“It is a truth,” the American Big Ugly said, nodding as his kind did to agree. “I wish you well, Kassquit. Please believe that.”
“And I… wish you well,” she replied. That was more true than otherwise-the most she would say about it. She took a deep breath. “Have we anything more to say to each other?”
“I do not think so,” Jonathan Yeager said.
“Neither do I.” Kassquit broke the connection. Jonathan Yeager’s image vanished from her monitor. She sat staring at the screen, waiting for a storm of tears to come. They didn’t. Not weeping seemed somehow worse than weeping would have. After a moment, she realized why: she had finally accepted that Jonathan Yeager wouldn’t be coming back.
I have to go on, she thought. Whatever I do, it will have to be in that context. If I seek another wild Big Ugly for sexual pleasure, I shall have to respond to him, not to my memories of Jonathan Yeager. She wondered how she could do that. She wondered if she could do it. Of course you can. You have to. You just figured that out for yourself. Have you already started to forget?
She probably had. Emotional issues arising from sexual matters were far more complex, and far more intense, than any she’d known before Jonathan Yeager came into her life. That, she feared, was also part of her biological heritage. She’d done her best to pretend that heritage didn’t exist. Now-she ran a hand across her hairy scalp-she was beginning to accept it. She wondered if that would result in any improvement. All she could do was see what happened next.
What happened next was that the telephone hissed again. “Junior Researcher Kassquit speaking,” she said again, seating herself in front of the monitor. “I greet you.”
“And I greet you, Kassquit,” Ttomalss said. “How are you today?”
“Oh, hello, superior sir.” Kassquit did a token job of assuming the position of respect-no more was needed while she was sitting down. Ttomalss might have asked the question as a polite commonplace, but she gave it serious consideration before answering, “All things considered, I am pretty well.”
“I am glad to hear it,” Ttomalss said. “I was listening to your conversation with Jonathan Yeager. I think you handled it with an emotional maturity to which many wild Big Uglies could only hope to aspire.”
“I thank you,” Kassquit said. Then, once the words were out of her mouth, she wasn’t so sure she thanked him after all. This time, she spoke with considerable care: “Superior sir, I understand why you monitored my life so closely when I was a hatchling and an adolescent: I was, after all, an experimental subject. But have I not proved your experiment largely successful?”
“There are times when I think you have,” her mentor answered. “Then again, there are other times when I think I may have failed despite my best efforts. When I see you imitating wild Tosevites, I do wonder whether environment plays any role at all in shaping an individual’s personality.”
“I am a Tosevite. It cannot be helped,” Kassquit said with a shrug. “I am having to come to terms with that myself. But have we not established that I am also a citizen of the Empire, and able to provide important and useful services for the Race? In fact, can I not provide some of those services precisely because I am at the same time a citizen of the Empire and a Big Ugly?”
She waited anxiously to hear how he would respond to that, and felt like cheering when he made the affirmative gesture. “Truth hatches from every word you speak,” he replied. “I cannot tell you how delighted I am to discover how seriously you take your obligations as a citizen of the Empire.”
“Of course I take them seriously,” Kassquit said. “Unlike a good many members of the Race-if I may speak from what I have seen-I take them seriously because I do not take them for granted.”
“That is well said,” Ttomalss told her. He used an emphatic cough. “Your words could be an example and an inspiration for many males and females of the Race.”
“Again, superior sir, I thank you,” Kassquit said. “And I am also pleased to have the privileges that come with citizenship in the Empire.”
She waited once more. Ttomalss said, “And well you might be. Say what you will for the wild Big Uglies, but you are part of an older, larger, wiser, more sophisticated society than any of theirs.”
“I agree, superior sir.” Kassquit couldn’t smile so that her face knew about it, as a wild Big Ugly could, but she was smiling inside. “And would you not agree, superior sir, that one of the privileges of citizenship is freedom from being arbitrarily spied upon?”
Ttomalss opened his mouth, closed it, and then tried again: “You are not an ordinary citizen of the Empire, you know.”
