Befflem in cages scurried around and squabbled with one another and beeped at anyone who went by and stuck out their tongues to help odors reach their scent receptors. They also beeped at the larger, more dignified tsiongyu, the Race’s other favorite pets. The tsiongyu usually ignored the befflem. Every once in a while, though, they lost their air of lordly disdain and tried to hurl themselves through the wire mesh of their cages at the low-slung, scaly beasts that annoyed them. When they did, the befflem only got more annoying. A beffel’s chief purpose in life often seemed to be getting someone or something angry at it.
Karen fascinated the befflem. Just as the odors in the pet store were alien to her, her smell was nothing they’d ever met before. They crowded to the front of their cages. Their tongues flicked in and out, in and out, tasting the strange odors of Earth. Their beeps took on a plaintive note. The befflem might almost have been asking, What are you? What are you doing here?
The tsiongyu, by contrast, pretended Karen wasn’t there. They were long-legged, elegant, and snooty. Too smart for their own good was how she thought of them. They ignored the members of the Race in the pet shop, too. They could be affectionate, once they got to know somebody. With strangers, though, it was as if they were society matrons who hadn’t been introduced.
There were also cages with evening sevod and other flying creatures in them. They stared at Karen out of turreted eyes. It wasn’t evening, so the sevod weren’t singing. The other flying animals squawked and hissed and buzzed. Karen wouldn’t have wanted anything that made noises like that in her house. By the prices on the cages, the Lizards didn’t mind the racket at all.
Farther back in the store were aquariums filled with Home’s equivalent of fish. They looked much less different from fish on Earth than land creatures here did from land creatures on Karen’s home planet. Water imposed more design constraints on evolution than air did. But the turreted, swiveling eyes went back a long, long way in the history of life on Home, for the fishy things used them, too.
One silver variety swam along just below the surface of the water. It had unusually long eye turrets. They stuck up into the air, as if they were twin periscopes on a submarine. A guard said, “When the shooter sees a ffissach or some other prey on a leaf over its stream, it spits water at it, knocks it down, and eats it.”
“Truth?” Karen said. The male made the affirmative gesture. Karen came closer and looked at the little watery creatures with new interest-till one of them, literally, spat in her eye. She jumped back in a hurry, dabbing at her face with the sleeve of her T-shirt.
The guards all laughed. They thought that was the funniest thing they’d ever seen. Once Karen had dried off, she did, too. “You see, superior Tosevite?” said the guard who’d told her about shooters.
“I do see,” Karen said. “But why did the shooter spit water at me? I was not sitting on a leaf.” The guards thought that was pretty funny, too.
As they left the pet shop, the manager called, “Would you not like a beffel of your own, superior Tosevite? Life with a beffel is never dull.” Karen believed that. She didn’t rise to the sales pitch, though.
Out on the sidewalk, a Lizard came up to her and said, “Excuse me, but are you not one of the creatures called Big Uglies?”
“Yes, that is what I am,” Karen agreed. Most of the time, members of the Race used the name without even thinking it might be insulting. She wondered how often whites had said nigger the same way around Frank Coffey.
Then, suddenly, she had other things to worry about. The Lizard opened his mouth wide and bit her in the arm.
She screamed. She pounded the Lizard on the snout. She kicked him. She grabbed his arm when he tried to claw her, too. After a heartbeat of stunned surprise, the guards jumped on the Lizard and pulled him off her.
“Big Uglies killed both my best friends on Tosev 3!” he shouted. “I want revenge! I have to have revenge!”
“You are as addled as an unhatched egg abandoned in the sun,” a guard said.
Karen paid next to no attention. Lizards’ teeth were sharp and pointed. She bled from at least a dozen punctures and tears. On Earth, improvising a bandage would have been easy, for cloth was everywhere. Not so here. She pulled her T-shirt off over her head and wrapped it around her arm. Seeing her in a bra and shorts wouldn’t scandalize the Lizards. They thought she was peculiar any which way.
Two guards dragged off the Lizard who’d bitten her. The third one bent into the posture of respect, saying, “I apologize, superior Tosevite. From the depths of my liver, I apologize. That male must be deranged.”
Karen’s arm hurt too much for her to care about the Lizard’s psychiatric condition. Through clenched teeth, she said, “Take me back to the hotel. I want to have our physician look at these wounds and clean them.”
“It shall be done, superior Tosevite,” the guard said, and done it was.
Back at the hotel, both Lizards and humans exclaimed when they saw her with a bloody shirt wrapped around her arm. They exclaimed again when she told them how she’d got hurt. “Please get out of the way,” she said several times. “I need to see Dr. Blanchard.”
“Well, this is a lovely mess,” the physician said when she got a good look at Karen’s injuries. She cleaned them, which hurt. Then she disinfected them, which hurt worse. “A couple of those are going to need stitches, I’m afraid.”
“Will they get infected?” Karen asked.
“Good question,” Dr. Blanchard said. She didn’t answer right away, reaching for the novocaine instead. That hurt going in, but numbed things afterwards. Before she started suturing, though, she went on, “We haven’t seen much in the way of germs here on Home that bother us. But I’ll tell you, I wish you hadn’t picked this particular way to try the experiment.”
“So do I,” Karen said feelingly. “The Lizard must have been storing up resentment since the days of the conquest fleet-well, since the days when word from the conquest fleet got back from Home. And the first Big Ugly he saw, he just went chomp! Good thing he didn’t have a gun.”
“Probably a very good thing,” Melanie Blanchard agreed. “Um, you may not want to watch this.”
“You’re right. I may not.” Looking was making Karen woozy. “Do you think a tetanus shot would help?”
“I doubt it. They won’t have tetanus here. They’ll have something else instead,” the doctor answered, which made an unfortunate amount of sense. “I will give you a bunch of our antibiotics, though. I hope they’ll do some good, but I can’t promise you anything.”
“Why not give me some of the ones the Lizards use, too?” Karen asked.
“I would, except I think they’re more likely to poison you than help you,” Dr. Blanchard answered. “I don’t know of any that have been tested on us. I don’t think anyone ever saw the need before.”
“Oh, joy,” Karen said. “If I start breaking out in green and purple blotches-”
“If you do, all bets are off,” Melanie Blanchard said. “But I don’t want to try anything like that before I have to, because it is dangerous for you. I think I’d better consult with some of the Race’s doctors, to find out which drugs I ought to use just in case.”
“I didn’t come here intending to be a guinea pig,” Karen said.
“People hardly ever do intend to become guinea pigs,” Dr. Blanchard observed. “Sometimes it happens anyway.”
“What do you think the chances are?” Karen asked.
Dr. Blanchard sent her a severe look. “Guinea pigs don’t get to ask questions like that. They find out.” Oh, joy, Karen thought again.
When Jonathan Yeager went into cold sleep, he never thought he would have to worry about whether his wife came down with a wound infection. He’d imagined a nuclear confrontation between the Admiral Peary and the forces of the Race, but never an angry Lizard with a long-festering grudge and a nasty set of teeth. He wished he hadn’t thought of the grudge in those terms-not that he could do anything about it now.