Second Contact Page 4

  Tosevite, Kassquit thought. That is what I call myself. And why not? That is what I am.

  It didn’t seem right. It didn’t seem fair. Without this preposterously large, preposterously ugly body (Kassquit knew the nickname the males of the Race—and, no doubt, this new female, too—had for Tosevites), the good brain inside this strangely domed skull might have accomplished something worthwhile. Oh, it still might, but that was far less likely than it would have been otherwise.

  “If I had been hatched on Home . . .” Kassquit said. And how many times had that thought echoed and reechoed? More than Kassquit could count. Did I ask for this body? Spirits of Emperors past, did I? The eyes that looked down at the metal floor could not slew in turrets. And is that my fault?

  Every step Kassquit took was a reminder of alienness. This Tosevite body would not bend forward into a proper posture—or what would have been a proper posture for anyone else. And the lack of true claws on Kassquit’s fingertips was another inconvenience. Ttomalss had turned out prosthetics that made operating machinery much easier. A proper member of the Race, though, would not have needed prosthetics.

  I am not a proper member of the Race. I am a Tosevite, brought up as if I were a proper member of the Race, or as close to a proper member of the Race as I can be, given my limitations. Oh, how I wish I had no such limitations. I am part person, part experimental animal.

  Kassquit did not resent that. The Race needed experimental animals, to learn how to live with and eventually rule the tempestuous Tosevites. Ttomalss had said as little about the natives of Tosev 3 as he could. From the small things he had let fall now and then, Kassquit understood what an honor, what a privilege, it had been to be selected for this role. Life as a Tosevite peasant? Kassquit’s mouth dropped open in scornful amusement at the idea.

  A small sound escaped Kassquit’s mouth along with the laugh. I should have better control, Kassquit thought. I usually do have better control, but I am upset. Ttomalss had said that Tosevites showed amusement with a noise rather than in the Race’s far more sophisticated, far more elegant fashion.

  I do not want to act like a Tosevite! In no way do I want to act like a Tosevite! I am one, but I wish I were not!

  Some things could not be helped. Posture was one. Skin was another. Kassquit ran one hand along the other arm. I should be a dark greenish brown like a proper male of the Race, or even, I discover, a proper female of the Race. Instead, I am a sort of pale yellowish tan color—a very disagreeable shade for a person to be.

  “And my skin is smooth,” Kassquit said with a sad sigh. “It will never be anything but smooth, I fear.” Kassquit sighed again. When I was coming out of hatchlinghood, how I waited till it would be like the ones everybody else had. I did not really understand then how different I was. The Emperor surely knows I do try to fit in as best I can.

  The skin under Kassquit’s palm was also faintly damp. Ttomalss had explained why that was so: instead of panting to cool the body, Tosevites used the evaporation of metabolic water. Tosev 3 was a wetter world than Home, which let the Big Uglies expend water so lavishly. Tosev 3 was also a colder world than Home, which meant the ship, whose climate was Homelike, seemed warm to Kassquit’s Tosevite body and prompted the activation of the cooling mechanism.

  It all made good sense. Ttomalss had patiently explained it over and over to Kassquit. It was, for Tosevites, thoroughly normal. It was also thoroughly disgusting, as far as Kassquit was concerned.

  Other things about the Tosevite body were even more disgusting: the business of passing liquid waste as well as solid, for instance. That also had to do with Tosev 3’s revolting wetness. Again, Ttomalss had been patience itself in explaining the reasons behind the differences.

  “I do not care about the reasons,” Kassquit muttered. “I wish there were no differences.”

  I am not usually like this, Kassquit thought. Usually, I can see what makes me more like the Race, not what separates me from it. I wish I had not met Felless. Seeing someone freshly come from Home reminds me that I am not and I cannot be. That hurts. It hurts worse than I expected.

  An itch on top of the head made Kassquit scratch. Very, very short hair rasped under the not-quite-claws at the tips of Kassquit’s fingers. Hair was another nasty thing about the Tosevite body. I wish I did not have any, Kassquit thought. Smooth is bad. Hairy is even worse. Emperor be praised that I do get clipped regularly. I wished I could die when the hair started sprouting here and there on my body. Having to get my head clipped is humiliation enough. Add these other spots and it is almost too much to bear.

