Down to Earth (29 page)

“Her face is like Liu Mei’s,” Jonathan said as they got to the car. “It doesn’t show anything.”

“Nope,” Sam agreed, sliding behind the wheel. “I guess what they say is, you have to learn how to use expressions when you’re a baby, or else you don’t. Since the Lizards’ faces don’t move much, the kids they took couldn’t do that.” He glanced over at his son. “Were you just looking at her face?”

Jonathan coughed and spluttered a little, but rallied fast: “I’ve seen lots of bare tits before, Dad. They’re not such a big deal for me as they would have been for you when you were my age.”

And that was undoubtedly true. Sam sighed as he started the engine. “Having ’em out in the open so much takes away some of the thrill, I think,” he said. His son looked at him as if he’d started speaking some language much stranger than that of the Race. So he was: to Jonathan, he was speaking the language of the nostalgic old-timer, a tongue the young would never understand.

Proving as much, Jonathan changed the subject. “She seems pretty smart,” he said.

“Yeah, she does.” Sam nodded as he got on the southbound freeway for the ride back to Gardena. “That probably helps her. I bet she’d be a lot crazier if she were stupid.”

“She didn’t seem all that crazy to me,” his son said. “She acts more like a Lizard than a person, yeah, but heck, half my friends do that.” He chuckled.

So did Sam Yeager, but he shook his head while he did it. “There’s a difference. Your friends are acting, as you said.” He’d been married to Barbara for quite a while, and most of the time he automatically kept his grammar clean. “But Kassquit isn’t—acting, I mean. The Race is all she knows. As best I can tell, we’re the first Big Uglies she’s ever seen face-to-face. We’re at least as strange to her as she is to us.”

He watched Jonathan think about that and slowly nod. “No ordinary person would have come out and talked about, uh, reproduction like that.”

“Well, it would have been surprising, anyhow,” Sam said. “But she thinks about it the way the Lizards would. She can’t help that—they’ve taught her everything she knows.” He took a hand off the wheel to remove his uniform cap—he’d gone to the consulate in full regalia—and scratch his head. “Still, she’s not made the way they are. She can’t even be as old as you are, Jonathan. If she’s like anybody else your age, she’s going to get urges. I wonder what she does about them.”

“What can she do, up there by herself?” Jonathan asked.

“What anybody by himself, or by herself, can do.” Sam raised an eyebrow. “Sooner or later, you find out it doesn’t grow hair on the palm of your hand.”

That made Jonathan turn red and clam up for the rest of the drive back home. Sam used the quiet to do some thinking of his own. Not only seeing Kassquit, but also listening to her trying so hard to be something she couldn’t be, did bring on guilt about Mickey and Donald. No matter how hard he and his family tried to raise them up as people, they would never be human beings, any more than Kassquit could really be a Lizard.

And what would happen when they met Lizards, as they surely would one day? Would they be as confused and dismayed as Kassquit had been at the prospect of talking with a couple of genuine human beings? Probably. He didn’t see how they would be able to help it.

It wasn’t fair. They hadn’t asked to be hatched in an incubator on his service porch. But nobody, human or Lizard, had any say about where he got his start in life. Mickey and Donald would have to make the best of it they could, as did everybody else on four worlds. And Sam and his family would have to help.

He hoped he’d stay around to help. Being fifty-seven had a way of putting that kind of thought in his mind. He was in pretty good shape for his age, but every time he shaved in the morning the first glance in the mirror reminded him he wouldn’t be here forever. Barbara could take over for him if he went too soon (somehow, contemplating his own death was easier than thinking about hers), and Jonathan, and whomever Jonathan married. He hoped that would be Karen. She was a good kid, and she and Jonathan had been thick as thieves lately.

After a moment, he shook his head. “Back to business,” he muttered. Business was getting a summary of the conversation Jonathan and he had had with Kassquit down on paper, and adding his impressions to it. He was glad he’d talked with his son. It helped him clarify his own thoughts.

He had to use the human-made computer to draft his report. With the one he’d got from the Lizards, he couldn’t print in English, but was stuck with the language of the Race. Kassquit might have found a report in the Lizards’ language interesting, but it wouldn’t have amused his superiors.

