Down to Earth

by Harry Turtledove

  Felless was doing her best to talk sense into an official from the Great German Reich’s Ministry of Justice: an inherently thankless task. “If you do not do more than you have to control ginger smuggling into lands ruled by the Race, it is only natural that we have retaliated as we have,” she told the Big Ugly. “Is it not just that we should assist the passage of Tosevite drugs into the Reich?”

  The official, a deputy minister named Freisler, listened as his secretary translated Felless’ words into the guttural language of the Deutsche, which she had not bothered to learn. He spoke with what sounded like passion. The secretary’s reply, however, was all but toneless: “Herr Freisler rejects this equivalence out of hand. He warns that drug smugglers seized inside the Reich, whether Tosevites or belonging to the Race, will be brought before People’s Courts and will be subjected to the maximum punishment allowed by law.”

  “Will be killed, you mean,” Felless said with distaste. The secretary wagged his head up and down, the equivalent of the Race’s affirmative hand gesture. The Deutsche had a habit of killing anyone of whom they did not approve completely; even for Big Uglies, they were savage.

  And to think I was fool enough to specialize in the Race relations with newly conquered species. Felless let out a soft hiss of self-derision. When she’d wakened from cold sleep after the colonization fleet got to Tosev 3, she’d discovered that hundreds of millions of Tosevites remained unconquered, the Deutsche among them. She’d also discovered that the Big Uglies, independent and conquered both, were far more alien to the Race than either the Rabotevs or the Hallessi.

  And she’d discovered ginger, which was an irony in its own right. Thanks to the Tosevite herb, her own mating behavior had acquired a frenzied urgency not far removed from that of the Big Uglies. The same was true of other females who tasted, which was the greatest reason the Race tried so hard to suppress the trade. Even as she argued against ginger to this Freisler creature, she craved a taste herself.

  She took a breath to tear the Big Ugly limb from rhetorical limb, but her telephone hissed for attention before she could speak. “Excuse me,” she told the secretary, who nodded. She took the phone from her belt. “Felless speaking.”

  “I greet you, Senior Researcher,” a male said into her hearing diaphragm. “Slomikk speaking here.”

  “I greet you, Science Officer,” Felless replied. “What news?”

  “I am pleased to inform you that both hatchlings from your clutch have lost their egg teeth within a day of the normal period,” Slomikk said.

  “That is indeed good news,” Felless replied. “I am glad to hear it. Out.” She broke the connection and returned the phone to its belt pocket.

  “What good news is this?” the Deutsch secretary inquired.

  Perhaps he was politely interested—perhaps, but not probably. What he was probably doing was seeking intelligence information. Felless did not care to give him any. “Nothing of great importance,” she said. “Now . . . your superior there was attempting to explain why circumstances that apply to the Race should not apply to the Reich. So far, his explanations have merely been laughable.”

  When that was translated, the Big Ugly named Freisler let out several loud, incoherent splutters, then said, “I am not accustomed to such rudeness.”

  “No doubt: you have made the Tosevites who came before you afraid,” Felless said sweetly. “But I do not fall under your jurisdiction, and so cannot be expected to waste time on fear.”

  More of the Deutsch official’s blood showed under his thin, scaleless skin, a sign of anger among the Big Uglies. Felless enjoyed angering the Deutsche. Their murderous style of government—and their irrationality—angered her. That they were misguided enough to reckon themselves—Tosevites!—the Master Race angered her even more. Getting a little of her own back felt sweet.

  She did not think of her hatchlings again till she was leaving Freisler’s office. He had not yielded in the matter of curbing ginger smugglers; angering him had also left him stubborn. Diplomacy—and the idea that she needed to be diplomatic toward Big Uglies—still came hard to Felless, as it did to many of the Race.

  She hadn’t been lying when she told the Deutsch secretary the news Slomikk gave her was of no great consequence. The only reason the hatchlings crossed her mind was an idle wish that she still had an egg tooth herself. Were it so, she might have torn the arrogant, noisy Freisler apart like an eggshell. The temptation to violence the Big Uglies raised in her was appalling.

