A human would have spoken of throwing away the key. As Auerbach raised his hands over his head, he wasn’t inclined to quibble about differ-ences in slang. He’d always known this day might come. He found himself less frightened, less furious, than he’d imagined he would or could be if it did. Turning his head toward Penny, he said, “I told you so.”
“Oh, shut up,” she answered, but he still thought he got the last word.
Nesseref always checked her telephone for messages when she got home after walking Orbit. As often as not, the messages she did get were advertisements, some delivered by real members of the Race reading from scripts, some altogether electronic. She deleted both sorts without the least hesitation. Nobody was ever going to convince her that she could set foot on the road to riches by responding to a phone call from someone far likelier to be out for his profit than her own.
Today, though, she had one of a different sort. A weary-looking male’s visage appeared on her monitor. “I am Gorppet, of Security,” he said. “I am calling from Kanth, near Breslau, in the Greater German Reich. We are both acquaintances of the Big Ugly named Mordechai Anielewicz. Please return my call at your convenience. I thank you.” His recorded image disappeared.
What sort of trouble has Anielewicz found now? Nesseref wondered. Gorppet’s phone code was part of the message. She let the computer reply, wondering if she would have to record a message for him in turn. But she got him. “Small-Unit Group Leader Gorppet speaking,” he announced. “I greet you.”
“And I greet you. Shuttlecraft Pilot Nesseref, returning your call.”
“Ah. I thank you for being so prompt,” Gorppet said.
“Mordechai Anielewicz is not just an acquaintance to me,” Nesseref said. “As you will probably know, he is a friend. From your call, I presume that he is now a friend in trouble. How can I help him?”
“He is indeed a friend in trouble.” Gorppet made the affirmative gesture. “He is being held hostage by several males of the Jewish superstition here in Kanth. They may well kill him. It is even possible they have killed him already.”
“Wait!” Nesseref exclaimed. “You must be mistaken. Anielewicz belongs to this superstition himself.”
“I spoke truth,” Gorppet said. “You do know that these Jews in Poland have an explosive-metal bomb.”
“I know Anielewicz claimed to have one,” Nesseref replied. “I never knew whether that was a truth, or only a fiction intended to impress me.”
“It is, unfortunately, a truth,” Gorppet told her. “And Jews, it seems, are no more immune to factional squabbles than any other Big Uglies. A faction that wanted to damage the Deutsche to the greatest possible degree seized control of the bomb during the late fighting and moved it to this vicinity.”
“I . . . see.” Nesseref saw only too well, and liked none of what she saw. “What will the Deutsche do if such a bomb bursts among them? What can they do?”
“No one precisely knows except for their own high-ranking officers,” Gorppet said. “No one is eager to find out. We are operating on the assumption that they have more weapons than they surrendered to us. All evidence strongly points that way. That is why Anielewicz agreed to try to persuade these Jews to give themselves up.”
“To help the Race? To help the Deutsche?” Nesseref said. “That is extraordinarily generous of him.” She used an emphatic cough.
Gorppet’s voice was dry: “I doubt those were his main motivations. I think he was more concerned lest Poland, his homeland, receive the brunt of whatever counterattack the Deutsche might make.”
“Ah. Yes, that does make a certain amount of sense,” Nesseref agreed. “But you have not answered the first question I asked you: how can I help him?”
“I have not thought of any direct way,” Gorppet said. “Still, you know him well and you know Big Uglies well in general, especially for a female from the colonization fleet. Would you be willing to enter the Reich and become part of the team that is seeking to regain control over this bomb?”
“Provided my superiors approve, I would be happy to,” Nesseref said.
“I have taken the liberty of making those arrangements before speaking to you,” Gorppet said. “I will send transportation for you shortly.”
“Have you? Will you?” Nesseref couldn’t decide whether to be grateful or annoyed. “How very . . . efficient.” She grudgingly gave the male the benefit of the doubt.
