Second Contact (46 page)

“As you say, Exalted Fleetlord,” Pshing answered. “My only concern is that we are, in certain areas, still vulnerable to sabotage from the Tosevites. The desalination plant and pipeline spring to mind.”

“I am assured the security plans are good,” Atvar said. “They had better be good; we have had enough painful lessons from the Big Uglies on how to construct them and where our vulnerabilities lie.”

He did not want to think about security plans and sabotage, not now. He wanted to walk along the sidewalks of the growing city, to watch males and females peacefully going about their business and getting on with their lives. Before too many generations, if all went well, they would rule the whole planet, not just a little more than half. And the Empire could get on with the job of civilizing another world.

If all went well . . .

Very faintly, he could smell the pheromones that meant a female somewhere upwind was ripe for mating. He tried to ignore the odor. He couldn’t quite. For one thing, it made him a little more irritable than he would have been otherwise. Even here, in the heart of the Race’s haven on Tosev 3, the Tosevite herb had come. He sighed. The troubles this world brought seemed inescapable.

All over the town, alarms began hissing. Amplified voices shouted: “Missile attack! Incoming missile attack! Take cover against missile attack!”

“No!” Atvar screeched. All around him, the colonists stared foolishly. Every moment counted, but they did not seem to realize it. They had not been trained for this. Atvar did not know which way to start himself. The missiles could be coming from any direction. If they’d been launched from one of the accursed submersible ships the Big Uglies had developed, they would be here all too soon.

Antimissile sites ringed the city, as they ringed the whole area of settlement here in Australia. But they were not infallible. They had not been infallible against even the crude missiles the Big Uglies had had during the fighting. And Tosevite technology was better now than it had been then.

Atvar turned his eye turrets toward Pshing. “If we perish here, Kirel will take vengeance the likes of which this world has never seen.”

“Of course, Exalted Fleetlord.” Pshing sounded so calm, Atvar envied him. The fleetlord did not want to fall here. He wanted to bring the assimilation of this world into the Empire as far forward as he could. How much the universe cared about what he wanted was liable to be another question.

Alarms kept hissing. Atvar looked around for someplace to shelter against the nuclear missile he assumed would momentarily burst overhead. He saw nowhere to hide. Turning to Pshing, he said, “I am sorry you had to come here with me as part of your duties.” If he was about to die, he didn’t want to die with the apology unspoken.

Before Pshing could answer, antimissiles roared off their launch platforms. They would do what they could, but Atvar knew some of their targets were all too likely to elude them.

Explosions to the north, to the northwest, and overhead smote his hearing diaphragms. Debris fell out of the sky, crashing down around and in the city the Race was building. A great chunk dug a hole in the ground not far from Atvar. The leg and tailstump of a male or female stuck out from under it. That leg still twitched feebly, but no one could have lived after so much metal fell on him.

Still, despite the bursts overhead, no new temporary sun blazed into life above the city. “Exalted Fleetlord, we may live!” Pshing cried.

“We may indeed,” Atvar said. “The antimissiles are performing excellently.” They were performing better than he’d imagined they could, let alone hoped. Those continuing explosions above him had to be Tosevite missiles intercepted and blasted out of the sky. Had they been anything else, one of those missiles would have ensured that he never heard anything again.

He opened his mouth to laugh exultantly. As he inhaled, all the strange, alien scents of the Australian desert went past his scent receptors and into his lung. Among them was a spicy scent he did not remember from his previous visit. He had never smelled anything like it before. It was, he thought, the most delicious odor he’d ever known, with the possible exception of a female’s pheromones. It reminded him of those pheromones, as a matter of fact.

“What is that splendid smell?” he asked aloud.

No sooner asked than answered. The response formed in his head even as Pshing spoke the words: “Exalted Fleetlord, I do not know for certain, but I think that must be ginger.”