  So was their weather. They did not heat the interiors of their buildings to temperatures comfortable to civilized beings (by which, in her mind, she meant females and males of the Race). But leaving the grandiose Justice Ministry and going out onto the streets of Nuremberg was another savage jolt. Blaming the Tosevites for the cold made no logical sense. Trying not to freeze, Felless cared little for logic.

  Fortunately, her heated motorcar waited nearby. “Back to the embassy, superior female?” asked the driver.

  “Yes, back to the embassy,” Felless answered. “I must report the Tosevites’ obstinacy to Ambassador Veffani.”

  “It shall be done,” the driver said, and set the motorcar in motion. It was of Deutsch manufacture, but ran reasonably well. The Big Uglies had been in the habit of fueling their motors with petroleum distillates; now many of them burned hydrogen, another technology stolen from the Race. Tosevites seemed to take such thefts, and the changes that sprang from them, for granted. They would have driven the Race mad. Felless more than half believed dealing with change on Tosev 3 had driven a good many males from the conquest fleet mad.

  Nuremberg’s main boulevards struck her as absurdly wide, even for the capital city of an independent not-empire. The Nazis, the faction ruling the Deutsche, had an ideology that assumed bigger was automatically better. A constable in one of their preposterously fancy uniforms—which also served an ideological function—halted traffic so a female Big Ugly leading an immature Tosevite by the hand and pushing another in a wheeled cart could cross. She took her time about it, not caring that she was inconveniencing Felless.

  Felless tried to take advantage of the inconvenience by studying the way the female cared for her hatchlings. The one in the cart was as absurdly helpless as all newly hatched—no, the Big Ugly term was born—Tosevites were after emerging from their mothers’ bodies. But even the one that walked by itself clung to the female who had presumably given it life. Of its own free will, it submitted itself to her authority.

  Hatchlings of the Race, till reason truly sprouted in them, assumed that their elders were predators, and did their best to avoid them. Maybe that was why obedience and subordination were so thoroughly drilled into those hatchlings once they became educable. The lessons almost always sank deep. But Big Uglies, who began so compliant, ended up more individualistic than members of the Race.

  Paradox. The changes came with sexual maturation, of course. That propelled Tosevites toward the autonomy to which they clung so fiercely from then on. The Race stayed on the quieter path, untouched by hormonal tides except during mating season—or when stimulated by ginger, Felless thought. Ginger disrupted patterns unshakable back on Home.

  After what seemed like forever, the constable permitted traffic to move again. Now that her attention had been drawn to them, Felless kept noticing Big Uglies—mostly females, by their wrapping styles and the length of their hair—caring for Tosevite hatchlings of various sizes.

  She tried to imagine leading her own pair of hatchlings down the street, holding each one by the hand. The absurdity of the notion made her mouth drop open into a wide laugh. The little creatures would do their best to bite her and escape. Civilizing hatchlings wasn’t easy. It was, in fact, one of the first specializations the Race had developed, back at, or rather before, the dawn of its history. Systematically civilizing hatchlings had helped lead to civilizing the Race.

  The motorcar pulled to a halt in front of the Race’s embassy to the Greater German Reich. Felless sighe
d with relief, not only relief at escaping the absurd fantasy that had filled her mind but also at seeing a sensible, functional cube of a building. The newer Tosevite structures in Nuremberg partook of the Nazis’ passion for immense pretentiousness. The older ones struck her as hideously overdecorated. Escaping to simplicity was a delight.

  Felless hurried to Veffani’s office. The ambassador said, “I greet you, Senior Researcher. I am glad to see you resuming your full range of duties after laying your eggs.”

  “I thank you, superior sir,” Felless replied. Either Veffani or Ttomalss, an experienced researcher in Tosevite psychology, had fertilized those eggs; they’d both mated with her when ginger made her seasonal pheromones spring to life. Had she been a Tosevite, she knew she would have cared which one was the father. Luckily, being a female of the Race, she didn’t need to worry about that. Business came first. “Superior sir, I regret to report that the Deutsche appear unyielding on the matter of ginger smuggling.”

