Aftershocks c-3 Read online

  The strange gesture made him seem wilder than Jonathan Yeager. He looked wilder, too. He was hairy all over, with short, thick, brown hair streaked with gray growing on his cheeks and chin as well as the top of his head. No one had given him a razor. And he spoke the Race’s language with an accent different from, and thicker than, Jonathan Yeager’s.

  He seemed to be trying not to study her body, which was covered only by the body paint of a psychological researcher’s assistant. Kassquit remembered both Jonathan and Sam Yeager behaving the same way at their first meeting. Coming right out and staring was evidently impolite but difficult to avoid.

  He said, “They told me I would another Tosevite visitor be having. They did not bother telling me you would a female be.”

  “Tosevite sexes and sexuality are matters of amusement and alarm to the Race, but seldom matters of importance,” Kassquit answered. “And, though I am of Tosevite ancestry, I am not precisely a Tosevite myself. I am a citizen of the Empire.” Pride rang in her voice.

  Johannes Drucker said, “I understand the words, but I do not think I understand the meaning behind them.”

  “I have been raised in this starship by the Race from earliest hatchlinghood,” Kassquit said. “Until quite recently, I never so much as met wild Big Uglies.” She hardly ever said Big Uglies around Jonathan Yeager. When speaking to this much wilder Tosevite, it came out naturally.

  “I… see,” the captive said. His mouth twisted up at the corners: the Tosevite expression of amusement. “Now that you have started us meeting, what do you think?”

  Kassquit couldn’t imitate that expression, try as she would. She answered, “The ones I have met are somewhat less barbarous than I would have expected.”

  With a loud, barking laugh, the Deutsch captive said, “Danke schon.” Seeing that Kassquit didn’t understand, he returned to the language of the Race: “That means, I thank you very much.”

  “You are welcome,” Kassquit answered. Only after the words were out of her mouth did she stop and wonder whether he’d been sarcastic. To cover her confusion, she changed the subject, saying, “I am told you came close to destroying this starship.”

  “Yes, that is a truth, superior female,” he agreed.

  “Why?” she asked. War, whether carried on by the Race or by Big Uglies, still seemed very strange to her. “No one aboard this ship was trying to do the Reich any particular harm. Most males and females here are researchers, not combatants.”

  She thought that a paralyzingly effective comment. The wild Big Ugly only shrugged. “Do you think all of the Tosevites in the Deutsch cities on which you dropped explosive-metal bombs were doing nothing but fighting the Race?”

  Kassquit hadn’t really thought about that at all. To her, the Deutsche had been nothing but the enemy. Now that Johannes Drucker pointed it out, though, she supposed most of them had just been going on with their lives. That made her examine her own side in a way she hadn’t before. “Why?” she said again.

  “Anything that the enemy serves a fair target is,” Johannes Drucker replied. “That is how we fight wars. And we have seen that the Race is not very different. No one invited the Race to come here and try to conquer Tosev 3. Do you think it is any wonder that we as hard as we could fought back?”

  “I suppose not,” admitted Kassquit, who hadn’t tried to look at things from the Tosevite point of view. “Do you not think that you would be using explosive-metal bombs on one another if we had not come?”

  “We?” The wild Big Ugly raised an eyebrow in what she’d come to recognize as a gesture of irony. “Superior female, you have no scales that I can see.”

  “I am still a citizen of the Empire,” Kassquit replied with dignity. “I would rather be a citizen of the Empire than a Tosevite peasant, which I surely would have been had the Race not chosen me.”

  “How do you know?” Johannes Drucker asked. “Are you happy here aboard this starship, living with nothing but males and females of the Race? Would you not be happier among your own kind, even as a peasant?”

  Kassquit wished he hadn’t asked the question that particular way. The older and the more conscious of her alienness she’d become, the less happy she’d grown. Some of the males and females of the Race were only too willing to rub her snout in that alienness, too. She answered, “How can I know? How does one find an answer to a counterfactual question?”

