Down to Earth

by Harry Turtledove

“Damaged windows!” Nesseref’s mouth fell open in sardonic laughter. Did—could—anyone think the Deutsch cannon shells had penetrated only through window glass? They could have gone through the outer walls just as easily—and through several inner walls, too.

  Anyone who thought would be able to see that in the flick of a nictitating membrane across an eyeball. But how many males and females feel like thinking right now? Nesseref wondered. How many will just want to seize any reassurance they can find?

  Nesseref sighed. Colonists hadn’t come to Tosev 3 expecting the conquest to be continuing here. They’d come to reconstruct lives as much like those back on Home as they could make them. She wondered how they would react to being plunged into the chaos of war. By all she’d seen, Big Uglies took it for granted. That wasn’t so among her own kind—far from it.

  The Deutsche will never have another chance to do this to us, she thought. But what of the other independent not-empires? If they didn’t walk soft, they would be sorry. She was sure of that.

  20

  Back in South Africa, Gorppet had more ginger than he knew what to do with. When the Race uprooted him from the comfortable post he’d won as a reward for capturing the fanatic named Khomeini, he’d brought barely enough to Poland to keep himself happy for a little while. And most of what he had, he couldn’t taste. He’d learned during the last round of fighting that a male who tasted too often thought he was braver and smarter and more nearly invulnerable than he really was. He usually found out his mistake by finding himself dead.

  Gorppet had learned all sorts of things during the fighting. That, of course, was why the Race had summoned him back to combat. He could have done without the honor. He’d already given the Big Uglies too many chances to kill or maim him. That was his view of the matter, anyhow. As far as his superiors were concerned, he was just one more munition, to be expended as necessary.

  At the moment, he waited in a barn that smelled powerfully of Tosevite animals. A regiment leader was briefing him and a good many other lower-ranking officers: “We can expect this latest Deutsch thrust to exhaust itself before long. The Big Uglies’ ability to resupply is almost entirely destroyed.”

  “Superior sir!” Gorppet signaled for attention.

  “Yes? What is it, Small-Unit Group Leader?” the officer asked.

  “Superior sir, did you ever run up against the Deutsche during the last round of fighting?” Gorppet asked.

  “No,” the regimental leader admitted. “I served on the lesser continental mass then.”

  “Well, then, superior sir, all I can tell you is, don’t count them out of anything till you see them all dead. And be careful even then—they may be shamming,” Gorppet said. “They are much tougher, male for male, than the Russkis or than any other kind of Big Ugly I can think of.”

  “I assure you, I have been thoroughly informed as to their proclivities,” the regiment leader said. “I can also assure you that I know whereof I speak. We shall deal with them here in short order.”

  He spoke as if he knew everything there was to know. He probably thought he did. That meant he either hadn’t seen hard fighting over on the lesser continental mass or had forgotten what it was like. Knowing he was wasting his time, Gorppet tried again: “The Deutsche, superior sir—”

  “Are broken,” the regiment leader said firmly. “Let us have no further doubts on that score. Do I make myself clear?”

  “Yes, superior sir.” Gorppet knew he sounded resigned and imperfectly subordinate, but had trouble caring. The regiment leader outranked him, but that didn’t mean the fellow kept his brains anywhere but his cloaca.

  And then, to Gorppet’s astonishment, another male spoke up: “Superior sir, the small-unit group leader is right. As long as the Deutsche are in the field, they are dangerous. Underestimating them will do nothing but get good males killed to no purpose. I mean no disrespect when I say this, for it is a manifest truth.”

  In a deadly voice, the regiment leader said, “Give me your name, Mid-Group Leader. Your statement will go on the record.”

  “Very well, superior sir: I am Shazzer,” the other male replied. The regiment leader spoke into a computer hookup. There, all too probably, went Shazzer’s reputation and hope for advancement. They would surely be gone if the regiment leader turned out to be right. They were also likely doomed even if the regiment leader turned out to be wrong. The Race did not like those who disagreed with duly constituted authority. The regiment leader’s eye turrets swung toward Gorppet. “Give me your name, too, Small-Unit Group Leader.”

