Down to Earth (62 page)

Had their guide been a human being, he would have sniffed. As things were, he waggled his eye turrets and spoke one dismissive word: “Foolishness.”

“Do you think so?” Jonathan Yeager asked in the language of the Race. “Would you say the same thing after you smell the pheromones of a female who has just tasted ginger?” The Lizard didn’t answer. In fact, he didn’t say another word till he’d led Sam and Jonathan to the chamber in which Kassquit sat waiting for them.

“I greet you, superior female,” Sam said in the language of the Race. His son echoed him. They both briefly assumed the posture of respect.

Kassquit got up from her seat and politely returned it. She was smoother at it than either of them, having no doubt had much more practice. “I greet you, Sam Yeager, Jonathan Yeager,” she said, and sat down again.

“It is good to see you once more,” Sam said. It was disconcerting to see so much of her; he had to work to keep his eyes on her face and not on her small, firm breasts or the slit between her legs, which looked all the more naked for being shaved. She made no move to conceal herself; she had no idea that she ought to conceal herself.
Jonathan’s right,
Sam thought.
I’m not as used to skin as he is.

“And it is good to see both of you,” she answered seriously, innocent in her nakedness. “I shall remember your visits all the days of my life, for they are so different from anything I have known before.”

“They are different for us, too,” Jonathan said. “You live in space. To us, getting here is an adventure in itself.”

“I did not think it would be so bad,” Kassquit said in obvious dismay;
adventure
had connotations of hardship in the language of the Race that it lacked in English. “You came on one of our shuttlecraft, after all, and with us spaceflight is routine.”

Sam did his best to spread oil on troubled waters: “One of these days, it would be nice if you could visit us down on the surface of Tosev 3.”

“I have thought of this,” Kassquit said. “I do not yet know whether it can be arranged, or whether it would prove expedient if it can.”

Ever since he’d whiled away summer afternoons fishing for bluegill and crappie in the creek that ran through his parents’ farm, Sam had known how to bait a hook. “Would you not be interested to learn what being among Tosevites is like?” he asked. “If you wore our style of wrappings and false hair, you would look just like everyone else.”

If that wasn’t bait, he didn’t know what was. Poor Kassquit had to be the most isolated individual in the world.
Even Mickey and Donald don’t have it so bad,
he thought uneasily.
They’ve got each other, and she ‘s got nobody.
Tempting her hardly seemed fair, but he was a soldier on duty and a human being loyal to his species, while she wasn’t human except by parentage, undoubtedly wished that parentage hadn’t happened, and served the Race with all her heart.

He could tell the hook had gone home, all right. It might well tear out of her mouth, of course; people were a lot more complicated than bluegill. Her face didn’t show much, but then, like Liu Mei’s, her face never showed much. But she leaned forward in her seat and took a couple of deep breaths. If that wasn’t intrigued interest, he had scales and eye turrets himself.

“To look like everyone else?” she said musingly. “I have never imagined such a thing—except in my wishes and dreams, where I look like a proper female of the Race.” Nobody raised by humans would have told a near-stranger anything so intimate; Kassquit didn’t understand the limits behind which people functioned. Then she said something that made Sam sit up and take notice: “If war comes, I may be safer in the not-empire called the United States than here aboard this starship.”

“Do you really think there will be a war between the
Reich
and the Race?” Jonathan blurted. He hardly seemed better at concealing what he felt than Kassquit did, and what he felt was horrified dismay.

“Who can know?” Kassquit answered. “The Race does not want to fight the
Reich,
but the
Reich
has no business making demands on the Race.”

“That is about what our government thinks, too, but we have little influence on what goes on in the
Reich
,” Sam said.

“Too bad,” Kassquit told him. “For Big Uglies, you seem sensible, you Americans, aside from your absurd custom of snoutcounting.”

“We like it,” Sam said. “It seems to suit us. We are not a people who care to be told what to do by anyone.”

“But what if those who tell you what to do know more about a question than you do?” Kassquit asked. “Does a physician not know more about how to keep you healthy than you can know for yourself?”