When he finished the report and pressed the key that would print it, a glorified electric typewriter hammered into life. The printer hooked up to the Lizard-built computer was a lot more elegant, using powdered carbon and a
skelkwank
light to form the characters and images it produced. You needed a powerful magnifier to tell its output was made up of tiny dots and didn’t come from a typewriter or even from set type.

He read through the report, made a couple of small corrections in ink, and set it aside. The printer kept humming till he turned it off. He started to turn off the computer, too, but changed his mind. Instead, he hooked himself up to the U.S. network. He hadn’t tried visiting the archive that stored signals traffic from the night the colonization fleet was attacked for quite a while. The more he learned about that, the better his chances of nailing the culprit and passing what he knew on to the Lizards.

They’ll never figure out whether it was the Nazis or the Russians, not on their own they won’t,
he thought. The Lizards were less naive than they had been when they came to Earth, but humans, long used to cheating one another, still had little trouble deceiving them. And, because the Lizards weren’t human, they often missed clues that would have been obvious to a person.

“There we go,” Sam muttered, as the name of the archive appeared on his screen. He waited for the table of contents to come up below it, so he could find exactly which transcripts would be most useful to him. The list took its own sweet time appearing; compared to the Race’s machine, this one was slow, slow.

Instead of the contents list, he got a blank, dark screen. Pale letters announced,
CONNECTION BROKEN. PLEASE TRY AGAIN
.

“You cheap piece of junk,” he snarled, and whacked the side of the case that held the screen. That didn’t change the message, of course. It did go a little way toward easing his annoyance. The Lizards’ computer worked all the time. The machine made in the USA broke down if he looked at it sideways.

But he was a stubborn man. He wouldn’t have spent eighteen years riding trains and buses through every corner of the bush leagues if he hadn’t been stubborn. He wouldn’t have risen to lieutenant colonel, either, not when he’d joined the Army as a thirty-five-year-old private with full upper and lower dentures. And he wouldn’t have got so far with the Lizards, either.

And so, even though he kept swearing under his breath, he patiently reconnected the computer to the network and navigated toward that archive again. This time, he didn’t even get the archival name before he lost his connection.

He scowled and stared at the dark screen with the now familiar message on it. “Junk,” he repeated, but now he sounded less sure whether the fault lay inside his computer. Maybe the chain connecting him to that distant archive—actually, he didn’t know how distant it was, only that it existed—had some rusty links in it.

He wondered if he ought to report the problem. He didn’t wonder for long, though. While his security clearance was high enough to give him access to that archive, he had no formal need-to-know. Nobody above him would be happy to find out he’d been snooping around in things that were formally none of his business. The powers that be would frown all the harder because he’d already established a reputation for snooping.

“Hell with it,” he said, and this time he did turn off the computer. Maybe the simplest explanation was that somebody somewhere had made a tidy profit selling the U.S. government—or would it be the phone company?—some lousy wiring.

He was making himself a bologna sandwich (he’d got sick of ham) when a car stopped in front of the house. The sound of the closing door made him look up from pickles and mayonnaise. A young man he’d never seen before was walking across the lawn toward the front porch. Another one sat in the car, waiting.

The one coming up to the house had his right hand in the pocket of his blue jeans. After somebody had taken some potshots at the house, that triggered an alarm bell in Sam. He hurried to the hutch in the front room and pulled out his
.
45
.

Barbara came into the front room from the direction of the bedroom. She’d spotted the guy, too, and was going to find out what he wanted. When she saw the automatic in Sam’s hands, her eyes opened enormously wide. He used it to motion her away.

Up on the porch came the stranger. Before he could knock, Sam opened the front door and stuck the .45 in his face. “Take that hand out of your pocket real nice and slow,” he said pleasantly, and then, over his shoulder, “Honey, call the cops.”

“Sure, Pop, anything you say,” the young man answered. “You’ve got the persuader there, all right.” But his hand moved swiftly, not slowly, and had a pistol in it as it cleared his pocket.

He must have thought Yeager would hesitate long enough to let him shoot first. It was the last mistake he ever made. The .45 jerked against Sam’s wrist as he fired. The young man went down. He wouldn’t get up again, either, not after taking one between the eyes at point-blank range. He kept jerking and twitching, but that was only because his body didn’t know he was dead yet.

