Down to Earth c-2

by Harry Turtledove

  She still wanted a taste.

  Down on the ground floor, males had cordoned off all the passages leading away, from the front entrance. Others stood in front of those cordoned-off passages with weapons in hand, to make sure no snoopy Big Uglies went down them in spite of the barricades.

  Boxes full of prizes stood in back of tables just behind the closed front doors. Felless sighed. “I am not ideally suited for this task,” she said, “because I speak neither the Deutsch language nor that of the local Francais, which I understand is different.”

  “Quite different,” Kazzop said. “But do not let it worry you. Most of us have at least some knowledge of one or both of these languages. While you are part of the project proper, your most important role will be data analysis. It is simply that we lack the personnel to restrict you to analysis alone, Senior Researcher.”

  With a martyred sigh, Felless said, “I understand.” Had she been doing only analysis, she could have tasted to her heart’s content. Nothing on Tosev 3 except ginger came close to contenting her heart.

  Kazzop, now, Kazzop sounded happy and excited about what he was doing. Felless envied him his enthusiasm. They took seats side by side, then turned on the card readers in front of them. She set a sheet of paper by hers. When amber lights showed the machines were ready, Kazzop turned to the males at the door and said, “Let them in. Tell them they must stay in two neat lines or we cannot proceed.”

  “It shall be done, superior sir,” one of the males answered, and swung the doors open. The Big Uglies outside roared. He and his comrades shouted in the local language. In came the Tosevites, more or less in two lines.

  The first of them came up to thrust his card at Felless-she knew he was a male, for he let the hair on his upper lip grow. She took the card from him and stuck it into the reader. A number showed on the screen: a zero. She touched the message printed beside the zero on the sheet of paper she’d set next to the reader. In the local language, it read, Sorry, you did not win anything today. Please try again.

  By the way the Big Ugly stared, she wondered for a moment if he could read at all. Then he let loose a torrent of what sounded like abuse. Felless was suddenly glad she knew no Francais. The Tosevite stomped away, still loudly complaining.

  Up came another Big Ugly, a female. Her card showed a one on the reader. Felless turned and grabbed a skelkwank — light disk player, which she handed to the Tosevite. She got a wave in return as the Big Ugly carried away her prize.

  More Tosevites trooped up, one after another. Those who won nothing complained loudly about it, even though none of the cards had promised anyone a prize. Males and females of the Race would have done better at remembering that.

  Most of the Big Uglies who did win got disk players. Some got portable computers. A few got good-sized cash awards-half a year’s pay for the average Tosevite. Just as those who’d failed were more abusive than members of the Race would have been, so the winners were more excited. Hidden cameras recorded all their responses.

  And then a female Big Ugly gave Felless her card. It showed a four, the only four among the cards the Race had given out. Felless turned to Kazzop. “Here is the biggest winner of them all,” she said.

  “Oh, good,” he answered. “Now I get to play with my bells and whistles, as if I were a Tosevite advertiser.” He turned on a raucous recording full of truly appalling noises. Felless winced. Kazzop laughed at her, remarking, “I have come to like the Big Uglies and the noises they enjoy.”

  “So I gather,” Felless said coldly. “You have come to like them altogether too well, if you want my view of the matter.”

  “It could be, superior female; it could be.” Kazzop sounded cheerful. “But look-all the Big Uglies in line and all the Big Uglies still waiting outside know she is the biggest winner. See how excited and envious they are?”

  Felless still had trouble reading Tosevite expressions. She was willing to believe Kazzop, though. “Interpret for me, if you will,” she said, and he made the affirmative gesture. “Tell the Tosevite congratulations, and ask her name.”

  Kazzop spoke in the language of the Francais. The Big Ugly answered in what sounded like the same tongue “She says thank you, and that her name is Monique,” he told Felless.

  “Just Monique?” Felless was puzzled. “Do they not usually have two names?”

  After more conversation, Kazzop said, “She seems reluctant to give her family name. She also seems reluctant to give reasons for her reluctance. She is more curious about what she has won.”