  “Carefully,” the wild Tosevite said. For a moment, Kassquit thought he hadn’t understood. Then she realized he was making a joke. She let her mouth drop open for a moment to show she’d got it. He went on, “Everyone’s life is full of counterfactuals. Suppose I this had done. Suppose I that had not done. What would I be now? Dealing with the things that are real is hard enough.”

  That was also a truth. Kassquit made the affirmative gesture. She said, “I am told you do not know what has happened to your mate and your hatchlings. I hope they are well.”

  “I thank you,” Johannes Drucker answered. “I wish I knew, one way or the other. Then I would also how to go ahead know. Now I can only at the same time hope and worry.”

  “What will you do if they are dead?” Kassquit asked. Not until the question was out did she think to wonder whether she should have asked it. By then, of course, it was too late.

  Though still imperfectly familiar with the facial expressions wild Big Uglies used, she was sure Johannes Drucker’s did not show delight. He said, “The only thing I can do then is try to put my life back together one piece at a time. It is not easy, but it happens all the time. It is certainly all the time in the Reich happening now.”

  “Males and females of the Race are also having to rebuild their lives,” Kassquit pointed out. “And the Race did not start this war. The Reich did.”

  “No matter who started it, it is over now,” the wild Big Ugly said. “The Race won. The Reich lost. Putting the pieces back together is always easier for the winners.”

  Was that a truth or only an opinion? Since Kassquit wasn’t sure, she didn’t challenge it. She asked, “If your mate is dead, will you seek another one?”

  “You have all sorts of awkward questions, is it not so?” Johannes Drucker laughed a loud Tosevite laugh, but still did not seem amused. Kassquit did not think he would answer, but he did: “I cannot tell you that now. It depends on how I feel, and it also depends on whether I meet a female I find interesting.”

  “And what makes a female interesting?” Kassquit asked.

  The wild Big Ugly laughed again. “Not only awkward questions, but questions different from the ones the males of the Race, the military males, have asked. What makes a female interesting? Ask a thousand male Tosevites and you will have a thousand answers. Maybe two thousand.”

  “I did not ask a thousand male Tosevites. I asked you,” Kassquit said.

  “So you did.” Instead of mocking her, Johannes Drucker paused and thought. “What makes a female interesting? Partly the way she looks, partly the way she acts. And part of it, of course, depends on whether she me interesting finds, too. Sometimes a male will find a female interesting, but not the other way round. And sometimes a female will want a male who does not want her.”

  “I think the Race’s mating season is a much tidier, much less stressful way of handling reproduction,” Kassquit said.

  “I am sure it is-for the Race,” the wild Big Ugly said. “But it is not how Tosevites do things. We can only what we are be.”

  Confronting her own differences from the Race, Kassquit had seen that, too. Culture went a long way toward minimizing those differences, but could not delete them. She wondered whether to ask Johannes Drucker if he found her attractive, and whether to use an affirmative answer, if she got one, to initiate mating. In the end, she decided not to ask. None of his words showed he might be interested. Neither did his reproductive organ, which was liable to be a more accurate-or at least less deceitful-indicator. As she left the compartment, she wondered if her decision would please Jonathan Yeager.

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p; He was quiet when she returned to the compartment. He did not ask her whether she’d mated with the Deutsch captive. It was as if he did not want to know. He did not have much to say about anything else, either. Kassquit didn’t care for that. She’d grown used to talking with the wild-but not too wild-Tosevite about almost everything. She felt empty, alone, when he responded so little.

  At last, she decided to confront things directly. “I did not mate with Johannes Drucker,” she said.

  “All right,” Jonathan Yeager answered, still not showing much animation. But then he asked, “Why not?”

  “He did not show much interest,” Kassquit replied, “and I did not want to make you unhappy.”

  “I thank you for that,” he said. “I thank you for thinking of me.” He hesitated, then went on, “You ought to think of yourself, too, you know.”

