“What?” he said, and somehow managed to make his interrogative cough sound sarcastic. “You mean you do not recognize the voice of your old not-quite-friend, the senior tube inspector?”
Ice and fire chased each other through Kassquit. “Oh, by the Emperor,” she whispered, and cast down her eyes. “You are a Tosevite.” She was talking with a wild Big Ugly. Somehow, he’d found her telephone code and arranged access to a phone connected to the Race’s communication system.
“I sure am,” answered the Big Ugly male she thought of as Regeya. “I bet you could tell the instant I opened my mouth. I cannot make some of your sounds the way . . .” His voice trailed off. With dull horror, Kassquit knew what was coming next. Regeya was no fool. He’d heard her speak. She reached for the recessed key that would break the connection, but her hand faltered and stopped. The tongue was out of the mouth any which way. If the worst was coming, she might as well hear it. And it was. In slow wonder, Regeya went on, “You have trouble with the same sounds I do. Are you by any chance a Tosevite yourself, Kassquit?”
Kassquit thought she spoke much better than the wild Big Ugly. Not only did he have trouble with some of the pops and special hisses of the Race’s tongue, but he also spoke it with an odd syntax and accent: shadows, no doubt, of his own Tosevite language. But that had nothing to do with anything. “I am a full citizen of the Empire,” she answered proudly.
Despite the pride, it was an evasion, and Regeya recognized as much. “You did not answer my question,” he said. “Are you a Tosevite?” He answered it himself: “You must be. But how did it happen? What made you throw in your lot with the Race?”
He thought she was a Tosevite traitor, as some males of the Race from the conquest fleet had turned traitor after the Big Uglies captured them. She proceeded to disabuse him of the notion. “I would not be anything but a citizen of the Empire,” she declared. “The Race has raised me since earliest hatchlinghood.”
Regeya said something in his own language that she didn’t understand, then let out several barking yips of Tosevite laughter. When at last he returned to the language of the Race, his only comment was, “Is that a fact?”
“Yes, it is a fact,” Kassquit said with more than a little irritation. “Why in the name of the Emperor”—calling on him made her feel more secure—“would I waste my time lying to you? You are on the surface of Tosev 3, while I orbit above it. Since you must remain there, what can you possibly do to me?”
She’d nipped the Big Ugly’s pride, but not quite as she’d expected. “I have been farther from Tosev 3 than you,” he answered, “for I have walked on the surface of the moon. So I might visit you one day.”
I hope not, was the first thought that went through Kassquit’s mind. The idea of coming face to face with a wild Big Ugly terrified and horrified her. Nor would she tolerate Regeya’s scoring points off her. “You may have gone from Tosev 3 to its moon,” she said, “but the Race has come from its sun to the star Tosev.”
“Well, that is a truth,” the Big Ugly admitted. “Pretty proud of the Empire, eh?” That last grunt was almost an interrogative cough in its own right.
“I am part of it. Why should I not feel pride in it?” Kassquit said.
“All right—something to that, too,” Regeya said. “How old are you, Kassquit? How old were you when the Race took you from the female who bore you?”
“I was taken away when I was newly hatched,” Kassquit answered. “Had I been brought up as a Big Ugly, even in part, I would have had more trouble becoming as fully a part of the Race as I have. The male who raised me began the project not long after the fighting stopped.”
“So you would be close to twenty now?” Regeya said, half to himself. Kassquit began to correct him, but then realized he naturally reckoned by Tosevite years rather than those of the Race. Laughing again, he went on, “Well, well, quite a head start.” Kassquit didn’t know what that meant. Regeya was still talking: “Did the male who raised you tell you that you were not his first attempt?”
“Oh, yes,” Kassquit replied at once. “He had to return one hatchling to the Tosevites because of political considerations, and was kidnapped while seeking to obtain another. With me, however, he succeeded.” As much as he could, as much as anyone could, she thought. But she would not let the Big Ugly see what lay in her mind.
