Second Contact

by Harry Turtledove

  As Fotsev walked on, he did turn an eye turret back toward the Big Ugly to make sure he didn’t have anything treacherous in mind. The Tosevite went on eating the small brown fruits—they looked rather like turds, but tasted sweet—and spitting the seeds into the dust of the street.

  “Oh, he is dangerous, all right,” Gorppet said, and laughed again.

  After the males of the Race rounded another corner, a Big Ugly approached them. It was a male, Fotsev saw: it had hair on its jaw and cheeks, and it exposed its entire face to the view of outsiders, which violated local custom for females. A moment later, he realized it was a prosperous male. The Big Ugly’s robes and headgear were fancier than those of most of his kind. That wasn’t so reliable an indicator as body paint, but nothing on Tosev 3 seemed as reliable as its equivalent back on Home.

  Then, to his surprise, the Big Ugly spoke in the language of the Race, and spoke well for one of its kind: “You males, will you answer some questions of mine? I am an ignorant man, and I seek to learn.”

  “Go ahead and ask,” Fotsev said, unused to such politeness from a Tosevite. The Big Ugly had given him more than the cook of his own species.

  “I thank you,” the Tosevite said, polite still. “Is it true that, in the ships the Race is now landing, there are both males and females, as Noah, peace be upon him, took male and female beasts aboard the Ark?”

  Fotsev didn’t know who Noah was, or anything about the Ark, a word the Big Ugly had of necessity put into his own language. Still, the question seemed straightforward enough. “Yes, the colonization fleet carries both males and females. How could we colonize this world if it did not?”

  He waited for the Big Ugly to pitch a fit. Instead, the fellow asked, “And, of these new members of the Race we now see on the streets of Basra, some are males and some are females?”

  “Yes,” Fotsev said. “How else?”

  “And your females are allowed to walk the streets naked, shamelessly showing themselves for your males to gaze upon and admire and desire?” the Big Ugly persisted.

  Gorppet pulled Fotsev aside for a moment to whisper, “What is this fool getting at?”

  “How should I know? He is not making a fuss, and that is good enough for me,” Fotsev whispered back. To the Tosevite, he said, “We do not wrap ourselves in cloths, the way you people do.”

  “But you must, when male and female are together,” the Big Ugly said earnestly. “Nakedness offends every custom.”

  “Not our customs,” Fotsev said.

  “But you will desire one another too much!” the Big Ugly cried in dismay.

  Fotsev didn’t laugh at him, though that wasn’t easy. The Big Ugly was plainly intelligent, and as plainly ignorant, ever so ignorant. “We do not mate because of what we see,” Fotsev said. “We mate because of what we smell.”

  “Nakedness is a crime against Allah,” the Tosevite said. “He will punish you for your wickedness.”

  “Let us get moving,” Fotsev said to his comrades. Arguing with a Big Ugly caused nothing but trouble. Leaving him to his own foolishness seemed a better idea.

  But he wouldn’t be left. He followed the males down the narrow, grimy, unpaved street, crying, “You must clothe your females. Allah teaches it. Do you dare act contrary to the word of Allah?”

  “This Allah of yours never talked to me,” Fotsev said, and laughed at the foolish Big Ugly. “If he does, maybe I will listen to him. Until then, I am not going to worry about him. I will worry about things that are real instead.” He laughed again.

  The Tosevite’s little eyes got as big as they could. “You say Allah is not real?” He turned and hurried away.

  “You got rid of him,” Gorppet said. “Well done!” To emphasize how well done, he folded himself into the posture of respect, as if Fotsev were at least an officer and perhaps a shiplord. Fotsev laughed once more, and so did his comrades. They got through the rest of their patrol with no trouble at all.

  A few days later, fresh rioting against the Race broke out in Basra. Three newly revived colonists got caught in the trouble and killed; a large number of Tosevites perished. Like his superiors, Fotsev hadn’t the faintest idea what might have touched it off.

  Mordechai Anielewicz was heading back toward his flat in Lodz when two Lizards came up to him. “You are Anielewicz,” one of them said in Polish, looking from his face to a photograph and back again. Even with the photograph, he sounded unsure.

