Second Contact

by Harry Turtledove

  “They stay warm that way,” the male from the conquest fleet said. “But even the Tosevites who live where the weather is decent wear cloths, or most of them do. They use them for display—and for concealment, too, I think.”

  “Why would they conceal with cloths?” Nesseref asked, puzzled. “They are not hiding from predators, are they? No, of course not.” She answered her own question. “They could not be.”

  “No, no, no—concealment from one another.” The male from the conquest fleet gave a brief, highly colored account of Tosevite courtship and mating habits.

  “That is revolting,” Nesseref said when he was through. “I think you are making it up. I am new to this miserable world, so you figure I will believe anything.”

  “By the spirits of Emperors past, I swear it is the truth,” the male said, and looked down at the ground. “They are worse than animals, but they have a civilization. Nobody will ever figure them out.”

  “Yes, we will, sooner or later.” The shuttlecraft pilot spoke with conviction. “We just have not given it enough time yet. In a few hundred years, or maybe a few thousand years, our descendants will look back on this time and laugh at how foolish and upset we were. And the Big Uglies will be loyal subjects of the Emperor, just like everyone else.” She paused and peered over toward a couple of them. “They will still be funny-looking, though.”

  “That last is truth,” the male said. “The rest . . . I tell you, superior female, you are still new-come from Home. You do not really know what things are like here. On Tosev 3, time is different, somehow. You can see things happen over years; they do not take centuries, the way they did with us. I am not sure there was a televisor on this planet when we got here. There are millions of them now.”

  “I do not know what that proves,” Nesseref said. “For all you know, they stole the idea from us. They seem to have stolen a lot of ideas from us.”

  “Oh, they have,” the male from the conquest fleet said. “They have, though it is not as if they have not got plenty of ideas of their own. But they do not just steal. They use what they steal, and they use it right away. Imagine the Race had never heard of televisors, but stole the idea for them from someone else. How long would we need before every other flat—every flat, some places—had a televisor in it?”

  Even the form of the question felt strange to Nesseref. Imagining the history of the Race as different from the way it really was took a distinct and uncomfortable mental effort. She handled it as she would have handled a simulator session for the shuttlecraft: not real, but to be taken as real. The answer she got was obvious and disturbing at the same time: “We would have needed thousands of years, because we would have to study the effects of televisors on a society that did not have them. We would have to be certain they were harmless before we began to use them.”

  “Just so,” the male agreed. “The Tosevites are not like that. They just start using things and then see what happens. Since we came, they have added televisors and computers and atomic energy and spacecraft and hydrogen engines and any number of different things—they tossed them into the pot to see how they flavor the stew. That is how they do things—and somehow they have not destroyed themselves.”

  “Not yet,” Nesseref said. “Slow and steady is better.”

  “On Home, slow and steady is better,” the male said. “Here—who knows?”

  Nesseref didn’t feel like arguing with him. “Can you arrange transportation to the west for me?” she asked. “I am supposed to visit a city called—Lodz, is it?—to examine the area for a possible shuttlecraft port site.”

  “I can direct you to one who will make those arrangements for you,” the male replied. “I can also tell you I think it is a bad idea: too close to the border with the Greater German Reich. Why do you think the ships from the colonization fleet have been landing in this part of Poland and not over there?”

  “My superior has ordered me to examine the area, and so it shall be done,” Nesseref said. “And I can also tell you that you seem to me to sound more like a Tosevite, or what I think a Tosevite would sound like from what I have heard, than a proper male of the Race.”

  She thought that a crushing insult. The male from the conquest fleet only shrugged and answered, “I am alive. That lets me talk however I like. And a lot of the males who used to sound so prim and proper are dead these days, so they do not sound like anything at all.”

  Having got the last word, he also got his revenge on Nesseref, or so she assumed, for the transportation to which another male from the conquest fleet assigned her was a Tosevite railroad train propelled by an engine—a steam engine, she discovered by asking—that stained the sky with its plume of black exhaust smoke. She had one compartment of her railroad car to herself, but that did not keep Big Uglies from walking by, staring in at her, and using their own gluey-sounding languages to make remarks she could not understand.

