That required care. Felless would spend one day in an orgy of tasting, the next in her hostel room waiting for her pheromones to subside so she could go out in public without exciting all the males who smelled them into a mating frenzy. Getting meals sent to the room rather than eating in the refectory cost extra. Felless authorized the change without the slightest hesitation.
All the individuals who brought meals to her were females. Once she noticed the pattern, she found that very interesting. Were the males and females who ran the hostels quietly adapting to the unavoidable presence of ginger on Tosev 3? She couldn’t have proved it. She didn’t dare ask about it. But the assumption certainly looked reasonable.
On the days when she was out and about, she noticed that ginger did indeed make its presence known in these new towns. She couldn’t smell the pheromones she emitted in her season; they were for males. But she saw a couple of matings on the sidewalks, and she saw more than a few males hurrying along in unusually erect posture and with the scales of their crests upraised. That meant they smelled female pheromones and were looking for a chance to mate.
How foolish they look, she thought. Back on Home, she wouldn’t have seen males interested in mating unless she was in her season herself. Then she would have found them attractive, not absurd. As things were, she viewed them with a cool detachment unlike anything she’d known on Home.
I wonder if this is the attitude Tosevite females have toward their males. That struck her as an interesting notion. It might repay further research when she got back to France. I might even ask this Monique Dutourd, she thought. She owes me favors, and I know she was involved in at least one sexual relationship.
The idea didn’t occur to her on a day when she’d been tasting ginger, but on one when she hadn’t, and when she was feeling the gloomy aftereffects of overindulgence in the herb. She wondered what that meant. Ginger was supposed to make a female clever. Maybe it only made a female think she was clever.
Such reflections disappeared when she got a telephone call from Ambassador Veffani. Without preamble, he said, “Senior Researcher, I strongly recommend that you return to France at once.”
“Why, superior sir?” Felless asked, doing her best to disguise dismay.
“Why? I shall tell you why.” Veffani sounded thoroughly grim. “Because there is serious danger of war between the Race and the not-empire known as the United States.”
“By the Emperor!” Felless was so upset, she barely remembered to cast down her eyes after naming her sovereign. “Have all these Tosevite not-empires gone addled at the same time?”
“It could be so,” Veffani answered. “There are threats that, if we fight the United States, the not-empire called the Soviet Union will join in on the side of their fellow Big Uglies.”
“That might almost be for the best,” Felless said. “Once we have smashed them both, Tosev 3 will be ours without possibility of dispute.”
“Truth,” the ambassador to France said. “Truth to a point, at any rate. The question remaining is, how much damage can the Big Uglies do us while we are smashing them? Estimates are that each of these not-empires could by itself hurt us at least as badly as the Deutsche did. If they fight us together, they may be able to do a good deal more than that, because we would not be able to concentrate all our military strength against either one of them.”
“Oh.” Felless stretched out the word. However much she wished it didn’t, that made good logical sense. But a new question occurred to her: “Why should I cut short my holiday to return to France? Will I not be in at least as much danger there as I am here?”
Veffani made the negative gesture. “I do not think so, Senior Researcher. Australia is part of the territory the Race rules, and so is a legitimate target for both the USA and the SSSR, as it was for the Reich. But France is an independent Tosevite not-empire. By the rules of war on Tosev 3, it is not a fair target for them unless it declares itself to be at war against them. The government of the Francais shows no willingness to do this.”
“They are ungrateful after we regained for them the independence they had lost to the Deutsche?” Felless asked indignantly.
“They are the most cynical beings I have ever known,” Veffani replied. “They know we did not free them from the Deutsche for their benefit, but for our own. And our efforts to use Big Uglies as soldiers against other Big Uglies have been far less successful than we would have wished. Let them be independent. Let them be neutral. Let their not-empire be a safe haven. It was not during the fight against the Deutsche.”
