Down to Earth (74 page)

Males and females of the Race rushed this way and that, heading for their own emergency stations. Some few would defend the starship, the rest merely huddle in it. If an explosive-metal bomb burst against its side, they would die where they huddled, probably faster than they could realize they were dead.

Seeing Big Uglies inside the starship made some males and females shout angrily. Kassquit shouted back. So did Jonathan Yeager, not always quite grammatically. Then he asked the very question she’d pondered a moment before: “What happens if we are hit?”

She gave him the only answer she’d come up with: “We die.” His face twisted. She knew little of the facial expressions wild Big Uglies used. From what she’d gathered, though, this one did not indicate pleasure.

Here was her home corridor. Here was her home doorway. She punched the keypad outside it. She had to try twice to get the combination right. When she did, the door opened. She went inside. Again, Jonathan Yeager followed. She closed the door behind them. Even through the metal, the clicks of toeclaws on metal and the cries of frightened males and females came clearly.

Kassquit was frightened, too. And so, no doubt, was Jonathan Yeager. She needed a little while to realize how frightened he must be. She, at least, was where she belonged, where she’d lived her whole life. He had to be as much adrift as she would have been had war broken out while she was on the surface of Tosev 3.

“What do we do now?” he asked. If there were any answers, he knew she had to be the one who had them.

He depends on me,
she realized with a small shock. She’d never had anyone do that before. She’d always been the one who depended on Ttomalss. “Wait,” she told him: the obvious. “Hope the all-clear sounds.” Once past the obvious, she had to pause and think, but not for long. She wished she could form her face into the expression wild Big Uglies used to show amiability. “Also, we ought to go on with what we were doing before the alarm came.”

Jonathan Yeager threw back his head and barked Tosevite laughter. “We have a saying: eat, drink, and be merry, for tomorrow we may die.” The laughter stopped. “But it may not be tomorrow. It may be the next instant.”

“That is a truth,” Kassquit said. “Because it is a truth, should we not go on? Is there anything else you would rather do?”

“No,” he said, and added an emphatic cough.

“Nor I.” She lay down on her sleeping mat. It was less resilient than the cot brought up from Tosev 3—
it fits the Race needs, not mine,
she thought—but it would have to do. “Let us continue, then.”

She’d expected him to put on another sheath and continue from exactly the point where they were interrupted. Instead, to her surprise and delight, he knelt beside her and began stimulating her all over again.

She hadn’t realized she could be stimulated on the web of flesh between her thumb and forefinger or the crook of her elbow or her earlobes. She’d always hated her ears, which marred the smooth lines of her head, and wished she had hearing diaphragms instead, as the Race did. Here was a reason to change her mind she hadn’t expected.

His mouth on her breasts gave her more pleasure than her own fingers had. She wasn’t so sure that was true when his head went between her legs. She knew just what to do and when to do it there. He didn’t; he was finding out by experiment. When she’d stroked herself, though, she’d always known what would happen next. With Jonathan Yeager’s caresses, she didn’t. Sometimes the surprises were disappointing. Sometimes they were altogether delightful. She gasped and shuddered, taken to her peak of pleasure almost by surprise.

After that, Jonathan Yeager did reach for the box of sheaths. “Would you not like me to stimulate you as well?” Kassquit asked.

The corners of his mouth turned up. “I
am
stimulated,” he answered, and pointed to that part of himself which proved the truth of his words. “If you stimulate me much more, I will . . .” He paused, perhaps looking for a way to put what he wanted to say into the language of the Race. He found one: “I will spill my seed, and then you would have to wait a while before I could mate again.”

That was the first Kassquit had heard of Tosevites having to wait between matings. “How long?” she asked. “A day? Ten days?”

He laughed again. “No, not so long as either of those. Maybe a tenth part of a day, maybe even less than that.”

Kassquit considered. “You gave me pleasure—I would like to return it,” she said at last. “It seems only fair, after all. If you spill your seed before we mate, then you do, that is all, and we will wait. If not, we will go on. Is that all right?”

The corners of his mouth turned up again. “Yes, indeed, superior female,” he said, and lay back on the mat.