Tires screaming, the car in which he’d come roared away. Barbara and Jonathan came dashing out at the sound of the shot. “Thank God,” Barbara said when she saw Sam standing. She turned away from the corpse on the porch. “Christ! I haven’t seen anything like that since the fighting. The police are on the way.”

“Good. I’ll wait for ’em right here,” Sam said.

They arrived a couple of minutes later, lights flashing, siren yowling. “What the hell happened here?” one of them asked, though he was talking more about why than about what—that was obvious.

“Somebody shot at this house from the street last year, Sergeant,” Yeager answered. He explained what he’d seen and what he’d done, finishing, “He tried to draw on me, and I shot him. His pal took off as soon as I did.”

“Okay, Lieutenant Colonel, I’ve got your side of it,” said the sergeant, who’d been taking notes. He turned to his partner. “See just what the guy was holding, Clyde.”

“Right.” The other cop used his handkerchief to pick up the weapon. It was a .45 nearly identical to Sam’s. Clyde looked up at Yeager. “He was loaded for bear, all right. Lucky you were, too.” He glanced over at the sergeant. “If this isn’t self-defense, I don’t know what the devil it is.”

“A hell of a mess on this guy’s porch,” the sergeant said. He looked back to Yeager. “No charges I can see, Lieutenant Colonel. Like Clyde says, this one looks open-and-shut. But don’t leave town—we’re going to have about a million questions for you, maybe more once we find out who this character is and what he had in mind.”

“If I get orders to go, I’ll have to follow them,” Yeager said. “I’ve got to report this to my superiors, too.”

“If you do have to leave, let us know where you’re going and how long you’ll be there,” the police sergeant said. “And if I was your CO, I’d give you a medal. If you didn’t do what needed doing, you wouldn’t be able to report to him now, that’s for damn sure.” He raised an eyebrow. “You think this guy had anything to do with the shots last year?”

“Damned if I know,” Sam answered. “Maybe we’ll be able to find out.”

 
8

Ttomalss was happily busy. Not only did he have endless work to do on his stint in the
Reich
(a stint that had only seemed endless), but his long experiment with Kassquit had entered a new and fascinating phase. “Now that you have made the acquaintance of these Tosevites through electronic messages and by telephone, would you be interested in meeting them in person?” he asked.

“No, superior sir,” Kassquit answered at once, “or at least not yet.”

His Tosevite hatchling perched awkwardly on the chair across the desk from his own. Not only was it the wrong shape for her posterior, but it was also too small. Ttomalss remembered when she could hardly even climb up into it—he remembered when she’d hardly been able to do anything but suck up nutrient fluid, make horrid excretions, and yowl. He had to remind himself she wasn’t like that any more. She was, these days, startlingly far from foolish.

Still, she needed guiding. “I have reviewed the recording of your conversation with these two Big Uglies,” he said—this recording had been made with her knowledge and consent. “For their kind, they do indeed seem remarkably sophisticated about the Race. This makes sense, since the senior male named Yeager is one of their experts on us. If you are ever to meet Tosevites not under our rule, they seem good candidates.”

“I understand that, superior sir,” Kassquit said, “but I am not yet ready to endure such a meeting. Even talking with them by telephone was most disturbing: more than I expected it to be.”

“Why?” Ttomalss asked. He was recording this conversation, too.

“Why, superior sir?” Yes, Kassquit was ever more her own person these days; she gave the counter question a fine sardonic edge. “It was disturbing to talk to beings who look like me. It was also disturbing to talk to beings who think nothing like me. To have both sets of circumstances combined was more than doubly disturbing, I assure you.”

“I see,” Ttomalss said. And, after a little intellectual effort, he did. “I suppose hatchlings of the Race raised by the Big Uglies, if there were such unfortunates, would be disturbed by their first meeting with true males and females of their own species.”

“Yes, I suppose they would,” Kassquit agreed. “If there were any such, I would be interested in talking with them, if we had some language in common. It would be intriguing to learn whether their experiences paralleled mine here.”

