Second Contact (67 page)

Betvoss seized the first part of that. “You say the colonists do not understand us? What of the Tosevites?” His wave encompassed the Big Ugly males in their wrappings of brown or white and the females in black with only their eyes showing and sometimes even those veiled away behind cloth.

Fotsev shrugged. “I do not expect Big Uglies to understand—they are Big Uglies. But the folk of the new town are my own kind—or they look like me, at any rate. I expected more than I got, and I was disappointed.”

“And I as well,” Gorppet agreed. “Only we who have been through it can understand what we endured. Some of the Tosevites who fought against us come closer than the males and females of the Race who did not.” He sighed. “When the males of the conquest fleet die, no one will understand.” After a couple of strides, he swung an eye turret toward Betvoss. “Some males do not understand now.”

“Truth,” Betvoss said. “And you are one of them.”

“Enough,” Fotsev said with a slow, tired, emphatic cough. “Are we Big Uglies, to brawl among ourselves?”

By the Emperor, I need a taste of ginger,
he thought. However much he might need one, though, he was not so sure where he might come by it. The herb was in shorter supply than he could ever remember. Those above him had always fumed and grumbled about ginger, and every so often made examples of males caught tasting or dealing in it. But there had always been plenty—till females from the colonization fleet showed what the herb did to them. Now the authorities were serious about keeping it off everyone’s tongue.

One of Fotsev’s eye turrets slid toward Gorppet. If anyone could still get ginger, he was the male. And if he understood why Fotsev stayed away from the new towns, maybe he would be more willing to share some of what he had, if he had any.

The breeze shifted, changing the notes in the symphony of stinks that played over Fotsev’s scent receptors. One odor cut through the usual array of Tosevite stenches, though: the pheromones of a female in her season.
Somebody is getting ginger,
Fotsev thought. He wasn’t the only male to note that scent, of course. His whole squad suddenly seemed more alert. A couple of troopers began to take on the erect posture associated with mating. Betvoss started away from his comrades, toward that wonderful scent.

“Back!” Fotsev said sharply, relishing the chance to rebuke the male who’d thought he was addled. “She is a long way off. We just have to go on about our business and pretend she is not there.”

“I smell her. I want to mate with her,” Betvoss whined. Fotsev wanted to mate with her, too, wherever she was, but not to the point where he forgot himself and forgot his duty. Even as he kept eyeing the market square, the urge remained, an itch inside his head—and inside his cloaca—he couldn’t scratch. It made him irritable; he was ever so ready to leap down Betvoss’ throat if the other male got more unruly than he had already proved.

But Betvoss, though he stayed sulky, obeyed: obedience was nearly as ingrained in the Race as was desire when presented with the proper stimuli.

Small male Tosevites came running up to the patrol, jabbering in their own language. Gorppet gestured with his rifle. He did not want them to get too close. Fotsev didn’t blame him. The Race had learned from painful experience that stopping suicide attackers wasn’t easy.

So far, the fanatical Tosevites had not begun using hatchlings as suicide warriors. That did not mean they would not do such a thing, though. In all truth, Gorppet was right to be cautious.

Caution came hard, though, when the small Big Uglies (a notion that made Fotsev laugh, but that was true: he overtopped almost all of them) came up in spite of Gorppet’s warning. They’d learned a few words from the language of the Race. “Food!” they shouted. “Want food!” Others shouted, “Want money!”

“No money,” Gorppet said, gesturing with the rifle again. The Race’s credit would have been useless to these ragamuffins, and handing out the metal disks the Tosevites used as their medium of exchange went against orders.

Food was something else. Fotsev had never seen hunger till he came to Tosev 3. He’d thought hunger was the feeling he knew just before it was time for a meal. Maybe that was hunger, of a sort. But it was not the kind of hunger that came from having no food at all, from having to do without meals. Fotsev knew such conditions had existed back on Home in ancient history, before the Empire unified his planet. But those days were more than a hundred thousand years in the past, a very long time ago even by the standards of the Race. Seeing that kind of hunger had jolted him, and he was far from the only male it had jolted.