  Kassquit had thought of herself-as a member of the Race, or as close an approximation to a member of the Race as she could be. She’d given little thought to herself as an individual. She hadn’t been encouraged to give much thought to herself as an individual. She said, “Does it not seem that wild Tosevites-especially wild American Tosevites-concern themselves too much with their individual concerns and not enough with the concerns of their society?”

  He shrugged. “I do not know anything about that. But if the individuals are happy, how can the society be unhappy?”

  Big Uglies had a knack for turning things on their head. The Race always thought of society first: if society was well ordered, then individuals would be happy. To look at individuals first… was probably the mark of American Tosevites, with their mania for snoutcounting. “Do you know that you are subversive?” she asked Jonathan Yeager.

  When his eyes narrowed and the corners of his mouth turned up, she responded to his amusement, even if she couldn’t duplicate the expression. Genetic programming, she thought. It couldn’t be anything else.

  He said, “I hope so. As far as we Tosevites are concerned, a lot about the Race could use subverting.”

  Had he said that when he first came up to the starship, she would have been furious. But now she had seen that he had his own way of looking at things, different from hers. From his sense of perspective, she was beginning to get one of her own. She said, “Well, you are halfway to subverting me.” They both laughed.

  As a senior researcher, Ttomalss stayed busy on a wide variety of projects, some his own, others assigned him by his superiors. Staying busy was what he got for being an expert on the Big Uglies. Of course, his research on Kassquit remained an important part of his work. Now that she was an adult, though, he did not have to give her constant attention, as he had when she was a hatchling.

  He still recorded everything that went on in her compartment. He would do that as long as she lived (unless she chanced to outlive him, in which case whoever succeeded him would continue the recording). She was far too valuable a specimen to let any data go to waste. Even if Ttomalss couldn’t evaluate all of it, some other analyst would in years or generations to come. The Race would be a long time figuring out what made the Tosevites respond as they did.

  Because he had been involved in her life so long and so closely, Ttomalss still evaluated as much of the raw data as he could. Kassquit’s interactions with Jonathan Yeager had taught him as much about the Big Uglies’ sexual dynamics as he’d learned anywhere else. Those interactions had also taught him a great deal about the limits of cultural indoctrination for Tosevites.

  “Well, you are halfway to subverting me,” Kassquit had told the wild Big Ugly a couple of days before Ttomalss reviewed the audio and video. Both Tosevites had used their barking laughter, so Ttomalss presumed she was making a joke.

  Hearing it hurt even so, because he feared truth lay beneath it. You cannot hatch a beffel out of a tsiongi’s egg was a proverb older than the unification of Home. He’d done his best with Kassquit, and had improved his chances of turning her into something close to a female of the Race by not allowing her any contact with wild Big Uglies till she was an adult.

  As he pondered, the recording kept playing in his monitor. Before long, Kassquit and Jonathan Yeager were mating. Watching them, Ttomalss let out a small, irritated hiss. He’d known how corrosive a force Tosevite sexuality was. Now he was seeing it again.

  He moved the recording back to Kassquit’s telling Jonathan Yeager she had not mated with the other Big Ugly aboard the starship. Ttomalss had wondered whether she would; he’d made a point of not mentioning the subject so he could avoid influencing her actions. Since she’d become acquainted with the pleasures of mating, he had rather expected that she would indulge herself. But no.

  “Pair bonding,” he said, and his computer recorded the words. “Because Kassquit is presently satisfied with Jonathan Yeager as a sexual partner, she seeks no other. These bonds of sexual attraction, and the bonds of kinship that spring from them, create the passionate attachments so characteristic of Big Uglies-and so dangerous to the Race.”

  The trouble is, he thought, that Big Uglies calculate less than we do. If they are outraged because of harm that has come to individuals for whom they have conceived one of these passionate attachments, they will seek revenge without regard for their own safety. Preventing damage from Big Uglies willing, even eager, to die if they can also hurt us is very difficult.

