Second Contact

by Harry Turtledove

  After a pause, Yeager answered, “Well, I don’t suppose I can blame you. The general is convincing, isn’t he?”

  “I don’t know what you’re talking about,” Johnson said, which might as well have meant, Hell, yes!

  Another pause. Then Yeager said, “Okay, sir, you don’t trust me, and you don’t have any reason to trust me. But I’m going to lay it on the line. The way it looks to me now, whatever the hell we’re doing up there, it’s something real big. It’s something so big, whoever’s in charge—which may be General LeMay and may be whoever his boss is—doesn’t want anybody, and I mean anybody, finding out about it. How does that sound to you?”

  Yeager might have been echoing Johnson’s thoughts. But Johnson was damned if he’d admit it. He’d trusted Stella, and that hadn’t got him anything but pain and lawyers’ bills. If he trusted Yeager, he was liable to get his tit in a worse wringer yet. So all he said was, “This is your nickel, Major. I’m still listening.” If by some chance this wasn’t Yeager, or if it was and he was trying to get Johnson in Dutch, maybe he’d end up hanging himself instead.

  “You think I’m setting you up, don’t you?” Yeager asked, which couldn’t have been a better echo of what was going on in Glen Johnson’s mind.

  “It did occur to me, yeah,” Johnson said dryly.

  “I wonder why.” Yeager could be dry, too. That made Johnson more inclined to believe him, not less. Maybe he’d known it would. He went on, “Listen. This isn’t how you keep a secret. The way you do that is to pretend you don’t have one, not to make a big hairy thing out of yourself and go around yelling, ‘I’ve got a secret and I won’t tell you what it is, so you’d better not ask—or else!’ Come on, Lieutenant Colonel. You’re a big boy. Am I right or am I wrong?”

  Johnson laughed. He didn’t want to—he knew he was handing Yeager an edge—but he couldn’t help himself. “I tell you what,” he said. “That’s how I’d play it, anyway.”

  “Me, too,” Yeager said. “Some of the big shots don’t understand anything but killing a mosquito with a tank, though. All that does is get a secret noticed. You noticed it—”

  “Yeah,” Johnson broke in. Again, he couldn’t help himself. If they’d let him go up to the space station, they could have shown him around, kept him from seeing anything he wasn’t supposed to see, and sent him home. Yeager was right. They hadn’t played it smart, not even a little.

  “I noticed, too,” Yeager said. “I’m not the only one, either. The Lizards have noticed something funny’s going on up there. There’s this one female of the Race named Kassquit—at least I think she’s a female of the Race; that’s a little strange—who’s real curious about things that have to do with the space station. And we don’t want the Lizards curious that way, not after what happened to the colonization fleet we don’t.”

  “Amen,” Johnson said. “The next time anything goes wrong, they’re going to shoot first and ask questions later.” He listened to himself with no small surprise. Somehow or other, Major Yeager had convinced him while he wasn’t looking.

  “That’s what I think, too,” Yeager said. “If you ask me, that’s what anybody with an ounce of sense would think. But that’s probably too much to ask of some people with a lot of stars on their shoulders.”

  “Yeah,” Johnson said again. He’d spent a lot of time fishing for bluegill when he was a kid. He knew what setting a hook was like. Yeager had set a hook in him, all right. “Next question is, what can we do about it? Can we do anything about it?”

  “I don’t know,” Yeager answered. “Part of that depends on just what they really are doing at the space station. I haven’t been able to find out, and I’ve got better and stranger connections than you might think. I got in big trouble the first time, but I didn’t know I would, so I went in straight up and didn’t bother sliding, if you follow me. I’m not playing it like that any more.”

  Johnson pondered. Yeager was still taking chances, or he wouldn’t have got on the phone. But there were a lot of different ways to be sneaky. A slow grin spread over Johnson’s face. “Maybe, Major, just maybe, I can get a close-up look at that critter after all.”