  “Superior sir, I am Gorppet,” he answered. He’d never expected to become an officer. If he stopped being one, the eggshell of his world wouldn’t shatter.

  “Gorppet,” the regiment leader repeated, this time into the computer hookup. Having finished that, he continued, “Now let us turn to the business at hand: wiping out the surviving remnants of the Deutsche.”

  “It shall be done, superior sir,” the assembled officers chorused. Gorppet mouthed the words along with the rest, though they were bitter on his tongue. He longed for ginger to rid himself of their taste, but made himself hold back.

  Out of the barn trooped the officers. Gorppet checked his radiation meter. This particular area wasn’t doing too badly; he didn’t need a breathing mask, let alone protective wrappings. The winds blowing the radioactive wreckage of the Reich to the east had been relatively kind here.

  As the officers began to scatter and return to their units, Gorppet hurried over to Shazzer and said, “I thank you, superior sir, for what you tried to do in there. I fear you did not help yourself by doing it.”

  Shazzer shrugged. “You spoke plain truth, Gorppet. Any male who has ever fought the Deutsche knows you spoke plain truth. Only pity is, we could not make that male see it.” He sounded not in the least concerned about what would happen to him.

  Before Gorppet could say how much he admired that, aircraft streaked toward him out of the west. Concern about careers suddenly evaporated. “Those are Deutsch!” he shouted, and dove into a shell crater.

  Shazzer dove in right behind him. Some of the other males were slower to take cover. Flames rippled under the wings of the enemy killercraft. “Rockets!” Shazzer screamed. He tried to scrabble deeper into the earth. Gorppet didn’t blame him. He was trying to do the same thing.

  The killercraft wailed past and were gone. Gorppet stuck up his head and looked around for the regiment leader who’d said the Deutsche were at the end of their tether. He didn’t spot him. Maybe that meant the optimistic officer had found himself a hole in the ground, too. Maybe it meant he’d been blown to bits. Gorppet didn’t much care, one way or the other.

  He didn’t keep his head up very long, either. Hisses in the air rose swiftly to shrieks. He shrieked, too: “Artillery!” He dove down into the crater once more.

  He thought the shells that burst around him were of heavier caliber than most of the ones the Big Uglies had thrown during the last round of fighting. He cursed. The Race’s artillery remained essentially the same as it had been when Home was unified a hundred thousand years before. Why change? It did the job well enough. The Big Uglies, unfortunately, didn’t think that way.

  Splinters whined overhead. The ground shook under Gorppet’s prostrate body, reminding him of the earthquakes he’d known when stationed in Basra and Baghdad. Shazzer said, “I think these are all explosive shells. The ones with gas in them sound different when they burst.”

  “Praise the spirits of Emperors past for small favors,” Gorppet said. “I truly hate the masks we have to wear to protect ourselves against the gas.”

  “And who does not?” the other veteran officer replied. “But I hate dying even more.”

  “Truth,” Gorppet agreed.

  If the Deutsche were short on ammunition, the bombardment they laid down gave no sign of it. Shells fell from the sky like rain. Shazzer said, “They are going to try to break through here. They would not be pounding us so hard if they wer
e not.”

  “How can they do that?” Gorppet said mockingly. “We have smashed them. They are completely destroyed. The regiment leader has said so.”

  Shazzer laughed—it was either laugh or curse. “I do not think the regiment leader bothered informing the Deutsche of this fact—if it is a fact.”

  “I wish I could get back to my small group,” Gorppet said. “They should have their commander with them.”

  “You would not last long if you climbed out of this hole,” Shazzer said. “Have you never seen that, without its officers, a small group often fights about as well under the command of its underofficers? I would not say that to every male, but you do not strike me as the sort it would insult.”

  “No, superior sir, it does not insult me,” Gorppet answered. “I have been an ordinary trooper and an underofficer myself. I never expected to be anything more. My opinion of officers is not far removed from yours.”

  “Then trust your soldiers,” Shazzer said. “I think we may have to do some fighting of our own here.”

