Second Contact

The truck rumbled off down the street, leaving a cloud of noxious fumes in its wake. Nesseref coughed a couple of times, and did her best not to breathe till the cloud dispersed. Yes, paying Big Uglies to haul trash made sense. But Big Uglies also made trucks. If they did that more cheaply than members of the Race could, would paying them for such manufacturing also make sense? Nesseref didn’t know. She did know some of the colonists were industrial workers. If they didn’t manufacture, say, trucks, what would they do?

If the trucks they did make were better but at the same time more expensive than those of the Big Uglies, what would the Race do? What should the Race do? She was glad she didn’t have to decide things like that.

She prowled the streets of the new town, now and then looking up through the scattered clouds at the stars. She knew the constellations well; they didn’t look a great deal different from the way they would have in the northern hemisphere back on Home, though of course they rotated about a different imaginary axis.

Little by little, the eastern sky turned pale with the approach of day. Before the star Tosev came up, a mist rose on the fields and meadows around the settlement the Race had built. Tendrils flowed through the streets, leaving the air damp and clammy. Despite that and despite the unpleasant chill, Nesseref stayed out, watching in fascination. Such mists occurred in only a few places back on Home, and then but seldom; the air usually stayed too dry to support them. They seemed common enough here in Poland, but still intrigued her.

This one, like most, hugged the ground. When Nesseref looked up through it, she had no trouble seeing the tops of taller buildings. But when she turned her eye turrets down to street level, so that she peered along the layer of water droplets, the lower stories of nearby structures blurred, while those farther away-and not much farther away, at that-disappeared altogether. She might have been alone in the center of a small, clear circle, the rest of the planet (for all she could prove, the rest of the universe) shrouded in fog. Even the sounds that reached her hearing diaphragms were distant, muffled, attenuated.

When Tosev rose, the mist let her look at it without protection. That seemed even stranger to her than the fog itself. As a shuttlecraft pilot, she’d grown used to harsh, raw sunlight, unfiltered even by atmosphere, let alone by these billions of droplets. Even a glimpse of a sun should have been enough to make her automatically turn her eye turrets away. But no, not here. She could look at Tosev with impunity-and she did.

With sunrise, the town began to come to life around her. Males and females trooped out of their apartment buildings. Off they went, to whatever work they had. A couple of them turned curious eye turrets in her direction. She wasn’t going anywhere. She was only standing and watching. That made her not fit in. She kept on doing nothing but standing and watching, too, which left the curious no excuse to ask her any questions. That suited her fine.

Now she didn’t know that she felt like breakfast, but she didn’t know that she felt like any different meal, either. She did feel like something, and breakfast would do. She had to look around to see where she was; she’d walked through the night almost at random. But the new town wasn’t large enough to make getting lost easy. Before long, she found herself in an eatery she’d already visited several times.

“Ham and eggs,” she told the male behind the counter. Ham she esteemed, as did most of the Race; the only thing better she’d found on Tosev 3 was ginger, and ginger she stubbornly refused. The local eggs tasted different from those of Home-rather more sulfurous-but weren’t bad when flavored with enough salt.

As the male gave her the meal, he remarked, “Before long, they will start bringing down our own domestic animals. Then we shall have proper eggs and more kinds of meat worth eating.”

“Good,” Nesseref said, handing him her identification card so he could charge her credit balance. “Yes, that will be very good indeed. Little by little, we may be putting down roots on this world after all. Perhaps our settlement here will work out, even if not in the way we thought it would before leaving Home.”

“This is not such a bad place,” the male answered. “Cold and wet, but we already knew that. If only there were fewer Big Uglies ru

“Truth,” Nesseref said. Did the Tosevite called Anielewicz have an explosive-metal bomb? Even if he didn’t, did it matter? The Reich and the SSSR and the United States had them. She was sure the countermale had meant Tosevites with rifles and submachine guns. They were the visible danger. But the ones with bombs were worse.

Atvar was feeling harassed. He should have been used to the feeling, after so much time on Tosev 3. In fact, he was used to the feeling. But he had less chance than usual to make the male addressing him regret it, because Reffet was every bit as much a fleetlord as he was.

“By the Emperor, Atvar,” Reffet snarled now, looking most unhappy indeed on Atvar’s screen, “what are these accursed American Big Uglies playing at with their preposterous space station? The miserable thing bloats like a tumor.”

“I do not know what they are doing,” Atvar answered. What he was doing was trying to hold his temper. Being an equal, Reffet was entitled to use his unadorned name. Equal or not, the fleetlord of the colonization fleet wasn’t entitled to use his name in that tone of voice. “Whatever it is, I doubt it means danger to us. When Big Uglies plan something dangerous, they rarely let us see any of it beforehand.”

“They have no business pla

“You must adapt,” Atvar said, knowing full well he could give no more infuriating advice to a male of the Race, especially one newly come to Tosev 3. “We have been over this ground before. They were on the point of developing this technology themselves when we arrived. Much of what they use is independently invented.”

“Much also is stolen from the Race.” Reffet’s tone suggested Atvar had personally handed over the engineering drawings.

“They developed rockets on their own. They were in the process of developing explosive-metal bombs when the conquest fleet came,” Atvar said. “They made it plain they would go to war and wreck this planet if we sought to keep them from doing what they had the ability to do. The colonization fleet would have had a thin time of it then.”

“Had the conquest fleet done its job properly, we would not be having this discussion now,” Reffet snapped.

Atvar wanted to bite him. All at once, he understood how Straha must have felt when he, as fleetlord, rejected the ambitious shiplord’s schemes one after another. For the first time, he even got some inkling of understanding why Straha had defected to the Big Uglies. At the moment, he felt rather like defecting himself. Then he wouldn’t have to deal with fools like Reffet, too hidebound to shed his own skin.

“You were not here at the time,” he said. “No doubt we could have benefited from your wisdom.”

“Truth,” Reffet said, not recognizing sarcasm. “Now we have to make the best of this bad situation. And I tell you this: even some from the conquest fleet are growing alarmed. My Security perso

“Have you been tasting ginger, Reffet?” Atvar demanded. “You know perfectly well that the conquest fleet had no females.” Yet the name Kassquit was familiar to him. He checked the computer records, then started to laugh. By the time it was through, that laugh was so enormous, it looked as if he were taking the bite he so desired out of the other fleetlord.