  “I am disappointed, but I am not surprised,” the ambassador said. “Corrupting us appears to be part of their strategy.”

  “Truth,” Felless said, though Veffani had been tactless. He could scarcely help knowing she was one of those ginger had corrupted, not when he’d been stimulated to mate with her. She feared he also knew she still craved the herb, though penalties for females who used it grew ever more severe.

  “They do not fear our countersmuggling efforts, then?” Veffani said.

  “If they do, they give little sign of it,” Felless said, “though you have warned me they are adept at bluffing.”

  “They are better than adept. They are liars from the moment they leave their eggshells—uh, that is, the bodies of their mothers,” Veffani corrected himself.

  “What is our course to be, then?” Felless asked.

  “I shall have to consult with my superiors,” the ambassador replied. “My own inclination is to continue on our present course until its failure is manifest. That has certainly not been proved. The Deutsche will smuggle. We should do the same, to show them the game has its prices.”

  “Truth, superior sir,” Felless said. “In fact, if you will recall, I was the first to warn the Deutsche that we were on the point of instituting such a policy.” She wanted credit for it, too.

  “I do recall, Senior Researcher. I was there, after all.” Veffani sounded amused.

  She didn’t mind if he laughed, so long as he remembered it, But, having reminded him, she thought it wiser to change the subject: “Slomikk tells me my hatchlings have shed their egg teeth.” As he might have sired them, that might be of some small interest to him, as it was to her.

  “Yes, it would be about time for that,” he agreed, with the polite attention she’d expected. “Now, back to ways of dealing with the miserable Deutsche . . .”

  Monique Dutourd angrily shook her head. “No, I don’t want to go to the cinema with you,” she told Dieter Kuhn. “I don’t want to go to supper with you. I don’t want to go anywhere with you. If you care anything at all about making me happy, go away and leave me alone.”

  Kuhn was slight and dark. He looked as much like a native of Marseille as Monique did. She’d assumed he was a Frenchman when he enrolled in her Roman history class at the university. He wrote French like a native. But he was no Frenchman. He was a Sturmbannfüthrer in the SS, in Marseille to bring ginger smuggling through the port under the control of the Reich.

  He folded his arms across his chest in the lecture hall, which was, to Monique’s dismay, empty but for the two of them. “I do not ask this because of my duty,” he said. His spoken French was good, but doubly alien in her ears: he used Parisian French, not the local dialect, and had a guttural accent that showed he was from the wrong side of the Rhine. “I ask for myself.”

  “How big a fool are you? How big a fool do you think I am?” Monique demanded hotly. “You’ve arrested my brother before. Now that Pierre’s gone back on the arrangement he had with you, you want to kill him. The only reason you ever cared about me was to get at him.”

  “That was a reason, true,” he agreed with a brisk nod not in the least French. “But it was not the only reason. I have always found you attractive.”

  He’d said that before. He’d done so little besides saying it every now and again that she’d put it down for just another ploy. She’d wondered if he preferred boys, in fact. If not, wouldn’t he have tried harder to get her into bed? A woman in occupied France who told an SS man no ran all sorts of risks, but he’d never used his position to take advantage of her, either.

  Never till now. Smiling not so pleasantly, he went on, “You should be friendlier to me. Would you really care to have the Reichs Security Service examine the political content of your lectures on the Germanic invasions of the Roman Empire? Believe me, I can arrange it.”

  Ice ran through her. When the Germans investigated you they locked you up, threw away the key, and decided later—sometimes much later—whether they wanted to find it again. But Dieter Kuhn had given her warnings like that once or twice before. He hadn’t followed up on them. And so she shook her head again. “Go away,” she said, and then added a localism that meant the same thing but was a good deal stronger.

  She hadn’t really thought he would understand it. By the way his face froze, he did. “I believe you will discover you have made a mistake,” he said, and turned on his heel with a military precision altogether Teutonic. When he strode out of the hail, she discovered to her surprise that she felt worse alone in it than she had with him.