He proved as good as his word. Nesseref had just got Orbit’s food and water ready for her own absence when an official motorcar pulled up in front of her apartment building. The driver telephoned from the motorcar, as if to leave her in no possible doubt: “I await you, Shuttlecraft Pilot.”
“Coming.” Nesseref hurried to the elevator, waited impatiently for it to arrive, and then rode down to the lobby. When she went out to the motorcar, she asked the driver, “Will you take me to this town by Breslau?”
“No, superior female,” he said, and drove her out of the new town to where a helicopter waited on the yellowish, dying grass of a meadow. She did not care for helicopters, reckoning them unsafe. But she boarded this one with no more than a minimal qualm. It sprang into the air and flew off toward the west.
When it landed, it came down not far from the wrecked and radioactive Deutsch city, at an encampment almost as large as the nearby Tosevite town of Kanth. At first, Nesseref was surprised to discover that the encampment contained Deutsch Tosevites as well as members of the Race. Then she realized that made good logical sense. The Deutsche, after all, were the ones most intimately concerned with the explosive-metal bomb.
“Yes, it is a considerable embarrassment for us,” Gorppet said when she was escorted to his tent. “The Jews, after all, are Big Uglies who are sup-posed to be under our control. For them to act so emphatically against our interest makes us look like fools to the Deutsche.”
“And to other Big Uglies,” Nesseref remarked.
“And to other Big Uglies,” the male from Security agreed. “The problem the Jews pose the Deutsche is at present the most urgent, however.”
“These Jews refuse to release Anielewicz?” Nesseref asked.
Gorppet made the affirmative gesture. “He went to them, they seized him, and he has not been seen since. We cannot prove he is still alive, but we presume he is, or the Big Uglies with the bomb would likely have tried to detonate it.”
“I . . . see,” Nesseref said, as she had when he telephoned her. “You have a lot of optimistic speculation resting on very little evidence, or so it seems to me.”
“That may well be so,” Gorppet said.
“Has anyone found a way to extract Anielewicz from his predicament?” Nesseref asked.
Now Gorppet used the negative gesture. “Not without unacceptable risk of having the bomb go off,” he replied.
“That would be unfortunate,” Nesseref said.
“Truth. And especially for Anielewicz.” Yes, Gorppet’s voice was dry. “Consideration is also being given to a bombardment so sharp and intense, it would kill everyone in the house before anyone could trigger the bomb.”
“That would be wonderful, if it worked,” Nesseref said. “How likely is it to work, do you think?”
“If either we or the Deutsche thought it likely, it would have been attempted by now,” the male replied. “That no one has attempted it shows how risky it is. That it remains under consideration shows how seriously both we and the Deutsche view this situation.”
“I understand,” Nesseref said. “Have you come to any better notion of how I may help rescue Anielewicz and keep the bomb from going off?”
“Unfortunately, no,” the male from Security told her. “But, since you know him well, I was hoping you might have insights and ideas that have not occurred to me.” Another male came in. His body paint was slightly more elaborate than Gorppet’s. To him, Gorppet said, “Superior sir, here is Shuttlecraft Pilot Nesseref. Shuttlecraft Pilot, I present to you Hozzanet, my superior.”
“I greet y
ou,” Nesseref said.
“And I greet you,” Hozzanet replied. “Welcome to the waiting room, Shuttlecraft Pilot. We hope we are far enough away to escape the worst effects of blast and radiation. We also hope we do not have to try to find out experimentally.”
“I can see that you might.” Nesseref swung an eye turret from Hozzanet to Gorppet and back again. “Are all Security males as cynical as the two of you?”
“Probably,” Hozzanet answered. “It is a useful part of our professional baggage. Believing the males and females and Big Uglies we are in charge of investigating would only trap us in a net of lies.”
“From your point of view, I suppose that makes sense,” Nesseref said. “You must have endless trouble with such unreliable and ever-shifting circumstances. I am glad I deal with the physical universe, with constants rather than variables.”