  That, for once, was a reaction Felless completely understood. “Well, go ahead and tell her,” Felless said. “Seeing how a couple of them have reacted to money, she will probably come to pieces when she learns she was won a home here with as many modern conveniences as we can include in it-something worth far more than our cash awards.”

  “Oh, without a doubt,” Kazzop said. “The recording of her reaction should be both instructive and entertaining.” He shifted from the language of the Race to that of the local Big Uglies.

  Felless waited for the Tosevite to shriek and burst into hysterics. One of the males who’d won money had tried to caress her with his lips. She understood it was a gesture of affection among Big Uglies, but the idea almost left her physically ill. She hoped this Tosevite would not try anything like that.

  To her relief, the female Big Ugly didn’t. Indeed, the Tosevite hardly showed any emotion at all for a moment. When she did speak, it was in quiet, measured tones. Kazzop was the one who jerked in astonishment. “What is going on?” Felless asked him.

  “She-the female-says she cannot accept the prize.” Kazzop sounded as if he couldn’t believe the sounds impinging on his hearing diaphragms. “She asks if we can make a substitution for it.”

  “You had not planned to do anything of the sort,” Felless said. “I realize that dealing with Big Uglies takes unusual flexibility, but still… Find out why she does not want the prize as offered.”

  “Yes. That is worth knowing. It shall be done.” Kazzop spoke in the local language. The Big Ugly’s reply sounded hesitant. To Felless, Kazzop said, “She is not altogether forthcoming. I gather that such a prize might draw too much notice from the Deutsch authorities.”

  “Ah. If I were a local Big Ugly, I would not want the Deutsch authorities noticing me, either.” Felless shuddered at some of the things the Deutsche had done. “Does she perhaps follow the-what is it called? — the Jewish superstition, that is it?”

  “I will not even ask her that,” Kazzop said. “If she follows it, she will lie. In any case, the Deutsche have exterminated most of their Jews by now. More likely she is a smuggler or other criminal-but she would be unlikely to admit anything of that sort, either.”

  “I wonder if she smuggles ginger.” Felless spoke in musing tones, so musing that Kazzop sent her a sharp look. She wished she’d kept quiet. Sure enough, her reputation had preceded her to Marseille.

  The Big Ugly female spoke again, this time without waiting for anyone to speak to her. “She is angry that we have something grand to give her that she cannot take,” Kazzop said. “She wants to know if we can substitute the cash value for the house.”

  “This is your project,” Felless said. “Were it mine, though, I would tell her no.”

  “I intend to,” Kazzop said. “Doing anything else would exceed my budget.” He paused, then stuck out his tongue to show he’d had an idea. “I will offer her a second prize instead.” He spoke in the language of the Francais. The Tosevite female replied with considerable warmth.

  “What does she say?” Felless asked.

  “That we are cheats, but that she has no choice but to let herself be cheated,” Kazzop said. “She accepts with bitterness and anger.”

  Felless felt a certain sympathy toward the female. That was the way she’d gone to work in Nuremberg after disgracing herself. She handed the Big Ugly the sheaf of printed papers that passed for currency in the Greater German Reich. The Tosevite stuffed
them into her carrying pouch and hurried away.

  Kazzop sighed. “That was not what I expected, but the unexpected also offers valuable insights.”

  “Truth,” Felless said.

  A little scaly devil came up to Liu Han’s hut in the prison camp and spoke to her in bad Chinese: “You come. Now.”

  For the most part, the little devils had ignored her since capturing her in the village not far from Peking. She wished they would have gone on ignoring her. Since they hadn’t, she sighed and got to her feet. “It shall be done,” she said.

  “Where are you taking her?” Liu Mei asked from atop the kang, on which she huddled to get a little warmth.

  “Not for you to know.” The scaly devil spoke in Chinese, even though she’d used his language. He gestured with his rifle at Liu Han. “You come.”

  “I am coming,” she said wearily. “Where are you taking me?”

  “You come, you see.” The scaly devil jerked the business end of his rifle again. Liu Han sighed and left the hut.