“Yes. Truth,” Atvar said. He could
see
the truth, all but hanging there in front of his eyes. It was as obvious as Venteff’s Theorem on the relationship between the squares of the sides of a right triangle and the square of the hypotenuse. Everything suddenly seemed obvious to him. He had never felt so brilliant, never since the day when he’d used the egg tooth at the end of his snout to break through the shell that separated him from the wider world.

“I never tasted ginger before,” Pshing said.

“Neither did I.” Regret filled Atvar. If he’d been using the Tosevite herb during the fighting, the Big Uglies surely would have had to yield to the Race. He felt certain and swift and strong, very strong.

Other males and females must have felt the same way, for they rushed upon the chunk of metal that had crushed one of their comrades and hauled it away. Some of them exclaimed in horror and disgust, for they were colonists, not males from the conquest fleet, and the crushed remains they uncovered were outside their experience. But they had acted swiftly and decisively, without the Race’s usual long pauses for thought.

“They did well,” Pshing said. For the moment, the action was what counted, not what resulted from it.

“Truth,” Atvar said again. He wondered which Tosevite notempire had launched this attack against the Race in its citadel on Tosev 3. Whoever it was certainly had some strange notions of what an attack was. But for the handful of males and females hit by falling pieces of rocket, the rest of the members of the Race on whom the Big Uglies had chosen to shower so much ginger were, if anything, enjoying themselves more than they had before.

He paused and looked about, now here, now there, his eye turrets moving independently of each other. The smell of ginger was not the only marvelous odor coming to his scent receptors now. Along with it, he smelled female pheromones.

Yes, of course,
he thought.
I remember. Ginger brings them into their season.
The Big Uglies had spent all the years since his arrival on Tosev 3 raising his ire; never once had the erectile scales atop his head risen with it. They were for only one sort of display, the sort he made now.

Pshing was also displaying his crest. So were other males, too, as far as the eye turret could reach. And females were lowering their heads and raising their hindquarters into the mating posture. They might have been uninterested mere moments before, but the ginger floating through the air in a fine, delicious cloud did to them what the coming of the season would have done back on Home.

Atvar advanced on the nearest female he saw. With every step he took, his own posture grew more nearly upright. But he was not the only male approaching her. Fury filled him, lest the other male get there before him. “Go back!” he shouted. “I am the fleetlord!” He showed his claws in a threatening gesture.

The other male also displayed his claws. “I do not care who you are!” he shouted back, a shocking lack of decorum at any time but the season. Then, it was every male for himself. “I am going to mate with this female.”

“No!” Atvar hurled himself at the male from the colonization fleet. He was older, but he also knew how to fight, not only as a commander but also as an individual. Before long, the other male fled, hissing and wailing in dismay.

The female over whom they’d fought turned an eye turret back toward Atvar. “Hurry!” she said. “This is uncomfortable.”

He did his best to oblige. It wasn’t uncomfortable while it went on: very much the reverse. As soon as he’d finished, the female skittered away. But he, like the other males in the city, kept right on smelling the pheromones from other females that announced they were still receptive.

It was, in fact, very much the way a day during the season would have gone back on Home. In other words, not a cursed thing got done. Males sought females and brawled among themselves. Females stopped and waited where they stood for males. Sometimes a single mating was enough to satisfy them. Sometimes, perhaps depending on how much ginger they’d inhaled and tasted, they wanted more.

Only slowly did the difference between here and Home sink into Atvar’s mind: what with ginger and pheromones, he was far more distracted than he should have been. Back on Home, everyone expected the season. It was part of the rhythm of the year, not a disruption.

Here in Australia, the reverse was true. This city had just hatched from its egg. Much of it, in fact, still remained inside the shell. Males and females had plenty to do without worrying about the distraction of mating as if they were so many Big Uglies. Some of that work would get done wrong now. Some of it would not get done at all. Out across the city, more males and females were liable to be hurt by the sudden onset of the season than from debris falling out of the sky.

Clever,
Atvar thought after a while. The Big Uglies who had done this were liable to be more clever than he was at the moment. His wits working far less clearly than they should have, he wondered whether inciting the Race to mate could be construed as an act of war. Was it not closer to what the Tosevites called, for no obvious reason, a practical joke?