A couple of other males in the body paint of Security pushed their way into the tent. Nesseref paid them no special notice till one of them asked, “Small-Unit Group Leader Gorppet?” When Gorppet made the affirmative gesture, both males drew pistols and aimed them at him. The one who’d spoken before said, “You are under arrest, on suspicion of dealing in ginger and violent assault on the Race in the subregion known as South Africa. Your Tosevite accomplices have been captured in the not-empire of France, and have made full confessions.”
Nesseref stared in astonishment. Gorppet said, “I deny everything.” He sounded convincing. But he’d just shown he, like Hozzanet, believed in very little. He would sound convincing, regardless of whether he spoke truth.
Hozzanet spoke to the males with the pistols: “We are in an emergency situation here. For the good of the Race, I ask that you allow my subordinate to stay free till it is resolved. If it is resolved satisfactorily, he will probably have earned a pardon. If not”—he shrugged—“we are all liable to be dead.”
The Security male who’d been quiet till then said, “We have no authority to bargain with you or with him.”
“Then you had better get some.” Hozzanet was as ready to bend the rules as a Big Ugly. “Go on. I give my pledge, in the Emperor’s name, that he will not flee.”
After whispering to each other, the Security males made the affirmative gesture. “On your snout be it,” one of them said. He left. His partner stayed.
“I thank you, superior sir,” Gorppet said quietly.
“I warned you when I recruited you for Security that we would not tolerate large-scale ginger operations,” Hozzanet said. “But you have a chance to redeem yourself even there—if that bomb does not burst.”
“If it does, spirits of Emperors past will judge us,” Nesseref said, and cast down her eye turrets.
“That is a truth,” Hozzanet agreed. “And they will judge harshly—they have never heard of ginger.”
“What you need to do,” Nesseref said, “is to get into communication with Anielewicz and help him persuade his fellow Jews not to detonate the explosive-metal bomb. If not . . .” She found herself puzzled and dismayed. She had never thought she would have any great use for a ginger dealer, but Gorppet plainly worked hard on his actual duties when he was not involved with the herb. And he didn’t seem to use it as some males did, as a tool to get females to mate with him.
Now he made the affirmative gesture. “That is a truth, superior female. It is what I need to do—or you, if you think the Big Ugly more likely to heed a friend than an acquaintance. But do you have any idea how to accomplish it without inciting the other Jewish Tosevites to set off the bomb?”
Wishing she could do anything else but, Nesseref used the negative gesture.
Prevod was an excellent writer. Straha would never have asked her to collaborate with him had he not liked some of her work he’d seen. And, as he saw from the prose the two of them produced together, his memoirs would be an egg-smasher to set tongues wagging for years . . . if they were ever published. He’d always expected Atvar to prove an obstacle to publication. He hadn’t expected the same problem from his coauthor.
“But, Shiplord, you cannot say that !” Prevod exclaimed, not for the first time, when Straha outlined another of the quarrels that had led to his barely unsuccessful effort to overthrow Atvar as fleetlord of the conquest fleet.
“And why not?” Straha demanded. He liked it that she was polite enough to call him shiplord, even though he was no longer entitled to wear the body paint showing him to be the third most powerful male in the conquest fleet. “It is a truth. I never stopped warning him that his half measures would lead to trouble. He continued them, and they did indeed lead to trouble.”
“Have you got documentary evidence to support this?” Prevod asked.
“I am sure such evidence exists,” Straha said. “I did not offer this advice in secret, but in meetings of the high-ranking officers of the fleet. Those records would have been preserved.”
“Can we gain access to them?” Prevod asked. “Or are they concealed from general view under secrecy regulations?”
“The latter, I would suspect,” Straha said. “Atvar would not be eager to have his ineptitude displayed for everyone to see.” He hesitated. When he went on, his tone was grudging: “And, I admit, even now we might not want the Big Uglies to learn how divided and uncertain we were in those days. They might think that malady still afflicted us. And”—acid returned to his voice—“with Atvar still in command, they might be right.”
Prevod sighed. “Without the documentation, Shiplord, how can I hope to include this incident in the book?”