Partly remembering the videos of Big Uglies mating she’d watched, partly imitating what Jonathan Yeager had done with her, Kassquit worked her way down his body with her hands and mouth. By the small noises he made, she judged she was succeeding in giving him pleasure. As he had with her, she crouched between his legs and stimulated him with her mouth.

With a small whir, the door to her chamber slid open and Ttomalss walked in. Jonathan Yeager’s reaction astonished Kassquit—he made a noise that sounded something like
Eep!,
jerked away from her so quickly that she almost bit him, and held both hands in front of the organ she’d been stimulating.

Ttomalss said, “I greet you, Kassquit, and you, Jonathan Yeager. I wanted to make certain you were both safe. I am glad to see you are.” He turned to go.

“I thank you, superior sir,” Kassquit said as he left. Jonathan Yeager said
Eep!
again. Kassquit wondered what it meant in his language. She got up and closed the door once more then walked back to him. “Shall we go on?”

He said something else she didn’t understand; it sounded like
Jesus!
Then he went back to the language of the Race: “After that, I hope I can.”

Kassquit wondered what he meant. She found out: he had wilted. More stimulation seemed called for. She applied it. She wondered what was in his laugh as he rose again. She thought it sounded like relief, but had too little experience with Tosevites to be sure. “There,” she said briskly after a little while. “Now—the sheath.”

“It shall be done,” he said, and did it.

In the videos, she’d seen several possible mating postures. Female astride male seemed as practical as male mounting female. She straddled Jonathan Yeager and joined their organs. As she lowered herself onto him, she stopped in sudden surprise and pain. “This is a mating!” she exclaimed. “It should not hurt!” The idea of mating that gave pain rather than pleasure struck her as addled even by the standards of Tosev 3.

But Jonathan Yeager said, “Female Tosevites have a . . . membrane that must be broken on the first mating. That can cause pain. After the membrane heals, this does not happen again.”

“I see.” Kassquit sighed. She hadn’t known that. None of her research had shown it. She wondered if the Race even knew it. She shrugged. If she hadn’t found out about it before, it couldn’t matter much, even to wild Big Uglies.

She bore down. The membrane certainly was there. Jonathan Yeager had better information than she did. She bore down again, at the same time as he thrust up from beneath her. The membrane tore. She hissed. It did hurt, and she wasn’t used to physical pain.

“Is it all right?” JonathanYeager asked.

“I—suppose so,” Kassquit answered. “I have no standards of comparison.”

He kept moving inside her. That went on hurting, but less than it had when he first pierced her. It brought a little pleasure with it, but not nearly so much as she got from a hand or from his tongue. She wondered if it would be different after she healed.

Beneath her, Jonathan Yeager’s face went very red. He grunted, clutched her hindquarters ahnost painfully tight, and thrust himself into her to the hilt. Then he relaxed. His eyes, which had squeezed shut, opened again. The corners of his mouth turned upward.

Kassquit slid off him. Her blood streaked the sheath and her inner thighs. “Is it supposed to be like this?” she asked Jonathan Yeager.

“Yes, I think so,” he answered. He took off the sheath, which was messy inside and out. “What do I do with this, superior female?”

She showed him. “Here—this is the trash chute. I do not think it would be wise to send it through the plumbing. It might cause a blockage in the pipes.”

“That would not be good, not in a starship,” he said. “No, it would not,” Kassquit agreed. “Tosevite wastes already give the plumbing difficulties it was not designed to handle.” She went to the sink, wet a tissue, and wiped the blood from her legs and private parts. Then she sent the tissue down the trash chute, too.

Jonathan Yeager imitated everything she did as he washed himself. “You are going to have to show me things here,” he told her. “I do not know how to live on this starship, any more than you would know how to live in my land on Tosev 3.”

“It should not be too hard,” she said.

He laughed. “Not for you—you have lived here all your life. For me, everything is strange. You have no idea how strange everything here is.”

That was likely to be true. Kassquit said, “I only hope we can go on living here.”

As if to underscore her words, the floor shuddered a little beneath her feet. “What was that?” Jonathan Yeager asked.

“I do not know, not for certain,” she answered. “But I think it may have been missiles firing at a target.”

“Oh,” the wild Tosevite said, and then, “I hope they hit it.”