  Her compartment had seats made to accommodate backsides with tailstumps, which was something, but not much. Despite the seats, she had an uncomfortable trip. Railroads back on Home used magnetic levitation and had a smooth ride; here, iron wheels kept clattering along rails and over rail junctions. Unpleasant, unfamiliar smells filled the car. When she opened a window to get some fresh air, she got soot from the engine’s exhaust instead. Finally deciding that was worse, she closed the window again and watched the countryside through its none-too-clean glass.

  Before long, she was thinking of going to sleep. The land between Warsaw and Lodz was flat and boring. Aside from being unusually green, it had nothing to commend itself to the eye. True, she was startled the first time she saw a Tosevite animal drawing a wagon, but then she saw several more in quick succession, which killed the novelty. She was also briefly interested at the first stop the train made in a small town, but she couldn’t tell the Big Uglies who got on from the ones who got off. Also, every stop—and the train made a lot of them—meant she took even longer to get where she was going.

  By the time she arrived, she was tempted to haul out a vial of ginger and have a taste, in the hope that the herb would make moments seem to move faster. But, unsure of what it would do to her common sense, she refrained. She wanted to be able to think clearly after she reached the town.

  When, after what seemed like forever, she finally did leave the railroad car and go out into the train station, the officer who met her was energy personified. “Of course we can find you what you need,” he said as he led her through the station, which seemed gloomy and cramped on the one fork of the tongue and ridiculously high-ceilinged on the other (only after she recalled it was built for Tosevites did the latter make sense). “Wherever you want it, superior female, we will put it there. If you like, we will flatten out some ground specially for you. We can do it. We can do anything.” He gave her not one but two emphatic coughs.

  “I do not even know if this is a suitable place yet,” Nesseref said, a little taken aback at such vigor. “Are the Big Uglies west of here not supposed to be dangerous?”

  “Oh, we can take care of the Deutsche, too,” the officer said with another emphatic cough. “If they give us trouble, we will give them a good kick in the snout.”

  But, over the next little while, his enthusiasm and his boasts faded away. He started looking all around, as if afraid someone might be following him. “Is something wrong?” Nesseref asked.

  “No,” he said in a forlorn voice, but then added, “Wait here, superior female,” and skittered around a corner. When he returned a moment later, he was strutting again, up on top of the world. “Wrong?” he demanded. “What could possibly be wrong? Everything is just as right as it could be, and this is the perfect—the perfect, I tell you—place for a shuttlecraft port, or my name isn’t Emmitto.”

  Before very long, Emmitto was subdued and worried again. Nesseref wondered what was wrong with him; such wild mood swings were most unusual in the Race. Only after he excused himself once more and once more returned full of exuberance did a warni
ng light begin to glow on the instrument panel of her mind. She had everything she could do not to let her mouth fall open in sour laughter. I should have tasted ginger, too, she thought. Then Emmitto would have had some company.

  Tosev blazed down out of a sky the wrong shade of blue, but with very respectable warmth all the same. Atvar smelled unfamiliar spicy odors far removed from the stinks of Cairo. “I should come to Australia more often, regardless of where I make my capital,” he told his adjutant.

  “Whatever pleases the Exalted Fleetlord,” Pshing replied. “Since so many of the Race will be settling here, surely your duty might well be construed as requiring you to make frequent visits here.”

  “It might indeed,” Atvar said, “although I expect I can find my own excuses for doing what I want to do anyhow. Most males can, at any rate.”

  He looked around with considerable satisfaction. Here as in few places on Tosev 3, the Race would have the land to itself. The Big Uglies had made little use of the central part of the island continent. Now the Race would show them how foolish they had been to ignore it.