“He was honest with you, at any rate. That is something,” Regeya said. “And you may be interested to know that I have met the Tosevite whom your male released. She is a normal young adult female in most ways, except that her face has no motion in it to speak of.”
“Neither has mine,” Kassquit said. “Here among the Race, that is of small account.”
“Yes, I suppose it would be,” Regeya said. “It is different among us Big Uglies.” He wasn’t shy about using the Race’s nickname for his—and Kassquit’s—kind. “You may also be interested to know that she—this other female—is one of the leaders in the rebellion against the Race in China.”
“No, that does not interest me at all,” Kassquit answered. “In the long run, rebellions will not matter. All of Tosev 3 will become part of the Empire. Males and females will be proud citizens, as I am.”
“That is possible,” the Big Ugly on the other end of the line said, which surprised her. He went on, “But I do not think it is certain. Our kind”—by which, to Kassquit’s annoyance, he had to mean his and hers—“is different from the Race in important ways. For instance, we are sexually receptive all the time, and the Race is not. Do you not agree that that is an important difference? How do you deal with it, there by yourself?”
“None of your business,” Kassquit snapped. She felt blood rising to her face, as it did when she was embarrassed. Having continuous sexuality among beings who did not was extremely embarrassing. She had learned that stroking her private parts brought relief from the tension that sometimes threatened to overwhelm her, but she’d been humiliated to find out Ttomalss knew what she did, even if he intellectually understood her need. She wished she were like the Race in that regard, but she wasn’t.
To her relief, Regeya did not press her. He said, “I am going to go now. I am using a telephone at the Race’s consulate in Los Angeles, and it is expensive for me. If you want to get in touch with me again, my name is Sam Yeager. I decided to call just to say hello. I tell you the truth when I say that I had no ideal would be speaking with another Tosevite.”
“I am not a Tosevite, not in the same sense you are,” Kassquit said, once more with considerable pride. “As I told you, I am a citizen of the Empire, and glad of it.” Now she broke the connection. She did not think it would offend the Big Ugly—the other Big Ugly—for Sam Yeager (not Regeya) had already said he was going.
A wild Tosevite . . . Her hand moved in the gesture of negation. The two of them might be similar genetically, but in no other way. His accent, his alien way of looking at things, made that perfectly clear.
But, in some ways, genetics and genetic predispositions did matter. Regeya had, for instance, unerringly focused on her sexuality as an important difference between herself and the Race. Ttomalss, looking at the issue from the other side of the divide, had proved far less perceptive.
Kassquit wondered what the Big Ugly looked like.
It does not matter, she told herself. He probably had hair all over his head, which would make him even uglier than Tosevites had to be. His face would be snoutless, his skin scaleless. He could not help being ugly, given all that. But she remained curious about the details.
On the telephone, he seemed much as he did in his electronic messages: clever, and possessed of a quirky wit very different from the way males and females of the Race thought. She should have despised him for being what he was. She tried, but could not do it. He intrigued her too much.
He is a relation, she thought. In a way, he is the closest relation with whom I have ever spoken. She shivered, though the air in her chamber was not cold, or even cool: it was adjusted to the warmth th
e Race found comfortable. She’d never known air of a different temperature. She’d never known anyone but males and females of the Race, either—not till now, she hadn’t. She shivered again.
Over lamb chops and carrots and mashed potatoes, Jonathan Yeager listened to his father in fascination. “That’s amazing,” he said. “They’re holding her prisoner up there, and she doesn’t even know she is one.”
His father shook his head. “Are Mickey and Donald prisoners?”
“No,” Jonathan said. “We’re raising them to see how much like people they’ll turn into. They’re guinea pigs, I guess, but they’re not . . .” Shoveling in another forkful of potatoes let him make the pause less awkward than it might have been otherwise. “Okay. I see where you’re going.”
“The girl up there is a guinea pig, too,” his mother said.
“That’s right.” Now his father nodded. “Twenty years ago, the Lizards started doing what we’re doing now. I wonder what sort of experiments they’ve run on her.” He sipped from a glass of Lucky Lager. “Makes me think twice about what we’re doing with the baby Lizards—seeing the shoe on the other foot, I mean.”
