Only slowly did the difference between here and Home sink into Atvar’s mind: what with ginger and pheromones, he was far more distracted than he should have been. Back on Home, everyone expected the season. It was part of the rhythm of the year, not a disruption.
Here in Australia, the reverse was true. This city had just hatched from its egg. Much of it, in fact, still remained inside the shell. Males and females had plenty to do without worrying about the distraction of mating as if they were so many Big Uglies. Some of that work would get done wrong now. Some of it would not get done at all. Out across the city, more males and females were liable to be hurt by the sudden onset of the season than from debris falling out of the sky.
Clever, Atvar thought after a while. The Big Uglies who had done this were liable to be more clever than he was at the moment. His wits working far less clearly than they should have, he wondered whether inciting the Race to mate could be construed as an act of war. Was it not closer to what the Tosevites called, for no obvious reason, a practical joke?
And yet, if they chose to do it again, would they not disrupt life here once more? If, after disrupting life, they followed with an attack that did include nuclear weapons or poisonous gas, what then? We would be in trouble then, Atvar thought.
He’d never imagined he might wish he had not had the joy of mating.
Felless craved ginger. She fought against the craving with a grim intensity the likes of which she’d never imagined. It wasn’t so much that she worried about the immediate effects of the ginger itself. But what it would do to her, what it would do to the males around her…
Whenever she tasted, she went into her season. She’d done that often enough to be convinced it was the ginger. She didn’t want to do it again. It turned her into an animal, one whose desires were even more alien to her than those of the Tosevites she was supposed to be studying. She knew all that. She understood it down to the core.
She still craved ginger.
Every so often, on the streets of Nuremberg or in the corridors of the Race’s embassy to the Reich, she would pass males and females coupling. New regulations had done little to stop it. Every so often, a male filled with lust by some other female’s pheromones would advance upon her with raised head scales and erect posture.
When she had no ginger in her, when she wasn’t chemically stimulated to go along with such nonsense, she enjoyed telling those males what she thought of them. Most of them looked astonished. One had been so drunk on pheromones, she’d had to bite him to get him to leave her alone.
And one, a clever fellow, had offered her ginger. “Have a taste,” he’d said, those upright scales on his head quivering. “You’ll feel like mating then.”
“I do not want to feel like mating!” she’d shouted in a transport of fury that still astonished her. “If my season had come on its own, that would have been one thing. Drugging myself for the sake of your mating urge is something else again.”
“Spoilsport,” he’d hissed, and gone off in a huff. He was Ambassador Veffani’s first secretary, an important male in the embassy. Felless had to hope he wouldn’t hold a grudge against her once female pheromones weren’t addling his scent receptors.
The trouble was, males remained in a state of low-grade lust for days at a time. One female or another in the embassy would taste ginger and set them off. Every so often, Felless proved unable to resist temptation herself. One of the males who coupled with her during a slip was the first secretary. Maybe that made him stop resenting her for her earlier refusal.
Even the Big Uglies noticed the disruption that had come over the Race. One of them, a male with a Deutsch chemical firm, complained to her about it: “Before, we could make arrangements and rely on them. Now, nothing your males and females say can be trusted from one day to the next. This is not good.”
“Were it not for the herb that comes from this planet, were it not for the Tosevites who supply us this herb, we would not have such difficulties,” she answered, not wanting all the blame to rest on her back.
She failed to impress the Big Ugly. “We Tosevites have also drugs,” he answered. “They do not turn all of us unreliable. When we catch Tosevites who use drugs, we treat them as criminals. We punish them. Sometimes we punish them severely.”
What a Deutsch male meant by severe punishment was either death or something that would make the victim long for it. Felless did not care to imagine herself on the receiving end of such punishment. She said, “We also punish those who use ginger.”
“You do not punish them enough, or they would not dare use it,” the Tosevite told her.
He sounded logical. He also sounded sure of himself. The Deutsche had a way of doing both those things at once. Sometimes, that made them very effective. Others, it just meant they went more spectacularly wrong than they would have otherwise. “Your ways are too harsh for us,” Felless said.
“Then you will suffer because of this,” the Big Ugly said, “and those of us who do business with you, unfortunately, will also suffer.” He got up and bowed stiffly from the waist, the Tosevite equivalent of the posture of respect. Then he turned and marched out of Felless’ office.
Troubled, she went to see the ambassador to the Deutsche. “Superior sir,” she said, “we are becoming the laughingstock of the Tosevites. Something must be done to minimize the effect ginger has on us.”
“In principle, Senior Researcher, I agree,” Veffani answered. “After the ginger bombs above our new city in Australia, I could scarcely disagree. Wherever we have both males and females, the Big Uglies have it within their power to incapacitate us. This is a danger we did not face even during the fighting.”
“What are we to do?” Felless asked.
“I do not know,” the ambassador said. “This is still under discussion by leading officials of both the conquest fleet and the colonization fleet. One part of the emerging solution-or emerging effort to find a solution-is the imposition of harsher penalties on those guilty of tasting ginger.”
“That solution would appeal to the Big Uglies,” Felless said, and explained the conversation she’d just had with the Deutsch male. “Shall we imitate their barbarism?”
“We may have no choice,” Veffani replied. “If we do not imitate their barbarism, we seem to be heading in the direction of imitating their reproductive habits, as you must realize.” Felless realized it all too well; he had coupled with her that first time she’d tasted ginger, when she still did not know what it would do to her. The ambassador went on, “Which would you prefer?”
“Neither, superior sir,” Felless answered at once. “I would prefer for things to return to the way they have always been.”
“A sentiment worthy of the Race,” Veffani said. “Tell me, then, how to make this particular situation unhatch and return to its egg.”
“I cannot,” Felless said softly. “I wish I could. And, speaking of eggs…”
She could feel a pair growing inside her, though they would not be ready to lay for some time yet. She had thought a successful mating-whichever one it had been-would shut down her desire and her production of pheromones. That was the sensible way things had worked back on Home.
As the males of the conquest fleet said over and over again, nothing on Tosev 3 worked the way it did back on Home. Ginger short-circuited the end of her cycle. Even though she was gravid, she still released pheromones and wanted to mate every time she tasted. The matings, she knew, were no more than meaningless sensation, like the meaningless sensation suffusing so much of Tosevite sexuality. That did not mean she did not hunger for them.
Ginger also produced nothing but meaningless sensation. That did not mean she did not hunger for it, either.