So now he took little cubes of pressed meat and concentrated nutrients and tossed a handful of them to the Big Ugly hatchlings. So did three or four other males from the squad. The Tosevites squalled in delight and squabbled with one another over the food. They had no trouble eating the Race’s rations, as Fotsev and his fellows had no trouble except occasional disgust with Tosevite foods. And some Tosevite food products were even more delectable to the Race than to Big Uglies . . . and so Fotsev’s mind, almost inevitably, came back to ginger.

The one problem with feeding some Tosevite beggars was that their success drew more, sure as carrion drew scavengers. After a while, Fotsev and his fellows ran low on ration cubes and started saying, “Enough! All gone!” The hatchlings cursed them in the language of the Race and, Fotsev was sure, even more hotly in their own tongue.

Gorppet said something in that language that made them stop cursing and bark out the laughter of their kind. After that, the patrol had less trouble getting rid of them. When Fotsev asked Gorppet what he’d said, the other veteran replied, “I wished that predators would find the eggs of all their descendants.” It seemed a fine strong curse to Fotsev till he remembered the Big Uglies did not lay eggs. Then he understood why the hatchlings laughed. But anything that avoided trouble suited him fine.

After what seemed forever, the patrol returned to barracks. Fotsev made his report, not that he had anything much to report. And then, for a little while, his time was his own. As he’d been sure he would, he hunted up Gorppet. “Come for a walk with me,” he said. Rumor had it that the barracks held listening devices. Fotsev neither knew whether rumor was true nor cared to learn.

Out in the open, he hadn’t even broached the subject before Gorppet said, “You look like a male who could use a taste—maybe even a couple of tastes.”

“Truth,” Fotsev said, with an emphatic cough. After a couple of tastes, Tosev 3 improved—and would stay improved till the ginger left his system. He asked, “How did you come by the herb? I am empty.”

“Your friend”—a common euphemism for a ginger dealer—“must be one of the males who got his from a Big Ugly west of here who’s out of business—for the time being, anyhow,” Gorppet answered. “I have lots of friends. That is why I never go dry.”

“I never thought I would,” Fotsev said ruefully, or as ruefully as he could with the herb exulting through him, “but I did.”

“The males with the fancy body paint want to get their teeth into this, all right,” Gorppet said. “They do not want females coming into season any old time.” He laughed; he’d had a couple of tastes, too. “You smelled how well it works while we were out on patrol. They can slow the trade down, but they can’t stop it.”

“I think you are right,” Fotsev said. “Hard to try to do other things, normal things, while on the edge of my own season. I understand why our superiors are fighting ginger so hard—but I still want one more taste.”

“It shall be done,” Gorppet said, and it was. He had another taste himself. They spent the rest of their free time enjoyably cutting Betvoss into little strips.

The Americans had a phrase: a slow boat to China. Liu Han and Liu Mei heard that phrase any number of times on their journey west across the Pacific, so often that they got good and sick of it. It was, if anything, an understatement for their homeward voyage aboard the
Liberty Princess
, a ship whose self-contradictory name never failed to amuse Liu Han.

Everything went fine from Los Angeles to Hawaii, but Hawaii, of course, still belonged to the United States. Past Hawaii, from the island of Midway (which the Japanese had seized, almost unnoticed, during the time of fighting against the little scaly devils) on, every stop the
Liberty Princess
made before Shanghai was in the Empire of Japan.

And the Japanese were suspicious. Now Liu Han wished her visit to the United States had drawn less public notice. Whenever Japanese inspectors came aboard the ship, they naturally tried to prove she and Liu Mei were, in fact, just who they were, despite papers purporting to prove them to be other people altogether.

They never quite managed. Liu Han thanked the gods and spirits in whom she was not supposed to believe for the English Liu Mei and she had picked up getting ready to visit the USA and improved while there. They used it as much as they could, baffling the Japanese who did not speak it and holding their own with the ones who did. Even in the Philippines, where many puppets of the eastern dwarfs were fluent in English, Liu Han and Liu Mei kept steadfastly insisting they were people other than their true selves, and got by with it. Without absolute proof—which they could not get—the Japanese did not care to embroil themselves with the United States.

