discover it does not even necessarily hold true for ourselves. I would appreciate the irony more were it less painful.”

That he noticed it at all spoke well for him. The human rulers of the Greater German
Reich
and the Soviet Union could not recognize irony if it cocked its leg and pissed on their ankles; of that Reuven was certain.

“You Tosevites have had long practice controlling continuous reproductive urges,” Shpaaka went on. “Since we are newcomers to the business, we shall probably end up borrowing from you: yes, I know, another irony.”

Shpaaka’s students whispered and murmured to one another. The Lizard affected not to notice, an indulgence he seldom granted them. Bahadur Singh, a turbaned Sikh, spoke to Reuven in English: “This will drive the Lizards to distraction—assuredly, to distraction—for some time to come.” His eyes glowed. “Maybe my country can use the distraction to make itself free.”

“It could be so.” Reuven didn’t really think it likely. The Lizards, distracted or not, would do whatever they had to do to hold on to India. But Bahadur Singh had hope. Reuven had no hope that Palestine could ever shake off the Lizards’ yoke. Even if it could, it would be torn between Arabs and Jews. The aliens’ rule was about as good as anyone here could hope for, having at least the advantage of disinterest.