  She looked down at her hands. They were shaking—a curious mixture of fury and fear. Her legs felt very light as she went downstairs to liberate her bicycle from its slot in the rack. She rode north up Rue Breteuil toward her flat, which was not far from the Old Port, the one that had attracted the ancient Greeks to what they’d called Massilia. The weather was crisp but not cold; even February in Marseille rarely had much bite.

  As she pedaled along, Frenchmen whistled at her. She was used to that, and ignored it. A couple of Wehrmacht troopers in a field-gray Volkswagen utility vehicle also loudly approved of the way she looked. She ignored them, too. They didn’t know who she was, just that she was a woman they found pretty. That made them harmless.

  She wished something would make Dieter Kuhn harmless, too.

  Along with the Frenchmen and -women and Germans on the streets of Marseille, she also saw a fair number of Lizards. They’d held the city, and much of the south of France, during the fighting, and still did a lot of business with the Greater German Reich here. Some of that business was legitimate, and craved by the occupiers. But the Nazis would have suppressed the rest if only they could. Ever since it was named Massilia, Marseille had been a smugglers’ paradise.

  And so, when Monique noticed a Lizard slowly walking past her block of flats, she didn’t think much of it. She came to a stop and got ready to lug the bicycle upstairs. In this part of town, unlike the university, it would not be waiting for her in the morning if she left it in the street.

  Before she could manhandle it into her building, the Lizard came up to her and spoke in hissing, not too grammatical French: “Est-ce que vous êtes Monique Dutourd?”

  “Yes, I’m Monique Dutourd,” she answered with some surprise. “What do you want with me?”

  “You are the brother—no, I err, the sister—of the famous Pierre Dutourd, is it not so?” the Lizard asked. “I seek to reach the famous Dutourd on a matter of business for both of us, but I have the difficulties. You can, it could be, help?”

  His business had to be ginger, ginger or drugs for people. “Go away,” Monique said quietly. She wanted to scream it. Dieter Kuhn or some other Nazi was surely keeping an eye on her. The Germans wanted her brother, too.

  “But why do you wish me to go?” the Lizard asked. His kind, she had heard, were naive, but she hadn’t expected him to be so naive as to ask a question like that. Before she could say anything, he went on, “There could be much profit in th
e business I do with your famous brother. Some of that profit would go to you, as middleman.”

  Monique laughed in his face, which startled him into drawing back a step. “Go away,” she repeated. “Don’t you know the Germans spy on me? They are also looking for my brother, my famous brother.” She laughed again, though doubting the Lizard understood the irony. “They are looking for him so they can kill him.”

  “But why is this?” The male seemed honestly bewildered. “He still smuggles ginger to the Race. It is only that now he smuggles also other things to you Tosevites. Could they care so much about this?”

  Explaining things struck Monique as more trouble than it was worth. Without even bothering to tell him to go away again, she started taking the bicycle up the stairs. She had papers to grade and, with a little luck, a long-stalled project on the epigraphy of the cult of Isis in Gallia Narbonensis to work on.

  Finally sensing he wasn’t going to get anywhere, the Lizard called after her: “Tell him my name is Ssimachan. He will know of me. He will want to do business with me. We can make much profit together, he and I.”

  Monique had no intention of telling Pierre any such thing. This Ssimachan struck her as so inept, he was far more likely to bring danger with him than profit. He probably had swarms of Gestapo men following him, too. If they happened to run into the ones who were, or might be, shadowing her . . . That was as unpleasant a thought as she’d had in quite a while.

  She sautéed squid in olive oil for supper, a meal the Romans would also have enjoyed. Then she went through the papers as fast as she could. As usual, Dieter Kuhn’s—he went by the name of Laforce in her classes—was very good. She snarled something under her breath. He never gave her any excuse to fail him, or even to give him less than a superior mark.

  After recording the grades, she got out her photographs and photostats and copies of drawings made and published by classicists over the previous three centuries. If she ever finished her monograph on Isis-worship in this part of the world during Roman times, she could publish it without too much fear. Unlike remarks on Romano-German relations, the cult of Isis held few modern political overtones.