And yet, if they chose to do it again, would they not disrupt life here once more? If, after disrupting life, they followed with an attack that did include nuclear weapons or poisonous gas, what then?
We would be in trouble then,
Atvar thought.

He’d never imagined he might wish he had not had the joy of mating.

Felless craved ginger. She fought against the craving with a grim intensity the likes of which she’d never imagined. It wasn’t so much that she worried about the immediate effects of the ginger itself. But what it would do to her, what it would do to the males around her . . .

Whenever she tasted, she went into her season. She’d done that often enough to be convinced it was the ginger. She didn’t want to do it again. It turned her into an animal, one whose desires were even more alien to her than those of the Tosevites she was supposed to be studying. She knew all that. She understood it down to the core.

She still craved ginger.

Every so often, on the streets of Nuremberg or in the corridors of the Race’s embassy to the
Reich
, she would pass males and females coupling. New regulations had done little to stop it. Every so often, a male filled with lust by some other female’s pheromones would advance upon her with raised head scales and erect posture.

When she had no ginger in her, when she wasn’t chemically stimulated to go along with such nonsense, she enjoyed telling those males what she thought of them. Most of them looked astonished. One had been so drunk on pheromones, she’d had to bite him to get him to leave her alone.

And one, a clever fellow, had offered her ginger. “Have a taste,” he’d said, those upright scales on his head quivering. “You’ll feel like mating then.”

“I do not want to feel like mating!” she’d shouted in a transport of fury that still astonished her. “If my season had come on its own, that would have been one thing. Drugging myself for the sake of your mating urge is something else again.”

“Spoilsport,” he’d hissed, and gone off in a huff. He was Ambassador Veffani’s first secretary, an important male in the embassy. Felless had to hope he wouldn’t hold a grudge against her once female pheromones weren’t addling his scent receptors.

The trouble was, males remained in a state of low-grade lust for days at a time. One female or another in the embassy would taste ginger and set them off. Every so often, Felless proved unable to resist temptation herself. One of the males who coupled with her during a slip was the first secretary. Maybe that made him stop resenting her for her earlier refusal.

Even the Big Uglies noticed the disruption that had come over the Race. One of them, a male with a Deutsch chemical firm, complained to her about it: “Before, we could make arrangements and rely on them. Now, nothing your males and females say can be trusted from one day to the next. This is not good.”

“Were it not for the herb that comes from this planet, were it not for the Tosevites who supply us this herb, we would not have such difficulties,” she answered, not wanting all the blame to rest on her back.

She failed to impress the Big Ugly. “We Tosevites have also drugs,” he answered. “They do not turn all of us unreliable. When we catch Tosevites who use drugs, we treat them as criminals. We punish them. Sometimes we punish them severely.”

What a Deutsch male meant by severe punishment was either death or something that would make the victim long for it. Felless did not care to imagine herself on the receiving end of such punishment. She said, “We also punish those who use ginger.”

“You do not punish them enough, or they would not dare use it,” the Tosevite told her.

He sounded logical. He also sounded sure of himself. The Deutsche had a way of doing both those things at once. Sometimes, that made them very effective. Others, it just meant they went more spectacularly wrong than they would have otherwise. “Your ways are too harsh for us,” Felless said.

“Then you will suffer because of this,” the Big Ugly said, “and those of us who do business with you, unfortunately, will also suffer.” He got up and bowed stiffly from the waist, the Tosevite equivalent of the posture of respect. Then he turned and marched out of Felless’ office.

Troubled, she went to see the ambassador to the Deutsche. “Superior sir,” she said, “we are becoming the laughingstock of the Tosevites. Something must be done to minimize the effect ginger has on us.”

“In principle, Senior Researcher, I agree,” Veffani answered. “After the ginger bombs above our new city in Australia, I could scarcely disagree. Wherever we have both males and females, the Big Uglies have it within their power to incapacitate us. This is a danger we did not face even during the fighting.”