Second Contact (73 page)

When he stepped back from the female, Ristin took his place. Other males crowded the kitchen, drawn by the female’s pheromones as surely as Tosevite flying pests were drawn by light. A couple of males got clawed; one got bitten badly enough to draw blood. Straha, satiated, withdrew. He knew he was supposed to tell Sam Yeager something, but for the life of him couldn’t remember what.

Felless was glad she was in the Race’s embassy in Nuremberg when the urge to lay her eggs became overwhelming. She and the Race would have been embarrassed if the urge had struck her while she was interviewing some Deutsch functionary with preposterous ideas. And she might not have—she probably would not have—found a proper place in which to lay had she been out among the Big Uglies.

Inside the embassy, though, Slomikk the science officer had prepared a chamber to which gravid females could go when their time came. It had a deep layer of sand on the floor, and plenty of rocks and dry branches the females could use to conceal their clutches. In the chamber, of course, such concealment didn’t matter. But it would have mattered very much to the Race’s primitive ancestors, and the urge to conceal remained strong.

Slomikk had also given the chamber extra shielding against local background radiation. That wouldn’t have mattered to Felless’ primitive ancestors, but she was glad of it.

When she went inside, she looked around warily to make sure she was alone—another triumph of instinct over reason. The door to the laying chamber clicked shut behind her. She was, as far as she knew, the first female to use it. Few others, here or anywhere, had tasted ginger as early as she had. Few others had mated as early as she had. And few others had become gravid as early as she had.

She scurried over to a corner of the chamber half screened from the doorway by branches and rocks. All her instincts shouted
This is the place!
to her. She could not have found anywhere better to lay her eggs. She was sure of it, sure in a way that transcended reason. This place felt
right
.

Splaying her legs apart, she bent forward and scooped a hollow in the sand. No one had ever told her how deep to make the hollow, but she knew: the knowledge was printed on her genes. Had the sand been warmer, she would have dug deeper; had it been cooler, the hole would have been shallower. Again, she knew that at a level far below the conscious.

With an effort, Felless straightened up enough to take a couple of short, spraddle-legged steps. That positioned her cloaca just above the hollow she’d dug. She bore down hard—and in absolute silence. At any other time, in any other place, she would have grunted and hissed with the effort she was making. Not here, not now. Grunts and hisses might have drawn predators to her, and to her clutch.

Her two eggs were far bigger than the waste that usually passed through her cloaca. At first, she did not think they wanted to come at all. She was sure the leading one had got stuck inside her body, and would obstruct everything behind it till she perished. Logically, she knew that was unlikely, but she wasn’t thinking logically at the moment.

Still silent, she bore down again. The pain of making that first egg move inside her threatened to tear her in two from the inside out. And the egg would not move. Maybe it really was impacted. After every mating season back on Home, a handful of females needed surgery to remove impacted eggs. Wouldn’t that be just her luck, to have a medical emergency here in the middle of the
Reich
? They’d have to take her away then.

I’ll try once more,
she thought,
and then I’ll shout for a physician.
Unlike the arid plains on which the Race had evolved, the laying chamber was equipped with a telephone on the far wall. If Felless needed help, she could get it.

She took a deep, deep breath, as if filling her lung with air could somehow help force the egg out of her and into the sand. And maybe it did, for she felt the accursed thing shift inside her. That made her redouble her effort to force it out. It also redoubled her pain, but somehow she hardly noticed.

The egg came forth and dropped into the sand. With it came a sense of relief and determination that surely sprang from some hormonal source, not the reason on which she usually relied. Still straddling the hollow in the sand, she bore down again.

She had an easier time with the second egg than she’d had with the first. Maybe the first had helped stretch the way for the one that came after it. Before long, two yellowish, speckled eggs—colored to match the sand in which her ancestors laid them—rested in the hollow.

She covered them with the sand she’d scooped aside. Her motions were sure and deft; her body knew how much sand to put over them. Then, on top of the sand, she voided a little. That was as instinctive as the rest of her laying behavior.