  Fotsev hated Basra. His reasons for hating Basra were easy to understand. The place stank. It was full of Big Uglies, and not only Big Uglies, but Big Uglies fanatically devoted to their superstition who might at any moment rise in rebellion against the Race. Patrols in Basra were never routine; any cloth-shrouded Tosevite might be an assassin, and some, expecting a happy afterlife from their preposterous outsized Big Ugly beyond the sky if they sacrificed themselves to his cause on Tosev 3, were willing, even eager, to slay themselves if only they could take males of the Race with them.

  So Fotsev hated Basra. As far as he was concerned, the only decent thing about it was the weather. Compared to that of Buenos Aires, where he’d been stationed before, it seemed a delightful reminder of Home.

  He let out a small, discontented hiss as he and his squad tramped through Basra’s central market square. “What is itching your tailstump?” Gorppet asked him. The male’s mouth fell open in amusement. “This place, I should not wonder. More filth and disease right here—I mean this miserable square, not the whole city: spirits of Emperors past, I don’t want to think about the whole city—than on all of Home put together.”

  “You need leave again,” another male told Fotsev. “Go on out to one of the new towns and you will see how things ought to be.”

  And that made Fotsev realize why he was so discontented. “I went out to the first one a while ago,” he said. “Once was enough. I have not been back. I do not want to go back. I hated the new town just about as much as I hate this place.”

  “You are mad, as addled as any Tosevite ever hatched,” said the other male, a fellow named Betvoss. Only astonishment could have prompted him to come out with such a thing, for Fotsev outranked him.

  A couple of males on the patrol hissed in alarm. A couple of more gestured to show they agreed with Betvoss. Fotsev could have taken offense, but he didn’t. When he spoke, he sounded more weary than anything else: “Home is an egg I have hatched out of. I am something different now. It may not be something better—I do not think it is something better. But I do not fit inside that shell any more. The males and females who live in the new towns know little of Tosev 3, and do not wish to learn. They still dwell inside the old shell. I have learned too much of Tosev 3, which I suppose is why I do not.”

  Betvoss twisted his eye turrets in a way that suggested he did not understand and that there was nothing for him to understand. Fotsev had expected as much. Betvoss said, “If you hate the new town and you also hate Basra, what is left for you?”

  “Nothing, probably,” Fotsev answered. “I think that will be the fate of many of us from the conquest fleet: caught betwixt and between, belonging nowhere.”

  “Not me,” Betvoss said. “I like the new towns. They remind me of how things were and how they will be again.”

  “I think Fotsev speaks truth,” Gorppet said, which astonished Fotsev; the dour veteran seldom took his part. Gorppet had seen much worse action during the fighting than Fotsev had, and Fotsev often thought the other male resented him for coming through so easily. But now Gorppet went on, “I went into the new town a couple of times, maybe three. I do not bother going any more, either.”

  “I enjoy it,” Betvoss said. “I would sooner be there than here. I would sooner be anywhere than here.”

  “They do not understand the males of the Soldiers’ Time in the new town,” Fotsev said. “They did not go through what we went through, and they cannot see why we did not deliver Tosev 3 to them as we would have if all the Big Uglies truly had ridden animals and swung swords, as the probe made us think they would.”

  Betvoss seized the first part of that. “You say the colonists do not understand us? What of the Tosevites?” His wave encompassed the Big Ugly males in their wrappings of brown or white and the females in black with only their eyes showing and sometim
es even those veiled away behind cloth.

  Fotsev shrugged. “I do not expect Big Uglies to understand—they are Big Uglies. But the folk of the new town are my own kind—or they look like me, at any rate. I expected more than I got, and I was disappointed.”

  “And I as well,” Gorppet agreed. “Only we who have been through it can understand what we endured. Some of the Tosevites who fought against us come closer than the males and females of the Race who did not.” He sighed. “When the males of the conquest fleet die, no one will understand.” After a couple of strides, he swung an eye turret toward Betvoss. “Some males do not understand now.”

  “Truth,” Betvoss said. “And you are one of them.”

  “Enough,” Fotsev said with a slow, tired, emphatic cough. “Are we Big Uglies, to brawl among ourselves?”