Straha sighed, too. “I am not writing a history text here, you know. Footnotes are not mandatory.” He studied Prevod. She was young and bright and highly skilled with words. When he engaged her, he’d thought that would be enough. He’d thought it would be more than enough, in fact. What he thought now was, Maybe I was wrong. Swinging an eye turret her way, he asked, “Have you ever felt inclined to challenge authority?”
“Why, no, Shiplord.” She sounded astonished that he should put such a question to her. “Those senior to me are generally senior for good reason. They know more than I do, and have more experience. Should I not learn from them rather than trying to substitute my inferior judgment for theirs?”
That was the response a female of the Race should have given. It was the response the large majority of males and females would have given. Straha knew as much. But hearing it now frustrated him no end. “If those in authority make a mistake, should you not point it out? If you fail to point it out, will they not go on making it—and probably making other mistakes as well?”
“Their own superiors are the ones who should correct them,” Prevod replied. “That is not an appropriate role for an inferior.”
“Who was Atvar’s superior?” Straha asked. “He made mistakes. He made them in huge lots. Who was to point them out to him? He had no superiors here. He still has none—and he is probably still making mistakes.”
“In my opinion, rehashing a past that cannot be changed will not gain you many readers,” Prevod said. “You would create a far more entertaining and exciting book by concentrating on the foibles of the Big Uglies and on your return to the Race with the information about which group of Tosevites attacked the colonization fleet. Do remember, most of those who read the book will have come here as members of the colonization fleet, not the conquest fleet.”
“I understand that,” Straha said. “You want this to be an entertaining and exciting memoir, then, not an important one?”
“If no one reads it, how can it be an important memoir?” Prevod said.
By the Emperor, how I want a taste of ginger, Straha thought. By the Emperor, how I need a taste of ginger. He refrained, though it wasn’t easy. He knew he would have a harder time putting up with Prevod if he did taste. Picking his words with care, he said, “One of the so-called foibles you mention was an honesty so thoroughgoing, the male who possessed it gave me information that would harm his own not-empire and his own species because he judged that the right
thing to do. How many males and females of the Race could hope to match him? But perhaps that would not amuse my readers enough to be entertaining.”
He intended his words for sarcasm. But Prevod took them literally, saying, “Many would think well of the Big Ugly under those circumstances. Having a sympathetic Tosevite appear might make for an interesting novelty.”
“We both use the language of the Race,” Straha said, “but I wonder if we speak the same tongue. Maybe I should go on in English.” He spoke the last sentence in the Tosevite language. He hadn’t used it since fleeing the United States.
“What did you just say?” Now Prevod sounded interested. When he told her, she went on, “Did you have to learn that Tosevite tongue? Were the Big Uglies too ignorant to learn ours?”
“You really ought to know better,” Straha said. “Some of them not only speak it but write it quite well.” That was when he realized he’d lost his temper, for he added, “About as well as you do, in fact.”
Prevod’s tailstump quivered in anger. She said, “That is ridiculous.”
“Is it?” Yes, Straha had lost his temper. He wrote an electronic message to Sam Yeager under the name of Maargyees that Yeager used to fool the Race’s computer network: I am trying to persuade a certain—a very certain—female that you are literate in our language.
Luck was with him, for a reply came back almost at once: I am sorry, Shiplord, but I cannot write it any more than I can speak it.
I see, Straha wrote back. And why not?
Because I am only a Big Ugly, of course, Sam Yeager returned. How can anyone without a tailstump have any brains? That is where the Race keeps them, is it not?
I often wonder if we keep them anywhere, Straha wrote.
Well, in that case you are wasted as a male of the Race, his Tosevite friend answered. You really ought to turn into a Big Ugly.
Straha’s mouth fell open in startled laughter. He swung an eye turret away from the monitor and back toward Prevod. “Do you see what I mean?”
The writer’s tailstump was twitching more than ever. “If you care for his writing so much, Shiplord”—now she used the title as one of reproach, not respect; he could hear the difference in her voice—“maybe you ought to get him to compose your memoirs with you.”
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