“Well, that is a truth,” Felless said, and then, “Tell me, superior sir, what is the cause of the latest crisis with the not-empire of the United States? I thought that, except for such peculiarities as snoutcounting, it was relatively civilized.”
“I know the answer to your question, Senior Researcher, but security forbids me from telling you,” Veffani replied. “Negotiations with the USA are still in progress; there is some hope that this war may be prevented. That will be more difficult if reasons for the crisis become too widely known. Even we are not immune from being forced to actions we might otherwise not take.”
“But will the Big Uglies of the USA not bellow these reasons to the sky?” Felless asked. “That not-empire is notorious for telling everything that should stay secret.”
“Not always,” Veffani said. “The American Big Uglies concealed the launch of their spaceship to the belt of minor planets in this solar system very well. And they have more reason to conceal this-believe me, they do.” He used an emphatic cough. “They would not bellow unless they wanted a war with us in the next instant.”
“I am not sure I understand, superior sir,” Felless said-an understatement, because she was annoyed Veffani wouldn’t trust her with whatever secret he knew, “but I shall obey, and shall arrange to return to Marseille as soon as I can.”
“You are wise to do so,” Veffani told her. “Now you colonists are beginning to get some notion of the delights we of the conquest fleet faced when we first came to Tosev 3. For you, though, these delights are less a surprise.”
He broke the connection before Felless could tell him how utterly mistaken he was. Everything about Tosev 3 had been a horrible surprise to the males and females of the colonization fleet. Felless remembered waking from cold sleep weightless, in orbit around what she’d thought would be the new world of the Empire, to be informed that nothing she’d believed on setting out from Home was true.
I will go back to Marseille, she though. I will go back to Marseille-after I enjoy myself one more time here. She still had more ginger in her luggage than she knew what to do with. No, that wasn’t true-she knew exactly what to do with it. She set out to taste as much as she could in one day.
Normally, a ginger-taster rode from exhilaration to depression and back again. Intent on tasting all she could, Felless didn’t wait for one taste to wear off before enjoying another. She stayed strung as tight as the herb would make her.
When a female she telephoned to arrange an early return to France pointed out a couple of difficulties in her revised schedule, Felless screamed insults. The other female said, “There is no reason to snap my snout off.”
“But-” Felless began. She seemed to have the Race’s entire aircraft schedule at the tips of her fingerclaws. But, when she tried to access the information with the thinking part of her mind, she discovered she couldn’t.
Yes, ginger makes you believe you are smart, she reminded herself. It does not really make you smarter, or not very much. It also made her far more vulnerable to frustration than she would have been otherwise.
“Here.” The female proposed another schedule. “Will this do?”
Felless examined it. “Yes,” she said, and the other female, with every sign of relief, vanished from her screen. Felless took another taste. She wasn’t sure the departure time would be late enough to let her stop producing pheromones by then. With so much ginger coursing through her, she didn’t care.
She cared the following day. For one thing, the depression that followed her binge was the worst she’d ever known. For another, she hadn’t stopped pumping out pheromones. She mated in the hotel lobby, in the motorcar that took her to the airfield, and in the terminal waiting to board the aircraft.
“A good holiday,” the last male said, with an emphatic cough.
And Felless answered, “Truth.” The pleasure of mating was different from that of the herb, but it was enough to lift her partway out of the shadows in which she’d walked since taking her tongue out of the ginger vial.
She wondered if she would lay a clutch of eggs. If I do, I do, she thought, and then, But if I do, Veffani had better not find out about it. The ambassador would not be pleased. He might even be angry enough to send her back to the Reich.
Fortunately, she was able to board the aircraft without stirring up a commotion. That could have been dangerous, especially if the flight crew had males in it. But her fellow passengers paid her no special heed. She settled down for the long, dull flight to Cairo, where she would board another aircraft for the return to Marseille.
Not so bad, she thought. She wished the holiday had been longer. That would have let her taste more. But she’d made up for a lot of lost time even so. Maybe she really was ready to get back to work.