  “I am Anielewicz,” Mordechai agreed, after briefly thinking about denying everything. It had worked for St. Peter, but he didn’t know how well it would work for him. “What do you want with me?”

  “We are to bring you before the regional subadministrator,” the Lizard answered. He and his comrade both carried automatic weapons. They sounded nervous even so. They had reason to sound nervous. If Mordechai shouted, they’d last only moments in spite of the high-powered rifles. Jews with guns of their own were on the street and, no doubt, watching from windows, too.

  But he did not shout. “I’ll come,” he said. “Do you know why the regional subadministrator wants to talk to me?”

  “No,” both males said together. Anielewicz believed them. The Lizards’ bosses were in the habit of giving orders, not explanations.

  “Well, I’ll find out,” Anielewicz said. “Let’s go.” He started off for Bunim’s headquarters near the square that housed the Bialut Market. The Lizards fell in on either side of him. He towered over them, but that didn’t make him feel important. Size mattered little, power a great deal. He had it, but so did Bunim. One of the Lizards spoke into a portable radio set or telephone to let the regional subadministrator know they were on their way.

  When he got there, Bunim addressed him in German: “I have spoken to you of the threat against the colonists I received.”

  “Regional Subadministrator, I remember,” Anielewicz replied. “Many ships have landed in Poland now. Many colonists have landed in Poland now. I know of nothing bad that has happened to them, though not many have landed near Lodz.” In their shoes, he wouldn’t have wanted to land near the border with the Greater German Reich, either.

  “Nothing bad has happened—not yet,” Bunim said. “But I am concerned. Is it the right word—concerned?” He didn’t like to make mistakes. In that, he was a typical Lizard. Mistakes showed faulty planning, and the Lizards were much enamored of planning in general.

  “Concerned is the right word, yes, Regional Subadministrator,” Anielewicz said, giving him what credit he could. “You have come to speak this language well.” That was a lie, but not an outrageous one. Bunim did work hard. Having delivered the compliments, Mordechai got down to business: “Why are you concerned? Have you received another threat?”

  “No, no one has threatened,” Bunim told him. “That is one reason I am concerned. When you Tosevites strut and bluster, we of the Race at least know where you stand. When you are quiet, that is the time for worry. That is the time when you are hatching plots in secret. And—” He fell silent.

  Anielewicz exhaled in some exasperation. “If no one had sent you the first message, you would not be worried now, even though everything was quiet. Since everything has been quiet since, why are you still worrying?”

  Bunim’s eye turrets flicked this way and that. He was an unhappy Lizard, no doubt about it. “I have reason to be concerned,” he declared, and added an emphatic cough even though he was still speaking German.

  “Well, if you do, you’d better show me why,” Mordechai said, his patience wearing thin. “Otherwise, I’ll just think you’ve been wasting my time.”

  “Show you why? It shall be done,” Bunim said. Even in German, the phrase sounded odd, and seemed to imply Anielewicz was the regional subadministrator’s superior.

  Bunim took out one of the skelkwank disks the Lizards used for just about all their recording. He stuck it in a player. Out came the threat he had mentioned before to Anielewicz. Mordechai was not tremendously fluent in the language of the Race, but he
followed it well enough to understand what he heard here.

  “Well?” he said when the brief recording was done. “I heard it. It was what you said it was, but so what?”

  “You heard it, but you heard without full understanding,” Bunim said.

  “You’d better explain, then,” Mordechai said. “I must be missing something here, but I don’t know what.”

  “You heard the threat?” Bunim asked. Mordechai nodded. Bunim understood the human gesture. He went on, “That threat, Anielewicz, was not spoken by a Tosevite. Without the tiniest fragment of doubt, it came from the mouth of a male of the Race.”

  Anielewicz thought about that for a few seconds. Then, very softly, he said, “Oy.” Bunim was right. People didn’t—couldn’t—sound quite right speaking the Lizards’ language. Sure as hell, that had been a Lizard. “What do you suppose it means?” Anielewicz asked the regional subadministrator.