  Ttomalss wondered if that hadn’t been the motivation behind the Reich’s attack on the Race. More than any of the Big Uglies’ other independent not-empires, the Greater German Reich struck him as a Tosevite family writ large. The not-emperors of the Reich had always stressed the ties of kinship existing among their males and females. They had also stressed the innate superiority of the Deutsche over all other varieties of Tosevites. Ttomalss, like other researchers from the Race-and like non-Deutsch Big Uglies-was convinced that was drivel, but the Deutsche really believed it.

  And, believing in their own superiority, believing in the wisdom of their not-emperors because those leaders were perceived as kin, the Deutsche had charged off to war against the Race without so much as a second thought. Ttomalss wondered if they-the survivors, a decided minority-still relied so blindly on the wisdom of those leaders.

  But he did not have to wonder, not with a Deutsch Tosevite aboard this very starship. He paid another visit to the compartment where Johannes Drucker was housed. The Big Ugly who had almost destroyed the ship saluted him and said, “I greet you, superior sir.” He did not make a difficult captive, much to the relief of every male and female of the Race aboard the starship.

  “And I greet you,” Ttomalss said. “Tell me, how do you feel about the leaders of your not-empire who took you into a losing war?”

  “I always thought anyone who wanted the Race to attack was a fool,” the Big Ugly replied at once, his syntax strange but understandable. “I have in space been, after all. I know, and always did know, the Race is stronger than the Reich. I blame my leaders for their ignorance.”

  That was a sensible answer; a member of the Race might have said much the same thing. “If you believed them to be fools,” Ttomalss asked, “why did you and the other Deutsche obey them without question?”

  “I do not know,” Johannes Drucker said. “Why did the males of your conquest fleet, when they saw Tosev 3 was so different from what they had expected, keep on saying, ‘It shall be done,’ to your leaders, even after those leaders ordered them to do many foolish things?”

  “That is different,” Ttomalss said testily.

  “How, superior sir?” the Deutsch male asked.

  “The answer should be obvious,” Ttomalss said, and changed the subject: “What will you and your fellow Deutsche do if your new not-emperor tries to lead you into further misadventures?”

  “I do not believe he will,” Johannes Drucker said. “I have known him for some time. He is an able, sensible male.”

  Ttomalss doubted Drucker’s objectivity. In any case, the Big Ugly had been too literal-minded to suit him. “Let me rephrase that,”
the psychological researcher said. “What will you Deutsche do if some future leader seeks to lead you into misadventures?”

  “I do not know,” Johannes Drucker answered. “How can I know, until a thing happens?”

  Seeing he wasn’t going to get anywhere on that line of questioning, Ttomalss tried another: “What do you think of the female, Kassquit?”

  Johannes Drucker let out several yips of Tosevite laughter. “I never expected a female Tosevite aboard your starship to meet, especially one without any… wrappings?” He had to cast about to find the term the Race used. “It made life here more entertaining than I thought it would be.”

  “Entertaining.” That was hardly the word Ttomalss would have used. “Did you find yourself interested in mating with her?”

  The Big Ugly shook his head, then used the Race’s negative hand gesture. “For one thing, I hope my own mate is still alive down in the Reich. For another, I did not think Kassquit was interested in mating with me.” Ttomalss wasn’t so sure Johannes Drucker was right about that, but gave no sign of what he thought. The Tosevite continued, “And I did not her attractive find, or not very. I like females with”-he gestured to show he meant hair-“and with faces that move more.”

  “Kassquit cannot help the way her face behaves,” Ttomalss said. “That seems to happen when the Race raises Tosevites from hatchlinghood.”

  “You have it with others tried?” Drucker sounded accusing. Ttomalss hoped he was misreading the Big Ugly, but didn’t think so. Before he could answer, Drucker added, “I suppose it is a wonder that she is not more nearly insane than she is in fact.”

  In a way, that casual comment infuriated Ttomalss. In another way, he understood it. Judged by Tosevite standards, he couldn’t have done a perfect job of raising Kassquit, despite his years of effort. He said, “She is satisfied with her life here.”

  “But naturally. She knows no other,” Johannes Drucker said.

  “If she did know another life, it would be as a Chinese peasant,” Ttomalss said. “Do you think that would be preferable to what she has now?”