“Ship-?” The female’s small eyes went as wide as they could. Still in the posture of respect, she said, “I meant no offense.”
“I do not reckon myself insulted.” Straha watched her staring at his ornate body paint, and wondered if she would be sporting something like it soon. “You speak and understand my language well,” he said. “Now go and study your chemistry. It may prove useful to you later in life.”
From behind the young female, Sam Yeager spoke again in English: “Yeah, run along, Karen. I’m talking shop here, I’m afraid.” On she went, that bright hair shining. Yeager came back into the study. “I hope she did not disturb you too much, Shiplord.”
“By her presence? No,” Straha replied. “I spoke truth when I said she spoke well. But I hope you will not be insulted when I say I would sooner have a more experienced underofficer in charge of securing a mined area.”
“As a matter of fact, I agree with you.” Yeager shook his head, a gesture of bemusement Straha understood. “But I sometimes think a lot of young males and females would sooner belong to the Race than to their own kind.” He laughed a loud Tosevite laugh. “Even the ones who imitate the Race most closely, though, forget how different your mating habits are from ours. Imitating those would not be easy for them.”
“As things seem to have turned out, your young females and males would say they are imitating our females and males under the influence of ginger,” Straha observed. “That would let them do anything they like in matters pertaining to mating.”
“They already come too close to doing anything they like,” Yeager answered. “It was not like this when I was an adolescent. And my father could have said the same thing before me, and his father before him.”
“There in a sentence you have the difference between your species and mine,” Straha replied. “With us, everything is always the same from one generation to the next.” He paused. “Though I do wonder whether that will hold as true on Tosev 3 as it has on the other worlds we rule. Everything we do here seems built on sand.”
“If you cannot change on this world, you are going to have problems, sure enough,” Sam Yeager said.
“Changing our mating habits will not be easy,” Straha said. “But I can also see that keeping from changing our mating habits will not be easy, either. I crave ginger right now. Surely females will crave it as much as males. If at each taste it stimulates them to give off the pheromones that indicate they are in season… life on this planet will grow even more complicated for us than it is already.”
“You had better get used to the idea, then,” Yeager said. “How do you suppose it will change your society?”
“I do not know. In the absence of data, I would sooner not try to guess,” Straha replied. “My kind is not so given to reckless speculation as is yours.” He pointed to the Tosevite. “I will tell you this, however: life for you independent Big Uglies has also grown more complicated than it used to be.”
“How do you mean?” Yeager asked, and then checked himself. “Oh. Of course. The attack against the colonization fleet.”
“Yes, the attack against the colonization fleet,” Straha agreed. “You Big Uglies learn quickly, but you also forget quickly. The Race is different. If, two hundred years from now, the Race learns which not-empire is guilty of that attack, we will punish that not-empire. And we will be searching for the truth through all those two hundred years.”
“I understand,” Yeager said, but Straha wondered if he really did. He was, after all, a Tosevite himself, even if he had unusual insight into the way the Race thought.
“Is there anything else?” Straha asked him. Yeager shook his head again, this time in negation. Typical Tosevite inefficiency, Straha thought, to have one gesture do duty for two separate meanings. The exile shiplord got to his feet. “Then I shall depart. I now have much to think about, and so, I would imagine, have you.”
“Truth,” said Yeager. He walked with Straha to the front door, and stood watching till the male had got into the Tosevite vehicle in which he was conveyed from one point to another in this city-which was not small even by the standards of the Race.
“Take me back to my home,” he told the Big Ugly who was his driver and guard.
“It shall be done, Shiplord.” The fellow started the vehicle’s motor. As he did so, he remarked, “That was an attractive female who went into Major Yeager’s house.” He appended an emphatic cough.
“If you say so,” Straha answered. “I am glad you found something to amuse you while I was talking with the major. On me, I assure you, the attractiveness, if any, of the female was wasted. I did note, however, that she made a most improbable mine-clearance underofficer.”
His driver laughed. “I believe it!” He glanced back at Straha, a habit the shiplord wished he would forget while the motorcar was moving. “How do you judge if a female of the Race is attractive?”
“By scent more than by sight,” Straha answered absently. He wondered if he should have told Yeager he wanted to mate with a female after all. If he was lucky, his eggs would join in the new society the Race was building here, even if he could not. He shrugged. Mating simply was not the urgent matter with him that it was for Tosevites. He missed it not at all. Getting home to his ginger struck him as much more urgent. “Do not dawdle,” he told the driver, and the motorcar went faster.
11
Rance Auerbach’s laugh, a harsh rasp, sounded almost as much like a death rattle as like honest mirth. “You think it’s true?” he asked Penny Summers. “You reckon ginger really does make those scaly bastards come into heat like it was springtime?”
“Too many people saying it for it to be a lie,” Penny answered. “I think it’s funny as hell, too, matter of fact. Sort of pays them back for all the nasty things they’ve thought about us, you know what I mean?” She lit a Raleigh.
“Give me one of those, will you?” Auerbach said. After he got it going and helped take one more step in wrecking his already damaged lungs, he went on, “Yeah, turnabout’s fair play, all right.”
That made him look out the bedroom window of his Fort Worth apartment, just to see if he noticed anything out of the ordinary. He didn’t. The people whose money Penny had walked off with had promised some turnabout, too. They hadn’t delivered. He was beginning to hope that meant they wouldn’t.
Penny said, “Ought to get some more ginger and smuggle it down into Mexico. Lots of females there, I hear.”
“Think you can?” If Rance didn’t sound dubious, it wasn’t from lack of effort. “There’s some people who aren’t real fond of you, remember?”
“It doesn’t take a whole lot of work to get ginger,” Penny said with a curl to her lip. “Hell, I can buy some down at the grocery store. But I’d want to lime-cure it, make it so the Lizards get all hot and bothered for it, before I took it down. The really tricky part is selling in someone else’s territory. You’re not careful about that, someday somebody’ll find you floating in an irrigation ditch.”
“Why take the chance, then?” Auerbach asked. Ever since the Lizards filled him full of holes, he’d been a lot less enthusiastic about taking chances than back in his Army days.
But Penny’s eyes glittered. “To get a really big stake, why else? I’ve got a good start on one, after I went and stiffed the boys back in Detroit. But I want more. I want enough so I can just go somewhere, get away from everything, and not have to worry about where my next dime is coming from for the rest of my days.”
“Like where?” Rance said, dubious again. “The Big Rock Candy Mountain?”
Penny shook her head. “No, I really mean it. How’s Tahiti sound? About as far away from Kansas as you can get, this side of Oz, anyway.”
Rance grunted thoughtfully. The outfit calling itself Free France still ran Tahiti and the neighboring islands. Neither the USA nor Japan had bothered gobbling them up, partly because that would have set the two at loggerheads, partly because the Free French made themselves very usefuclass="underline" they did business with everybody, people and Lizards alike, and didn’t ask questions of anybody.