“Judging who is an expert in public affairs is harder,” Sam replied. “Many claim to be experts, but they all want to do different things. That makes choosing among them harder. So we let those who convince the largest number of us that they are wise and good govern our not-empire.”

“What if they lie?” Kassquit asked bluntly.

“If we find out, we do not choose them again,” Yeager said. “We choose them for terms of so many years, not for life, and we hope they cannot do too much damage while in office. What if the Race has a very bad Emperor? He is the Emperor for as long as he lives.”

“His ministers will do what is right regardless,” Kassquit said. “And even a bad Emperor’s spirit will watch over the spirits of citizens of the Empire. What good is a bad Tosevite snout-counted official after he is dead? None whatever.”

No sooner had Sam discarded one particular question as impolitic than Jonathan asked it: “How do you know spirits of Emperors past watch over other spirits? Is it not a superstition, the same as our Tosevite superstitions?”

“Of course it is not a superstition,” Kassquit said indignantly. “It is a truth. The truth is not a superstition.”

“How do you know?” Jonathan persisted. Sam made a small gesture, warning his son not to push it too hard.

He gave Kassquit credit. Instead of saying something like,
I just do,
she gave a serious answer: “All the males and females of three species on three worlds believe it. All the males and females of the Race have believed it for more than a hundred thousand years, since Home was unified. Could so many believe such a thing for so long if it were not true?”

“And you believe it?” Sam asked gently.

“I do.” Kassquit made the affirmative gesture. “Spirits of Emperors past
will
cherish my spirit. And my spirit, when that time comes, will look no different from any other.” She spoke with great confidence.

You poor kid,
Yeager thought. He had to look away from her for a moment; tears were stinging his eyes, and he couldn’t let her see that.
And the worst part of it is, you only know a fraction of what all the Lizards have done to you, because there so much of it you can’t see, any more than a fish sees water.
But then he shook his head. No, that wasn’t the worst part of it after all. He could see just how warped the Race had made Kassquit, and he knew damn well he was going to go right on raising Mickey and Donald as if they were human beings.
What a son of a bitch I am. But it’s my job, dammit.

He supposed the SS men who put Jews and fairies and Gypsies into gas chambers said the same thing. How could they do anything else if they wanted to go home afterwards and kiss their wives and eat pig’s knuckles and knock back a seidel or two of beer? If they really thought about what they were doing, wouldn’t they go nuts?

It’s not the same.
He knew it wasn’t, but had the uncomfortable feeling the difference was of degree, not of kind.

A silence had fallen in the chamber, as if nobody knew what to say next. Finally, Kassquit made a pointed return to a new take on an earlier subject: “Do you not think the present aggressive policy of the Deutsche makes it more likely that they were the Big Uglies who attacked the ships of the colonization fleet?”

“A good question,” Sam said. Jonathan nodded, but then remembered to make the proper hand gesture, too. Sam went on, “I am not sure the one has anything to do with the other. It might, but I have no proof.”

He would have been happy to incite the Race against the Nazis had he had proof. He didn’t think that would make his superiors happy, though, and he more or less understood why: however thoroughgoing a lot of bastards the Germans were, they were also part of the balance of power. He sighed. Life never turned out to be as simple as you thought it would when you were Jonathan’s age, or Kassquit’s.

Kassquit said, “I can understand why you would not admit any such thing about your own not-empire, but are the Deutsche not your foes as well as the Race’s?”

That was also balance-of-power politics. Speaking carefully, Sam answered, “It is a truth that the United States and the
Reich
were fighting a war when the Race came. But each decided the Race was a bigger danger than the other.”

“I do not understand this,” Kassquit said. “In the Empire, all Tosevites would be at peace. You would not fight the Race, and you would not fight among yourselves, either. Is this not good?”

“One of the parts of the United States—‘provinces’ is as close as I can come in your language, but that is not quite right—has a slogan,” Sam said. “That slogan is, ‘Live free or die.’ Many, many Big Uglies feel that way.”

“I do not understand,” Kassquit repeated. “How are the Tosevites in the USA or the SSSR or the
Reich
freer than those the Empire rules?”