As soon as she’d done it, she took several quick steps away from the place where her eggs rested. Any other female of the Race who sought to lay in that spot would be similarly repulsed by the pheromones in the dropping. So would the females of several species of predators back on Home. Females of the Race rarely had to worry about them these days, but evolution didn’t know that.

Felless made her way out toward the door of the laying chamber. Those first few voluntary steps told her how worn she was: her legs didn’t want to bear her weight. She felt empty inside; the eggs growing within her had compressed the rest of the innards, which now seemed to have more room than they knew what to do with.

She wanted to hurry to the refectory, but could not—she couldn’t hurry anywhere. She could only walk slowly, her legs still wide apart. Her cloaca smarted—worse than smarted—from having been stretched far more than it had to open at any other time in her life.

There was ham in the refectory. Felless approved of ham. It was one of the few Tosevite foods of which she did approve. She ate several slices, went back, and ate several more. It seemed to give her ballast. When she came back again for a third helping, the server gave her a dubious look. Voice sardonic, he inquired, “What did you do, just lay four eggs?”

“No, only two,” Felless answered, which made the would-be wit retreat in as much embarrassment as the Race had known in retreating from England.

After she’d eaten, Felless went to her quarters. She knew what she wanted to do there, and she did it: she lay down and fell asleep. When at last she woke, she was ravenously hungry. A glance at the chronometer showed why: she’d been asleep for a day and a half.

Still feeling logy and slow, she checked her messages. Only one mattered enough to answer right away.
Since I am a male, I had to do my best in preparing the laying chamber,
Slomikk had written.
Was it satisfactory?

In every respect,
she wrote back, and sent the message. The science officer had done as well as any female might have.

After the message went out, one of Felless’ eye turrets slid down to a locked drawer in her desk. In that drawer, Veffani’s warnings notwithstanding, rested a vial with several tastes of ginger. She wanted a taste. She was sure the herb would help ease her post-laying exhaustion. As far as she was concerned, ginger eased everything.

But, with a small hiss of regret, she made herself move away from her desk. She couldn’t be tasting ginger if she was going out in public—and she was going out in public, because she was starving again. She didn’t want to have to pause to mate on the way to the refectory. She didn’t want to pause at all on the way to the refectory, and she didn’t want to get in trouble for using ginger. Most of all, she didn’t want anything, even something so small as a male’s reproductive organ, entering her cloaca.

She hissed again. No matter what common sense told her, she still craved ginger. She had far fewer chances to taste these days than she would have liked. For a while, she’d hoped her craving would ebb because she could safely taste but seldom. That hadn’t happened. If anything, her desire for the herb grew stronger because she had so few chances to satisfy it.

Out into the uncaring world of the embassy she went. Ttomalss was just coming out of his quarters, too—as well she hadn’t tasted. “I greet you, superior female,” he said.

“I greet you, Senior Researcher.” Felless’ voice was a scratchy parody of the way she usually sounded.

Ttomalss noticed. His eyes turrets went up and down her, noting the way she stood. “You have laid!” he exclaimed.

“Truth,” Felless said. “It is over. It is done.” She amended that: “Until the hatchlings break out of their shells, it is done. Then begins the task of civilizing them, which is never easy.”

“Yes, I know of this, although with a hatchling of a different sort,” Ttomalss said.

“Why, so you do,” Felless said. “In that, you are an unusual male. But now, if you want to keep talking with me, come along to the refectory.” She started that way herself.

“It shall be done.” Ttomalss fell into stride beside her.

“How does it feel to bear the burden of rearing a hatchling?” Felless asked. “Even if Kassquit is a hatchling of a very different sort, you are to be commended for your diligence. On Home, that is the work of females.”

“Kassquit is indeed a hatchling of a different sort,” Ttomalss said, “and she truly may have discovered a male of the Race of a different sort.” He told her more about Regeya, and about the cryptic message he’d had from Security.

“She still thinks he may be a Big Ugly masquerading as a male of the Race?” Felless said. “As I told you before, I find that very hard to believe.”