  Sure enough, Big Uglies started falling back past the barn where the regiment leader had held his briefing. They were not Deutsche: they were the local Tosevites, as loyal to the Race as any Big Uglies were. But if they had to retreat, that meant the Deutsche were advancing. “I wish we had more landcruisers in the neighborhood,” Gorppet said fretfully, “more landcruisers and more antilandcruiser rockets.”

  With a shrug, Shazzer answered, “The Deutsche previously concentrated their efforts farther south, in the direction of the city of Lodz—or what was the city of Lodz. Naturally, we concentrated our resources there, too.”

  “Naturally,” Gorppet said bitterly. “And then the Big Uglies shifted their forces and did something we failed to anticipate. This has happened too many times.”

  Before Shazzer could reply, a clanking rumble announced that the Deutsche had landcruisers in these parts, even if the Race didn’t. Gorppet stuck his head out of the hole again. The artillery barrage had moved on, and was now pounding positions farther east. Even if it hadn’t been, he needed to see what was going on. The greater the distance at which he and his comrades engaged the landcruisers, the better.

  “We have to fight as a small group ourselves now,” he told Shazzer. The other male made the gesture of agreement.

  And here came the landcruisers, three of them, much bigger and no doubt much more heavily armored than the ones the Big Uglies had used during the last round of fighting. A Tosevite stood up in the cupola of the closest one. Landcruiser commanders had a habit of doing that; it let them see much more than they could if they stayed buttoned up inside their machines and peered out through periscopes.

  It also left them much more vulnerable. The Race had lost many fine landcruiser commanders—it was commonly the good ones who did stand up and look around—to Tosevite snipers. Now Gorppet did his best to redress the balance. He fired a quick burst from his rifle at the Big Ugly in the cupola. The Deutsch male toppled. “Got him!” Gorppet shouted.

  But the rest of the landcruiser crew had spotted his muzzle flashes. The turret and the big gun it carried swung toward his hole. Before it could fire, though, a Tosevite leaped from cover, scrambled up onto the landcruiser, and threw something down through the open cupola into the turret. Flames and smoke rose. Escape hatches popped open. Big Uglies bailed out. Gorppet gleefully shot them. A moment later, the landcruiser blew up.

  “One of those nasty bottles of burning hydrocarbon distillate,” Shazzer said. “Remember how they gave us fits?”

  “I am not likely to forget,” Gorppet answered. “And I am not sorry to see them used against the Deutsche by Tosevites on our side.”

  A second Deutsch landcruiser exploded, this one even more spectacularly—a hit from another landcruiser’s big gun. Gorppet shouted in glee. Before his shout was through, the third Tosevite landcruiser went up to flames. One of the Race’s machines rattled past the barn, heading west.

  “Maybe the regiment leader was right after all,” Gorppet said. He turned his eye turrets this way and that. “Maybe he is even still alive to find out he was right after all—but I do not see him.” He shrugged. “I do not miss him very much, either. My guess is, we have a better chance against the Deutsche without him.”

  Ever since the fighting stopped—in fact, since before the fighting stopped—Ttomalss had devoted himself to the exhausting task of raising a Tosevite hatchling. From all he’d gathered, the task of raising a Tosevite hatchling was difficult and exhausting even for the Big Uglies themselves. It was doubly—odds were, a lot more than doubly—difficult and exhausting for him, since he was the first male of the Race to try it. He had neither instincts nor accumulated wisdom upon which to fall back.

  Years of patient work had made Kassquit into a female very nearly independent of him. He was grateful for that; it let him analyze some of the work he’d done with her so that others who came after him could do it better, and it also let him do some work unrelated to her. After so long without it, he’d rediscovered the joys of having time to himself again.

  And now the war had broken out once more, confining him to the starship for the time being. That would have been annoying enough by itself, but there was worse. Because he’d raised Kassquit, he was also expected to take charge of Jonathan Yeager, the wild Big Ugly who’d been brought up to the starship to mate with her.