  Ttomalss had been reassuring about that, too. The Race’s research proved it was normal among Tosevites of about Kassquit’s age. But it was not normal aboard the ship. It made Kassquit even more abnormal here.

  What would I do without Ttomalss? Kassquit wondered. The male had been a guide, a teacher, a mentor, a hearing diaphragm to listen, for all of Kassquit’s life. A hearing diaphragm to listen? I will not think about the strange curls of flesh at the sides of my head, nor about the holes inside them with which I hear. I will not think about them. I will not.

  Trying not to think about something worked as well as that usually did. Kassquit touched an ear, then gave it a painful yank. Maybe I should have these clipped. It would not be too hard, and it would make me look a little closer to the way I should.

  Ttomalss had not wanted to put a mirror in Kassquit’s compartment. His argument had been that looking at such a different face would only lead to discontentment. “I will be more discontented if you do not treat me as if I were part of the Race,” Kassquit remembered saying. “If I were a member of the Race, I would have one.” Ttomalss had yielded; it was the first argument Kassquit had ever won from him.

  The technician who had installed the mirror in the compartment had treated Kassquit like a member of the Race, all right. He had fastened it at a level that would have been perfect for a member of the Race. Kassquit had to stoop to see anything but the paint marking this unsatisfactory body’s unsatisfactory torso.

  Stooping, Kassquit thought, This is how I look. I cannot do anything about it. Small eyes, white with dark center, folds of skin at their inner corners narrowing them further still, without nearly the angle of vision the Race enjoyed. Kassquit had had strips of hair above them, too—Tosevite signaling organs, Ttomalss called them—but those strips got clipped with the rest. A projection below and between the eyes that housed the nostrils. An absurdly small mouth with mobile soft tissue around it and a wildly variegated set of teeth inside.

  Out came Kassquit’s tongue for a critical examination. It needed criticizing, all right, being short and blunt and unforked. Again, and not for the first time, Kassquit wondered whether surgery could correct that flaw.

  “What is the use?” Kassquit said, straightening once more. “What is the use of any of it? They can cut this and clip those and maybe do some other things, too, but it will not help, not really. I will still look like—this.”

  Maybe Ttomalss had been right. Maybe the mirror should have stayed out. In the end, though, how much would it have mattered? I am a Tosevite. I wish I were not, but I am. With or without a mirror, I know it.

  Kassquit went over to the computer terminal, put on false fingerclaws, and returned to the earlier game. But it didn’t engross, as it had before going in to see Felless. Reality has a way of breaking in, Kassquit thought. The best thing about the computer is that it does not know—or if it does know, it does not care; it really does not care—I am a Tosevite. That is one of the reasons it is so much fun. As far as the computer is concerned, I am as good as anybody else. How can I go on believing that, even imagining that, after meeting a female straight from Home?

  “Home,” Kassquit said again, making the word a drawn-out sigh of longing. I know what to do. If I am presented to the Emperor, I know how to bend, I know all the proper responses. I would make Ttomalss proud.

  Another open-mouthed laugh, this one, at least, properly sil
ent. As if anyone would present a Tosevite to the Emperor! Kassquit paused. A Tosevite might be presented to the Emperor, but as a curiosity, not as a person who reverenced him as the Race and the Hallessi and the Rabotevs did. That was not good enough. It made Kassquit angry. I deserve to reverence the Emperor like anyone else!

  “Calm yourself. You are growing too excited,” Ttomalss would have said, had he been there and known what was in Kassquit’s mind. Calm did not come easily; as Ttomalss had explained it, the hormones that produced physical maturation in Tosevites were also liable to produce mood swings wilder than any the Race experienced outside the brief mating season.

  Ttomalss told the truth there as elsewhere, Kassquit thought. All things considered, I would sooner not have gone through maturation.

  Another reluctant trip to the mirror. This time, Kassquit did not stoop, but sighed after looking away at last. Sure enough, the twin bulges of tissue in the upper part of the torso made the lines of her body paint harder to read than they should have been.