After the last Japanese official gave up in frustration, after the
Liberty Princess
was finally cleared to sail for Shanghai with the two Chinese women aboard, Liu Han turned to her daughter and said, “Do you see? This is what the power of a strong country is worth. The United States protects its people and protects its ships. One day, China will be able to do the same.”

Liu Mei did not try to hide her bitterness. “Before we become a strong country, Mother, we have to become a country of any sort. As far as the little scaly imperialist devils are concerned, we are nothing but part of their Empire.”

“That is why we have traveled so far,” Liu Han answered. “We did everything we could in the United States, I think. Weapons are coming. I do not know just when they will reach us: the Japanese and the Kuomintang and the little devils will all make that as hard as they can. But the weapons will come sooner or later. The People’s Liberation Army will take advantage of them sooner or later. And, sooner or later, the scaly devils will pay for their aggression and oppression. How long that takes doesn’t matter. Sooner or later, it will happen. The dialectic demands it.”

Except for mentioning the dialectic, she might have been a little scaly devil talking. One of the things that made them so dangerous was their habit of thinking in the long term. Mao had coined a good term to describe them: he called them incrementalists. They never retreated, and kept moving forward half an inch here, a quarter of an inch there. If they needed a hundred years or a thousand years to reach their goals, they didn’t care. Sooner or later, they would get there—or so they thought.

But then Liu Mei said, “If the little scaly devils had come here sooner, they could have easily conquered us. We also have to worry about whether we can afford to wait.”

“We have the dialectic on our side. They did not,” Liu Han said. But her daughter’s words worried her. The dialectic said nothing about when victory would come. She could only hope it would come in her lifetime. Most of the time, she didn’t worry about not knowing. Every once in a while, as today, it ate at her.

The
Liberty Princess
sailed up the Yangtze to Shanghai. The city had more Western-style buildings than any other in China, having been the center of the round-eyed devils’ imperialist ambitions before the coming of first the eastern dwarfs from Japan and then the little scaly devils. Liu Han had known that, of course, but it had meant little to her because she’d seen few Western-style buildings before coming to the United States. Now she’d spent months in a city of nothing but Western-style buildings. She studied the ones in Shanghai with new eyes.

The city meant something different to Liu Mei. “So this is where my father died,” she said in musing tones. “That did not mean so much to me before I learned about him from the American who knows so much about the little devils.”

“Nieh Ho-T’ing always said he died very bravely,” Liu Han said, which was true. “He helped men of the People’s Liberation Army escape after they struck the little devils a stinging blow.” She looked at Shanghai with new eyes herself. Memories of Bobby Fiore came flooding into her mind—and a little jealousy at how interested Liu Mei had been in the American half of her family.

Again, her daughter might have picked the thought from her mind. “In everything that matters, I am Chinese,” Liu Mei said. “You were the one who raised me. We are going home.” Liu Han smiled and nodded. Liu Mei wasn’t as right as she thought, thanks to the little scaly devil named Ttomalss. Liu Han’s daughter did not smile, because the little devil had not—could not—smile at her while trying to raise her after stealing her as a newborn from Liu Han. Liu Mei knew that had happened to her, but remembered none of it. It had marked her just the same.

“Now we have only to get off this ship, get onto the train, and go home to Peking,” Liu Han said. “And, I think, before we do that, we have to stop somewhere and get something to eat. It will be good to eat proper food again.”

“Truth,” Liu Mei said, and used an emphatic cough. “The Americans eat some very strange things indeed. Fried potatoes are not bad once you get used to them, but cheese—how do they eat cheese?”

“I don’t know.” Liu Han shuddered. “What else is it but rotten milk? They should throw it away or feed it to pigs.”

Shortly thereafter, she conceived the identical opinion of the Chinese customs officials who manned the Shanghai customs office for the little scaly devils. She had hoped—she had, in fact, been assured—officials who sympathized with the Party and the People’s Liberation Army would ease her passage back into China. Hopes and assurances or not, it didn’t happen. The customs men who dealt with her daughter and her might have been working for the Kuomintang, or they might have completely prostituted themselves to the little devils. Liu Han never was sure of that. She was sure they thought her false papers were false papers, no matter how artfully they’d been forged.