Now Ttomalss looked at her with alarm and dismay. She didn’t usually speak of herself as being apart from the Race, even though she was. Contact with the wild Big Uglies truly had disturbed her. He did his best to reassure her: “This is a circumstance unlikely to arise. The Tosevites lack the patience needed to carry out such a long-term project.”

After he’d spoken, he wondered if he was right. The Big Uglies might be impatient, but they owned boundless curiosity. If they could somehow get their hands on eggs . . . But, unlike Tosevites, he didn’t show his thoughts on his face. Kassquit could have no notion of what went through his mind.

Her own thoughts were taking a different trajectory. “It would not happen for some years, at any rate. They could not have even attempted to raise hatchlings until the colonization fleet arrived.”

“As I say, there is no evidence, none, that they have attempted to do such a thing,” Ttomalss replied. “Now, shall we withdraw from hypotheticals and return to what can in fact be established?”

“As you wish, superior sir.” Unlike an independent Big Ugly, Kassquit had learned proper subordination.

Ttomalss asked her, “Under what circumstances might you eventually agree to a direct meeting with these Big Uglies?”

“I need further conversations with them,” Kassquit answered. “Only then will I be able to decide if I want to take that step.”

“Not unreasonable,” Ttomalss admitted. Now that he thought on it, he was not altogether sure he wanted to risk her, either. She had never been exposed to or immunized against Tosevite diseases. There were many of those, and the Race was not well equipped to combat them. Losing Kassquit would be a devastating setback. “I think I may need further conversations with our physicians before permitting the meeting, too. I must plan with all possible forethought.”

“Certainly,” Kassquit said. “What other course to take?”

Ttomalss did not reply, not to a question obviously rhetorical. Had he been a Big Ugly, though, his features would have twisted themselves into the expression that showed amiability.
You are not altogether a Tosevite,
he thought.
My teaching—the Race teaching—has made you far less headstrong than you would be otherwise. What has succeeded with you can succeed with your whole species.

Kassquit said, “May I go now, superior sir?”

“Yes, of course,” Ttomalss answered. “I thank you for your efforts in this matter. You must now determine whether you are willing to attempt a physical meeting with these Big Uglies, and I must determine how dangerous to your health such a meeting might be.”

After Kassquit had left his compartment, the senior researcher permitted himself a long sigh of relief. He was very glad Kassquit had declined his offer to get her a wild male Tosevite with whom she could relieve the tensions of her continuous sexual drive. He had not considered the possible medical consequences of such a meeting before he made the offer. Had she accepted, he would have felt duty-bound to carry it out. Had she fallen ill on account of anything so trivial as sexuality, he would never have forgiven himself.

He went through the recording of her conversation with the Big Uglies again. The younger Tosevite named Yeager particularly fascinated him. As far as appearance went, he might almost have hatched from the same egg as Kassquit. But his accent and his limited understanding made it plain he was only a wild Tosevite.

Ttomalss knew there were Big Uglies who imitated the Race every way they could. That encouraged him. As far as he was concerned, it marked a step toward assimilation. He had seen no such Tosevites in the
Reich.
The leaders there, having evidently come to the same conclusion, had banned body paint and shaved heads in the territory they held. Considering what passed for justice in that territory, Ttomalss found it unsurprising that few Tosevites there dared flout the law.

Though the younger Big Ugly was more interesting to look at, Ttomalss slowly realized the older one was much more interesting to hear. Like Jonathan Yeager, Sam Yeager spoke the language of the Race with a curious accent and with odd turns of phrase. But, listening to him, Ttomalss found that he did—or at least could—think like a male of the Race. The senior researcher wondered if he understood Big Uglies anywhere near as well as the older Yeager understood the Race. He was honest enough to admit that he didn’t know. He himself was capable—he didn’t denigrate his own abilities—but the Tosevite seemed inspired.

How, he wondered, could a Big Ugly have prepared himself to become an expert on another intelligent species when his kind hadn’t known there were any other intelligent species to meet? If he ever conversed with the elder Yeager, he would have to ask that question.

He was contemplating other questions when the telephone hissed. He’d been forming a clever thought. It disappeared. That made him hiss, in annoyance. Resignedly, he said, “Senior Researcher Ttomalss speaking—I greet you.”