  And that was far from the worst of the changes she had undergone. Growing the new patches of hair had been very bad. And, had Ttomalss not warned her she would suffer a cyclic flow of blood from her genital opening, she would surely have thought she was ill from some dire disease when it began. The Race suffered no such grotesque inconveniences. Ttomalss had arranged to bring Tosevite sanitary pads up from the surface of the world below for her. They worked well enough, but that she needed such things galled her.

  But more upsetting even than that were the feelings coursing through her for which the language of the Race seemed to have no names. With them, for once, Ttomalss had been little help. Dispassionate remarks about reproductive behavior did nothing to slow the thudding of Kassquit’s heart, the whistle of the breath through her, the feeling that the compartment was even warmer than normal.

  She had found something that did. Her hand slid down along her painted belly. Of itself, her stance shifted so her feet were wider apart than usual. She looked up at the ceiling, not really seeing it, not really seeing anything. After a bit, she exhaled very hard and quivered a little. Her fingers were damp. She wiped them on a tissue. She knew she would be easier for a while now.

  2

  Peking brawled around Liu Han. She wore the long, dark blue tunic and trousers and the conical straw hat of a peasant woman. She had no trouble playing the role; she’d lived it till the little scaly devils came down from the sky and turned China—turned the whole world—upside down.

  Her daughter, Liu Mei, who walked along the hutung—the alleyway—beside her, was proof of that. Turning to Liu Han, she said, “I hope we won’t be late.”

  “Don’t worry,” Liu Han answered. “We’ve got plenty of time.”

  Liu Mei nodded, her face serious. Her face was almost always serious, even when she laughed. The scaly devils had taken her from Liu Han right after she was born, and had kept her in one of their airplanes that never landed for her first year of life outside the womb—her second year of age, as the Chinese reckoned such things. When a baby, she should have learned to smile by watching people around her. But she’d had only little scaly devils around her, and they never smiled—they could not smile. Liu Mei hadn’t learned how.

  “I should have liquidated that Ttomalss when I had the chance,” Liu Han said, her hands folding into fists. “Mercy has no place in the struggle against imperialism. I understand that now much better than I did when you were tiny.”

  “Truly, Mother, too late to fret over it now,” Liu Mei replied— seriously. Liu Han walked on in grim silence. Her daughter was right, but that left her no happier.

  She and Liu Mei both flattened themselves against the splintery front wall of a shop as a burly, sweating man with a load of bricks on a carrying pole edged past them going the other way. He leered at Liu Mei, showing a couple of broken teeth. “If you show me your body, I will show you silver,” he said.

  “No,” Liu Mei answered.

  Liu Han did not think that was rejection enough, or anywhere close to it. “Go on, get out of here, you stinking turtle,” she screeched at the laborer. “Just because your mother was a whore, you think all women are whores.”

  “You would starve as a whore,” the man snarled. But he walked on.

  The hutung opened out onto P’ing Tsê Mên Ta Chieh, the main street leading east into Peking from the P’ing Tsê Gate. “Be careful,” Liu Han murmured to Liu Mei. “Scaly devils seldom come into hutungs, and they are often sorry when they do. But they do patrol the main streets.”

  Sure enough, here came a squad of them, swaggering down the middle of the broad street and expecting everyone to get out of their way. When people didn’t move fast enough to suit them, they shouted either in their own language—which they expected humans to understand—or in bad Chinese.

  Liu Han kept walking. Even after twenty years of practice, the scaly devils had trouble telling one person from another. Liu Mei bent her head so the brim of her hat helped hide her features. She did not look quite like a typical Chinese, and a bright little devil might notice as much.

  “They are past us,” Liu Han said quietly, and her daughter straightened up once more. Liu Mei’s eyes were of the proper almond shape. Her nose, though, was almost as prominent as a foreign devil’s, and her face was narrower and more forward-thrusting than Liu Han’s. The black hair the hat concealed refused to lie straight, but had a springy wave to it.