“Am I less than ordinary?” Kassquit asked. “If I am, how am I a citizen at all?”
“No, you are not less than ordinary,” Ttomalss said.
Before he could add anything to that, Kassquit pounced: “Then why do you have the right to continue to listen to my conversations?”
“Because you are different from an ordinary citizen of the Empire,” Ttomalss answered. “You can hardly deny that difference.”
“I do not deny it,” she said. “But I do think the time is coming, if it has not already come, when it will not outweigh my need to be able to lead my life as I see fit, not as you reckon best for me.”
“Here you are, trying to wound me again,” Ttomalss said.
“By no means.” Kassquit used the negative gesture. “You are the male who raised me. You have taught me most of what I know. But I have hatched from the egg of immaturity now. If I am a citizen, if I am an adult, I have the right to some life of my own.”
“But think of the data the Race would lose!” Ttomalss exclaimed in dismay.
“Am I important to you as an individual, or because of the data you can gain from me?” Even as Kassquit asked the question, she wondered if she wanted to hear the answer.
“Both,” Ttomalss replied, and she reflected that he could have said something considerably worse. But even that wasn’t good enough, not any more.
“Superior sir,” she said, “unless we can reach an understanding, I am going to take a citizen’s privilege and seek to gain my privacy, or more of it, through legal means. And, should I learn I am in truth more nearly experimental animal than citizen, I shall have other choices to make. Is that not a truth?” She ended the conversation before Ttomalss could tell her whether he thought it was a truth or not.
“I think we’re in business,” Glen Johnson said. “By God, I really do think we’re in business. We got away with it clean as a whistle.”
“Congratulations,” Mickey Flynn said. “You’ve just squeezed maximum mileage from a series of one case.”
“Oh, ye of little faith,” Johnson said.
“I have a great deal of faith-faith in the capacity of things to go wrong at the worst possible moment,” Flynn replied. “Always remember, O’Reilly insisted that Murphy was an optimist.”
“He usually is,” Johnson agreed. “Usually, but not always.”
Flynn shrugged. “If you think you’re going to make me give way to unbridled optimism, you can think again. Either that, or you can put on a bridle and go horse around somewhere else.”
With a snort more than a little horselike, Johnson said, “I wonder what will happen when the Lizards do find out.”
“That depends,” Mickey Flynn said gravely.
“Thank you so much.” Johnson tacked on not an emphatic cough but another snort. “And on what, pray tell, does it depend, O sage of the age?”
“Vocative case,” the other pilot said in something like wonder. “I haven’t heard a vocative case, a real, living, breathing vocative case, since I escaped my last Latin class lo these many years ago.” Johnson had never heard of the vocative case, but he was damned if he would admit it. Flynn went on, “Well, it could depend on a lot of different things.”
“Really? I never would have guessed.”
“Hush.” Flynn brushed aside his sarcasm like an adult brushing off a five-year-old. He started ticking points off on his fingers: “First off, it depends on how soon the Race does figure out what’s going on.”
“Okay. That makes sense.” Johnson nodded. “If they work that out day after tomorrow, they have a better chance of doing something about it than if they work it out year after next.”
“Exactly.” Flynn beamed. “You can see after all.”
Now Johnson ignored him, persisting in his own train of thought: “And things will be different depending on whether they find out on their own or if we have to rub their snouts in it.”
“This is also true,” Flynn agreed. “If the latter, they will probably be trying to rub our noses in things at the same time. That creates the need for a lot of face-washing, or else a mudbath-I mean, a bloodbath. See, for example, the late, not particularly lamented Greater German Reich.”
Johnson shivered, though the temperature in the Lewis and Clark never changed. He felt as if a goose had walked over his grave. “What happened to the Hermann Goring could have happened to us this past summer, too. The Lizards made damn sure the Nazis weren’t going to get themselves a toehold in the asteroid belt.”
“It didn’t happen to us because it happened to Indianapolis,” Mickey Flynn said. “Thanksgiving is coming before long. Do we give thanks for that, or not?”