“The more I think about it, the more plausible I find it,” Ttomalss said. “Underestimating the Tosevites’ cleverness has hurt us countless times before.”

Felless said, “They are what they are. They cannot be what we are. They
cannot
.” She added an emphatic cough, then continued, “Can you imagine one of these Deutsch males with whom we have to deal carrying off such an imposture for even the time light takes to cross an atomic nucleus? The
Reichs
minister of justice, for instance—this Sepp Dietrich. I doubt he can even use a computer, let alone pretend he belongs to the Race on one.”

She snorted at the absurdity of the notion. But then she remembered Dietrich’s secretary. That male had spoken the language of the Race well, for a Tosevite. If he could somehow sneak onto the computer network, could he pass himself off as a male of the Race? She made the negative hand gesture. She couldn’t believe it.

Ttomalss said, “Kassquit has had trouble making anyone in authority think Regeya might be a Big Ugly. Investigators believe him more likely to be some sort of swindler, but analysis of his messages shows no attempt to defraud. Real interest in the question is minimal.”

“If the authorities do not believe Regeya is a Tosevite, how can Kassquit persist in opposing them?” Felless said. She was typical of the Race in that she trusted and followed those above her till they gave her some overwhelming reason not to.

“Perhaps, as you said, like calls to like,” Ttomalss suggested.

“I said she wished like called to like,” Felless pointed out.

He thought about it. “Truth: you did,” he admitted.

“Yes, I did,” Felless said. “And now, very loudly, food calls to me.” She hurried on toward the refectory, not caring in the least whether Ttomalss came along.

  19

Little by little, Nesseref was getting used to her flat in the new town that had gone up east of the Tosevite hamlet called Jezow. The flat itself boasted all the conveniences she’d enjoyed back on Home. She had access to the Race’s computer network, which put her in touch with all of Tosev 3. Telephone and television service were also as good as they would have been on the world she’d left behind. She could find entertainment programs at the touch of a fingerclaw. They were all recordings, of course, but that mattered little to her. Over the course of a hundred thousand years, the Race had produced so much that one lifetime’s viewing couldn’t give a female even a smattering of it.

Only her furnishings told her she dwelt on Tosev 3. The pieces that had come from Home with the colonization fleet were of the lightest and most austere manufacture, nothing she would have had in her apartment there. The tables and chairs made locally did not look like work the Race would do. Even the ones that weren’t too tall and too large were . . . not so much wrong but alien in style and decoration. The very grains of the woods were strange, as were the gaudy fabrics the Polish Tosevites reckoned the height of style.

Also strange was the view out her window.
It is all far too green,
she kept thinking. The trees sprouted great profusions of leaves. Grass and shrubs grew lavishly, far more lavishly than most places on Home. Having rain drum against that window almost every other day also felt unnatural.

Going to the shuttlecraft port was always a relief. The facilities there were full of the Race’s gear, even if Big Uglies had erected them. Taking a shuttlecraft up into orbit was an even greater relief. The craft and the starships they served were pure products of the Race. Aboard them, she could almost forget she wasn’t orbiting Home.

Almost. For one thing, the world beneath her looked different.
Waterlogged
was the word that most readily came to mind. Those vast expanses of ocean seemed as wrong as the frequent rain. And, for another, the Race had to share orbital space with the Big Uglies. Their mushy voices, chattering in their languages and in hers, crowded the radio bands even worse than their hardware crowded space.

One piece of hardware in particular stood out. “What
are
the Big Uglies doing?” she asked as she floated weightless at the central docking hub of the
27th Emperor Korfass
. “Are they building a starship of their own?”

“Do not be absurd,” answered the male she had come to ferry down to the surface of Tosev 3, a chemical engineer named Warraff. “They cannot hope to fly between the stars. They did not even travel beyond their own atmosphere until after the fighting stopped. That is only the space station of the not-empire called the Confederated—no, excuse me, the United—States.”