  By the Emperor, I need a taste of ginger, he thought. However much he might need one, though, he was not so sure where he might come by it. The herb was in shorter supply than he could ever remember. Those above him had always fumed and grumbled about ginger, and every so often made examples of males caught tasting or dealing in it. But there had always been plenty—till females from the colonization fleet showed what the herb did to them. Now the authorities were serious about keeping it off everyone’s tongue.

  One of Fotsev’s eye turrets slid toward Gorppet. If anyone could still get ginger, he was the male. And if he understood why Fotsev stayed away from the new towns, maybe he would be more willing to share some of what he had, if he had any.

  The breeze shifted, changing the notes in the symphony of stinks that played over Fotsev’s scent receptors. One odor cut through the usual array of Tosevite stenches, though: the pheromones of a female in her season. Somebody is getting ginger, Fotsev thought. He wasn’t the only male to note that scent, of course. His whole squad suddenly seemed more alert. A couple of troopers began to take on the erect posture associated with mating. Betvoss started away from his comrades, toward that wonderful scent.

  “Back!” Fotsev said sharply, relishing the chance to rebuke the male who’d thought he was addled. “She is a long way off. We just have to go on about our business and pretend she is not there.”

  “I smell her. I want to mate with her,” Betvoss whined. Fotsev wanted to mate with her, too, wherever she was, but not to the point where he forgot himself and forgot his duty. Even as he kept eyeing the market square, the urge remained, an itch inside his head—and inside his cloaca—he couldn’t scratch. It made him irritable; he was ever so ready to leap down Betvoss’ throat if the other male got more unruly than he had already proved.

  But Betvoss, though he stayed sulky, obeyed: obedience was nearly as ingrained in the Race as was desire when presented with the proper stimuli.

  Small male Tosevites came running up to the patrol, jabbering in their own language. Gorppet gestured with his rifle. He did not want them to get too close. Fotsev didn’t blame him. The Race had learned from painful experience that stopping suicide attackers wasn’t easy.

  So far, the fanatical Tosevites had not begun using hatchlings as suicide warriors. That did not mean they would not do such a thing, though. In all truth, Gorppet was right to be cautious.

  Caution came hard, though, when the small Big Uglies (a notion that made Fotsev laugh, but that was true: he overtopped almost all of them) came up in spite of Gorppet’s warning. They’d learned a few words from the language of the Race. “Food!” they shouted. “Want food!” Others shouted, “Want money!”

  “No money,” Gorppet said, gesturing with the rifle again. The Race’s credit would have been useless to these ragamuffins, and handing out the metal disks the Tosevites used as their medium of exchange went against orders.

  Food was something else. Fotsev had never seen hunger till he came to Tosev 3. He’d thought hunger was the feeling he knew just before it was time for a meal. Maybe that was hunger, of a sort. But it was not the kind of hunger that came from having no food at all, from having to do without meals. Fotsev knew such conditions had existed back on Home in ancient history, before the Empire unified his planet. But those days were more than a hundred thousand years in the past, a very long time ago even by the standards of the Race. Seeing that kind of hunger had jolted him, and he was far from the only male it had jolted.

  So now he took little cubes of pressed meat and concentrated nutrients and tossed a handful of them to the Big Ugly hatchlings. So did three or four other males from the squad. The Tosevites squalled in delight and squabbled with one another over the food. They had no trouble eating the Race’s rations, as Fotsev and his fellows had no trouble except occasional disgust with Tosevite foods. And some Tosevite food products were even more delectable to the Race than to Big Uglies . . . and so Fotsev’s mind, almost inevitably, came back to ginger.

  The one problem with feeding some Tosevite beggars was that their success drew more, sure as carrion drew scavengers. After a while, Fotsev and his fellows ran low on ration cubes and started saying, “Enough! All gone!” The hatchlings cursed them in the language of the Race and, Fotsev was sure, even more hotly in their own tongue.

  Gorppet said something in that language that made them stop cursing and bark out the laughter of their kind. After that, the patrol had less trouble getting rid of them. When Fotsev asked Gorppet what he’d said, the other veteran replied, “I wished that predators would find the eggs of all their descendants.” It seemed a fine strong curse to Fotsev till he remembered the Big Uglies did not lay eggs. Then he understood why the hatchlings laughed. But anything that avoided trouble suited him fine.