  Even though she was wearing a quilted cotton jacket, the cold the kang held at bay smote with full force when she went outside. The little scaly devil let out an unhappy hiss; he liked the winter weather even less than she did. Old, dirty snow crunched under her feet-and under his. He plainly wanted to skitter ahead. To annoy him, Liu Han walked as slowly as he would let her. Maybe he would get frostbitten or catch chest fever. She didn’t know if little scaly devils could catch chest fever, but she hoped so.

  The camp was depressingly large. The scaly devils were doing their best to hold China down. Some of the people they’d scooped up were Communists like Liu Han, others Kuomintang reactionaries, still others men and women of no particular party whom they’d seized more or less at random. They didn’t even try to keep the Communists and Kuomintang followers from one another’s throats-their theory seemed to be that, if the humans quarreled among themselves, they wouldn’t have to do so much work. Partly because of that, the Party and the Kuomintang did their best to keep a truce going.

  “Here. This building.” The scaly devil pointed again, this time not with his rifle but with his tongue. The building toward which he directed Liu Han stood near the prison camp’s razor-wire perimeter. It was not the building where most interrogations were conducted; that one lay closer to the center of the camp. Some of the interrogators were the little devils’ human running dogs; that building had an attached infirmary and a sinister reputation.

  Liu Han had been there a couple of times. No one had done anything too dreadful to her, but she was relieved to be going somewhere else. Even though this building had machine guns mounted on it, she thought it was only an administrative center. She’d never heard of anyone being tortured there.

  When she went inside, she opened her jacket and then took it off; the place was heated to the scaly devils’ standard of comfort, which meant she’d gone from winter to hottest summer in a couple of steps. The scaly devil who’d fetched her from her hut sighed with pleasure.

  Another little devil took charge of her. “You are the Tosevite Liu Han?” he asked in his own language, knowing she could use it.

  “Yes, superior sir,” she answered.

  “Good. You will come with me,” he said. Liu Han did, to a chamber that contained nothing but a stool, a television camera, and a monitor; another scaly devil looked out of the monitor, presumably seeing her televised image. “You may sit on the stool,” her guide told her. The little devil with the rifle positioned himself in the doorway to make sure she didn’t do anything else. Her guide folded himself into the posture of respect before the little devil in the monitor, saying, “Here is the Tosevite female called Liu Han, Senior Researcher.”

  “Yes, I see her,” that little devil replied. He raised his eye turrets, so that he seemed to look right at Liu Han. When he spoke again, it was in halting Chinese: “You remember me, Liu Han?”

  “I’m sorry, but I don’t,” she replied in the same language. As far as she was concerned, one little scaly devil looked very much like another.

  He shrugged just as if he were a person and returned to his own tongue: “I would not have recognized you, either, but we spent a lot of time making each other unhappy during the fighting. My name is Ttomalss.”

  “I greet you,” she said, not wanting to acknowledge the pang of fear that ran through her. “The advantage is yours now. I did not kill you when I had the chance.” That was as close as she would come to begging for mercy. She bit down on the inside of her lower lip. She hoped that was as close as she would come to begging for mercy. If Ttomalss wanted vengeance for being captured and imprisoned and threatened, what could she do to stop him?

  At the moment, he seemed mild enough. He asked, “Is your hatchling-Liu Mei was the name you gave her, not so? — well?”

  “Yes,” Liu Han answered. Then she returned to Chinese for a sentence she couldn’t say in the scaly devils’ language: “She never did learn how to smile, though. You had her too long for that.”

  “I suppose I did,” Ttomalss said. “I encountered this same problem with a Tosevite hatching I succeeded in raising after you released me. I believe it lacks a solution, at least for Tosevites raised by the Race. Our faces are not mobile enough to give your hatchlings the cues they need to form expressions.”

  “So you did finally manage to steal another Tosevite hatchling?” Liu Han said. “Too bad. I had hoped I frightened you enough when I captured you to keep you from trying that again. Somewhere, a Tosevite female mourns, as I mourned when you took Liu Mei away from me.”