  “Perhaps,” he said, “just perhaps, mind you, the colonization fleet could establish its administrative center here, a center that would, in time, become the Race’s chief administrative center, replacing Cairo. That would allow us to change capitals without confessing weakness to the Tosevites. If I spent my retirement here, I might yet come to think of Tosev 3 as a pleasant world.”

  “A clever notion indeed, Exalted Fleetlord,” Pshing said. “Shall I relay it to Fleetlord Reffet for his views?”

  “Not yet,” Atvar answered. “Let me study it for possible drawbacks first. We are males of the Race. I need not be hasty here, as I would when dealing with the Big Uglies. Returning to old habits feels good, after so long.” He paused, then let out an exasperated hiss. “Or perhaps not so good. If I return to the habit of slowness, the Tosevites will make me regret it before long.”

  “If we succeed in bringing this world into the Empire, I wonder if we shall ever be able to slow the Big Uglies down to a pace that the other races find tolerable,” Pshing said.

  “I hope so, for the Tosevites’ sake and ours,” Atvar said. “I also hope we can bring this world fully into the Empire, for their sake and ours.”

  Though he would not say as much to his adjutant, he feared the result if the Race failed to bring the independent not-empires into the Empire in a fairly short time. That the Big Uglies had succeeded in building a technological civilization in the relatively brief period since the Race’s probe showed they had none warned of their prowess. What they had done since the colonization fleet made the warning even more urgent. Then, while astonishingly advanced, they had been behind the Race in every area. They’d hung on with an abundance of cunning and matériel. Now . . .

  Some males brushed aside the Tosevites’ progress by noting how much they had borrowed—stolen, many said, and truthfully—from the Race. Atvar recognized the truth in that. But he also saw how the Tosevites did not blindly borrow, how they used machines and information taken from the Race to bring their own preexisting technology up to date, how they put their own slant on everything they stole.

  His experts had run projections. He’d run secret projections of his own, too. They differed in detail, depending on just what assumptions went into them. The broad outlines, though, were startlingly, dismayingly, similar: before too long, the Big Uglies’ technology would be more advanced than that of the Race.

  Most of the projections said the Race would still enjoy a breathing space after that: the Big Uglies would need a while to realize what they’d achieved. Sooner or later, though, they would. They couldn’t help it.

  What would happen then? There too, the projections differed. Nothing good for the Race, though, was the theme that ran through them.

  And I can’t even destroy those not-empires, Atvar thought, not without destroying the whole planet, which means destroying the colonization fleet. One of the ideas haunting him was that such destruction might be worthwhile in spite of the cost: it might mean saving the Race as a whole.

  Pshing pointed at something moving across the barren countryside, for which distraction Atvar was thoroughly glad. “What are those things, Exalted Fleetlord?” his adjutant asked.

  “Tosevite life of some sort, I suppose,” Atvar answered. “If you have a monocular, you will be able to tell more.”

  “I do, Exalted Fleetlord.” Pshing took the magnifier from a belt pouch, turned one eye turret toward the distant creatures, and raised the magnifying lenses. He let out a startled hiss. “How peculiar! Are those Big Uglies? No, they cannot be. But still . . .” He gave Atvar the monocular. “See for yourself, Exalted Fleetlord.”

  “I will.” Atvar brought the little tube up to one of his own eyes. The creatures on the plain seemed to leap much closer. “They are funny-looking.”

  “They certainly are.” Pshing added an emphatic cough. “I thought almost all Tosevite life forms except the Big Uglies themselves were quadrupeds, not bipeds.”

  “I seem to recall reading that this island continent had an ecosystem long isolated from others on Tosev 3,” Atvar said. “Maybe that accounts for these peculiar things. They look almost like a cross between the Big Uglies and ourselves, don’t they?—though their tails are long.”

  Just then, something must have startled the Tosevite creatures, which went bounding off at a very respectable turn of speed. “Well!” Pshing said. “I did not think they could move like that.”