“So do I,” Kassquit answered. “If they do not hit it, it will hit us.”

“I know that.” Jonathan Yeager put his arm around her. No male or female of the Race would have made such a gesture. Physical contact mattered more among Big Uglies than it did to the Race. Having grown up among the Race, Kassquit had not thought it would matter to her. She was surprised to discover herself mistaken. Genetic programming mattered. The touch of another of her kind—and one with whom she’d known other physical intimacies—brought a certain reassurance.

Not that that will do us any good whatever if a missile does strike this starship,
she thought, and then wished she hadn’t.

For Mordechai Anielewicz, a quarter of a century might have fallen away in the course of bare days. Here again were the Nazis swarming over Poland’s western border, panzer engines rumbling, attack aircraft diving on the forces defending the land where he’d lived all his life.

Coming out of Lodz, he was a lot closer to the border than he had been in 1939, when he’d lived in Warsaw. The Germans didn’t have so far to come to get him this time. On the other hand, Poland was better able to fight back than she had been then.

A Lizard fired a missile at an oncoming German panzer. The panzer stopped coming on; it burst into flames. A hatch opened. German soldiers started bailing out.

Anielewicz squeezed the trigger on his automatic rifle. One of the Germans threw out his arms, spun, and fell facedown. A lot of bullets were flying; Mordechai didn’t know whether he’d been the one who killed the Nazi. He hoped so, though.

The Lizards didn’t have a lot of troops on the ground—most of their males were in landcruisers. By themselves, they’d had trouble with the
Wehrmacht
when the conquest fleet first landed. The Nazis were a lot better armed now than they had been in 1942. That was why Jewish fighters and Poles served as a lot of the infantry in the fight against the German invaders.

“Gas!” The cry rang out in Yiddish, in Polish, and in the language of the Race at almost the same instant. Mordechai Anielewicz yanked out his mask and put it on with almost desperate haste. It wasn’t complete protection against nerve gas; he knew that all too well. And he’d already had one dose of what the Germans had used during the last round of fighting against the Race. He didn’t know how much he could take now without quietly falling over dead.

Maybe you’ll get to find out,
he thought, breathing in air that tasted of rubber through an activated-charcoal canister that gave him a pig-snouted look. If he’d been a proper kind of fighting leader, he wouldn’t have been at the front at all. He would have been back in a headquarters somewhere tens of kilometers to the rear, with aides to peel him grapes and with dancing girls to pinch whenever he felt he needed a break from commanding.

But headquarters weren’t necessarily safe these days, either. He couldn’t think of any place in Poland that was necessarily safe. As soon as talks between the Race and the Germans broke down, he’d got his wife and children (and Heinrich’s beffel) out of Lodz and into a hamlet called Widawa, southwest of the city. Widawa wasn’t safe, either, and the knowledge that it wasn’t ate at him. It was closer to the German border than Lodz was. He didn’t want to think about what would happen if the Nazis overran the little town.

Trouble was, he also didn’t want to think about what would happen if the Nazis hit Lodz with an explosive-metal missile. If they did, the city would go—and, probably, the fallout from the blast would blow east. Looked at that way, Widawa made more sense than a lot of other refuges.

Machine-gun bullets stitched the ground in front of Anielewicz, kicking up dirt that bounced off the lenses of his gas mask. He blinked as if the dirt had gone in his eye. If he did get an eyelash in his eye or something like that, he would have to live with it. If he took off the mask to get it out, he would die on account of it.

Another German panzer started burning. They didn’t go up like bombs the way they had before, though. Back in the last round of fighting, they’d used gasoline-fueled engines. Now they ran on diesel fuel, as Russian tanks had even then, or on hydrogen, as Lizard landcruisers did.

But the Germans had a lot of panzers. The flame that burst from a machine near the one that had taken a hit was muzzle flash, not damage. And a Lizard landcruiser off to Anielewicz’s right caught fire itself. Males of the Race bailed out, as German soldiers had a moment before. Mordechai grunted, though he could hardly hear himself inside the mask. In the last round of fighting, the Germans had counted on losing five or six of their best panzers for every Lizard landcruiser they knocked out. The ratio would have been higher than that, but the Nazis were tactically better than the Race, as they had been tactically better than the Red Army.