“It certainly does,” Jonathan’s mother said. “That poor girl—brought up to be as much like a Lizard as she could?” She shuddered. “If she’s not completely out of her mind, it’s God’s own miracle.”
“She sounded sensible enough,” his father said. “She doesn’t know what being a human is like. What bothers her most, I think, is that she can’t be as much like the Race—like the rest of the Race, she’d probably say—as she’d like.”
“If that’s not crazy, what is?” his mother returned. His father took another sip of beer, in much the same way as Jonathan had eaten those mashed potatoes.
“We ought to set her free,” Jonathan exclaimed: the idea blazed in him. “We—the United States, I mean—ought to tell the fleetlord we know they’ve got her and they have to let her go.”
He expected his mother and father to catch fire, too. Instead, they looked at each other and then at him. “I don’t think that would be a good idea, Jonathan,” his mother said after a moment.
“What? Why not?” he demanded. “If I’d been living up there all this time, I’d sure want to be free.”
“No.” His father shook his head in a way that could only mean he was ready to lock horns on this one. “If you’d been living up there all this time, you’d want what Kassquit wants: to be more like a Lizard. You play games about imitating the Race. With her, it’s not a game. It’s the real thing.”
Jonathan started to get angry at that. A couple of years earlier, he would have for sure. His old man had a lot of damn nerve saying his study of the Race was only a game. But, he had to admit, trying to live like the Lizards wasn’t the same as never having seen, never even having talked to, another human being in his life. “Well, maybe,” he said grudgingly—from him, a large concession.
His father must have seen that he’d been on the point of blowing up, because he leaned across the kitchen table and set a hand on Jonathan’s for a moment. “You’re growing up,” he said, which almost caused trouble again, because Jonathan was convinced he’d already grown up. But then his dad said something that distracted him: “Besides, if you look at it the right way, Kassquit’s our ace in the hole.”
“Huh?” Jonathan said.
“I don’t follow that, either,” his mother added. With a pointed look at Jonathan, she went on, “I’m more polite about the way I say it, though.”
His father grinned. He always did when he put one over on Jonathan’s mom, not least because he didn’t do that very often. He said, “Suppose the Race finds out we’ve got Mickey and Donald. What will the fleetlord do? Scream his head off, that’s what, and probably tell us to give ’em back before he sends in the Lizard Marines.”
“Oh, I get it!” Jonathan said excitedly. “I get it! That’s hot, Dad! If he says, ‘Give ’em back,’ we can answer, ‘Why should I? You’ve had this girl for years.’ ” His old man could be sneaky, no two ways about it.
But Jonathan’s mother said, “I don’t like that, Sam. It turns the girl into nothing but a pawn.”
“Hon, we both just told Jonathan that Kassquit’s never, ever going to have a normal life or anything close to it,” his father said. “She’s been the Lizards’ pawn ever since they got hold of her. If she turns out to be our pawn, too, what’s so bad about that?”
“I don’t know,” his mother answered. Her gaze went down the hail toward Mickey and Donald’s room. “It’s different somehow, thinking of that being done to a human being rather than a Lizard.”
“That’s what the Race would say, too, Mom, except they’d put it the other way round,” Jonathan said.
“He’s not wrong, hon,” his father said. His mother still didn’t look happy, but she finally nodded. His father went on, “And speaking of Mickey and Donald . . .” He got up from the table and put his dishes in the sink, then pulled a knife from the drawer next to it and opened the refrigerator. “Time they had their supper, too.”
Jonathan also got up. “I’ll feed ’em, Dad, if you want me to.”
“Thanks.” His father nodded. “I’m glad you help with the chores around here, believe me I am, but I’ll take care of this. I was the one who got ordered to raise them, after all, so I will.”
“Well, I’ll come along, if that’s okay,” Jonathan said. “I like Lizards, in case you hadn’t noticed.” He tapped himself on the chest. With the weather warm, he didn’t bother wearing a shirt. This week, his body paint declared him an electronic instruments repairmale.