  “A lot of Tosevite creatures are deceptive, all the way up to the Big Uglies,” Atvar said. Suddenly, one of the animals crashed to the ground and lay kicking. The fleetlord could not see why until a Big Ugly emerged from concealment and ran over to the downed creature. “Will you look at that!” Atvar exclaimed, and passed the monocular back to his adjutant.

  “Yesss.” Pshing drew the word out into a hiss of his own. “Not all Tosevites have moved forward from where the probe found them, have they?”

  “By no means,” Atvar answered. The Big Ugly he’d been watching was naked, his dark brown hide filthy and daubed here and there with mud of various colors.

  “He is bashing in the animal’s head with a rock,” Pshing reported. “I think his knife is metal, though. Looking at him, I do not think he could have made it for himself.”

  “Perhaps he got it in trade from the more advanced Australians,” Atvar said, “the ones whose principal cities we bombed so as to take possession of this continent.”

  “It could be so,” Pshing agreed. “That strikes me as more likely than his having made it for himself.”

  “Speak to the folk hereabout—I want him captured and brought before me,” Atvar said on sudden, almost Tosevite-like, impulse.

  “It shall be done, Exalted Fleetlord.” Pshing got out his radio and spoke into it.

  It was done, but only barely. When the Tosevite saw males and females of the Race approaching, he disappeared. That was how it seemed to Atvar, at any rate. One instant he was there in plain sight, running away; the next, he might have vanished off the face of Tosev 3.

  His pursuers caught him nonetheless. Pshing, who was listening to their calls back and forth, said, “One of them has an infrared detector, Exalted Fleetlord. Without it, I do not think they could have found him.”

  The Big Ugly kept struggling for all he was worth. The males and females of the Race had to tie him before they could bring him in to Atvar. By then, the fleetlord wished he hadn’t put them to so much trouble. To avoid disappointing them, he didn’t show it, but praised them extravagantly.

  Shouts poured from the Tosevite’s throat, in whatever unintelligible language he spoke and then, to Atvar’s surprise, in English, a speech he recognized even if he’d never learned to use it. Pshing had no trouble finding a male from the conquest fleet who understood it. The fellow said, “Exalted Fleetlord, he says you mate with your own mother and also says you mate at an inappropriate orifice—the Big Uglies have mor
e than we do, you know. He intends these as insults.”

  “Ask him how he lives in this country,” Atvar said.

  “It shall be done,” the male replied, and began speaking English. The dark-skinned Big Ugly kept yelling the same phrases he had used before. After a while, the male turned back to Atvar, saying, “Exalted Fleetlord, I do not think he knows any more of this language than these few words.”

  “How strange,” Atvar murmured. “Why would anyone go to the trouble of learning insults in a language without learning any more in it? Having to try to understand more than one speech is bad enough as it is.” The language of the Race united three worlds, and had for time out of mind. Tosev 3 had even more languages than it had had empires and not-empires before the Race arrived.

  “What shall we do with him, Exalted Fleetlord?” Pshing asked, pointing to the Tosevite. “He is not going to tell us anything, I don’t think.”

  “He is also not going to harm us, for which spirits of Emperors past be praised,” Atvar said. “He cannot harm us, being too ignorant—and how I wish that were true of every member of his species.” He turned to the male who spoke English. “Take him well away from this starship. Give him a knife of ours, to make up for the one he no longer has, and let him go.”

  “It shall be done, Exalted Fleetlord,” the male replied. “May I give him some food, too? We have had some of these savages come around begging before; they mostly know how to pull the lid off a tin.”

  “Yes, do that,” Atvar said. “Otherwise, he might come back to rob rather than to beg. I want the Big Uglies to be dependent on us; I do not want them making worse nuisances of themselves than they have already.”

  “Any Big Ugly is—or can be—a nuisance,” the male said. He and the ones who had brought the Tosevite to Atvar got him up on his feet in spite of his hoarse shouts and his efforts to bite and kick. As they led him away, he voided liquid waste.