“Why is it so large?” Nesseref asked. “I am certain the Tosevites had nothing of that size in orbit when we first came to Tosev 3.”

“No one knows the answer to that,” Warraff replied. “No one of the Race, at any rate. The American Tosevites are doing something peculiar there; I would be the last to deny it. Keep an eye turret on the computer network to stay up with the latest gossip, but bear in mind it is only gossip.”

“I thought you told me it belonged to the United States,” Nesseref said. “Who are the Americans?”

Straightening out that misunderstanding took a little while. Nesseref had paid little attention to the lesser continental mass. She knew about the SSSR and the
Reich
because Poland lay sandwiched between them. But she’d had only radio contact with U.S. spacefliers and ground stations, and had forgotten those Big Uglies had an alternative name for themselves.

Several officials were waiting for Warraff when she brought him down to the shuttlecraft port outside the new Australian cities; he was, evidently, good at what he did. No one was waiting for Nesseref, no matter how good she was at what she did. She found transportation from the shuttlecraft port to the airfield not far away. Then she had to wait for the next flight to Poland, and then she had to endure the journey halfway round the planet.

By the time she walked into her flat, her body had no idea whether it was supposed to be day or night. Locally, it was late afternoon. She did know that felt wrong. Uncertain whether to eat breakfast or go to sleep, she chose the latter. When she woke up, it was the middle of the night, but she could not go back to sleep no matter how hard she tried.

She felt caged inside the flat. She’d spent too much time inside her shuttlecraft and inside the airplane that had brought her home. She rode the elevator down to the lobby of her building and then strode out into the street. This sort of thing had happened to her after other missions, too. Once more was an annoyance, not a catastrophe.

Few other males or females of the Race were on the street. Nesseref eyed the ones who walked or motored past with a certain amount of wariness, but only a certain amount. The Race was generally more law-abiding than the Big Uglies, and males and females chosen as colonists were generally law-abiding even by the standards of the Race. Still, every hatching ground held a few addled eggs.

Tosev 3 could do some addling of its own. A male sidled up to Nesseref, saying, “I greet you. How would you like to greet something nice for your tongue?”

“No,” Nesseref said sharply—all the more sharply because she did crave ginger. “Go away.” When the male did not move off fast enough to suit her, she added, “Very well, then, I will call the authorities,” and reached for her telephone.

That got the fellow moving at a better clip. Nesseref felt more regret and anger than satisfaction. She walked along the quiet streets. Loud metallic crashes sent her skittering forward to investigate. She found a couple of Big Uglies loading trash cans into a ramshackle truck of Tosevite design.

“We greet you, superior sir,” they said, lifting cloth caps from their heads in unison. Their accents were even worse than the foremale Casimir’s, and they couldn’t tell Nesseref was a female. But they acted as if they had every right to be where they were and do what they were doing.

“What is going on here?” Nesseref asked.

She had little experience in judging Tosevite expressions, but needed little to realize they found the question stupid. So did she, once she thought about it. One of the Tosevites said, “Taking trashes away, superior sir. Race not wanting to do. Paying us to doing instead.”

“Very well,” Nesseref said, and the Big Uglies resumed their noisy, smelly work. Indeed, it was labor no male or female of the Race would want to perform. Paying the Tosevites to do it made perfect sense.

The truck rumbled off down the street, leaving a cloud of noxious fumes in its wake. Nesseref coughed a couple of times, and did her best not to breathe till the cloud dispersed. Yes, paying Big Uglies to haul trash made sense. But Big Uglies also made trucks. If they did that more cheaply than members of the Race could, would paying them for such manufacturing also make sense? Nesseref didn’t know. She did know some of the colonists were industrial workers. If they didn’t manufacture, say, trucks, what would they do?

If the trucks they did make were better but at the same time more expensive than those of the Big Uglies, what would the Race do? What should the Race do? She was glad she didn’t have to decide things like that.

She prowled the streets of the new town, now and then looking up through the scattered clouds at the stars. She knew the constellations well; they didn’t look a great deal different from the way they would have in the northern hemisphere back on Home, though of course they rotated about a different imaginary axis.