  “One of two things.” Bunim held up a clawed middle finger. “It could be some Tosevites holding a male of the Race prisoner. This is not good.” The Lizard held up his index finger. “Or it could be a male of the Race plotting with Tosevites: a criminal, I mean to say. This also is not good.”

  “You are right,” Mordechai said. “Did any male go missing not long before you got this recording?”

  “No, but this does not have to mean anything,” Bunim answered. “We know both the Reich and the Soviet Union still have prisoners they took during the fighting. So does the USA. So do Britain and Nippon. Those not-empires are less likely to threaten Poland, though. If you were wondering, the recording was posted to me here from Pinsk. How it got to Pinsk, I do not know.” His eye turrets swung toward Anielewicz. “You were in Pinsk not so long ago, nicht wahr?”

  “Yes, it is so,” Anielewicz said, judging a lie there more dangerous than the truth. “I was meeting an old friend”—which stretched the point about David Nussboym as far as it would go, and then another ten centimeters—“I hadn’t seen since the fighting stopped.” That last clause, at least, was true.

  Bunim looked to be on the point of saying something, but closed his mouth instead. Maybe he’d expected Mordechai to lie about going to Pinsk. After a moment, he started again: “You Jews could have captives, too. Do not think we do not know about this.”

  “So could the Poles, more easily than we could,” Mordechai said. “Or it could be a ginger smuggler angry at the administration here and wanting to embarrass you.”

  “All these things may be true,” Bunim said. “Only one of them is true, or perhaps truth lies in none of them, but in a place we have not yet found. But where is that place? I have males of the Race trying to learn. I have Poles trying to learn. And now I have Jews trying to learn, too.”

  “Yes, we had better find out about that, hadn’t we?” Mordechai said abstractedly. “You are right, Regional Subadministrator. This could be trouble.”

  “The colonization fleet has already had too much trouble,” Bunim said. “We had better not have any more. If we have any more, Tosevites will also have trouble. They will have more trouble than they ever imagined.”

  “I understand,” Anielewicz said. “I tell you this, Regional Subadministrator: no humans like you any better than the Jews of Poland. If you will not find humans on your side among us, you will not find them anywhere.”

  “Then it may be that we shall not find them anywhere,” Bunim said. “I know you have had dealings with the Reich when you thought our eye turrets were turned the other way. I know you are not the only one to do this, too.”

  Anielewicz felt a dull embarrassment, rather as if he’d been caught in bed with a woman other than Bertha. But his marriage to the Lizards was one of convenience, not of love. And he’d been unfaithful not only with the Nazis but also with the Russians, as David Nussboym could attest. He shrugged. Like any adultery, his bouts of infidelity to the Race had seemed a good idea at the time.

  He said, “When the Race came to Earth, we Jews here in Poland were slaves to the Reich. Men are not meant to be slaves.”

  “And we set you free,” Bunim said. “And see the thanks we have had for it.”

  Yes, he sounded like a woman betrayed. “You set us free of the Germans,” Mordechai said.

  “That is what I told you,” Bunim said.

  But Anielewicz shook his head. “No, it is not. You set us free of the Germans. You did not set us free. You aimed at becoming our masters yourselves. We do not care for that any more than we cared for having the Nazis enslave us.”

  “And who would rule you if we left Poland?” Bunim inquired. Twenty years on Tosev 3 had taught him sarcasm.

  He had also asked a question—the question—for which Anielewicz had no good answer, and indeed no answer of any sort. Instead of answering, he evaded: “This is why we will help you now. For your safety, and for our own, we need to find out who is making threats against the arriving colonists.”

  “So you do,” Bunim said. “Any trouble that comes down on our heads—in the end, it comes down on your heads, too.”

  Anielewicz sent him a stare of undisguised loathing. “It’s taken you all this time since you came to Earth, but you’ve finally figured out what being a Jew means, haven’t you?”

  “I do not know what you are talking about,” Bunim said, which might have been true or might not. The Lizard went on, “I do know that my first duty is to preserve the Race, my next is to preserve the land on which the Race will dwell, and only after that do I concern myself with the welfare of Tosevites of any sort.”