Sam wished she hadn’t phrased the question like that. Millions of Frenchmen and Danes and Lithuanians and Ukrainians weren’t free, or anything close to it. Neither were millions of Germans or Russians, for that matter. “Not all Tosevite not-empires are the same,” he said at last.

“They look that way to us,” Kassquit answered.

Whoever’d raised her had done a good job: she really did think of herself as a member of the Race. Sam made a small clucking noise.
I hope I can do that well with Mickey and Donald, no matter how unfair it is to them.

Kassquit had trouble getting used to the way the wild Big Uglies looked at her. With a male or female of the Race, eye turrets said exactly where eyes pointed. The gaze of the Tosevites was shiftier, subtler. She thought their eyes kept drifting down her body, but they would return to her face whenever she was at the point of remarking on it.

Their words were also confusing and evasive. They steadfastly defended what was to her obvious nonsense. And they seemed sure they made perfect sense.
Alien,
she thought.
How can they be so strange, when they look so much like me?

After a moment, she realized she was the strange one by Tosevite standards. That realization was something of an intellectual triumph, because she loathed the idea of judging herself by the standards of wild Big Uglies.

And the Tosevites insisted they didn’t have one set of standards, but many—perhaps one for each of their not-empires. “You are all one species,” she said. “How can you have more than one standard? The Empire has three species—four now, counting Tosevites—but only one standard. Having many on a single planet is absurd.” Ttomalss had also said the Big Uglies varied by culture, but she wanted to hear how these wild ones explained it.

Jonathan Yeager said, “We do not always agree on what the right way to do things is.”

Sam Yeager made the affirmative gesture. “Sometimes there is no right or wrong way to do something, only different ways. Being different is not always the same as being right or wrong. I think the Race has trouble seeing that.”

“Back on Home, the Race has no trouble seeing right from wrong,” Kassquit said; that was what she’d been taught. “Contact with Tosevites has corrupted some of us.”

To her surprise and annoyance, both wild Big Uglies burst into loud barking yips of laughter. “That is not a truth, superior female,” Sam Yeager said, and used an emphatic cough. “I have met plenty of males—and some females now, too—who are as crooked as any Big Ugly ever hatched.”

He sounded very sure of himself. In the face of direct experience, how much was teaching worth? Kassquit decided to change the subject again; “What do the two of you hope to learn by these visits with me?”

“How to meet the Race halfway,” Jonathan Yeager answered.

Sam Yeager amended that: “To see whether we can meet the Race halfway. If we cannot, then perhaps war is the best hope we have after all.”

Live free or die.
It struck her as a slogan fit only for the hopelessly addled. Plainly, it meant something different to the wild Big Uglies. She did not want to explore that path again. Instead, she pointed with her tongue at Jonathan Yeager and said, “It seems to me that you are meeting the Race halfway.”

“I enjoy your culture,” he answered. “It interests me. I am learning your language, because I cannot deal with the Race without it. But under this”—he patted his shaven head and tapped the body paint on his chest—“under this, I am still a Tosevite with my own culture. Meeting you helped show me what a truth that is.”

“Did it?” Kassquit felt a pang of disappointment. “Meeting you made me hope you were leading toward . . .” Her voice trailed away. She was not sure how to say what she wanted without giving offense.

Sam Yeager, who seemed not to take offense easily, spoke for her: “You thought Jonathan was leading toward the Race’s quiet, bloodless conquest of Tosev 3.”

“Well, yes.” Kassquit made the affirmative gesture, even if she wouldn’t have been so frank as the wild Tosevite.

Then the older Yeager surprised her again, saying, “You could be right. I do not know if you are. Frankly, I doubt that you are. But you could be.”

“Why do you doubt it?” Kassquit asked.

“Because no matter how much of the Race’s outward culture we adopt—no matter whether we start using body paint instead of wrapping, no matter whether we reverence the spirits of Emperors past instead of keeping our own superstitions—we are still too different from you,” Sam Yeager answered. “And we will stay different from you, because of our sexuality and the social patterns that come from it.”