Little by little, the eastern sky turned pale with the approach of day. Before the star Tosev came up, a mist rose on the fields and meadows around the settlement the Race had built. Tendrils flowed through the streets, leaving the air damp and clammy. Despite that and despite the unpleasant chill, Nesseref stayed out, watching in fascination. Such mists occurred in only a few places back on Home, and then but seldom; the air usually stayed too dry to support them. They seemed common enough here in Poland, but still intrigued her.

This one, like most, hugged the ground. When Nesseref looked up through it, she had no trouble seeing the tops of taller buildings. But when she turned her eye turrets down to street level, so that she peered along the layer of water droplets, the lower stories of nearby structures blurred, while those farther away—and not much farther away, at that—disappeared altogether. She might have been alone in the center of a small, clear circle, the rest of the planet (for all she could prove, the rest of the universe) shrouded in fog. Even the sounds that reached her hearing diaphragms were distant, muffled, attenuated.

When Tosev rose, the mist let her look at it without protection. That seemed even stranger to her than the fog itself. As a shuttlecraft pilot, she’d grown used to harsh, raw sunlight, unfiltered even by atmosphere, let alone by these billions of droplets. Even a glimpse of a sun should have been enough to make her automatically turn her eye turrets away. But no, not here. She could look at Tosev with impunity—and she did.

With sunrise, the town began to come to life around her. Males and females trooped out of their apartment buildings. Off they went, to whatever work they had. A couple of them turned curious eye turrets in her direction. She wasn’t going anywhere. She was only standing and watching. That made her not fit in. She kept on doing nothing but standing and watching, too, which left the curious no excuse to ask her any questions. That suited her fine.

Now she didn’t know that she felt like breakfast, but she didn’t know that she felt like any different meal, either. She did feel like something, and breakfast would do. She had to look around to see where she was; she’d walked through the night almost at random. But the new town wasn’t large enough to make getting lost easy. Before long, she found herself in an eatery she’d already visited several times.

“Ham and eggs,” she told the male behind the counter. Ham she esteemed, as did most of the Race; the only thing better she’d found on Tosev 3 was ginger, and ginger she stubbornly refused. The local eggs tasted different from those of Home—rather more sulfurous—but weren’t bad when flavored with enough salt.

As the male gave her the meal, he remarked, “Before long, they will start bringing down our own domestic animals. Then we shall have proper eggs and more kinds of meat worth eating.”

“Good,” Nesseref said, handing him her identification card so he could charge her credit balance. “Yes, that will be very good indeed. Little by little, we may be putting down roots on this world after all. Perhaps our settlement here will work out, even if not in the way we thought it would before leaving Home.”

“This is not such a bad place,” the male answered. “Cold and wet, but we already knew that. If only there were fewer Big Uglies running around loose with weapons.”

“Truth,” Nesseref said.
Did
the Tosevite called Anielewicz have an explosive-metal bomb? Even if he didn’t, did it matter? The
Reich
and the SSSR and the United States had them. She was sure the countermale had meant Tosevites with rifles and submachine guns. They were the visible danger. But the ones with bombs were worse.

Atvar was feeling harassed. He should have been used to the feeling, after so much time on Tosev 3. In fact, he was used to the feeling. But he had less chance than usual to make the male addressing him regret it, because Reffet was every bit as much a fleetlord as he was.

“By the Emperor, Atvar,” Reffet snarled now, looking most unhappy indeed on Atvar’s screen, “what are these accursed American Big Uglies playing at with their preposterous space station? The miserable thing bloats like a tumor.”

“I do not know what they are doing,” Atvar answered. What he was doing was trying to hold his temper. Being an equal, Reffet was entitled to use his unadorned name. Equal or not, the fleetlord of the colonization fleet wasn’t entitled to use his name in that tone of voice. “Whatever it is, I doubt it means danger to us. When Big Uglies plan something dangerous, they rarely let us see any of it beforehand.”