  From his perspective, that made perfectly good sense. Mordechai knew he himself put Jews ahead of Poles, Poles ahead—far ahead—of Germans, and humans ahead of Lizards. But Bunim had resources he couldn’t hope to match. If the Lizards decided the Jews deserved oppressing . . . if they decided that, how were they any different from the Nazis?

  He shook his head. That wasn’t fair to the Lizards. When they’d discovered Treblinka, they’d destroyed it in horror. Anielewicz did not think they would ever build an extermination camp of their own. A generation on Earth could not have corrupted the males of the conquest fleet that far, and the males and females of the colonization fleet would not be corrupt at all, not by Earthly standards.

  Bunim said, “Remember, our fates—is that the word?—our fates, yes, are tied together. If the Race fails on Tosev 3, your particular group of Tosevites is also likely to fail. The rest of the Tosevites, starting with the Poles, will make sure of this. Am I right or am I wrong?”

  He was all too likely to be right. Anielewicz had no intention of admitting as much. In a stony voice, he replied, “Jews got by for three thousand years before the Race came to Earth. If every male and female of the Race disappeared tomorrow, Jews would go right on getting by.”

  Bunim’s mouth fell open in Lizardly amusement. “What are three thousand years?” he asked. “Where will you be in three thousand more?”

  “Dead,” Anielewicz answered, “the same as you.”

  “You, yes,” Bunim agreed. “I, yes. The Tosevites? Possibly. The Race? No.” He spoke with absolute confidence.

  “No, eh?” Anielewicz said. “What about that male who threatened the colonists, then?” He had the somber satisfaction of seeing that he’d made Bunim loathe him as much as he loathed the Lizard.

  Beside the 13th Emperor Makkakap, the shuttlecraft seemed tiny. Beside the shuttlecraft, Nesseref seemed tiny. That surely made her seem infinitesimal alongside the enormous bulk of the starship now landed not far from the Tosevite town of Warsaw.

  The logic was flawless. Nesseref, however, had other concerns besides logic. Turning to the male from the conquest fleet beside her, she asked, “Why would anybody want to live in this miserable, cold place?”

  “You think it is cold now, wait another season,” the male answered. “Nobody from Home knows what cold is about. Winter here is like cold sleep without the drugs to make you unconscious.” He laughed. “Tosev 3 has different drugs, believe you me it doe
s. Have you found out about ginger yet, superior female?”

  “Yes,” Nesseref said, which was not quite the truth and not quite a lie. She still had the two vials males had given her on earlier visits to Tosev 3. That in itself was against regulations, which grew more strident on the subject with each passing day. But she hadn’t actually opened the vials and tasted the herb inside. As long as she didn’t do that, she felt no enormous guilt.

  “Good stuff, isn’t it?” the male said enthusiastically. This time, Nesseref didn’t answer at all. Every male from the conquest fleet who talked about ginger talked about it enthusiastically. That was one reason she hadn’t tried it herself: she didn’t trust anything that evoked such fervent responses. Being a shuttlecraft pilot had made her rely more on her own opinion than was usual among the Race.

  Her own opinion at the moment was that things looked more confused than they should have. Newly awakened males and females from the colonization fleet wandered here and there, none of them with any clear notion of where they ought to be going or what they ought to be doing. The males from the conquest fleet who moved among them were easy to pick out by eye. They strode with purpose, to some destination familiar to them. They’d had years to get used to the vagaries of life on Tosev 3. A couple of hasty briefings couldn’t possibly have the same effect.

  Turning back to the male beside her, she asked, “When you do not taste ginger, how do you stand Tosev 3? How do you keep from being bored to death?”

  The male laughed again. “Superior female, you can die a lot of ways on this planet, but being bored is not one of them. Of course, if you do get bored, one bunch of Big Uglies or another is liable to kill you, but I do not suppose that is what you were talking about.”

  “No,” Nesseref said. Just how dangerous these natives could be hadn’t really sunk in, despite her getting shot at on the way down to Cairo. Some Tosevites were laboring in the shadow of the 13th Emperor Makkakap. “They certainly do look funny, do they not?—wrapping themselves in cloths even when they work hard.”