“And I greet you—you who have escaped from the
Reich,”
said Felless, whose image overlay the now muted views of Kassquit and the two Big Uglies named Yeager. “You have no idea how lucky you are.”

“You are mistaken, superior female,” Ttomalss answered with an emphatic cough. “I know exactly how lucky I am. Spirits of Emperors past grant that you soon find yourself able to make a similar escape.”

Felless cast down her eyes. In a miserable voice, she said, “It shall
not
be done.” She sighed. “You transgressed against the Deutsche and were ordered out of the
Reich,
while I transgressed against our own kind and was ordered to stay in this accursed place. Where is the justice in that?”

“Transgressed against our—?” Ttomalss began, but his confusion quickly faded. “They caught you with your tongue in the ginger jar, did they?”

“You might say so,” Felless said bitterly. “Veffani and most of a team of senior officials from Cairo mated with me when I was summoned to a meeting in the ambassador’s office just after I had tasted.”

Now there was a scandal to keep the embassy buzzing for a long time! Ttomalss had to work to keep from laughing in Felless’ face. That would be cruel—tempting, but cruel—after she’d disgraced herself. “I do not understand why you were ordered to stay there,” he said.

“As punishment,” she snapped. “I was hoping you would have a sympathetic hearing diaphragm, but I see that is too much to ask for.”

“I am lucky enough not to have acquired the ginger habit,” he said. “And it is a less urgent matter with me, since I am a male.”

“Unfair,” Felless exclaimed. “I did not ask to release pheromones after tasting. I wish I would not. I also wish I were not going to lay another clutch of eggs. But wishes are pointless, are they not?”

Ttomalss remembered the extravagant wishes he’d made while Liu Han held him in captivity. “No, not always,” he said. “They can help keep hope alive, and hope matters most when things look worst.”

“Hope?” Felless said. “My only hope is to get away from this dreadful place, and that is what I cannot do.” She paused. “No, I take that back. My other hope is to be able to get more ginger before my present supply runs out. That, at least, I expect I will be able to accomplish.” Her image disappeared from the screen.

Ttomalss stared for a little while at the soundless pictures of the two wild Big Uglies and of Kassquit. With a sigh, he ended the playback of that recording, too; he couldn’t concentrate on it. Poor Felless! For all her expertise, she hadn’t adapted well to Tosev 3. She’d expected it to be far more like Home than it really was.

If she’d stayed aboard a starship or gone to one of the new towns on the island continent or on the main continental mass, she might have done well enough. But her field of specialization involved dealing with the alien natives of Tosev 3 . . . who had proved far more alien than the Race could possibly have imagined before setting out from Home.

Well, I know all about that,
Ttomalss thought. He knew it in more intimate detail than he’d ever imagined, thanks to his captivity in China and thanks to his raising Kassquit. One way or another, everyone in the conquest fleet had learned the lessons with which the males and females of the colonization fleet were still grappling.

The colonists didn’t want to adapt. There were so many of them, they didn’t have to adapt to the same degree as had the males of the conquest fleet.
They have it easy,
Ttomalss thought.
We did the real work, and they do not appreciate it.
He wondered if the older generation of the Big Uglies ever had such thoughts about their dealings with the Race, and if the younger ones were as ungrateful as the males and females of the colonization fleet. He doubted it.

Atvar studied a map of the regions of Tosev 3 the Race ruled. Some parts of it were a tranquil yellow-green, others angry red, still others in between. He turned to Pshing, his adjutant. “Fascinating how little correlation there is between this map and the one reflecting active rebellion,” he observed.

“Truth, Exalted Fleetlord,” Pshing agreed. “The subregions of the main continental mass known as China and India accept veneration of the spirits of Emperors past almost without complaint, as do large stretches of the region known as Africa. Yet China and India still seethe with political strife, while Africa is largely tranquil. Intriguing.”

“So it is.” Atvar pointed to another section of the map. “Yet the southern part of the lesser continental mass is afire with resentment against us because of this measure, and that had also been one of the areas where our administration was least difficult and annoying. It is a puzzlement.”

“We do not yet understand everything we should about the Big Uglies,” Pshing said. “A world, I have discovered since our arrival here, is a very large place to get to know in detail.”