His father paused while slicing corned beef. (Jonathan sometimes thought the hatchlings ate better than he did. But then, the government paid for all their food, while his folks had to shell out for what went down his throat.) “Sure. Come right ahead. Be good for the little guys to know people visit sometimes, that we aren’t just the gravy train.”
As they walked down the hall toward the Lizards’ room, Jonathan asked, “Aren’t you going to shut that door?”
“Hmm? Oh. Yeah.” His dad did, but then said, “It won’t be too long, or I hope it won’t, before we don’t have to do that any more. We’ll be able to start letting them loose in the house. I hope we will, anyhow.”
“You don’t think they’ll rip the furniture to ribbons?” Jonathan said. “Mom won’t be real happy if they do.”
“Well, neither will I—we’ve talked about that,” his father answered as he opened the door to Mickey and Donald’s room. “But heck, you can teach a cat to use a scratching post—most of the time, anyhow—so I figure we can probably teach these guys to do the same thing. They’re smarter than cats, that’s for darn sure.”
The hatchlings had been playing some sort of game with a red rubber ball—an active one, by the way they stopped and stood there panting when Jonathan and his father came in. The ball was about golf-ball size. A human baby would have stuck it in his mouth and likely choked to death. Jonathan wouldn’t have known something like that for himself, but his parents both insisted it was true. Mickey and Donald were different, though. Unlike human babies, they knew from the very beginning what was food and what wasn’t; at need, they could catch their own.
Donald did something with the ball no cat could: he picked it up and threw it at Jonathan. Jonathan tried to catch it, but it bounced off his hand and away. Both Donald and Mickey sprang after it. His father clicked his tongue between his store-bought teeth. “Have to score that one an error, son.”
“Yeah, I know,” Jonathan said in mild annoyance. He was sure that, had the baby Lizard thrown the ball at his father, he would have caught it even though he had only one free hand. Jonathan was stronger than his dad these days, but he still wasn’t half the ballplayer his father was. That got under his skin when he let himself think about it.
But he preferred thinking about Mickey and Donald. “Come and get it,” his father told them, and they didn’t waste much time abandonin
g the ball for corned beef. He and Jonathan both talked to them, and with each other. Letting them get used to the idea of language, Jonathan’s dad always called that. Turning to Jonathan, he remarked, “They aren’t stupid—they’re just different.”
“Uh-huh.” Jonathan could get away with grunts and even split infinitives around his father, where his mother would come down on him like a ton of bricks. He sometimes wondered if his dad found talking around his mom hard, too. But that wasn’t anything he could ask. Instead, he pointed to Mickey, who had a little shred of corned beef hanging from one corner of his mouth, and said, “You’re a little pig, you know that?”
One of the hatchling’s eye turrets swung to follow his pointing finger: it might have been danger, or so evolution warned. Mickey’s other eye kept watching Jonathan’s father, who at the moment emphatically was the source of all blessing. Sure enough, he offered Mickey another strip of corned beef, and the little Lizard leaped forward to take it.
“I wonder what he and Donald will be like in twenty years,” Jonathan’s father said, and then, more than half to himself, “I wonder if I’ll be around to see it.”
Jonathan had no idea how to respond to that last sentence, and so he didn’t. He said, “I wonder what that—Kassquit, was that her name?—is like now. She’d be somewhere close to my age, wouldn’t she?”
“Maybe a little younger—she said the Lizards got her after the fighting stopped,” his father answered. “She’s smart—no two ways around that. But as for the rest . . . I just don’t know. Pretty strange. She can’t help that.”
“I’d like to talk with her myself,” Jonathan said. “It would be interesting.” He used an emphatic cough, forgetting he wasn’t supposed to do that around Mickey and Donald.
“Don’t know if I could arrange it,” his father said, in tones suggesting he had no intention of trying. But then his gaze sharpened. “You know, it might not be so bad if I could, though, especially with the video hooked up. You look like a Lizard, you know what I mean?—or as much as a person can.”
Down to Earth Page 18