  “The Race needs to conduct this research,” Ttomalss said. “We must learn how Tosevites and the Race can get along. We must learn what Tosevites raised as citizens of the Empire are like. I know you disapprove, but the work is important to us-and to everyone on Tosev 3.”

  “How would you like it if some of us stole your hatchlings from you and tried to raise them as Tosevites?” Liu Han asked. “That is what you have done to us.”

  “You could never do such a thing,” Ttomalss told her. “You would never do such a thing. A project like the one I have undertaken requires far more patience than the usual Big Ugly has in him.”

  Liu Han wanted to set up a project to steal eggs from the little scaly devils and raise the chicks-or whatever one called newly hatched little devils-as if they were human beings. She had no idea how to go about it, and the little devils had learned a good deal about security since their early days in China, so she couldn’t get in touch with anyone outside the prison camp anyhow. But the urge to take Ttomalss down a peg burned in her anyhow. As things were, she could only say, “I think you are mistaken.”

  “I do not,” Ttomalss said calmly. Liu Han glared at him. Despite what she’d done to him years before, he had the little devils’ arrogance in full measure.

  Still, things could have been worse. As long as he was talking with her about hatchlings, he wasn’t interrogating her about the Party. Of themselves, the scaly devils did not go in for painful questioning, but now they had Chinese stooges who did. If they gave her to them…

  “When I first studied you, I did not think you would rise to become a power in the resistance against the Race hereabouts,” Ttomalss said. “Your goals are not admirable, but you have shown great strength of character in trying to achieve them.”

  “I think freedom is admirable,” Liu Han said. “If you do not, that is your misfortune, not mine.”

  “There is only one proper place for all the subregions of this planet: under the administration of the Race,” Ttomalss said. “In the course of time, those subregions will take their proper place.”

  “Freedom is good for the Race, but not for the Big Uglies,” Liu Han jeered. “That is what you are saying.”

  But Ttomalss made the negative hand gesture. “You misunderstand. You Tosevites always misunderstand. When the conquest is complete, Tosev 3 will be as free as Home, as free as Rabotev 2, as free as Halless 1. You will be contented subjects o
f the Emperor, as we are.” He swung his eye turrets down toward the surface of the desk at which he sat, a gesture of respect for the ruler among the little scaly devils.

  “I take it back,” Liu Han said. “You do not think freedom is good for anyone, even your own kind.”

  “Too much freedom is not good for anyone,” Ttomalss said. “Even your own faction would agree with that, seeing how it punishes Tosevites who disagree with it in any way.”

  “This is a revolutionary situation,” Liu Han said. “The Communist Party is at war with you. Of course we have to weed out traitors.”

  Ttomalss let his mouth fall open: he was laughing at her. “I do not believe you. I do not even think you believe yourself. Your faction rules the not-empire called the SSSR, and kills off members regardless of whether they show allegiance to any other power or not.”

  “You do not understand,” Liu Han said, but Ttomalss understood too well. He was, Liu Han recalled, a student of the human race in his own fashion. Liu Han had seen purges were sometimes necessary, not only to get rid of traitors but also to keep up the energy, enthusiasm, and alertness of people who didn’t get purged.

  “Do I not?” the little scaly devil said. “Perhaps you will enlighten me, then.” In his own language, he had a fine, sarcastic turn of phrase.

  Nettled, Liu Han started to answer him in great detail. But she bit down on the words before they passed her lips. She had seen many years before that Ttomalss was a clever little devil. He wasn’t arguing abstracts with her here. He was trying to anger her, to make her say things before she thought about them. And he’d come within a hairsbreadth of succeeding.

  What she did say after checking herself was, “I have nothing to tell you.”

  “No? Too bad,” the little scaly devil said. “Shall we see whether you have anything to tell me after you watch your hatchling tormented in front of you? Your strong feelings for your blood kin can be a source of weakness for you, you see, as well as a source of strength. Or perhaps the hatchling should watch your interrogation. Which do you think would produce the better results?”