  “This is most unfair,” he complained to the starship captain after receiving the order. “Most extremely unfair, superior sir. Wild Tosevites are only a secondary interest of mine. My main concern his been civilizing Big Uglies unspoiled by their own cultures. In that I have succeeded beyond anyone’s expectations. I cannot promise a result even remotely similar with this specimen.”

  “Senior Researcher, it is a Big Ugly,” the captain said. “You have made a name for yourself as an expert on Big Uglies. If this one does not deal with you, with whom will it deal? With me? I thank you, but no. I have not the patience or the expertise to deal with it. The same holds true for my officers. You are the logical candidate for the job, and you will do it. That is an order, Senior Researcher. Do you understand me?”

  “Only too well, superior sir,” Ttomalss replied with a sigh. “Very well. It shall be done. To the best of my ability, it shall be done.”

  “It is not altogether wild,” the captain reminded him, softening his manner now that he’d got his way. “It speaks our language fairly well for a Tosevite, and it has some knowledge of our culture.”

  “I placed greater hopes on such epiphenomena in former days than I do now,” Ttomalss said. “They are the eggshell. The egg within, I fear, remains profoundly alien.”

  “You do not have to transform it into a female of the Race.”

  “Male,” Ttomalss corrected.

  With a shrug, the captain said, “Whichever. It could matter only to another Big Ugly. As I was trying to tell you, it does not have to become a male of the Race. All you have to do is keep it from getting under everyone else’s scales and making males and females itch while it is up here. Eventually, it will return to its not-empire, after all. Go on. Tend to it.”

  “It shall be done,” Ttomalss repeated miserably, and left the captain’s office.

  When he returned to his own chamber, he found Jonathan Yeager waiting in the hallway outside. The wild Big Ugly assumed the posture of respect and said, “I greet you, superior sir.”

  “I greet you, Jonathan Yeager,” Ttomalss replied with no great warmth. “And what can I do for you today? Is it not something Kassquit could handle for you?” Several times, he had managed to use his Tosevite ward to keep this other Big Ugly from unduly bothering him.

  But Jonathan Yeager shook his head in the Tosevite negative gesture, then remembered to shape his hand into the one the Race used. “No, superior sir, Kassquit cannot handle this. That is why I wanted to talk with you.”

  “Very well,” Ttomalss said, as he had to the starship captain not long before. He opened t
he door. As it slid wide, he went on, “Come in and tell me what you require.” The sooner he dealt with the Big Ugly, the sooner he could return to his own concerns once more.

  “I thank you,” Jonathan Yeager said. As he usually did, he wore wrappings around the area of his private parts. In a way, that marked him as a wild Big Ugly. In another way, though, it simplified his outline; his projecting reproductive organs were quite different from the unobtrusive ones Kassquit had. He sat down in the seat designed for Tosevite hindquarters that Ttomalss had installed in his office.

  “What is it you want, then?” the psychological researcher asked. He was certain the Big Ugly wanted something.

  And, sure enough, Jonathan Yeager said, “I would like to make an arrangement to get a gift for Kassquit, superior sir. I want it to be a surprise. That is why I cannot tell her, and why I had to come to you.”

  “A gift?” Ttomalss was floundering. “What sort of gift?”

  “Something to show I care for her,” the Tosevite replied. “I am not sure what sorts of things I can get for her here. That is another reason I came to you: to learn what is available in the way of such things.”

  “A gift to show you care for her,” Ttomalss repeated. “Care for her in the alarmingly emotional way you Tosevites tend to care for your sexual partners? Is that what you mean?”

  “Well . . . yes, superior sir,” the wild Big Ugly said. “It is a custom among us, for those who are fond of each other.”

  Ttomalss remembered encountering the custom, now that the Big Ugly reminded him of it. He had never thought it would matter to him. More to the point, he had never thought it would matter to Kassquit. He asked, “If you were back in your own not-empire, what gift might you give a female for whom you had conceived such a foolish and violent fondness?”

  “I might get her flowers, superior sir,” Jonathan Yeager answered.

  “Why?” Ttomalss demanded. “What possible good are flowers?”

  “They are pretty,” the Big Ugly replied. “And they smell sweet. Females like them.”