  After what seemed forever, the patrol returned to barracks. Fotsev made his report, not that he had anything much to report. And then, for a little while, his time was his own. As he’d been sure he would, he hunted up Gorppet. “Come for a walk with me,” he said. Rumor had it that the barracks held listening devices. Fotsev neither knew whether rumor was true nor cared to learn.

  Out in the open, he hadn’t even broached the subject before Gorppet said, “You look like a male who could use a taste—maybe even a couple of tastes.”

  “Truth,” Fotsev said, with an emphatic cough. After a couple of tastes, Tosev 3 improved—and would stay improved till the ginger left his system. He asked, “How did you come by the herb? I am empty.”

  “Your friend”—a common euphemism for a ginger dealer—“must be one of the males who got his from a Big Ugly west of here who’s out of business—for the time being, anyhow,” Gorppet answered. “I have lots of friends. That is why I never go dry.”

  “I never thought I would,” Fotsev said ruefully, or as ruefully as he could with the herb exulting through him, “but I did.”

  “The males with the fancy body paint want to get their teeth into this, all right,” Gorppet said. “They do not want females coming into season any old time.” He laughed; he’d had a couple of tastes, too. “You smelled how well it works while we were out on patrol. They can slow the trade down, but they can’t stop it.”

  “I think you are right,” Fotsev said. “Hard to try to do other things, normal things, while on the edge of my own season. I understand why our superiors are fighting ginger so hard—but I still want one more taste.”

  “It shall be done,” Gorppet said, and it was. He had another taste himself. They spent the rest of their free time enjoyably cutting Betvoss into little strips.

  The Americans had a phrase: a slow boat to China. Liu Han and Liu Mei heard that phrase any number of times on their journey west across the Pacific, so often that they got good and sick of it. It was, if anything, an understatement for their homeward voyage aboard the Liberty Princess, a ship whose self-contradictory name never failed to amuse Liu Han.

  Everything went fine from Los Angeles to Hawaii, but Hawaii, of course, still belonged to the United States. Past Hawaii, from the island of Midway (which the Japanese had seized, almost unnoticed, during the time of fighting against the little scaly devils) on, every stop the Liberty
Princess made before Shanghai was in the Empire of Japan.

  And the Japanese were suspicious. Now Liu Han wished her visit to the United States had drawn less public notice. Whenever Japanese inspectors came aboard the ship, they naturally tried to prove she and Liu Mei were, in fact, just who they were, despite papers purporting to prove them to be other people altogether.

  They never quite managed. Liu Han thanked the gods and spirits in whom she was not supposed to believe for the English Liu Mei and she had picked up getting ready to visit the USA and improved while there. They used it as much as they could, baffling the Japanese who did not speak it and holding their own with the ones who did. Even in the Philippines, where many puppets of the eastern dwarfs were fluent in English, Liu Han and Liu Mei kept steadfastly insisting they were people other than their true selves, and got by with it. Without absolute proof—which they could not get—the Japanese did not care to embroil themselves with the United States.

  After the last Japanese official gave up in frustration, after the Liberty Princess was finally cleared to sail for Shanghai with the two Chinese women aboard, Liu Han turned to her daughter and said, “Do you see? This is what the power of a strong country is worth. The United States protects its people and protects its ships. One day, China will be able to do the same.”

  Liu Mei did not try to hide her bitterness. “Before we become a strong country, Mother, we have to become a country of any sort. As far as the little scaly imperialist devils are concerned, we are nothing but part of their Empire.”

  “That is why we have traveled so far,” Liu Han answered. “We did everything we could in the United States, I think. Weapons are coming. I do not know just when they will reach us: the Japanese and the Kuomintang and the little devils will all make that as hard as they can. But the weapons will come sooner or later. The People’s Liberation Army will take advantage of them sooner or later. And, sooner or later, the scaly devils will pay for their aggression and oppression. How long that takes doesn’t matter. Sooner or later, it will happen. The dialectic demands it.”