  She was a pretty girl—prettier than I was at that age, Liu Han thought—which worried her mother as much as or more than it pleased her. Liu Mei’s father, an American named Bobby Fiore, was dead; the scaly devils had shot him before she was born. Before that, he, like Liu Han, had been a captive on one of those airplanes that never landed. They’d been forced to couple—the little scaly devils had enormous trouble understanding matters of the pillow (hardly surprising, when they came into heat like barnyard animals)—and he’d got her with child.

  Off to the east, toward or maybe past the Forbidden City, gunfire crackled. The sound was absurdly cheerful, like the fireworks used to celebrate the new year. Liu Mei said, “I didn’t know we were doing anything today.”

  “We’re not,” Liu Han said shortly. The Communists were not the only ones carrying on a long guerrilla campaign against the scaly devils. The reactionaries of the Kuomintang had not abandoned the field. They and Mao’s followers fought each other as well as the little devils.

  And the eastern dwarfs kept sending men across the Sea of Japan to raise trouble for the little scaly devils and the Chinese alike. Japan had had imperialist pretensions in China years before the little devils arrived, and resented being excluded from what had been her bowl of rice.

  More scaly devils whizzed past, these in a vehicle mounting a machine gun. They headed in the direction of the firing. None of them turned so much as an eye turret in Liu Han’s direction. Liu Han decided to make a lesson of it. “This is why we are strong in the cities,” she said to Liu Mei. “In the cities, we swim unnoticed. In the countryside, where every family has known its neighbors forever and a day, staying hidden is harder.”

  “I understand, Mother,” Liu Mei said. “But this also works for the Kuomintang, doesn’t it?”

  “Oh, yes,” Liu Han agreed. “A knife will cut for whoever takes it in hand.” She nodded to her daughter. “You are quick. You need to be quick, the way the world is today.”

  When she was Liu Mei’s age and even older, all she’d wanted to do was go on living as she and her ancestors always had. But the Japanese had come to her village, killing her husband and her little son. And then the little scaly devils had come, driving out the eastern dwarfs and capturing her. She, who had not even thought of going to the city, was uprooted from everything she’d ever known.

  And she’d thrived. Oh, it hadn’t been easy, but she’d done it. She had abilities she hadn’t even suspected. Once in a while, when she was in an uncommonly kindly mood, she thought she owed the little scaly devil
s some gratitude for liberating her from her former, ever so limited, life.

  She glanced over to Liu Mei. She owed the scaly devils something else for what they’d done to her daughter. And she’d been giving them what she owed them ever since. That debt might never be paid in full, but she intended to keep on trying.

  Liu Mei’s face did not change much even when she laughed. She laughed now, laughed and pointed. “Look, Mother! More devil-boys!”

  “I see them,” Liu Han said grimly. She did not find the young people—boys and shameless girls, too—in any way amusing. When foreign devils from Europe spread their imperialistic web through China, some Chinese had imitated them in dress and food and way of life because they were powerful. The same thing was happening now with respect to the scaly devils.

  This particular pack of devil-boys took things further than most. Like most such bands, they wore tight shirts and trousers printed in patterns that mimicked body paint, but several had shaved not only their heads but also their eyebrows in an effort to make themselves look as much like scaly devils as they could. They larded their speech with affirmative and interrogative coughs and words from the little scaly devils’ language.

  Many older people gave way before them, almost as they might have for real scaly devils. Liu Han did not. Stolid as if she were alone on the sidewalk, she strode straight through them, Liu Mei beside her. “Be careful, foolish female!” one of the devil-boys hissed in the scaly devils’ tongue. His friends giggled to hear him insult someone who would not understand.

  But Liu Han did understand. That she was part of the revolutionary struggle against the little scaly devils did not mean she had not studied them—just the opposite, in fact. She whirled and hissed back: “Be silent, hatchling from an addled egg!”

  How the devil-boys stared! Not all of them understood what she’d said. But they could hardly fail to understand that a plain, middle-aged woman spoke the little devils’ language at least as well as they did—and that she was not afraid of them. The ones who did understand giggled again, this time at their friend’s discomfiture.